Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge
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Tryst with Destiny: Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge 447
cosmopolitan Hindu family, Amartya Sen grew up amid the horrors of
Chapter XVIII the Bengal famine, communal violence, the collapse of British rule, and
partition. As a brilliant student and campus agitator in Calcutta, he over-
came a near-lethal bout of cancer, bested one hundred thousand other
Tryst with Destiny: exam takers, and won admission to the college of Isaac Newton, G. H.
Hardy, and the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, Trinity College in
Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge
Cambridge. Since 1970, Sen has lived mostly in England and America,
but his thoughts have never strayed far from India. Drawing on his own
There haven't been many folk songs written for capitalism, but
experiences, a lifelong study of the disenfranchised, and a deep knowledge
there have been many composed for soc.ial justice.
of Eastern and Western philosophy, Sen has questioned every facet of
contemporary economic thought. Challenging traditional assumptions
It is mainly an attempt to see development as a process of
about what is meant by social welfare and how to measure progress, he has
expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. In this approach,
helped restore "an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic
expansion of freedom is viewed as both (1) the primary end and
problems:' 3 He is a public intellectual, engaged by issues, from famines
(2) the principal means of development.
~Amartya Sen 1
and premature female mortality, to multiculturalism and nuclear prolif-
eration. His inspiring journey from impoverished Calcutta in newly inde-
pendent India to the ivory towers of Cambridge, England, and Cambridge,
Massachusetts-and back again-is a triumph of reason, empathy, and a
very human determination to overcome incredible odds.
In January 2002, India's Hindu nationalist government of the
Joan Robinson wound up her talk at the Delhi School of Economics Bharatiya Janata Party threw a three-day celebration for India's far-
clutching a copy of Mao's "red book:' It was the late 1960s. Her topic was flung diaspora in Delhi. In a gesture that revealed both how far he had
the dismal state of Western economics, but mostly she talked about China traveled-and how close he had remained to his roots--Sen left that gath-
and the Cultural Revolution. The audience was in rapture. vVhen the wild ering to address an outdoor "hunger hearing" with several hundred peas-
applause faded at last, a willowy young man asked a question. His tone ants and laborers in a chilly dirt field on the far side of town.
implied the mildest and most polite skepticism. Robinson rebuffed him One by one, members of the audience went up to the microphone. A
soundly but "with affection:' 2 They were, after all, the best of enemies, for- scrawny fourteen-year-old from Delhi spoke about going hungry after she
mer professor and favorite student. At Cambridge, she had cultivated stu- lost her dishwashing job. A dark-skinned man from Orissa described how
dents from the third world. One of the most gifted was Amartya Sen, but three members of his family had died after a local drought the previous
Sen's interest in human rights and the immediate amelioration of poverty year. fifty years after independence, a larger fraction of India's population
dashed with Robinson's enthusiasm for the Soviet model of industrializa- suffered from chronic malnutrition than in any other part of the world,
including sub-Saharan Africa. Yet India's government kept food prices
tion.
Amartya means "destined for immortality:' Born into a scholarly and high via agricultural price supports and had accumulated the biggest foodGRAND PURSUIT Tryst with Destiny: Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge 449
stockpile in the world, a third of which was rotting in rat-infested govern-· as "an adventurous man" who got a PhD in chemistry at London Univer-
ment granaries. sity and fell in love with an English Quaker. After returning home to an
When Sen stood up, shivering in his baggy cords and rumpled jacket, arranged marriage, he became head of the agricultural chemistry depart-
he spoke less about the "interest of consumers being sacrificed to farmers" ment at Dacca University. The Sens lived in a typical Dhaka house, fifty or
and more about "profoundly lonely deaths." Addressing an audience that sixty feet long, narrow in the front, "the middle being a courtyard open to
seemed plainly awestruck, he conveyed sympathy and encouragement. the sky;' with plenty of room for servants and relatives. 6
"Without protests like these," he said, "the deaths would be much more. Sen began his education at an English missionary school in 1939. Two
If there had been something like this, the Bengal famine could have been years later, as the Japanese advanced toward British India, he was sent to
prevented." Their willingness to speak out, he told them approvingly, was live with his maternal grandparents in Santiniketan, just north of Calcutta,
"democracy in action:' "to keep me safe from the bombs." Santiniketan has special connotations
for Bengalis-indeed for all Indians-because of its association with
Sen is Bengali. Like saying that an American is a southerner, that has very Rabindranath Tagore, the poet. After winning the Nobel Prize for literature
specific connotations. Bengal is a river delta; fish is the mainstay of the in 1913, Tagore used his prize money to expand the Visva Bharati school
Bengali diet; dhoti, chappals, and panjabi are the traditional garb. All Ben- in Santiniketan, where he tried to apply his ideas about education and
galis, Sen says, are great talkers, as he is. The worst thing about dying, Ben- his notions of merging Eastern spirituality with Western science. Gandhi
galis like to joke, is the thought that the people will keep talking and that visited Santiniketan in 1940, and for years India's nationalist elite, includ-
you won't be able to answer back. ing Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, sent their children to study there.
The Bengali word for public intellectual is bhadralok, and Bengal has Sen's maternal grandfather, Kshitimohan Sen, a distinguished San-
a long tradition, going back at least two centuries, of learned men with skrit scholar, was on the faculty of Visva Bharati. Sen attended classes in
cosmopolitan outlooks who battled social evils such as untouchability Tagore's coeducational school under the eucalyptus trees. His free time
and suttee. Sen is part of that tradition. His family is from the old part of was spent mostly with his grandfather. "Everyone found him formidable;'
Dhaka, an ancient river city 240 kilometers as the crow flies from Calcutta, Sen recalled. "He woke at four. He knew all the stars. He talked with me
now the capital of Muslim Bangladesh. In Jane Austen's day, Dhaka was about the connections between Greek and Sanskrit. I was the only one of
"a big, bustling place of first-rate importance:' famous the world over for his grandchildren who had a sense of academic vocation. I was going to be
its fine muslins (called bafta hawa, or "woven air"). 4 Competition from the one who carried the mantle."
Manchester brought decline. By 1900, Dhaka's population had shrunk by If Santiniketan was a tranquil oasis, it hardly escaped the upheavals of
two-thirds, and, according to a contemporary travel guide, "all round the the time. At the time of his death in 1941, Tagore was deeply disenchanted
present city are ruins of good houses, mosques, and temples, smothered in by the West, professing to see little difference between the Allied and Axis
5
jungle." Thirty-odd years later, when Sen was born, in 1933, Dhaka had powers. The war accelerated the final break with Britain. After Gandhi
regained some of its former importance by becoming a regional adminis- launched the "Quit India'' movement in 1942, the British arrested sixty
trative center for the British Raj. thousand Congress Socialist Party supporters, including Amartya Sen's
Sen was born into that class of English-speaking academics and civil uncle; by end of that year, over one thousand people had been killed in
servants who helped run British India. He describes his father, Ashutosh, anti-British riots. "My uncle was in preventive detention for a very longGRAND PURSUIT Tryst with Destiny: Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge
time," Sen recalled. "Several other 'uncles' also were jailed, including one to seek work. The realization that "extreme poverty can make a person a
who died in prison. I grew up feeling the injustice of this." helpless prey;' Sen said, was to inspire his philosophical inquiry into the
The 1943 Bengal famine--the consequence of wartime inflation, cen- conflict between necessity and freedom. 8 A more immediate effect, how-
sorship, and imperial indifference rather than crop failures-destroyed ever, was a strong distaste for all forms of religious fanaticism and cultural
the last remnant of respect for the British. The new viceroy, Lord Wavell, nationalism.
wrote to Churchill, the "Bengal famine was one of the greatest disasters
that has befallen any people under British rule and damage to our reputa- Presidency College, one of the most elite institutions of higher education
7
tion here both among Indians and foreigners in India is incalculable:' Sen in India, looks today much as it did in 1951, when Sen enrolled there, and,
later estimated that 3 million people, mostly p~or fishermen and landless for that matter, much as it did in 1817 when British expats and Indian
laborers, perished from starvation and disease. notables founded the Hindu College. Its faded pink stucco fa~ade with
At the time, for the boy of ten, the famine meant a steady stream of peeling green shutters, the black plaques identifying the different rooms,
starving villagers who passed through Santiniketan in a desperate attempt the dim interiors with their ceiling fans and row upon row of long wooden
to reach Calcutta. His grandfather allowed him to hand out rice to beg- benches, all evoke a long-bygone era. In the years immediately follow-
gars, "but only as much as would fill a cigarette tin" and only one tin per ing independence, though, the college was a ,political hotbed. Sen arrived
family. Later, as a university student, he reflected on the fact that only the thinking he would study physics but quickly found economics of greater
very poor and members of despised castes had starved, while he and his urgency and interest.
family-and, indeed, their entire class--remained unaffected. That ob- Thanks to the traditions of Indian higher education, Sen was intro-
servation was to inform his theory of famines as man-made, not natural, duced to classical works like Marshall's Principles of Economics as well as
disasters. new work like Hicks's Value and Capital and Samuelson's Foundations.
Even more traumatic was the eruption of communal violence on (Later, at Trinity, he would be disappointed in the relative lack of math-
the eve of independence. The idea of a multicultural Indian nation was ematical sophistication of his Cambridge dons.) His principal passion,
very much alive in Santiniketan, and, traditionally, Muslims and Hindus however, was politics, and before his first term ended, he was elected as
achieved a higher degree of assimilation in Bengal than in other parts of one of the leaders of the Communist-dominated All India Students Fed-
India. Yet when religious conflict erupted on the eve of independence, it eration. He read voraciously, skipped lectures, and spent most of his time
set neighbor against neighbor in a vast pogrom. Ashutosh Sen, along with debating Marx with his Stalinist friends in the coffeehouse on nearby Col-
the other Hindus on the faculty of Dhaka University, were forced to leave lege Street, a street that then as now was lined with hundreds of booksell-
Dhaka in 1945. ers' stalls.
On one of his last school holidays in his Dhaka home, Sen witnessed Later he recalled, "[A}s I look back at the fields of academic work in
a horrific scene. A Muslim laborer named Kader Mia staggered into the which I have felt most involved throughout my life ... they were already
family compound, screaming and covered in blood. Stabbed in the back by among the concerns that were agitating me most in my undergraduate
some Hindu rioters, he died later that day. "The experience was devastat- days in Calcutta." 9 Those concerns were crystallized by a life-and-death
ing for me;' recalled Sen. Mia told Sen's father, who took him to a hospital, crisis in his second year at Presidency. Just before his nineteenth birthday,
that his wife had pleaded with him to stay home that day. But his family Sen felt a pea-sized lump in the roof of his mouth. A street-corner GP
had no food, so he had little choice but to go to the Hindu part of town dismissed it as a fish bone that had worked its way under the skin. TheGRAND PURSUJT Tryst 1Nith Destiny: Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge
lump, however, didn't disappear and, in fact, grew larger. After consulting a devastating illness-especially one that carries a social stigma, that's
a premed student who lived next door to him at the YMCA, he learned taboo-isn't just terrifying, it makes you feelpolluted, powerless, outcast.
that cancers of the mouth were fairly common among Indian men. A few The awful things Sen witnessed growing up were shocking, but they were
hours with a borrowed medical textbook convinced Sen that he was suf- happening to others. This was happening to him. It produced a lasting
fering from stage two squamous cell carcinoma. identification with others who were also hurting, voiceless, deprived.
It took months and the intervention of relatives and family friends to Overcoming the cancer was also empowering. His mother, Amita,
arrange a biopsy at Calcutta's Chittaranjan Cancer Hospital. The biopsy said, "I gave Amartya to God when he was nineteen:' tc But he has said that
confirmed his suspicions. At that time, a diagnosis of oral cancer was a taking matters into his own hands left him with enormous confidence in
virtual death sentence. Surgery generally only accel~rated the spread of the his own instincts and initiative. "Psychologically I was in the driver's seat;'
cancer, and, as a result, most sufferers slowly suffocated as their tumors he recalled. "I was aggressive. I was the one asking whether I would live.
gradually blocked their windpipes. Radiation, the standard treatment in What was best? What could I do? I had a sense of victory."
England and the United States since the turn of the century, was still too When he returned to his classes, he said, "I came back with a bang;'
difficult and costly to be widely available in Calcutta. After reading about full of fresh purpose. He promptly got a first, won all sorts of prizes, in-
radiation in medical journals, Sen was finally able to locate a radiologist cluding a debate prize. He applied to Trinity College in Cambridge, where
willing to treat him. The radiologist urged Sen to let him use a maximum Nehru had studied. He was rejected initially but, some months later, unex-
dose, justifying the risk by saying, "I can't repeat it:' For Sen, possible death pectedly summoned. His father spent half his slender capital to pay for the
from radiation sickness seemed preferable to certain death by suffocation. journey. The airfare on BOAC proved prohibitive, so in September 1953,
The treatment was unpleasant, if not as awful as its aftermath. A mold just before his twentieth birthday, Sen sailed from Bombay to London on
was taken. A leaden mask was made. Radium needles were placed inside the same liner as the Indian women's hockey team.
the mask. Like the hero of the Victor Hugo novel, Sen sat in a tiny hospital
room with the mask screwed down "so there would be no movement:' The In Cambridge, new miseries-darkness, cold, awful food, dreadful
procedure was repeated every day for one week. "I sat there for four hours loneliness-awaited Sen. His teeth, addled by radiation, were a chronic
at a time and read;' Sen recalled. "Out of the window, I could see a tree. source of pain and embarrassment. The landlady of his rooming house,
What a relief it was to see that one green tree." who had begged the college not to send her "Coloreds;' fussed at him
The dose was massive, some 10,000 rads-four or five times to- about such things as drawing the curtains at night. "You can't see out, but
day's standard dose. After he was sent home-his parents now lived in they can see you;' she would say, as if he were a stupid child.
Calcutta-the effects of the radiation appeared: weeping skin, ulcers, At the university, Sen encountered a political minefield, split by ran-
bone pain, raw throat, difficulty in swallowing. "My mouth was like putty. corous rivalries among Keynes's disciples and critics. Indira Gandhi, who
1 couldn't go to class. I couldn't eat solids. I lived in fear of infection. I studied in Santiniketan for a year, once remarked that she learned an es-
couldn't laugh without bleeding. It brought home to me the misery of sential survival skill there; namely, "the ability to live quietly within myself,
human life:' That misery lasted for nearly six months. And these were only no matter what was happening outside:' 11 Sen, too, got by on inner quiet,
the immediate effects. Over time, radiation destroys bone and tissue, leads eagerly engaging with scholars from different sides of the ideological di-
to necrosis and fractures, and destroys the teeth. vide but without giving up his independent way of looking at things.
Cancer was a defining moment. For one thing, learning that you have He did, however, fall under the spell of the brilliant and imperious454 GRAND PURSUIT Tryst with Destiny: Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge 455
Joan Robinson. Newly independent India was divided not just along eth- from two villages in West Bengal to check their nutritional status related to
nic lines but also between diametrically opposite visions of the future. income, sex, etc," he said. "If anyone asked me what I was doing, I would
Gandhians envisioned a spiritual and rural India of hand- loom weavers. have said, I was doing welfare economics." 12
Followers of Nehru saw Soviet-style central planning and a landscape Famines like the one in Bengal, Sen argued, occurred despite adequate
dotted with dams and steel plants. Sen's thesis, The Choice of Techniques food supplies when higher prices and joblessness robbed the most vulner-
( 1960), criticized government planning in India by underscoring basic able groups in society of their "entitlements" to food and when the lack
economic principles. After completing a second BA and finishing his thesis of elections and a free press stifled public pressure on the government to
research, he returned to India, first teaching at Jadvapur University and, intervene. By contrast, Robinson applauded draconian policies such as the
subsequently, at the newly formed Delhi School of Economics. Great Leap Forward-and, as Sen later pointed out with some bitterness,
Had Sen stopped writing in the late 1960s, we would know him, if "failed utterly to detect the biggest famine in modern history;' in which an
at all, as one of a generation of Indian development economists who estimated 15 million to 30 million Chinese perished in the aftermath of
favored Nehru's formula of heavy industry, state-run enterprises, and forced collectivization. He never broke with her publicly, but by the time
self-sufficiency-a formula that produced disappointing results and that Robinson died in 1983, they had not corresponded in years.
has since been disavowed by most economists, including Sen. But begin-
ning around 1970, he shifted his intellectual focus sharply and produced In the 1970s and 1980s, Sen proposed a general theory of social welfare
a series of startling philosophical papers on social welfare that account for that attempted to integrate economists' traditional concern for material
much of his influence today. well-being with political philosophers' traditional concern with individual
This burst of creativity followed a second life crisis. In the space of a rights and justice. Objecting to the utilitarian creed of his fellow econo-
year, he accepted a position at the London School of Economics, his father mists, which called for judging material progress chiefly by the growth
died of prostate cancer, and he was forced to confront the possibility that of GDP per head-and citing a long tradition from Aristotle to Friedrich
his own cancer had come back. Once in England, he underwent extensive von Hayek and John Rawls-Sen argued that freedom, not opulence per
reconstructive surgery when it turned out that his symptoms had been se, was the true measure of a good society, a primary end as well as a prin-
due to the delayed effects of his earlier radiation. After a long and dif- cipal means of economic development. He wished, as he says in his book
ficult convalescence, he left his wife and two young daughters and fell on India, to "judge development by the expansion of substantive human
passionately in love with Eva Colorni, an Italian economist who was the freedoms-not just by economic growth ... or technical progress, or so-
daughter of a prominent Socialist philosopher killed by Fascist forces in cial modernization ... [These] have to be appraised ... in terms of their
World War II. Eva encouraged Sen's new philosophical interests and urged actual effectiveness in enriching the lives and liberties of people-rather
him to apply his ethical insights to urgent issues like poverty, hunger, and than taking them to be valuable in themselves." 13
women's inequality. He and Eva lived together in London from 1973 until Sen asked three separate questions to which he proposed answers: Can
her death from stomach cancer in 1985, and had two children together. society make choices in a way that reflects individual citizen's preferences?
When Sen turned to ethics, Robinson advised her star pupil to "give Can individual rights be reconciled with economic welfare? And, lastly,
up all that rubbish." He ignored her counsel. At Eva's urging, he made what is the measure of a just society?
a detailed study of what he saw as a particularly grim consequence of In the 1930s and 1940s, libertarians worried that the West would trade
authoritarian rule, notably famines. "I once weighed nearly 250 children its commitment to political liberalism for economic security. A generationGRAND PURSUIT Tryst with Destiny: Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge 457
later, Sen worried that India and other third world nations would sacrifice Is there a conflict between individual rights and economic welfare?
democracy in the race for economic growth. How, he wondered, could Sen proceeded to mount a much broader attack on utilitarianism, in-
conflicts between social action and individual rights be resolved? spired, in part, by John Rawls's magisteriall971 A Theory ofJustice, widely
\'\Then Sen took up the issue in the late 1960s, two powerful challenges seen as a philosophical justification for the modern welfare state. Utilitar-
had been laid down to the possibility of reconciling the two. One came ians, including most economists, believe that society needs only to take
from Friedrich von Hayek, who feared that "specialists" and specific in- account of the welfare of its citizens. Rights enter their thinking, if at all,
terests would impose their own preferences on everyone. By substituting only indirectly, as contributors to happiness or satisfaction. In a twist on
government plans for individual plans, he argued, the authorities were Jeremy Bentham's rule "the greatest good for the greatest number;' Rawls's
imposing a monolithic set of priorities on individuals who would prefer to "difference principle" states that a just society should maximize the wel-
make their own trade-offs among diverse alternatives. fare of the worst-off group. This, of course, is a very utilitarian idea. But
The other, even more daunting, challenge came from a wholly un- Rawls's primary focus is on individual rights, which take precedence over
expected quarter: a highly theoretical tract, Social Choice and Individual material well-being, and which economists have traditionally ignored.
Values, published in L951 by a politically moderate American economist, In another 1970 journal article, "The Impossibility of the Paretian
Kenneth· Arrow. Sen first encountered Arrow's impossibility theorem Liberal:' Sen made an urgent case for paying attention to rights as well as
at Presidency College. The theorem appeared to be a logically unassailable welfare, pointing out a potentially serious conflict between the two. 14 Most
proof that no system of voting could produce results that reflected the economists accept a criterion for economic welfare far less demanding
preferences of individual citizens. Except when there was complete con- than those proposed by Bentham or Rawls. The optimal state, argued the
sensus, all voting procedures yielded outcomes that were, in some sense, nineteenth-century Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, is one in which it
undemocratic. Most of Sen's college friends were Stalinists. While Sen is no longer possible to make anyone better off without making someone
shared their enthusiasm for equality, he "worried about political authori- else worse off. In other words, it is a society in which all conflict-free op~
tarianism:' \Vas Arrow's theorem a rationale for dictatorship? portunities for improving overall utility have been exploited.
Since Arrow's result could not be challenged directly, Sen chose to But Sen showed that even this seemingly innocuous standard can run
probe Arrow's seemingly innocuous assumptions-the conditions any afoul of individual rights. Vv'hen many people define their own welfare in
democratic procedure had to meet. In Collective Choice and Social Welfare, terms of restricting the freedom of others-Muslim clerics are happier if
published in 1970, he argued that one of Arrow's axioms-which ruled schooling is prohibited for girls, Catholic nuns feel better if abortion is
out comparisons between different citizens' well-being-was not, in fact, illegal, parents like the idea of outlawing recreational drugs--free choice
essential, and was indeed arbitrary. If such comparisons were allowed, Sen can conflict with Pareto optimality.
suggested, the impossibility result no longer held. Sen, and researchers Suppose, to use an updated version of Sen's original example, f'Prude"
inspired by him, went on to pinpoint the conditions that would enable values the freedom to practice his own religion, but not as much as he
decision-making rules consistent with individual rights to work. In fact, would a ban on pornography. "Lewd" values the freedom to read pornog-
Sen's "comparative metrics of well-being" launched his pursuit of yard- raphy, but not as much as he would a ban on religion. If the government
sticks that could prod democratic governments to adopt social reforms, outlawed both pornography and religion, both would be happier-but
and launched a long-running debate over the best ways to define and also less free.
measure poverty. Economics hasn't necessarily come to grips with Sen's message, butGRAND PURSUIT Tryst with Destiny: Sen in Calcutta and Caniliridge 459
economists are now more apt to reflect on what's left out of the equa- that one problem with this definition of justice is that individuals make
tion when they use GDP to measure material gains. In particular, they decisions-whether to work hard or to complete an education-that de-
have become more circumspect in equating GDP with well-being. Sen termine their capabilities at a later stage.
argues that GDP leaves out individuals' opportunities that may be more How does postcolonial India measure up in Sen's view? His book
important to them than their income, a serious shortcoming. To be sure, with Jean Dreze, India: Development and Participation, begins by quoting
one could argue (as does Eric Maskin, a Nobel laureate in economics) that Nehru's stirring speech at the hour of independence: "Long years ago we
while rights and welfare may sometimes conflict, in general, rights can be made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem
seen as a way of protecting welfare. The right to read what you want-as our pledge:' Nehru pledged among other things, "the ending of poverty
opposed to having people tell you what you can read-usually results in and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity." 1' For Sen, "the
higher incomes, for example. Still, given how polarizing such conflicts are ambitious goals ... remain largely unaccomplished." A student once asked
in many societies, it was remarkably prescient of Sen to have pointed it out Sen why he hadn't changed the "content" of his thoughts since the 1950s.
three decades ago. "Because;' said Sen, "the surrounding environment hasn't changed. I'll
In expanding his assault on utilitarianism, Sen argued that growth probably die saying the same things."
alone is an inadequate measure of welfare because it doesn't reveal how To be sure, he points out, much has changed in the third world. Life
well or badly deprived individuals are doing, and that utility-based on expectancy has expanded from forty-six to sixty-five, and real per capita
people's current preferences and satisfaction-is similarly misleading, income has more than tripled. Many once-poor countries now have more
because deprived individuals often tailor their aspirations to their im- in common with rich ones than with the ones they left behind.
poverished circumstances. To get around these and other difficulties, he Yet, Sen says, the 1 billion citizens of the world's biggest democracy are
proposed a new way of thinking about the goals of development. He called still among the world's most deprived. Extreme deprivation, he points out,
it "the capabilities approach." is now concentrated in just two regions of the world: South Asia and sub-
What creates welfare aren't goods per se, but the activity for which Saharan Africa. Life expectancy is higher in India than in Africa because
they are acquired, he argued. I value my car for increasing my mobility, India has escaped large-scale famine and avoided civil war. But in terms of
for example. You might value your education for giving you the chance illiteracy, chronic malnutrition, and economic and social inequality, India
to participate in discussions like ours. According to Sen's view, income is does as. badly or worse than sub-Saharan Africa, especially with respect to
significant because of the opportunities it creates. But the actual opportu~ the condition of women.
nities (or capabilities, as Sen calls them) also depend on a number of other India and China were comparably poor in the 1940s. Today, however,
factors-not just preferences that might be constrained by deprivation- China's life expectancy is seventy-three versus India's sixty-four. Infant
such as life spans, health, and literacy. These factors should also be mortality is less than half of India's, seventeen deaths per one thousand
considered when measuring welfare. He constructed alternative welfare births versus fifty. Nutritional yardsticks also show that China is far ahead
indicators, such as the UN's Human Development Index, in this spirit. in eliminating chronic malnourishment. Literacy rates for adolescents
Paralleling his approach to welfare measurement, Sen maintains are well over 90 percent in China-with no gap between girls and boys-
that individuals' capabilities constitute the principal dimension in which versus much lower, and far more divergent, rates in India. 1" Of course,
societies should strive for greater equality-though he stops short of say- India's citizens enjoy democratic rights-including a free press-that
ing which capabilities and what degree of equality. He admits, however, China's more prosperous citizens can still only dream of. The challengeGRAND PURSUIT
for Sen and other economists advisin~ India is how to nudge its economy
along China's path of globalization without sacrificing the democracy of Epilogue
which Sen and India are so proud.
Robert Solow, who won a Nobel for his theory of economic growth,
once called Sen the "conscience of our profession." For a long time, how- Imagining the Future
ever, Sen's approach to economics was decidedly suspect on both left and
right. At Cambridge, Calcutta, and Delhi in the 1950s and 1960s, when
Soviet-style planning was in vogue, Sen was persona non grata on the Left.
In the 1980s and 1990s, when free markets were once again the rage, the
then chairman of the Nobel Prize committee confidently predicted, "Sen
will never get the prize." Sen won the Nobel in 1998 "for his contributions
to welfare economics:'
But times have changed. These days, when he travels to Asia, Sen is Most journeys start in the imagination. The grand pursuit to make man-
treated more like Gandhi than like a professor of economics as he travels kind the master of its circumstances is no exception.
about with police escorts. In Santiniketan in January 2002, crowds lined The eighteenth-century founders of economics had a vision of eco-
the streets to watch him come and go, and young girls at Visva-Bharati nomic organization in which voluntary cooperation would replace coer-
dropped to the ground to touch his feet (something he brusquely discour- cion. But they assumed that nine out of ten human beings were sentenced
ages). Determined, like the poet who named him, to use his Nobel Prize to by God or nature to lives of grinding poverty and toil. Two thousand years
draw attention to issues he cares about, he has donated half of his $1 mil- of history convinced them that the bulk of humanity had as much chance
lion winnings to establish two foundations, one in West Bengal, the other of escaping its fate as prisoners of a penal colony surrounded by a vast
in Bangladesh, to promote the spread of elementary education in rural ocean had of escaping theirs.
areas. Dickens, Mayhew, and Marshall came to economics in Victorian Lon-
As India's Soviet-style, autarkic, and bureaucratic economy became don during a revolution in productivity and living standards. They were
increasingly dysfunctional, while Japan and the Asian tigers achieved animated by a brighter, more hopeful vision. To them, the ocean looked
modern standards of living, Sen moved away from the view that Western more like a moat. They could imagine humanity on the far side, advanc-
aid and better terms of trade were the keys to third world growth and ing a step at a time toward an ever-receding horizon. These economic
closer to the Schumpeterian perspective that local conditions are decisive thinkers were driven not only by intellectual curiosity and a hunger for
and that nations do, ultimately, control their own destinies. He embraced theory but also by the desire to put mankind in the saddle. They were
deregulation and opening the Indian economy to foreign trade and invest- searching for instruments of mastery: ideas that could be used to foster
ment while insisting on government intervention on behalf of the poor, societies characterized by individual freedom and abundance instead of
especially in health, education, and nutrition. The argument ended when moral and material collapse.
Mao suspended the Cultural Revolution and Deng Xiaoping introduced Economic intelligence, they learned, was far more critical to success
economic freedoms. China's remarkable leap into modernity left the So- than territory, population, natural resources, or even technological leader-
viet Union in the dust and fatally discredited the Soviet economic model. ship. Ideas matter. Indeed, as Keynes famously put it during the Great De-Epilogue Epilogue 463
pression, "the world is ruled by little else." 1 Like Marshall, Keynes thought the average lifespan has risen to two and oue-half times that of 1820 and
of economics as an engine of analysis that could separate the wheat of continues to edge higher. Remarkably, even the Great Recession of 2008
experience from the chaff, and he was convinced that economic ideas to 2009, the most severe economic crisis since the 1930s, did not reverse
had done more to transform the world than the steam engine. Economic the prior gains in productivity and income. Life expectancy kept going up.
truths might be less permanent than mathematical truths, but economic The world financial system did not collapse. There was no second great
theory was essential for learning what worked, what didn't, what mattered, depression.
what did not. Inflation could lift output in the short run but not the long Madmen in authority from Hitler to Stalin and Mao have repeatedly
run. Gains in productivity are the primary driver of wages and living stan- tried-still try-to ignore or even suppress economic truths. But the more
dards. Education and a safety net could reduce poverty without producing nations escape poverty and make their own economic destinies, the less
economic stagnation. A stable currency was necessary for economic stabil- compelling the rationalizations of dictators become. Rather than overtak-
ity, a healthy financial system is essential for innovation. As Robert Solow ing the West, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990.
observed, "The questions keep changing and the answers to even old ques- There is no going back.. Nobody debates any longer whether we should
tions keep changing as society evolves. That doesn't mean we don't know or shouldn't control our economic circumstances, only how. Asked about
quite a bit that is useful, at any given moment:' 2 their fondest hope for the future, protestors in Cairo named economic
Economic. calamities-financial panics, hyperinflations, depressions, improvement. The men and women on the streets of Tunisia, Syria, and
social conflicts and wars-have always triggered crises of confidence, other Middle Eastern nations in 2011 represent the latest wave of citizens
but they have not come close to wiping out the cumulative gains in aver- to imagine an economic future characterized by growth, stability, and a
age living standards. The Great Depression put economics as well as the business climate favorable to entrepreneurship. Once such a future can
modern decentralized economy on trial. World War II ended on a note of be imagined, returning to the nightmare of the past seems increasingly
gloom and self-doubt with Keynesian economists anticipating a twilight impossible.
age of stagnation and disciples of Hayek fearing the triumph of social-
ism in the West. Instead, growth rebounded and living standards shot up.
Governments achieved some success in managing their economies. Since
World War II, history has been dominated by the escape of more and
more of the world's population from abject poverty. Defeated Germany
and Japan rose phoenixlike from the ashes in the 1950s and 1960s. China
launched its remarkable growth spurt around 1970. More recently, India
has emerged from decades of stagnation.
Reality has mostly outstripped imagination. Even Schumpeter could
not have imagined that the world's population would be six times greater
but ten times more affluent. Or that the fraction of the earth's citizens who
lived in abject poverty would dwindle by five-sixths. Or that the average
Chinese lives at least as well today, if not better, than the average English-
man did in 1950. Only Fisher would not have been surprised to learn thatYou can also read
