Amartya Sen has had a a profound impact on economics, politics and development theory, writes PAUL CULLEN
HE HAS been called the conscience of the dismal science but Nobel laureate Amartya Sen confesses that, sometimes, economics isn’t quite dismal enough for him.
He’s joking, of course, but not completely: “It is concerned with the agonies of human beings and how we can rectify them. I think that programme is still there.”
Chances are you have heard of the 75-year-old Indian academic whose work has had a profound impact on the worlds of economics, politics and development theory. Over 500 people turned up to hear him speak in Dublin this week, and hundreds more were turned away. Many of those who responded to his address delivered eulogies rather than questions.
But equally the chances are that you may have difficulty recalling what he does. Sen is a soft-spoken polymath whose work spans an impressive number of fields – economics, philosophy, social theory, ethics, even feminism. He is no crusader, nor is he a “single big issue” thinker, and most of his life has been spent on university campuses on either side of the Atlantic. The implementation of his ideas he largely leaves to others.
Yet few modern intellectuals have had such a profound effect on the global society in which we live. His work on the causes of famine, which he blames on food inequality rather than food shortage, has proved enormously influential. He rebalanced the traditional focus on narrow financial statistics by helping to create the United Nations’ Human Development Index as a broader measure of quality of life.
And now, since the collapse of the financial markets, his support for the mixed economy and a sense of common humanity has moved back centre-stage.
“We’re certainly in a terrible mess, there’s no doubt about that, but the mess is one of our creation,” he told The Irish Times yesterday, shortly before receiving an honorary doctorate from Trinity College (he already has degrees from UCD and Maynooth).
“I don’t take the view that there was anything natural about the decline the world economy has seen. We created it by terrible policy.”
Sen traces the root of the rot back to the Reagan era when the belief set in that the market economy was self-regulating and “any attempt to control it would be a disaster”. The unbridling of the markets reached its nadir during the presidency of George W Bush, as excess credit and bad debt was unleashed and regulation was turned off.
“It generated a culture of irresponsibility from which we haven’t fully recovered. There was a collapse, and one collapse led to another, like a house of cards.”
On top of the financial crisis, he says, there is now a crisis of confidence caused by the abrupt end to decades of regulation that guided successful economies in the era after the second World War.
Sen, who is currently professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard, says he doesn’t know enough about the “catastrophic fall” in Ireland’s economy to comment but his analysis of the global situation carries local echoes. The US, he says, began its bailout of the banks “in the stupidest possible way” by providing money without any conditions. “You need conditionality or nationalisation but they did neither.”
He believes banks are a “good subject” for nationalisation but reveals his moderate streak by rejecting this approach because of the “sense of chaos and confusion” it would cause in the minds of shareholders.
Governments, he says, can shape the solution by first showing they understand the problem, accepting mistakes have been made, indicating what way the mistakes are being rectified and revealing their vision of the future. Got that, Brian?
Sen was just a child when he witnessed at first hand the effects of famine in his native Bengal in the 1940s, which claimed the lives of three million people. In his academic work, he has studied our Great Famine and even wrote it up as a chapter in his seminal 1981 study Poverty and Famines. However, he dropped the chapter before publication, feeling his reading of the period wasn’t sufficiently thorough.
Nonetheless, he sees many parallels between the Indian and Irish famines; the obtuseness of the ruling class, their notion that the victims were to blame for their misery, and mistakes in food policy.
“If you lack sympathy so completely when people are dying under your administration, you are ready to forgive yourself very easily for huge blunders,” he comments, pointing out to similar factors underlying more recent Ethiopian famines.
Not one to leave his mind in neutral, Sen spent yesterday morning at the National Gallery before receiving honorary membership of the Royal Irish Academy. In the gallery, he displayed particular interest in the paintings of Jack Butler Yeats; the artist’s brother, William Butler Yeats, championed the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore to Western audiences, and Tagore would later found the school which Sen attended and gave him the name Amartya, or “immortal”.
He pleads ignorance when asked about the cut in Irish aid but points out that in spite of our economic troubles, this country is still richer than most countries in the world.
As for the future, Sen is guardedly optimistic. “To a great extent, we created the economic crisis but we know how to solve it. If we rectify our ways, I don’t see any reason why the worst should not be over.”