From: Arvind Kumar
http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/1868465/column-india-needs-neither-amartya-sen-nor-jagdish-bhagwati
India needs neither Amartya Sen nor Jagdish Bhagwati
A public spat has erupted between the economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen. Bhagwati has highlighted the ill-effects of Sen's policies that focus on wealth redistribution while ignoring economic growth.
Bhagwati's assessment is correct and the reasons for the deteriorating economy under the UPA government can be traced to Amartya Sen. Failed policies such as NREGA were based on Sen's ideas and put in place by his long-time collaborator Jean Dreze who served on the National Advisory Council.
Sen's views are shaped by his Communist background as a student. His much touted Kerala model is simply an expression of the romanticised notion that Communist rule creates a utopia. The harsh reality of Kerala is that endless strikes by labour unions led to industries shunning the state and nearly 10 per cent of the population fled to the Middle East in search of jobs. Even Kerala's high literacy rate is independent of Communism. By 1947, half the state was already literate despite the national average hovering around 10 per cent.
Even so, Amartya Sen's support for boosting literacy rates reveals his flawed thinking.
Literacy rates are good tools when used as indicators of the overall wellbeing of societies since more prosperous and better nourished societies typically contain many more literate people, but programmes that directly target and adjust literacy rates amount to rigging the indicators without fixing the fundamental problems. Besides, equipping people with just kindergarten-level education helps nobody.
Among Sen's views, his explanation of how famines arise is truly bizarre. He claims that gluttonous eating habits among wealthy people cause famines that deprive the poor of their share of food. In reality, famines in British India resulted from government controls which impoverished people to the extent that they could not even purchase food from neighbouring places during times of food scarcity in their regions. Such effects of government interference should have us worried about the latest efforts of Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze. Their Right to Food law will create problems as government interference in any sector is always followed by large scale misery.
Many economists have exposed Sen's errors, but his harshest critics are on the internet.
Unlike the academia which has become a mutual admiration society due to the peer review process, the participants on the internet have high standards and ridicule bad ideas.
Jagdish Bhagwati is right this time, but his career has charted a strange opportunistic trajectory. Like the bat in Aesop's fable describing a war between the birds and the beasts, Bhagwati has always positioned himself on the side of those in power. In 1973, he advocated a "progressive" India using Communist rhetoric. By 1983, he was a Keynesian who regularly served international institutions.
In 1993 his was the loudest shill for the World Trade Organization's mercantilist policies of consumption-based economies and destructive patent regimes couched as globalisation. For a brief period, when "compassionate capitalism" became the fashionable term to justify controls, Bhagwati joined in with "globalization with a human face" to justify WTO's controls, but by 2003, he had reinvented himself and had become a champion of liberalisation.
The author is an expert on technology and economic issues. Views expressed are personal.
sent from samsung galaxy note, so please excuse brevity
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