[Nettime-bold] Amartya Sen: Develoment as Freedom

[McKenzie Wark <mw35@nyu.edu>]

[Good profile of one of the more nuanced thinkers on economic
development and globalisation.-- Ken Wark]


Amartya Sen: Development as Freedom
Jonathan Steele

Amartya Sen is an economist of ambition: to end world poverty, for
starters. On the eve of his Australian tour, the Nobel prize winner
talks to Jonathan Steele about freedom, globalisation and everything.

Amartya Sen went to a school in Bengal which promoted curiosity rather
than exam results, and he has never forgotten how one of his teachers
summed up a classmate: "She is quite a serious thinker even though her
grades are very good." In Sen's own case, the epigram needs rephrasing.
Even though he is high up in the world league of serious thinkers a
Nobel laureate in economics who might also have won the prize for
philosophy if the committee recognised the subject he has achieved
something. Sen is a rare example of an intellectual who has had a major
effect on politics.

His work on the causes of famine changed public perceptions by showing
why thousands might starve even when a country's food production has not
diminished, and his analysis of poverty has been enormously influential.
Arguing that simple measures of GNP were not enough to assess the
standard of living, he helped to create the United Nations' Human
Development Index, which has become the most authoritative source of
welfare comparisons between countries.

As Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Sen is also deeply immersed in
the debate over globalisation, which he will be discussing at the
upcoming Federation Festival in Melbourne. He has given lectures to
senior executives of the World Bank but has also shown his commitment to
reform from below by becoming honorary president of Oxfam.

He has also courted controversy in Britain by criticising a recent
report on multi-ethnicity for saying that Britain should be seen as a
loose federation of cultures held together by common bonds of interest.

Though this was meant to be a modern liberal vision, Sen feels it
devalues individual identity, risks lumping people into "communities"
they may not want to be part of, and interferes with a person's freedom
to make her own choices. (Among his many contributions to development
economics, Sen has produced pioneering studies of gender inequality, so
he always writes "her" rather than "his" when referring to an abstract
person). He also jumped into the debate over human rights and "Asian
values", taking strong issue with Singapore's former prime minister, Lee
Kuan Yew, for claiming that liberalism was a Western export unsuited to
Asia.

Sen's line was not the conventional view that individual liberty is a
Western invention which needs to have universal application. Rather, he
argued that "the championing of democracy and political freedom in the
modern sense cannot be found in the pre-Enlightenment tradition in any
part of the world, west or east".

However, separate components of this progressive idea from religious
tolerance to egalitarianism and support for a climate of debate have
come and gone in many different cultures at various historical times.

The strongest features of his work, joining his economics and philosophy
together, are ethics and a sense of common humanity. "He's very
concerned about justice, " says Sudhir Anand, professor of economics at
Oxford. "He's made major contributions not only in measuring poverty but
understanding it. To him, poverty is the lack of capability to function,
so reducing it is related to positive freedom. What's important to
people is to be able to do and be."

Sen's fellow economists love the way he has given the subject a
friendlier image, yet he was not awarded the Nobel prize for his more
accessible work in development economics, but for "social choice
theory", the philosophical foundation backed by mathematics which
supports all his writings.

The only surprise with his Nobel prize was that it came so late. "It was
only political reasons which prevented him getting it earlier," says his
old friend, the historian Eric Hobsbawm. "Ever since the mid-'70s the
Swedish committee has been strongly committed to free-market theory,
until it took a real punch in the midriff in '97-'98 with the Asian crisis."

Though he has strong political views, Sen has avoided public political
statements. He is primarily an academic who wants his ideas to cascade
through the institutions by virtue of their intellectual force, and then
flow into general circulation as the new wisdom. "He's peculiarly shy
about talking politics publicly. It's a kind of self-denial," says
Meghnad Desai, director of the centre for the study of global governance
at the London School of Economics. "It's also a generational thing. Good
economists, when he started out, didn't get into politics. So he prefers
to be subversive in a technical way."

In his native India, Sen is a star. When he won the Nobel prize in 1998
he was dubbed the Mother Teresa of Economics as crowds followed him
around "wanting to touch his fountain pen", in Hobsbawm's words. Among
academics Sen's reputation is almost unrivalled. He has served as a
full-time or visiting professor at a dozen of the world's most
prestigious universities, and must hold the record for the highest
number of honorary degrees (53 according to his CV).

"Sen has made fundamental contributions to at least four fields: social
choice theory, welfare economics, economic measurement, and development
economics," says Sudhir Anand. "The pre-eminence that he has achieved in
each of these different fields is remarkable for any scholar: that he
has achieved pre-eminence in so many is utterly extraordinary. He is
held in enormously high respect by theoretical, empirical and policy
economists alike to say nothing of philosophers and political theorists."

Sen has spent almost his entire adult life on various university
campuses, and was even born on one. His father taught chemistry at Dhaka
University (now in Bangladesh) but Amartya came into the world in 1933
at Santiniketan, just north of Calcutta, on the campus of a small,
progressive co-ed school and college founded by the writer, philosopher
and poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore, who was the only Nobel laureate
(for literature) from India before Sen, was a close friend of Sen's
maternal grandfather, who taught Sanskrit at Santiniketan. Tagore helped
to choose the baby's name, which means "immortal" in Sanskrit. Sen's
mother was a writer who performed in many of the dance-dramas which
Tagore wrote. She still edits a literary magazine in Bengal.

"Tagore founded Santiniketan with the idea of creating something
different from the English-language Raj kind of school," says Sen. "It
also differed from the Indian nationalist school. The teaching language
was Bengali, and the place was very self-consciously international, with
a sense of global culture. The existence of a Europe outside Britain was
more easily conceded in Santiniketan than happened in the rest of the Raj."

But the school was not for the poor, and when Sen was still only nine,
he underwent a profound experience. "One day a chap came wandering in,
very obviously deranged. Some of the nastier boys were being unpleasant
to him and some of us felt we had to do something to help. I got
chatting to the man and it became quite clear he hadn't eaten for about
40 days. But then, one, 10, it seemed like about 100,000 people came
walking through the campus on the way to Calcutta to find some charities
which might help them."

Until this shock Sen was blissfully unaware of suffering. No-one in his
family, which he calls lower middle-class, nor any of his friends'
families, were affected by the famine. "I was upset by what I saw. My
grandfather gave me a small cigarette tin and said I could fill it with
rice and give it to the starving, but only one tinful per family."

The famine was clearly class-dependent. Only people on the lowest rung
of the economic ladder, such as landless rural labourers, were hungry
and the memory stayed with Sen, prompting him several decades later to
do his study of that famine and several others in the Sahel, Ethiopia
and China.

The opening lines of his study are typical of his lapidary style:
"Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food
to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat."

After examining the records, he found that overall food output in Bengal
in 1943 was not lower than in 1941, when there was no famine. The real
problem was that the wages paid to farm labourers in 1942 had not kept
up with the rising price of food caused by inflation in Calcutta, which
was going through a boom as the Raj put money into war production. This
resulted in what Sen called a shift in "entitlements" labourers had
suffered a reduction in their ability to command power over food.

As he was entering his teens, Sen had what he calls another
"devastating" political experience. The "idea of India", with its rich
cultural heterogeneity, which he had learned at Santiniketan, collapsed
into a welter of sectarian identities when people started to define
themselves as Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs, and went on killing sprees.

One afternoon at the family home in Dhaka a man rushed through the gate,
screaming and bleeding. Sen's father took him to hospital. The man was a
Muslim labourer who had been set upon by Hindu thugs after looking for
work in a Hindu area because his family was short of food. The episode
turned him against the idea of prioritising communal identity, and gave
him another graphic lesson in the way economic unfreedom can make people
prey to serious violations of their rights.

By then Sen was already bent on an academic career, though his interests
wavered. "I seriously flirted in turn with Sanskrit, mathematics and
physics, before settling on the eccentric charms of economics."

He went to the Presidency College in Calcutta and was soon thrown into
the hotbed of political coffee-house debate. His family belonged to the
Bengali intellectual elite, and Bengal itself was the most vibrant and
politically active city in India. Most of its luminaries were well to
the left of Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru.

Although Sen eagerly joined in the arguments, he says: "I could not
develop enough enthusiasm to join any political party." It was an early
sign of his detachment from collective action as well as the pragmatic
caution which have stayed with him, in spite of his moral engagement and
intellectual boldness.

In the early '60s, when he was at Trinity as director of studies, his
then wife, Nabaneeta Dev, went on the ban-the-bomb marches led by
Bertrand Russell. Sen did not. It was partly pressure of work, he says,
but "I had also developed more scepticism of what could be achieved by
activism without necessarily weakening on the importance of the cause".

Sen still calls himself a person of the Left, but he says he felt
something disturbing about the standard left-wing politics of his
student days. Most of his friends were Stalinists. He liked their
egalitarian commitment but felt they were not open to political
pluralism and that they even saw political tolerance as a "weakness of
will". "I thought it was a major defect of the Stalinist Left not to
recognise that establishing democracy in India had been an enormous step
forward. There was a temptation to call this sham or bourgeois
democracy. The Left didn't take seriously enough the disastrous lack of
democracy in communist countries."

This point was to stay with him in his famine studies, when he
enunciated the view that no famine has ever occurred in a country with a
free press and regular elections. He compared China and India. Although
by most indicators, from life expectancy to literacy, Mao's China was
ahead of Nehru's India, China had had a catastrophic famine between 1958
and 1961 in which some 30 million people starved to death. There was no
free press or alternative political parties to give early warning. In
democratic India, free of the Raj, that could not have happened.

But Sen did not go overboard in his praise of democracy. He pointed out
in his 1984 book, Resources, Values, and Democracy, that while there was
no famine in India, a third of the population went to bed hungry every
night. "The quiet presence of non-acute, endemic hunger leads to no
newspaper turmoil, no political agitation, no riots in the Indian
parliament. The system takes it in his stride."

When Sen arrived in Cambridge at the age of 19 to study economics, he
found the college "a bit of an oasis". The big debates in political
economy in the university were raging between neo-classicists and
followers of Keynes. Sen found that this suited his style. He has always
rejected any simplistic labelling of people, and his work is constantly
peppered with references to earlier economists whom he respects for
their views, regardless of the ideological camps which form around them.
He takes examples from Adam Smith, as well as Marx, without being a
Smithian or a Marxist.

In 1970, his book, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, attempted to
rescue welfare economics from the pessimism of free-marketeers, who
argued that there was no point in government intervention, and that
individuals should be left to choose whatever the market made available
in response to their choices, and statists, who concluded that
authoritarian choices had to be made by governments on other people's
behalf. Sen argued that perfection in social decision-making is
unnecessary. Partial comparisons between people can help and majority
decisions do carry weight, as long as the interests of the less
assertive citizens are not ignored.

His own life, meanwhile, had its periods of turmoil and tragedy. While
an undergraduate, he developed cancer of the mouth. Radiation therapy
whittled away his palate and could have proved fatal: he was unable to
eat solid food for three months and doctors said he had only a 15 per
cent chance of survival. In 1971 there were fears that the cancer had
recurred but, after a while, the diagnosis proved wrong.

That same year, Sen left his wife, Dev, with whom he has two daughters.

He later married Eva Colorni, an Italian economist, who died of cancer
in 1985, leaving Sen with a 10-year-old daughter, Indrani, and
eight-year-old son, Kabir. Moving with the two children to Harvard, he
renewed contact with an old student friend, the brilliant Pakistani
economist Mahbub ul Haq, who persuaded him to join in elaborating the
Human Development Index as a rival to the World Bank's system of ranking
countries by classical macro-economic criteria such as savings rates and
GNP.

Sen's empirical work has occasionally been criticised on points of
detail, or for not going far enough. Alex de Waal, the author of Famine
Crimes, a book which looked at how democracy prevents famine, says the
mere fact of democracy is not enough. He also says the main cause of
famine is epidemic disease rather than starvation. But he describes
Sen's work as "seminal".

An article Sen wrote in the British Medical Journal, which then appeared
in The New York Review of Books with the headline, "More than a Hundred
Million Women are Missing", was picked apart by some demographers. Sen
had examined the disturbing fact that while female mortality is
generally lower than male mortality at all age groups in most cultures,
this is not the case in India. Because of massive gender inequality,
girls have less food and are taken to doctors less often than boys. Sen
accepts that the criticism of his "ballpark figure" was legitimate, but
says his main point about inequality cannot be challenged.

More substantial criticisms revolve round his role in the current
globalisation debate. Meghnad Desai sees a double problem. One is the
issue of accessibility. Desai cites Sen's latest book, Development as
Freedom, which is based on a set of lectures he gave the World Bank in
1996. It views the enhancement of human freedom as both the principal
end and the most effective means of achieving development. Desai,
however, describes it as written for the converted, as well as being too
dense.

He also feels Sen has failed to come clean on a major change of mind.
"He used to be anti-market and very sympathetic to the Nehru line. Then
he found a clever way round it. During the past 20 years he's finally
made his peace with the market, though on his own terms and without
going all-out for a free market. It's a higher form of reconciliation."

Sen gets quite heated by the suggestion that he has changed his line on
the market. "Nothing I've ever written was anti-market. Being against
the market is like being against conversation. It's a form of exchange.
But I was just as hostile in the past to giving any privileges to the
market as I am now. Besides, those who are great advocates of the market
don't always make it easier for people to have access to the market
through basic education, credit or whatever."

He is also stung by the charge that he is middle of the road. "That
depends on how you define the road. There is a road which you can define
in which I am in the middle, but part of my problem is to argue that
people should be on a different road. I'm really trying to change the
road. My frustration is that I have not been very successful in changing
the focus of the debate."

Even in trying to change the road, Sen's line on globalisation is
relatively soft. "Opponents may see globalisation as a new folly, but it
is neither particularly new nor a folly," he says. He supports the
"themes" raised by anti-capitalist and environmental protesters at
Quebec, Seattle, Prague and Melbourne, but not their "theses", which he
finds too simple. The problem is not free trade, but the inequality of
global power.

He welcomes the rise of the NGO movement, which combines with media
coverage to produce the beginning of some "countervailing power" to the
larger corporations and the traditional policies of First World
governments. But he also blames many Third World governments for not
undertaking domestic reform.

He believes the UN has to be saved from insolvency and given a greater
leadership role which escapes from the asymmetry caused by the veto
power of the five richest and/or largest countries. "There needs to be a
watchdog institution which is concerned with inequality and fair trade,
asks why the US and Europe are so restrictive to products from the Third
World, and raises questions about the pricing policy of the drug companies."

For the past 10 years, Sen has been married to the economic historian,
Emma Rothschild. Asked how he relaxes, he replies: "I read a lot and
like arguing with people."

Dr Amartya Sen is giving an Alfred Deakin Lecture titled "Global doubts
as global certainties" in Melbourne on May 15. It will be broadcast on
ABC Radio National at 8.30pm on May 16.

Jonathan Steele is a journalist with The Guardian.



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