“Indeed, the nationalist movement in India often summoned these historical traditions and memories to use the past to build the future in a skillful way, and Mahatma Gandhi himself was particularly visionary in this constructive exercise.”
                                                                                                                            
                                                           --Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze *

            At the end of his book on famines, Amartya Sen writes, “[M]arket forces can be seen as operating through a system of legal relations (ownership rights, contractual obligations, legal exchanges, etc.).  The law stands between food availability and food entitlement.  Starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance.”  (1)

This is a causal analysis.  There is a cause; there is an effect.  The cause is modern jurisprudence, which is derived historically from the Roman law of nations.  The effect is famine.

Throughout the book Sen refutes empirically the common opinion that famine is caused by the decline or lack of food availability.  Instead, he attributes famine to lack of legal entitlement to food.[i]  Sen discusses several famines in detail.  In the case of the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, which killed three million people and stunted many more, food availability in 1943 was only five percent lower than the average of the preceding five years.  The per capita food availability index was nine percent higher than in 1941 when there was no famine.  The reason why people starved was that they could not legally command entitlement to food, even though food was physically available.   Military and civil construction workers employed nearby in connection with World War II had money and could use it to buy food.  This drove up prices.  The harvest at the end of 1942 was fairly poor, which drove up prices more.  Expecting prices to continue to rise and availability to continue to fall, producers and speculators held stocks in the expectation of further price increases.  The speculators turned out to be wrong in that there was a bumper harvest at the end of 1943.  By that time, however, starvation deaths had already reached a peak (though hunger-related deaths from malaria, cholera, and smallpox would continue into 1944).  The Great Bengal Famine of 1943 was a boom famine related to powerful inflationary pressures initiated by public war spending, and complicated by public bungling and private speculation.  Those who died were mainly poor people who worked for wages or did piecework, who had the misfortune of falling between two price regimes.   Rice prices had been stable in the past; around 1943 rice prices went up and thereafter they stayed up, at the historical juncture between the two price regimes, wages failed to keep up with prices.  Sen makes a similar detailed empirical case for the legal causes of starvation regarding famines in Ethiopia in 1972-74, the Sahel in 1973, and Bangladesh in 1974 (Sen 1999: 55-56, 60, 75-76, 78).

His study of famines marked a turning point in Sen’s work.  He had always been interested in the measurement of welfare.[ii]  Starting with the famine study, empirical studies concerning how to use public action to increase welfare became more prominent parts of his work.  We will make some points regarding the measurement of welfare, and then return to famine, and after that go on to compare Sen’s concept of public action to increase welfare with Gandhi’s nonviolent constructive program.

           

        Today, after Sen has written so much about the measurement of welfare, always with impeccable logic; always acknowledging and incorporating the valid points of anti-egalitarians, skeptics, and free marketeers; it is hard to imagine that just a few decades ago scholars took seriously the claims that welfare could not be measured, and that, consequently, there could be no rational basis for public action to increase welfare.

          A.C.  Pigou in his Economics of Welfare (1920) argued that an extra shilling in the pocket of a poor person contributed more to society’s total welfare (i.e. “utility,” i.e. happiness) than an extra shilling in the pocket of a rich person.  The rich person would hardly notice the difference.   For the poor person a shilling to buy a bottle of aspirin might spell the difference between being kept awake by a toothache and a night’s sleep.  

           For most (but not all) practical purposes, Sen agrees with Pigou that equality is better.   On the whole and with certain exceptions, the same total wealth, the same total income, produces more welfare when it is distributed throughout society with greater equality.    Not a dogmatic equality.   Not an absolute equality.   Not an equality of sameness (on the contrary, Sen advocates more equal capacity to choose to be different).    Not equality as a pretext for the violence of a Pol Pot.   Not equality pushed to the point where it violates Rawls´ difference principle.  (11)    Pigou´s fundamentally egalitarian approach to social welfare was not extremist, and neither is Sen`s.

         Pigou was vigorously attacked and, some said, completely refuted.   Sen, who was born in 1933, and who entered the debate at a point where the intellectual prestige of Pigou´s egalitarian welfare economics was at its nadir, had to deploy sophisticated mathematical and logical arguments, and, later, careful empirical studies like his work on famines,   to reinstate the prestige of the general Pigovian ideas that  (a) welfare can be measured, and (b) when it is measured, it often implies policy recommendations that aim to augment total welfare by shifting income, wealth, and basic entitlements to health and education toward the middle and lower classes.

             In 1932 Lionel Robbins of the London School of Economics published an influential defense of the position that economists should not make any policy recommendations that include value judgments, his An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science.  (12)   In the tradition of David Hume’s 18th century argument that an “ought” can never be deduced from an “is” or from any number of statements about what is, and in the tradition of G.E. Moore, who had argued at the beginning of the 20^th century that it was a fallacy to define as good any natural property, e.g. being happy; Robbins strictly separated facts from values.   Economists were to confine themselves to facts.   Facts imply no values.   “Welfare” could not possibly be a concept that is part of the science of economics because the very idea of it implies that it would be good for there to be more of it and bad for there to be less of it.

             Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem was even more a starting point for Sen than Robbins´ separation of economics from value judgments.   Contrary to Arrow, Sen argued that rational social choices were possible.    Contrary to Robbins, Sen joined the tradition of those who brought economics and ethics together, instead of keeping them apart, a tradition which, in Sen´s view, included Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill, among others.

                Arrow adopted a tripartite division of methods for making social choices, which had been proposed earlier by F.H. Knight of the University of Chicago.   Any society makes its collective decisions in one of three ways, or by a combination among them:  (a) by the decisions made by authorities, such as kings or priests, or anybody empowered to make decisions for the group.  (b) by customs or rules accepted by the group, as Max Weber envisioned when he wrote that traditional societies were governed by custom, (c) by consensus.

        “Consensus” for Knight, and for Arrow following him, means rather less and rather more than one might expect at first.   It might better be called “the principle of consent.”    It does not mean everyone agrees.  It does mean that a decision has legitimacy because it can be construed as one to which there was consent.  What Knight mainly has in mind is voting and buying.   Elections and markets.   His tripartite theory praises modernity, as modernity manifests itself in industrial democracies.    Modern democracies are on the whole better than traditional societies because the untenable concept that somebody is smart and good enough to decide for everybody is no longer believed.   That there is a right way to do things handed down by tradition is no longer believed either.    Modern people do not need to believe much of anything to make collective choices.   What they do is vote.   To know whether the decision is legitimate it is not necessary to know whether the voters cast their votes for the right reasons.   It is enough to know, in many cases, that a certain candidate got the majority of votes.   The candidate is then legitimately elected.   Knight sees a parallel with markets.   To evaluate a product it is generally not necessary to know its merits, and one should be skeptical about there being any valid way to judge the merits of a product on any scientific or philosophical grounds.   It is enough that people buy it.   With certain exceptions, the general rule is that people should be allowed to buy what they want, and producers should be allowed to produce what they can sell.

          As Arrow applies Knight’s ideas, they are indifferent between capitalism and socialism.  The voters can choose socialism, as Arrow, writing his doctoral dissertation in the late 1940s, thought that the voters of the United Kingdom had done to an important extent.   Socialism was then legitimate in the UK because the voters had chosen it.

        One can defend calling such a political process “consensus” in the strong sense in which everyone joins a consensus even though the vote was not unanimous...    Although many voted against the Labour Party, they did so with the understanding that whoever got a parliamentary majority could write the laws.  In a sense all consented.

          Thus Arrow writes about a Knightian modern world where “consensus” reigns because social choices are legitimated by individual choices.   Individual choice, also named preference, governs society at a level of abstraction where the concept of preference refers both to voting for candidates or laws in a democratic political process and to buying whatever may be for sale in markets, in either a socialist or a capitalist context.

        To the objection raised by writers like Maurice Dobb (and, more famously Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfort School generally) that it makes no sense to ground the legitimacy of the social order on individual preferences, because individual preferences are themselves products of the social order, and in particular of a capitalist mass consumption society that socializes its members to be consumers of its products, Arrow has a reply.  He classifies such writers as idealists.   Idealists start not from the preferences people actually express, but to the ones they would express if the corruptions of the environment were removed.  (12A)   Idealism of any kind Arrow takes to be incredible to a modern mind, and also likely to lead to imposing some people’s values on others.   The ethical relativism implicit in starting from whatever people’s preferences happen to be, regardless of how they came to be what they happen to be, appears to Arrow, as to most economists, to be the better alternative. (12B)

         A key problem Arrow set for himself in the 1940s was how to sum individual preferences to get a social preference.   This was an updated version of the problem Jeremy Bentham thought he had solved in the early 19^th century with his felicific calculus, i.e. calculations adding up different people’s levels of happiness.   For Bentham a social choice (a decision to adopt certain “legislation” in his terminology) was correct if it led to the greatest good for the greatest number.   Good was defined as happiness, and happiness was defined as pleasure.   Each person was to count as one, and none for more than one.   Each person was regarded as an expert who knew more about his (presumably also her) own happiness than anyone else.  Consequently, as a general rule free markets in which people chose what they wanted could be expected to aggregate individual happiness to get the greatest total social happiness.   Alternative legislative proposals could be evaluated with a felicific calculus which calculated the amounts of happiness each would produce.  The one that produced the greatest good for the greatest number was the legislation that ought to be enacted.   The reform of British institutions in the direction of more free trade and personal liberty was what Bentham and other “philosophical radicals” generally advocated.   They thought they desirability of free trade was a conclusion that could be demonstrated using the felicific calculus as a method.  It was the centerpiece of a utilitarian science of legislation.

       As noted above, in the hands of A.C. Pigou and others,  utilitarianism, in its crude felicific calculus form, and also in more sophisticated forms that developed over the years,  proved to be a fertile source of arguments for public intervention in the economy for the benefit of the middle class and the poor.     In addition to changing its political colors, it was criticized as untenable science, by Robbins in the book mentioned above and also by others.    By the 1940s when Arrow wrote, economists no longer thought in terms of happiness, or pleasure, or utility.   Happiness could not be observed.   Preferences could.   To tell what a consumer preferred, it was only necessary to observe what the consumer purchased.  Whether the consumer was happy, the economist had no way of knowing.   Happiness dropped out as something that could not be ascertained, and which even if it could be ascertained was not necessary to test any hypotheses that economists ought to want to test.   Everything economists wanted to say, or at least everything scientific they wanted to say, they could couch in terms of preferences.

       Arrow’s problem was to formalize rational social choices in modern society. (13)   A logical way to deduce social choices from individual preferences would be an explicit scientific algorithm which would make precise what modern people already do in a rough and ready way, namely shape society by their votes and purchases.  When the conceptual universe is narrowed to the point where the only possible basis of justification is consent (i.e. choice, i.e. preference) then if society as a whole is going to make a justified decision, that decision has to be justified by some form of consent.   If one starts with the Arrovian premise that the preferences of individuals are unproblematic bedrock on which the foundations of economics can be erected, then it becomes natural to ask Arrow’s question:  whether social choices can be justified by summing the preferences of the individual members of society.  

        Arrow’s answer is:  they can’t.   This is his impossibility theorem.   Several premises, each of which is indubitable if you are in a liberal Arrovian state of mind, are required to prove this result.    Quite apart from Arrow’s formal proof, his result is intuitively not surprising.  (14)  Once it is granted that the criterion of value is naked preference, which has no justification other than a pure expression of individual will, it is natural to conceive of each individual as a law unto himself, or unto herself.   Intuitively, it would not be surprising to find, as Arrow does formally, that a social decision binding all of them could not be made by a group of such individuals.  Each individual in the group could only continue to be a law unto himself or herself by becoming a dictator who would impose his or her will on everyone else.  An impossible result.

         Sen´s work on the measurement of welfare patiently led economists back to rational ethics.  Sen resisted the tendency to think that if there can be no mathematical and scientific algorithm for value judgments, then no rational value judgments can be made at all.   Like Martha Nussbaum, with whom he collaborated (15), he adopted the Aristotelian views that reasoning should be of a type appropriate to its subject matter, and that exact reasoning was not appropriate to ethics.  Sen mastered the writings of specialists in ethical reasoning and became a professor of both economics and philosophy at Harvard.   He did not deny the claims of individual liberty and autonomy to be important human values, but neither was he driven by specious extensions of such claims to the conclusion that there could be no social values. 

        Sen did not revive the discredited utilitarian view that social welfare could be measured by finding out how happy people were.   He did not deny Lionel Robbins´ claim that private individuals should be left free to determine their own values, rather than being dictated to by economists in the name of science.   Sen accepted much of the libertarian thinking of Robert Nozick, with whom he team taught a course at Harvard.  But he gave Nozick´s ideas, and Robbins´, a left turn.  If freedom is a good thing, then everybody should have it.   Freedom is not an empty formula.  It is the capacity to do things.  It is being an agent.   The kind of equality Sen favors is a relatively high degree of equality of capacity to do things.   Thus the right of each person to pursue his or her own version of the good becomes a justification for public action to support the opportunities and capacities of individuals.

       Seen in the light of Sen´s work to answer those who deduced laissez faire from skepticism, his decision to write a study of famines was a strategic choice.   With respect to famines, the proper answer to the proposition that economists should not make the value judgment that they are bad and should not happen is, “You’ve got to be kidding!”     With respect to famines, the proper answer to the proposition that no collective action should be taken to avert and relieve them because there can be no rational basis for social choice is, “You can’t mean what you say!”    Famine is a topic that lends itself to making it clear that whatever else one may do with one’s analyses of the theoretical foundations of welfare economics, one should not use them to paralyze ethical action.

         The strength of Sen´s case on the issue of famines has a drawback.   The drawback is that one might agree with Sen on famines, but regard it as an extreme case, and go on to agree with the skeptics and the free marketeers most of the time.  I think it is better to regard Sen´s case for public action to prevent famine as an entering wedge, rather than as an exceptional argument applicable only to extreme cases.   His arguments for rational ethics and for intelligent public action are general arguments,  which just happen to be more obviously forceful in a situation where it is clear to everybody that indifference is morally wrong and that free markets alone will not solve the problem.  Although Sen´s detailed studies of famine are a reductio ad adsurdum of Pareto optimality (the doctrine that an optimum is reached when there are no more sales between willing buyers and willing sellers), it implies no good reasons for relaxing when there are no famines.   In a subsequent book, Hunger and Public Action, Sen and his co-author Jean Dreze lament that it is harder to move people to relieve endemic undernutrition  than it is to move people to relieve famine, which suggests that they indeed regard the famine issue as an entering wedge, which is useful to make points that should be extended to other issues. (16)

        In that book Sen and Dreze take up again the legal causes of famine.  They write, “... in the disastrous Irish famines of the 1840s (in which about an eighth of the population died, and which led to the emigration of comparable numbers to North America), the law and order situation was, in many respects, apparently excellent.  In fact, even as the higher purchasing power of the English consumers attracted food away, through the market mechanism, from famine-stricken Ireland to rich England, with ship after ship sailing down the river Shannon laden with various types of food, there were few violent attempts to interfere with that contrary –and grisly—process.  ...  the millions that die in a famine typically die in an astonishing `legal´ and `orderly´ way.”  (17)

         “The legal system that precedes and survives through the famine may not, in itself, be a particularly cruel one.   The standardly accepted rights of ownership and exchange are not the authoritarian extravaganzas of a heartless Nero or some brutal Genghis Khan.  They are, rather, parts of the standard legal rules of ownership and exchange that govern people’s lives in much of the world.”  (18)

          Sen and Dreze might have made some further observations regarding the standardly accepted rights of ownership and exchange.  They might have gone on to observe that while those rights and rules are commonly accepted today  in most of the world, they are far from governing all of the relationships of persons to things on this planet even now,  while just a few centuries ago they were confined to Europe.   Even now, even in industrial democracies, entitlement to food within families is not governed by the laws of property and contract.  Every infant born makes straight for the mother’s breast and drinks free milk.  If this sort of thing does not happen, the infant fails to achieve what Erik Erikson calls “basic trust” and is likely to remain emotionally and socially incompetent throughout life.  It is only much later, when the grown child leaves home and tries to earn a living, that it sinks in that according to the standardly accepted laws of ownership, if she owns no real estate, and if she can pay no rent, then she has no right to occupy space.  If she has nothing to sell that anybody wants to buy, then according to the standardly accepted laws of exchange, she has no right to eat.  As long as the child remains under the protection of a functional family, and as long as the entire family is not destitute, that child’s right to be somewhere and to eat something is governed by the laws of love, and not by the civil code.  

         Sen and Dreze might also have observed that the standardly accepted rights of ownership and exchange make everybody insecure, although they make some people more insecure than others.   Sen had noted in his study of famines that in five surveyed villages in the district of Faridpur during the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, 52.4% of landless agricultural laborers became destitute, while 40.3% of landless agricultural laborers died.   Among landlords the corresponding figures were 0.0% and 0.0%.   In this case the standardly accepted rights of ownership made one class insecure and another class secure.

        The arguments of Karl Marx and of John Maynard Keynes, which show that the standard operations of a capitalist economy lead to conditions under which everyone is insecure, can be regarded as consequences of standardly accepted laws.   Those laws imply a dynamic.  In Marx’s terminology, the dynamic is called accumulation.  In other words, given that the way to make a living in a world governed by standardly accepted rights of ownership and exchange is to sell something, be it labor, services, goods, or whatever, the way essential social functions get moving—their dynamic—is the expectation of profitable sales.  Given the way we have organized our economy, it is only the expectation of profit that gets wide-scale production and distribution accomplished.   Marx’s law of the falling rate of profit shows that this dynamic will eventually weaken, slow, falter, and—for many—stop.    Keynes’ concept of low-level equilibrium shows that a market is quite capable of reaching equilibrium where supply matches demand while a substantial portion of the population remains out in the cold, unemployed.   These standard operations of a capitalist economy, however, are nothing more than the manifested consequences of the legal rules that constitute and govern them.  It is the latter, therefore, that can be regarded as the cause of the instability and social polarization that make everyone insecure.  Viewed more generally, once it is established that employment is regarded as a species of purchase and sale governed by the laws of contract, it follows that there is no guarantee that everyone will be employed.   Whether people are employed depends on whether somebody wants to hire them.   Nor is there any guarantee that the products of any business can profitably be sold.  Customers are free not to buy.  Insecurity, therefore, is a consequence of rights.

        Pursuing further the idea that lack of legal entitlements is the cause of hunger might also have led Sen and Dreze to a critique of the use of “preference” as an explanatory category in economics, which would have supplemented what Sen has written about preference.    It is not clear, at least to me, to what extent Kenneth Arrow thought that preferences of voters were historical causes that explained the standardly accepted rules of ownership and exchange.   He seems to assume that in some sense the laws are what they are because the preferences of the populace, expressed in votes, make them what they are.    Although his precise meaning is not clear to me, it is clear to me that the direction of the arrow of causation is normally the other way around.    Given that the dynamic for getting production underway, which is generated by standard rules about owning things and exchanging them, is profit-seeking, it follows that when profits falter the economy slows down.   In an economy that relies on such a dynamic for its daily bread, everybody suffers when the economy slows down, except perhaps for a few odd characters like bankruptcy lawyers.   The basic rules of the system are thus so structured that voters are likely to prefer candidates who successfully manage the system within the standard framework the rules provide.  Voters will not prefer candidates who frighten investors.  Consequently legislation and policy will be more a consequence than a cause of standardly accepted rights of ownership and exchange. 

         If Sen and Dreze had followed out these further ramifications suggested by the concept that the law causes starvation, they might have come to agree with Mahatma Gandhi that the very foundations of modernity are untruthful.   Modernity’s legal foundations presuppose a lack of community bonds that is incompatible with truth as Gandhi conceived it.   People were secure in   Ram Raja, Gandhi’s ideal traditional village, because of truth conceived as loyalty;   it was everybody’s duty to take care of everybody else.  With modernity came fewer duties and more rights, less security and more individualism.   Sen and Dreze might have followed this Gandhian logic to the point where they would have embraced J.P. Narayan´s concept of total revolution, which proposed a communitarian nonviolent transformation of civil society. 

          Instead, Sen and Dreze refrain from challenging the standardly accepted rules of ownership and exchange.    They write:    “But when they [the standard rights] are not supplemented by other rights (e.g. social security, unemployment insurance, public health provisions), these standard rights may operate in a way that offers no chance of survival to famine victims.  On the contrary, these legal rights [the standard ones] backed by the state power that upholds them, may ensure that the `have nots´ do not grab food from the `haves´, and the law can stand solidly between needs and fulfillment.”  (19)   Thus for Sen and Dreze,  as for the United Nations, for whose Development Program Sen is a leading adviser, the better path is to leave the standard rights  inherited from Roman Law more or less intact, and to complement them with economic and social rights.  The methods they propose for advancing along this path they call “public action.”

         Public action is an ample concept.  It includes state action.  It includes the actions of social movements and non-governmental organizations.  It includes the electoral and educational work of political parties, and the peace and justice work of churches.  It includes the cooperative mutual aid projects through which people at the grassroots help themselves.  It includes the political organization of the deprived classes.   It includes the work of a free press which serves as a watchdog and as a system of alarms. 

         The concept is so ample that it is helpful to proceed toward defining it by saying what it is not.  It is not just any state action.  In particular, Sen criticizes military expenditures as a waste of resources.  He also criticizes official corruption, which often goes together with militarism, or with civil struggles to control the assets of the state.  Political parties functioning as patronage machines to benefit their members do not count as doing public action.  On the other hand, adversarial politics that aggregates the interests of constituencies does count as public action, even though the motives are not idealistic. 

       Public action is not the standard struggle to earn a living by selling something at a profit.  That is private action.   For Sen private action alone is unable to achieve human security or sustainable development, which is why public action is needed.  On the other hand, Sen´s concepts would seem to imply that  private sector businesses that include ecological and community service goals in their mission statements and accounting protocols are doing public action.  It is tempting to generalize that public action is any action by anybody that is oriented toward the common good.

        Sen, together with Jean Dreze and other co-authors, deploys an elaborate set of empirical studies to prove that public action as he conceives it --featuring democratic accountability and an activist state intervening to affirm the capacities of its citizens—in fact produces measurable increases in welfare.   He is the guiding spirit behind the annual United Nations Development Report, which ranks the nations of the world according to a series of indices of positive freedoms.

        One of Sen´s claims is that there has never been a famine in a well functioning democracy.  He identifies the mechanisms that produce this empirically observed phenomenon.  Adversarial politics assures that no government can allow a famine to happen.   If there were a famine, at the next elections, it would  probably  be voted out and its opponents voted in.   A free press assures that no famine can be concealed, and that any administrative bungling of relief will be revealed.   Reporters save lives. 

       One of Sen and Dreze´s pieces of empirical evidence for the absence of famine in democracies comes from Botswana. (20)  Botswana is a poor drought-prone country in famine-prone sub-Saharan Africa.  It has had no famines.  Unlike nearby countries which have had famines, it has a highly democratic political system and a vigilant free press.

         As negative evidence, Sen and Dreze cite Communist China, a country which has made great progress according to many indicators, but which has a highly authoritarian political structure.     Notwithstanding its socialist ideology, which was in principle committed to solidarity, there were severe famines in China in 1958-61.  The famines appear to have killed 23 to 30 million people, while a controlled press duped both the public and the government with rosy stories. The lower officials did not dare tell the higher officials what was happening.  (21)

          Although Sen´s empirical generalization about famines and democracy appears to be valid, there are other aspects of his empirical claims which are harder to establish.   India, his home country, is a particularly hard test case for his theory.  A story can be told about India which, if true, proves Sen wrong.

           The story is as follows.  India has had by now sufficient experience with public action to learn that public action does not work.  Under Nehru India had an activist state which started the newly independent country with a strong tradition of government intervention in the economy.   Because of Gandhi India has been awash with do-gooders and voluntary benevolent organizations of all kinds.  But India did not take off economically until 1991 when it left both Nehru and Gandhi behind, and more fully embraced private action energized by profit-seeking.   Even today, India lags behind China, which turned to neoliberalism earlier, in 1979, and which has an authoritarian government.    On this account key elements of Sen´s public action approach are discredited: state action, public-spirited voluntary cooperation, democracy, a free press.  The winning factors, on this possible interpretation of the experience of his native land are two that Sen denigrates: unsupplemented free markets and authoritarian governments.

           I will review eight of the ways  Sen defends himself against stories  like the one told above, as a way of  rounding out an introduction to his views before comparing them to Gandhi´s. 

            First,  although it is true that India prior to 1991, had a rather slow “Hindu rate of growth” of about 3% per year, it is not true that India stood still, and one sees quite substantial progress in that time period  if one looks at social rather than economic indicators.   For example,  life expectancy at birth was in India was  44.0 years in 1960, 53.9 years in 1981 and 59.2 years in 1991.  (22)

            Second,  Sen regards economic growth that does not produce increases in welfare as a waste rather than an achievement, hardly worth analyzing, certainly not worth emulating.   He characterized Brazil, for example, as following until recently a strategy of “unaimed opulence.”   Brazil had one of the highest economic growth rates in the world, but a life expectancy at birth lower than Sri Lanka which had one fourth Brazil´´s which had one tenth of Brazil´s GNP per capita. (23)

            Third,  Sen regards China´s superiority to India on welfare measures, when the two started out with similar numbers at the time of India´s independence, as largely due to the  comprehensive health and education programs carried out by the Communist regime prior to the 1979 reforms.  (24)  He also thinks that in China, as in other countries, having a healthy and educated population laid a firm foundation for future economic growth.

            Fourth,  since the neoliberal reforms of  1979 China´s so-called “responsibility system” has led to a slowing of improvement on some welfare measures, and slippage backwards on others, notably due to the authoritarian regime´s dismantling of most of the health care system.  (25)

           Fifth,  India has yet to translate its post-1991 economic growth into substantial welfare improvements, particularly in the fields of  health care and primary education.  These basic  forms of public action to affirm human capacities  were neglected by India´s earlier so-called “socialist” governments, and continue to be neglected  in these days of high per capita GNP growth.  (26)

            Sixth,  it is possible to achieve measures on welfare indicators comparable to those of China under Indian conditions,  without adopting China´s authoritarianism.  The proof is the Indian state of Kerala, which actually outdoes China considered as a whole, and to a lesser extent the state of West Bengal.   (27)

           Seventh,  Sen favors the expansion of social opportunities by a combination of supportive public intervention and effective use of market mechanisms,  a general viewpoint which  leads together with other considerations to  policy recommendations somewhat different from India´s past and also somewhat different from India´s present.   He regards his views as supported by empirical findings worldwide.  Consequently stories about India being benighted until 1991 are not strictly relevant to his proposals, since he is not an unconditional supporter or an unconditional detractor of any of the sets of policies that India has pursued before or after 1991.  (28)

            Eighth,    Sen´s defense of the idea that welfare can be measured accepts and advocates the value of people being agents and not just patients.   This line of thought lends itself to justifying democracy not just on the basis of what it accomplishes, but on the basis of broadly participatory  government by the people playing an active role in whatever the successes or failures may be.  (29)

            These eight short points do not do justice to Sen´s long arguments.  They may serve to suggest the sorts of reasons Sen has for believing that his case for public action is not refuted by the facts of recent history.  The facts, according to Sen, show that democracy and human rights are complementary to development however it is measured, but especially when it is properly measured.   Properly measured, development is the enjoyment of positive freedoms, which makes a people that loses its freedom by definition underdeveloped.  (30)    There is no trade off that makes less democracy the price of more progress.   Economic development without social development is pointless.   Security for all in the form of provisions for meeting basic needs is possible at a low level of GNP per capita, as Sen  shows in detailed discussions of Costa Rica, Chile at one point in its history, Jamaica,  Kerala state, and pre-reform China, among others.  Although human security at a high level of economic development –what Sen calls growth-led security—is also possible, what really matters is the increase in human welfare, not the GNP.

          One cannot help but feel that Sen is philosophically correct, as a matter of economic ethics, but that the dynamics of history are working against him.  If history is moving in Sen´s direction at all, it is moving that way too slowly.  There is too much uncertainty about whether it is even possible to arrive at the final goal of assuring the sustainable provisioning of food , clean water, sewers, housing, health care, and education, in a world where all enjoy the dignity of being  free subjects who are agents shaping their own lives and contributing to society.    Although his concept of public action goes some way in the right direction,  Sen has not really provided a solution to a problem  Keynes diagnosed, the problem of low-level equilibrium.   In one of his books Sen explains why Keynes’ proposals  for macroeconomic management of aggregate demand never had much influence among Indian economic planners.  (31)  They seemed to be proposals for solving first world problems, not third world problems.   Nevertheless, the problem Keynes set out to solve –that of a market economy which excludes much of the population from its benefits—is very much a third world problem, and indeed a global problem.    As each day passes, the market economies of the 177 or so nations are becoming more and more a single global integrated market economy.   As Keynes prophesied,  under such conditions it is very hard for an individual nation-state to carry out social policies that benefit its unemployed and precariously employed population.  (32)

            Sen´s theory is more a normative theory than a dynamic theory.  While Lionel Robbins proposed to separate facts from values completely, Sen does not separate facts from values at all.   The statistics he analyzes are measures of the achievement or lack of achievement of valuable goals.  With respect to these measures he analyzes the “strategies” of each of the 177 or so nation-states in terms of their success or failure in reaching those goals.   He routinely, although not always, pays each nation’s government the implicit compliment of appearing to assume that it is sincerely trying to increase the welfare of its citizens, and that it has adopted a strategy that it believes will serve such ends.  That the global economy as a whole is driven by a dynamic, like the logic of accumulation that characterizes Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system interpretation of history,  or like the accumulation on a world scale of  Samir Amin or Maria Mies, (33) is not a concept that enters into his country-by-country comparisons of the relative successes and failures of different development strategies.  Sen does, however, offer bits of  evidence that even if the relentless logic of capitalist accumulation,  as it has been historically aligned with military force and with pride, sets limits to what any government can do, it is not always or perhaps not even usually an immoveable obstacle that prevents public action to increase welfare.   For example, he cites a study showing that poor education in parts of  India is not so much due to a fiscal crisis of the state induced by the pressures of globalization,  as due to lack of participatory democracy that results in a situation where the teachers, although paid, do not show up to teach, and there is nothing the parents can do about it.  (34) 

                If we ask whether a world driven largely if not entirely by the dynamics of profit accumulation can solve Keynes’ problem of low-level equilibrium, then we ask a question Sen does not answer.  Helping everyone to achieve insertion in the labor market by assuring education and health care for all is not an answer because even though there may be labor shortages in certain fields, the general problem is that the supply of labor already matches the demand for labor with millions still out in the cold.   Following the model of a nation that has successfully achieved high marks on all welfare measures cannot be an answer for everybody.  The problem is not that the global market economy has no good examples of people and nations who successfully sell products that other people want and can pay for, and even better examples where commercial success is shared with less fortunate brethren.  The problem is that always, somewhere in the system, there will be people who have nothing to sell that anyone wants to buy. 

          Looking at Sen’s writings just as the expression of a normative philosophy, a decline in order of magnitude occurs when they move from theory to practice.  At the level of theory,  Sen and his co-authors write of positive freedoms.   They write about  just or nearly just societies where difficult philosophical  questions arise because the claims of freedom and the claims of  justice are not always easy to reconcile.  The level of practice is different.  Now the writings are about preventing famines.  Then they move to endemic malnutrition, and then on to eliminating illiteracy, and to assuring that as many impoverished girls as impoverished boys are admitted to primary schools where the teachers actually show up and teach them.   The practical writings are about eliminating the worst abuses, the ones that could not be justified by any ethical theory.  

         There may be a connection between a theory of public action with comparatively little to say about the dynamics of the world economy, and a normative theory that in practice tends to focus on the poorest of the poor.  It may be that in practice the logic of capital accumulation really does run most of the world most of the time, and that consequently it is not realistic to expect a great deal from public action, defined as action guided by logics other than that of capital accumulation.  Given such severe limitations on what can be accomplished, ethics falls in line by relaxing its imperatives.   Instead of commanding what ought to be, it sets priorities for the work of the limited power of public action by forbidding the worst of what ought not to be.

Gandhi offers a more radical approach.  He challenges the standardly accepted rules of ownership and exchange.  He advocates and practices a different dynamic.  T.K. Mahadevan said of him, correctly I think, “The core of the Gandhian teaching consists of one concept and no other.  It is truth.”  (35)  Many have puzzled over what Gandhi meant by “truth,” including Raghavan Iyer, who wrote, “He [Gandhi] used the word ‘truth’ in several senses and it is not always clear which is to be taken in a particular context.” (36)  We are working with the idea, derived in part from Erik Erikson’s study of Gandhi, that for Gandhi the core meaning of truth is loyalty or reliability, and that its context, its Sitz im Leben, is that of an ideal traditional Indian village, in which Gandhi lived in his imagination, and to some extent in his youth, in reality.   Truth is about community bonds.   (37)   Romain Rolland called Gandhi “the man who became one with the universal being,”  (38)   not because he floated off into outer space, but because he stayed on earth and identified his welfare with that of his fellow human beings and all living things.

         On such a relational and bonded view of truth, the standard European laws of property ownership imposed on India by the British are untruthful and invalid.  Property requires the exclusion of the have-nots from the premises, indeed of everyone except the owner and those licensed by the owner to enter.   Truth requires inclusion.   Relationship is everything.    The story is told that Gandhi once threw a valuable pair of binoculars into the ocean because it had been the occasion of a quarrel between himself and a friend.   The point was that the material object was worth nothing if it interfered with what really mattered, the relationship.

         The standard European laws of exchange do not work either in the cultural context of a traditional Indian village.  The ideal village is animated by the dynamic that animated Gandhi:  service.   Gandhi specifically disapproved of shopping with a spirit of bargain, seeking to buy at a low price and sell at a high price in order to make a profit.  He held that even as a consumer, especially as a consumer, one should act in a spirit of service and make those purchases which will most benefit the poor.

        Gandhi was not always aware of the everyday common sense of the world he was living in, as it was shaped by the civil laws that frame commercial transactions in a modern economy.   He often acted like everyone else, accepting a social reality built around commodity exchange as normal.   He even excused the damage done to the unemployed textile workers of Lancashire by the Indian boycott of British cloth that he led by saying that the Indians had no contractual obligations to the Lancashire mill hands.   (39)    But just as often he challenged the premises of common sense with his radical communitarian law of love.

        It is obvious that a modern economy,  or any economy which might conceivably be created in the future by transforming modern economies, could not possibly function as an ideal traditional Indian village.   There have to be markets.  There cannot be markets without ownership.  There cannot be markets without contracts.   Gandhi realized this. He worked throughout his life in a number of practical ways to give an ethical orientation to  modern institutions, and to invent new institutions to meet the needs of the time and place.    The community bonding imagined to have existed in the traditional village could not be duplicated,  but their  spirit and intent could.  

          One of the ways to carry out such a spirit and intent, in my opinion, is to follow Sen´s principle of complementing public action with the intelligent use of market mechanisms, regarding markets as “…among the instruments that can help to promote human capabilities….”  (40)  This principle presupposes that the market is an instrument.   It presupposes that the market is a tool that can be intelligently employed to serve human purposes, and therefore judged and held accountable by a democratic polity.     Unfortunately,  it is all too often the other way around.   The dynamic generated by the standardly accepted rights of ownership and exchange generates its own imperatives,  which democratic polities obey more than they command.

         Transforming the dynamics of the global economy is,  consequently, a prerequisite to the intelligent use of markets as instruments that Sen advocates.    The transformational process  requires a questioning and a constructive revision of the standardly accepted  rights of ownership and exchange.  

        

       

                                                          Notes

* Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, India, Development and Participation.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2d edition, 2002. p. 348n.

(1)    Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation.  (first published 1981)  (Cited hereafter as Sen, Famines).   Reprinted in Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, The Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze Omnibus.   Delhi:  Oxford University Press, 1999. p. 166

(2)  Such an ideology critique is carried out by Arturo Escobar in Encountering     Development.   Princeton NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1995.

(3)   Sen, Famines, p. 60.  Another estimate is 13% higher than 1941. p. 58...

(4)   Sen, Famines, p. 75.

(5)   Sen,  Famines, p. 76

(6)Sen, Famines, pp. 55-56.

(7)Sen, Famines, p. 75

(8) Sen, Famines, p.  78

(9) I am including in the category of “measurement of welfare” Sen´s doctoral dissertation on choice of techniques,  his related work for the United Nations on project evaluation, his work on the measurement of equality and inequality, and his essays on ethics and economics, some of which came after the famine study.   If I am inappropriately combining disparate endeavors under the same label, then one would have to say that I have chosen a label that does not fairly reflect the breadth of his interests.

(10)   A.C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare.  London: Macmillan, 1920.

(11)   John Rawls´ difference principle states that a certain amount of inequality benefits the poorest class in society.    By providing incentives to produce more, it results in a greater total social product.   Provided that the resulting greater social product is then equitably distributed, the consequence of a certain amount of inequality is greater welfare for the poorest class in society, as well as greater welfare for the other classes.  The just and fair amount of inequality is that amount of it that most benefits the poorest, and no more.  It should perhaps be noted that the single-minded pursuit of exactly the right amount of inequality should not ride roughshod over other ideals.   John Rawls, a Theory of Justice.   Cambridge MA:  Harvard University Press, 1974.

(12)Lionel Robbins, The Nature and Significance of Economic Science.  London: Macmillan, 1932.

(12A)  Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values.  New York: Wiley, 1951. p 74

(12B)  Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values. New York: Wiley, 1951. p 85. 

(13) Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values.  New York: Wiley, 1951.

(14) The formal proof is, in outline:

(15)E.g. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, The Quality of Life.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

(16)Hunger and Public Action, first published 1989,.p. 261,  reprinted in the Omnibus cited in Note (1) above, here cited as Sen and Dreze, Hunger, to the page numbers of the Omnibus, which are the same as the original page numbers. 

(17)Sen and Dreze, Hunger, p. 22.

(18)Sen and Dreze, Hunger, p. 23

(19)Sen and Dreze,  Hunger, p. 23

(20)Sen and Dreze, Hunger, pp. 152-58

(21)Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, India, Economic Development and Social Opportunity, first published 1995, reprinted in the Omnibus cited in note (1) above, here cited as Sen and Dreze, India, to the page numbers of the omnibus, which are the same as the page numbers in the original edition.    Pp. 75-77.

(22)Sen and Dreze, India, p. 71

(23)Sen and Dreze, Hunger, pp. 180, 189, 258

(24)Sen and Dreze, Hunger, pp. 204-225

(25)Id.

(26)Sen and Dreze, India (passim)

(27)Sen and Dreze, India, p. 60, p. 82, 55-56.

(28)E.g.  Sen and Dreze, India, pp. 83-86

(29)Sen and Dreze, Hunger, p. 279.

(30)Amartya Sen,  Development as Freedom.  New York: Anchor Books, 2000.

(31)Amartya Sen, Development Planning, the Indian experience.  Delhi:  Oxford University Press, 1994.

(32)John Maynard Keynes, “National Self Sufficiency,” The Yale Review,  volume 22, number 4,  June 1933, pp. 755-769.

(33)Immanuel Wallerstein, e.g. The Modern World-System II, Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World -Economy.,  1600-1750.  San Diego: Academic Press, 1980,  Samir Amin,  Accumulation on a World Scale.  New York: Monthly Review Press,  1974,  Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. London: Zed Books, 1999.

(34)Sen and Dreze, India,  105-6.

(35)T. K. Mahadevan, “An Approach to the Study of Gandhi,” in G. Ramachandran and T.K. Mahadevan (eds.)  Quest for Gandhi.  New Delhi: Gandhi Peace Foundation, 1970.  p. 249

(36)Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi.  New Delhi:  Oxford University Press, 1973. p. 162

(37)See the discussion of truth in Chapter Two,  “Jawaharlal Nehru,” above, and Erik Erikson,  Gandhi´s Truth.  New York: Norton, 1969.   Citing this work, Naresh Dadhich comments that Erikson “…traced the historical-psychological development of Gandhi from ´Moniya´ to ´Mohan´to ´Mr. Gandhi´to ´Mahatma.´ He has applied his theory of ego-identity to the interpretation of Gandhi´s personality.  Erikson defines Ego-identity as, ´a process located in the core of the individual, and yet also in the core of the communal culture, a process which establishes the identity of these two identities.´”   Naresh Dadhich, Gandhi and Existentialism.  Jaipur and New Delhi: Rawat Publications,  1993. p. 53, quoting Erikson  op. cit. at pages 265-66.

(38)Romain Rolland, Mahatma Gandhi, the man who became one with the universal being.  (translated by Catherine Groth)   London: Swarthmore Press, 1924. 

(39)M.K. Gandhi

(40)Sen and Dreze, India p. 202