Sen in conversation with Angus Deaton and Tim Besley — pdf and video.
Excepts:
“She took a position—which has actually become very popular in India
Amartya Sen
now, not coming from the left these days, but from the right—that what you have to concentrate on is simply maximizing economic growth. Once you have grown and become rich, then you can do health care, education, and all this other stuff. Which I think is one of the more profound errors that you can make in development planning. Somehow Joan had a lot of sympathy for that position. In fact, she strongly criticized Sri Lanka for offering highly subsidized food to everyone on nutritional grounds. I remember the phrase she used: “Sri Lanka is trying to taste the fruit of
the tree without growing it.”
On Keynes:
“On the unemployment issue I may well be, but if I compare an economist
Amartya Sen
like Keynes, who never took a serious interest in inequality, in poverty, in the environment, with Pigou, who took an interest in all of them, I don’t think I would be able to say exactly what you are asking me to say.”
On the 1943 Bengal Famine, the last big famine in India in which ~ 3M people perished:
“Basically I had figured out on the basis of the little information I had (that indeed
everyone had) that the problem was not that the British had the wrong data, but that their theory of famine was completely wrong. The government was claiming that there was so much food in Bengal that there couldn’t be a famine. Bengal, as a whole, did indeed have a lot of food—that’s true. But that’s supply; there’s also demand, which was going up and up rapidly, pushing prices sky-high. Those left behind in a boom economy—a boom generated by the war—lost out in the competition for buying food.”“I learned also—which I knew as a child—that you could have a famine with a lot of food around. And how the country is governed made a difference. The British did not want rebellion in Calcutta. I believe no one of Calcutta died in the famine. People died in Calcutta, but they were not of Calcutta. They came from elsewhere, because what little charity there was came from Indian businessmen based in Calcutta. The starving people
Amartya Sen
kept coming into Calcutta in search of free food, but there was really not much of that. The Calcutta people were entirely protected by the Raj to prevent discontent of established people during the war. Three million people in Calcutta had ration cards, which entailed that at least six million people were being fed at a very subsidized price of food. What the government did was to buy rice at whatever price necessary to purchase it in the rural areas, making the rural prices shoot up. The price of rationed food in Calcutta for established residents was very low and highly subsidized, though the market price in Calcutta—outside the rationing network—rose with the rural price increase.”
On John Smith
“He discussed why you have to think pragmatically about the different institutions to be combined together, paying close attention to how they respectively work. There’s a passage where he’s asking himself the question, Why do we strongly want a good political economy? Why is it important? One answer—not the only one—is that it will lead to high economic growth (this is my language, not Smith’s). I’m not quoting his words, but he talks about the importance of high growth, high rate of progress. But why is that important? He says it’s important for two distinct reasons. First, it gives the individual more income, which in turn helps people to do what they would value doing. Smith is talking here about people having more capability. He doesn’t use the word capability, but that’s what he is talking about here. More income helps you to choose the kind of life that you’d like to lead. Second, it gives the state (which he greatly valued as an institution when properly used) more revenue, allowing it to do those things which only the state can do well. As an example, he talks about the state being able to provide free school education.”
Amartya Sen