Yannis Palaiologos is Greek and thus, but for his miseducation at Oxford, would be as smart as fuck. He has a foolish interview with Amartya Sen titled 'Economics needs a moral awakening'. In other words, it must stop concerning itself with scarcity and focus on 'non-rival' goods- e.g. saying everybody should get everything from the Magical Money Tree.
“Let us not forget that economics is a moral science,” Emmanuel Macron told the Financial Times in a recent interview.
If it were, it would be enough to say 'scarcity is immoral' for scarcity to cease to exist.
This is one of the central thoughts animating the work of Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize winner in the dismal science but also a renowned political philosopher.
thanks to 'intellectual affirmative action'. Sadly, his pal Manmohan became a two term Prime Minister of India while fellow Laureate Mohammad Yunus is now ruling the roost in Sen's ancestral Bangladesh. It seems being an economist does not necessarily entail being useless and impotent.
Kathimerini contacted the great Indian thinker at his home in Boston and asked him about that quote from the French president and about whether, in the age of Covid-19, it is finally time for economics to widen its view of human behavior and of the ends of economic policy by reconnecting with moral philosophy.
Why stop there? Why not reconnect with Alchemy?
“I remain an eternal optimist,” the 86-year-old Sen replies. “I still believe that a much wider understanding can emerge.
That wider understanding is that Sen was always just a waste of space.
Policymaking reflects our level of understanding. We must realize in a deep way that not only economics, but society as a whole must reflect our moral values –
Some societies do reflect the moral values of their people- which is why kaffirs run away from them.
we live together well when we help each other.
Neanderthals helped each other. This didn't prevent their going extinct.
This truth of our fundamental interdependence can be seen particularly clearly at the time of a pandemic.
The reverse was the case. The lockdown meant staying the fuck away from each other.
If we don’t grasp it, that will be a major epistemic failure with large ethical implications.”
The pandemic taught us that the only epistemic failures which have ethical implications occur in STEM subjects. Guys working in laboratories, not moral philosophers, developed the vaccines which permitted the ending of lockdown.
He says that the understanding of the relationship between epistemology and ethics
there is no such relationship.
can be traced back to many sources, including Aristotle, in “The Nicomachean Ethics”
the dude was wrong. There is no 'best' way to live. True if you get paid to teach shite, you then say that the good life consists in learning that shite.
and “Politics.” For Sen, the upcoming US presidential elections will be a crucial battleground where the ability of propaganda and fake news to obscure the moral demands of our mutual dependence will be tested.
Four years later, voters decided that sleepy Joe and comatose Kamala were shit. Trump was a better President.
Still teaching at Harvard (online these days), Sen is the author of the capability approach to political philosophy, according to which a person is free only to the extent that they are capable to pursue the ends that give value to life.
A slave may have that capability. A free man may not. Many decide that what is truly valuable is only what happens after death. They may live in a more moral and philanthropic manner as a result.
Thus, a lack of access to healthcare is an element of unfreedom,
It isn't. It may arise because one is not in jail. There is a considerable cohort, in America, whose longevity, health and educational outcomes improve if they are incarcerated for long periods during their adolescence and early manhood.
even for someone living in a politically and economically liberal polity.
If you suffer from a condition for which Medical Science has not found a cure, then you can't access appropriate health care irrespective of the type of regime you live under.
Does the pandemic highlight the importance of capabilities as a constitutive element of freedom?
No. It shows it was useless shit. Under lockdown, those capable of helping others- e.g. the neighbour of a disabled person who previously helped her with household chores- were prevented from doing so in order to prevent the spread of a dangerous virus.
“The European welfare state, including the national health service, is an excellent example of
a collective insurance scheme.
the conception of freedom as capability,
there was no such foolish talk at the time when the NHS was created. Indeed, Churchill railed against the proposals of the Labour Party in an infamous BBC broadcast before the 1945 election
He said ' ….there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. …liberty, in all its forms is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism. …there is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus boss.
'A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and aspects… could not afford opposition. Socialism is, in its essence, an attack upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.
'But I will go farther. I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are shortsighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.
'No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk — the common people, as they like to call them in America — where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?'
This did not mean Churchill was against collective health and unemployment insurance. Indeed, he had championed both at an early point in his career. What was missing from the speeches of Atlee, Aneurin Bevan or anybody else at that time was talk of 'capability' or 'unfreedom'. It was Communists who said that in Stalin's Russia 'positive freedoms' (e.g. to remunerative employment) were guaranteed by the State. Thus the proletariat were able to develop their potential capabilities to the full. Sadly, the one capability they most wanted to exercise was the capability to run away to the decadent, Capitalist, West.
Sen, too, was unenthused by the prospect of developing his capability to spin cotton in Gandhian India.
including but going well beyond the ‘negative’ conception of liberty as the absence of coercion,” he says, alluding to Isaiah Berlin’s classic taxonomy.
which he made after the 'Butskillite' consensus on the Welfare State had become the bedrock of post-War British politics.
He characterizes the 2008 global crisis as stemming from “an overreliance on ‘negative liberty,’ as the banks were allowed to engage in practices with no social benefit but great potential for destruction, like the insuring of bonds they didn’t own against default.”
My insurance company is very evil. It is exercising 'negative liberty'. It insures me against my house burning down even though it does not own my house! What possible 'social benefit' does the Insurance industry provide? Also, how come I have unemployment insurance even though the insurer does not own my body? The 'negative freedom' to pay me unemployment benefit is socially undesirable. Only the person whose slave I am should be allowed to give me money when and if I have no remunerative employment.
The ideal, he says, is a “balanced approach” between positive and negative freedom –
why not a 'balanced approach' between positive and negative unicorns?
something understood by the great theoreticians of political economy, from Adam Smith and Condorcet to J.S. Mill, Karl Marx and A.C. Pigou.
None were foolish enough to speak of 'negative freedom' or 'morose unicorns' or other such imaginary creatures. There are Hohfeldian 'immunities' which a Court might uphold- e.g. my immunity from sucking your cock even if you really really want me to. There are no 'negative freedoms'.
This approach “was the foundation of the post-war welfare state in Europe.”
Nope. The Welfare State grew out of previous 'Poor Law' and Parochial provisions as well as collective insurance schemes of various types.
Sen brings up the example of World War II Britain,
which was like World War I Britain except that Rationing was introduced sooner
where “there was a fear that there would not be enough food
which is why the government stockpiled food
and that people would starve. So the policy of rationing and of controlled prices was implemented.
Tegart, the police chief who crushed the Bengali, Jugantar, Revolutionaries, was brought in to crack down on the black market.
As a result, not only was starvation averted, but undernourishment declined greatly,
for some sections of the population. But the same thing happened during the Cuban 'Famine' of the Nineties. The plain fact is, when people eat less of what is bad for them, their health improves.
and severe undernourishment disappeared altogether.” It took the war, he explains, “to make the British government take on the responsibility of feeding the entire British population
The British Government has been feeding its people since Tudor times. The last famine in England was in 1623.
– though this did not extend to its colonial subjects in India, where there was a major famine during the war years.”
Sen is lying. Britain had transferred all power over Food, Land, Supply etc. to an elected Government in Bengal. It was corrupt and incompetent- which is why there was such high mortality relative to the food availability deficit. Democracy caused a famine twice in Sen's ancestral homeland. The first was in 1943. The second was in 1974. The solution was to raise food output four fold.
He observes that “unfortunately” in the current crisis the “culture of sharing does not seem, so far at least, to be gaining much ground –
Modi shared. Biden was reluctant to do so.
though the problem is less acute in Europe than it is in the US or India.”
India supplied a lot of vaccine.
He speaks of the negative global influence “of the dominance of an American economic philosophy that goes back to Ronald Reagan,
Carter, not Reagan, was the first fiscal conservative. Nixon was the first and last avowed Keynesian. Sen knows nothing about either American or British economic history.
but which was followed by subsequent presidents, including Bill Clinton, who himself thought later on that some of these policies were mistaken.”
No. He pretended that he was more like Bernie Sanders only because he was trying to help his wife win.
And he is keen to point out that the first economic thinker to highlight the need for regulation to protect the economically vulnerable was none other than Adam Smith:
Nonsense! Scotland had Poor Law acts from 1579 onward. The aim was to get the 'economically vulnerable' to work rather than subsist by vagrancy or theft. Scotland, like England, had laws to force the able-bodied to work. After the Jacobite uprising, the power of Barons' Courts to extract forced labour was reduced. Smith considered regulation to be mischievous or unenforceable. As for the 'economically vulnerable', they were also biologically vulnerable. They would die unless they had the foresight to emigrate.
“In ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ he says that the intervention of the state on behalf of the workers is almost invariably right,
He never said any such thing. The plain fact is, regulations regarding the poor or the wages payable to workers was decided at the parish level. There was no separate mechanism of State. India had such a thing. Scotland did not.
whereas intervention on behalf of ‘the masters’ – that is, the rich capitalists – is quite often wrong.”
The rich paid the rates which sustained the parish. They decided on all matters to do with the poor or the working class. Smith does say that the law could be used to prosecute the ring-leaders of 'Labour Combinations' but it turned a blind eye to Employer Cartels. But his broader point is that there will be emigration or depopulation if wages are pushed down to a level where workers can't reproduce themselves by having enough babies.
In that spirit, Sen criticizes eurozone policy during the euro-crisis,
Why did Germans not pay the pensions of Greeks so they could all retire at 55?
“under the direction of the European Central Bank and certain member-states.” “The leader then of the ECB, Jean-Claude Trichet,
who had opposed the fifty percent haircut for private investors in Greek bonds
is in many ways a powerful thinker – and I am proud to call him an old friend – but he got this one quite wrong.”
The private investors accepted the haircut insisted on by Merkel. She who pays the piper...
Their insistence on directly reducing deficits and debt, in the midst of a downturn, he says, “led to severe cuts in public expenditure.”
That public expenditure should never have been made in the first place. The Greeks had cooked the books. When they were found out, it was a case of hair-cuts all round.
Yet “the deficits – quite often – grew because of the need to stimulate the economy in the face of widespread banking failure. It was really a crisis of capitalism, not primarily that of an over-extended state.”
Nope. It was a crisis of a bad actor which had been cooking the books and spending too much while permitting tax evasion and corruption on a gargantuan scale.
And the result of the harsh austerity imposed was “a real loss of protection for the poor and the working class in Europe
in Greece. But lots of middle class people were badly affected.
– the consequences of which we are experiencing even now with the difficulty in dealing with the pandemic.”
Greece responded very well to the pandemic. They are a smart people with great civic sense. Their mistake was to let Professors of stupid shite hold high political office.
This policy mistake, he argues, exacerbated the negative consequences of the misguided effort to shrink the welfare state which actually preceded the financial crash.
Nobody was shrinking anything before the crash.
Sen is largely in favor of the “unorthodox policies” implemented by the ECB under Mario Draghi and his successor, Christine Lagarde, and also of the fiscal flexibility granted by the EU to member-states to deal with the crisis. “A relapse into orthodoxy would badly hurt the poor and the economically vulnerable,” he warns.
What hurts the poor is low productivity. As for the economically vulnerable, haircuts on their savings hurt them disproportionately. Sen-tentious economics which pretends there is a Magic Money Tree is what prevents policy makers from focusing on raising productivity and ensuring there will be no hair-cuts for savers.
Locked down and out in India
Sen is particularly critical of the way his home country has dealt with the pandemic.
He criticized Mamta's handling of the lockdown- right? Wrong. He'd have had his head kicked in. However, since Modi is Mamta's enemy, he is obliged to pretend that Modi is the Devil.
The policy of the Indian government,
like the policy of the West Bengal and Bangladesh government
“under the influence of the better-off classes,” he says, “focuses very largely on controlling the spread of the virus, not paying adequate attention to the economic repercussions.
Next time, both Bangladesh and India will do what Pakistan did- viz. nothing- at least in the poorer states.
For the poor, the sudden imposition of the lockdown meant that, from one moment to the next, they were left without work and without an income, facing the prospect of starvation.”
The Indian authorities did not know how big the migrant population was. Some states, like Kerala, had the state capacity to reassure migrants they would be fed. Others did not. That's why a lot of people ended up walking home so as to be sure to get food from the public distribution system in the place where they were registered. 'One Nation, one Ration Card' was supposed to have helped but migrants in a State whose language they don't speak may well disbelieve that their entitlements will be effective.
The policy that has been adopted is not only “blatantly unjust”; it is not even effective in achieving its stated goal: “When a large number of people, who work far from their homes, were left without income, they were forced to walk back in masses to their villages (train and bus services were suspended as part of the lockdown), spreading the virus to new areas.” In addition, the very limited testing carried out in India means “we don’t know the scale of the epidemic in the country.”
In other words, if you want to help the poor and the vulnerable, you actually have to raise productivity and state capacity. Gassing on about capabilities won't help.
Along with Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Indian central bank, and current Nobel Laureate Abhijit Banerjee, Sen wrote an article in the Indian Expres
this article was published in the middle of April, 2020. The joke was that the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana ( Prime Minister's Food Security Scheme for the Poor) had been scheme announced a couple of weeks previously on March 26 2020. Indians were laughing at the NRI Professors presuming to advise Modi from their Ivy League Ivory Towers.
s urging the use of the food stocks of the Food Corporation of India – a state institution that buys up farmers’ products at guaranteed prices and then either sells them or distributes them to those in need – to feed the poor.
Which is what Modi did. 800 million will be given free food for the next five years. Was this because of Sen or Rajan? No. It was a case of buying votes.
“Not using a part of the huge food stocks – far in excess of stocks in the past and much larger than what is needed for the purpose of stabilization – for more generous support of the poor is a serious omission,” Professor Sen says. “The central government could use even 40-50 million tons without endangering food security, and this would have relieved hunger across the country,” he points out.
But Modi knew this better than Sen. Remaining in India means you end up knowing more about Indian economics. Sen may have had some such 'capability' but he lost it when he ran off with his best friend's wife to the LSE. From this immoral slumber nothing can wake him.
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