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By Homo Rationalis
Critically
writing on Amartya Sen is a difficult task. Apart from being a Nobel
Laureate and Bharat Ratna awardee, he has variously been called Mother
Teresa and the “conscience of the economic profession” (by Robert Solow,
no less). His ability to navigate controversies, even in the
politically charged atmosphere of Cambridge university – where he
completed his PhD under the formidable Joan Robinson – is legendary.
Kaushik
Basu, the current chief economist of the World Bank and a former
protege of Sen, once recalled Sen’s advice to him on how to interact
with the media: “Don’t utter a sentence that can be misconstrued or any
subset thereof that can be misinterpreted”. Basu could not follow this
advice himself: his utterances on legalizing pretty corruption cases
created a storm in a teacup; yet Sen has followed this advice all his
life and sugar-coated almost everything he has to say.
So
how does one review or understand a scholar whose substantive
interventions often advocate policies that make little sense when seen
in a holistic manner, nonetheless are packaged in ostensibly sensible
words?
We
believe that for understanding a smart person like Sen, we need to
parse his silence. He has a long and distinguished career as an
economist and what he does not say is perhaps as important and
meaningful as the things he says. It is only by juxtaposing his own
career with the trajectory of evolution of the Indian economy that we
shall be able to reach some important conclusions regarding Sen the
public intellectual. With this insight, let us review the career of
Amartya Sen and his public interventions in so far as they relate to
Indian public policy.
Sen
was undoubtedly a brilliant student of Presidency College, and his
calibre can be gauged from the fact that he was appointed full professor
and founder-head of the Department of Economics at Jadavpur University
at the young age of 23, even before he completed his PhD (Choice of
Techniques, under Joan Robinson and A.K. Dasgupta). Nonetheless his
first major policy intervention took place in 1962, when he pointed out
that there existed an inverse relationship between farm size and farm
productivity in almost every agricultural zone in India. The policy
implications of this finding were blindingly obvious: land ceilings and
redistribution of agricultural land will not only lead to more
egalitarian rural structure, but will also raise food production and
help tide over the building food crisis. As commentators noted years
later:
“The
relationship between farm size and productivity has been intensely
debated in India. A large number of studies during the 1960s and 1970s
provided convincing evidence that crop productivity per unit of land
declined with an increase in farm size (Sen 1962, 1964; Mazumdar 1965;
Khusro 1968; Hanumantha Rao 1966; Saini 1971; Bardhan 1973; Berry1972)
which provided strong support for land reforms, land ceiling and various
other policies to support smallholders on ground of efficiency and
growth.”
This
was, of course, one example of what might be called voodoo economics.
In reality, the production of foodgrain plummeted from 71 million tons
in 1961 to 65 million tons in 1967 and a major food crisis erupted that
could only be averted with the help of imports, and later, the Green
Revolution (Little and Joshi, 1994). It is important to remember that
with policies implied in Sen’s work, India would have faced a major
famine and humanitarian crisis in 1970s. This was the first, yet
unfortunately not the last, of the policy misadventures that Sen either
explicitly advocated or implicitly condoned.
After
Jadhavpur University, Prof. Sen joined the Delhi School of Economics,
an institution that, together with Indian Statistical Institute
(Kolkata) and Presidency College, provided the intellectual kernel for
the planning regime. There, Sen established himself as one of the holy
trinity of the Indian left-liberal establishment (A.K.Sen, K.N. Raj, and
Sukhmoy Chakravarty). His foray into growth modelling – together with
K. N. Raj – is widely believed to be broadly supportive of the then
existing planning paradigm.
This
is bewildering because the mid-sixties and seventies were the period
when the ills of Indian planning were becoming apparent, even obvious.
Per capita income growth had plummeted to near zero. Inflation was in
double digits. Even those high figures were underestimations. Goods were
simply not available in markets; shortages, rationing, and long queues
for purchasing even essential commodities were the norm. Massive
corruption and black marketing emerged. A waiting period of six months
or more was not uncommon for something as simple as procuring an HMT
wristwatch; unemployment was soaring. The public sector was accumulating
losses, and the prospect of an external crisis never ebbed.
What
is more, these economic problems were spilling into social
disturbances. Youth all over the India were angry, a phenomenon
immortalized by Amitabh Bacchan’s films, in which he gave voice to the
anguish of the ‘angry young man’ and whipped up rhetoric against the
‘system’. Their anger was being reflected in public agitations and
political and militant actions all over India. In Bihar, anti-corruption
agitation was in full swing, and in Gujrat Navnirman agitation was in
the offing. From Punjab to the north-east, trouble was brewing in every
part of India. Economic mismanagement came very close to unravelling the
whole fabric of the Indian republic: the country was widely seen as the
land of a “million mutinies”, an economic basketcase that was headed
towards chaos, anarchy, and eventual disintegration.
Among
the more cosmopolitan intellectual elites, India’s predicament was
being unfavourably contrasted with the experience of East Asia, that was
then making economic progress in every field. Jagdish Bhagwati wrote
his ‘India: Planning for Industrialization’ with Padma Desai, which
became the seminal intellectual attack on the state-led, insular and
dirigiste development strategy. Sen, however, chose to remain silent
and, and just as India was lurching from one crisis to another, turned
his attention to an esoteric field within mathematical economics known
as “Social Choice”. He wrote his magnum opus “Collective Choice and
Social Welfare” in 1970 and went on to teach at Harvard with Kenneth
Arrow and John Rawls.
It
is pertinent to note that after the farm size and productivity debate,
Sen increasingly turned away from positive to normative economics. His
papers began to more and more investigate “shoulds” rather than “is”.
His scholarly laurels rest, therefore, not on his understanding of
economic processes, but making tools for economic measurement and
development of alternative conceptions of well-being that are novel yet
have to stand the test of time.
Within
economics, financial economists are often accused of being mathematical
wizards whose work has little connection with the real world.
Ironically, this charge should apply even more in the case of Sen. The
mathematical theorems he helped prove are not concerned with even
hypothetical economies; rather they investigate the logical conundrums
that emerge when more than one individual try to reach collective
decisions by way of voting protocols that obey certain technical
restrictions.
It
is important to understand that social choice does not offer any
expertise in public policy whatsoever. An economy is a complex system,
much like an ecosystem. Any economist who tries to enter policy debates
should master the various interdependencies and feedback loops that
invariably emerge in a complex system. Public policy is and should be
guided by positivistic considerations through and through. John von
Neumann’s motto “Stable processes we shall predict; unstable processes
we shall control.” is the main mantra of practical economists
also; measurement issues are important but not central. To give an
analogy, Wilhelm Rontgen who invented the X-ray did not claim to have
become a physician on that count; the inventor of the cardiogram should
never perform surgery on a heart patient. Similarly, if you devise a
Human Development Index, it gives you no expertise to claim how it can
be improved. But Sen has never honoured this distinction and has often
(ab)used his Nobel prize in normative economics for promoting his pet
social policies.
Of
late, he has turned into an intellectual bully. Armed with the Nobel
prize, he tries to browbeat opponents into submission even as his
arguments lack methodological rigour . A recent example of this tendency
might be found in the Food Security Bill (FSB) debate, where he pulled
out of thin air a figure of 100 deaths per week, due to non-passage of
the FSB. It should be remembered that there is no rationale or
justification for this figure whatsoever. In fact, Sen himself
confessed, “to capture people’s attention, you have to have a number.”
The
question is whether an economist, no matter how accomplished and
decorated, and whatever be the moral urgency of the cause he is
espousing, is entitled to manufacturing his evidence. How will a court
deal with a lawyer who is known to be manufacturing evidence? How will
an experimental scientist be treated if it turns out that she cooks up
her own data to suit her pet fancies? Yet when Amartya Sen goofs up, he
gets an easy pass. If only Left academics received as much scrutiny as
the normal academics do, India will perhaps be in a much better shape.
Indeed,
for a man known to have an opinion on everything under the sun, from
Binayak Sen to Section 377 of the Indian penal code, from the Ramayana
and the Mahabharata to Akbar the Great, Sen’s writings on the faultlines
of Indian policy are remarkably sketchy, sparse and evasive except when
he is sniping at the reform process from the sidelines and excoriating
the Right’s “ridiculous fascination with growth”. Unill 1998, his
standard quip was, “I try not to write on international trade and often
succeed.” (India’s Economic Reforms and Development: Essays for Manmohan
Singh, OUP 1998).
In
the same essay, written in honour of the “reformer” Manmohan Singh, Sen
had to make the following remarks: “Manmohan’s track in challenging the
inescapability of stagnant export earning was a lot wiser than
mine.” Additionally. “the art of shooting oneself in the foot, as
practised in the export-import policies of the Government of India, was
laid bare by Manmohan’s empirical studies.” Just as his position on
agricultural productivity and export-pessimism had become empirically
indefensible by 1998, Sen had no option but to eat crow.
Again,
in recent interviews, he has been slightly more forthright: “I think
the biggest symbol of corruption culture was the License Raj, which
empowered officers. The License Raj was an absolute hotbed of corrupt
activity. Among its contributions, the creation of a governmental
culture which is not constructive but destructive, and obstructionist,
is one. The extension of corruption was another terrible thing. License
Raj was one of the absurdly bad systems that India had to live through.
At this rate, Sen might even accept in 2050 that his ideas have been
utterly ruinous for the Indian economy and Bhagwati was far “wiser” than
him. Full stop, responsibility over.
In
short, Sen has belatedly accepted that economic reforms were long
overdue. The question that then emerges is the following: “Did this
realization finally dawn upon you in 2000? Where were you when Jagdish
Bhagwati made most of the arguments in Sixties, or when a vigorous
debate on Indian reforms was raging in the Nineties? Your studied
silence on issues of enormous importance, particularly when you find
time to comment on subjects as diverse as Geeta, ludo and almanacs, was
deafening. It suggests only two explanations: either as an economist,
you are far less sophisticated and prescient than some of your peers and
fellow-economists, or you are an intellectual coward and a selfish
careerist who cannot even stand for what you consider yourself to be
right. You weigh personal costs and benefits even as grave issues of
public importance are involved.”
I
leave it to his legions of admirers to decide which option they
consider more likely. Either way, he suffers from serious credibility
issues, his 28-page academic CV
notwithstanding. Sen’s gratuitous, unsolicited, and increasingly
unprofessional statements on topics ranging from the FSB to Narendra
Modi deserve as much seriousness and respect as accorded to the maverick
genius of our time: Noam Chomsky.
Source: http://centreright.in/2013/07/making-sense-of-sen/
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