Amartya Sen: 'I am very suspicious of taking people for a ride on some imagined alternative'

He’s a Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences. He’s also a Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University, and was the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge until 2004. He’s none other than Mr. Amartya Sen.

Business Insider caught up with this great economist at the Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, chatting gleefully with fellow Harvard Professor Sugata Bose about his latest book – The Country of First Boys.

Over the next hour, Sen offered valuable socio-economic lessons on several issues. These had significant remarkable relevance for modern India. While the 82 year old economist didn’t name any individual or political group, but it wasn’t impossible to connect the dots.

Sex-specific abortions:
More girls are born than boys everywhere in the world. All of the States in the East and South of India have birth ratio of girls in the European range. That goes all the way from Assam to Bengal to Orissa all the way to Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. However, all states in the north and west have lower than that. Sometimes considerably lower. In the case of Haryana and Delhi it will be in the 80s. That is quite dramatic. Some have gone even worse over the years.

Connection between Sanskrit and Mathematics
Indian mathematics didn’t flourish in the Vedic period as some nationalists tend to claim now. It flourished 4th-5th Century onwards and there was also quite clearly external impulse in it. I think Babylonian and Greek Mathematics came to India around that time. Then Indian mathematics took off in a dramatic way, and influenced not only India but what was the central area of intellectual excellence – the Middle East.

The Arab and Iranian Mathematicians actually knew Sanskrit. Al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the word Algorithm, and from his book AlJjabr Wal-Muqābala the word Algebra is derived, he knew Sanskrit.

There was a connection between Sanskrit and Mathematics as a conveyance, and I’ll be interested in both.

Sanskrit used as tool for Intolerance and Communal Animosity
The Hindu-Muslim divide was cultivated around the 40s. It’s important to recognize that in Bengal Muslim League didn’t win an election until 1946, and by 1952 Bangladesh is agitating about language.

It’s got nothing to do with Sanskrit, really. Sanskrit is also where you have the skeptical documents. It offers all of that.

Most people who advocate Sanskrit don’t know the language. That makes it very easy for them not to read any of these. They don’t have to read, because they couldn’t. So I think it comes as a political thing.

After my Nobel, India Today had an article saying a Westernized Indian gets a Nobel. I asked the Editor that I would like to talk with the author. I would like him to come to my hotel, and to argue on it. The only thing I insist on is that we talk in Sanskrit!

The quest for ‘Nyay’ (Justice) over ‘Neeti’ (Principle)
I think very often that distinction has been misunderstood.

It’s not compromise It’s accepting something with a gamble, and the gamble is that you wnd up not making that progress at all. What can de done now should be done now. What cannot be done shouldn’t be forgotten. That is what you may call a ‘sequence planning’ rather than a ‘spot planning’.

Small industry as a means of Sustainable development
Has there been any example of a country which has proceeded to have fairly fast economic expansion without industrial development and by which I do mean industrial development? That would be a good example.

That's not true of America, that's not true of Europe, of Japan, of China, of Korea, of Hong Kong or Singapore. It's not true of Latin America. I think one of the things I have to resist is an imagined that these things are wrong, and there are all kinds of wrong that there is an alternative that is much better. New things have been tried.

I am very suspicious of taking people on what I would call for a ride on the ground that some imagined alternative would be much, much better. What is a country which has no large industry but still is very rich?

Justice and Workers' Rights
The small industries are still there but the big industries have withdrawn. When I went to London first, I went by boat - not an adventurous boat, but by a ship - as I could not afford the airfare. In those days, there were 18 flights from Calcutta to London every week. Now there is not one. There is not a single flight to anywhere in Europe. You have to go to Doha, Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Bangkok or Singapore and then escape. But you can't go anywhere.

I think that couldn't have been the intention to put so much focus on distribution and the workers' power and so on that you end up not having the industries and there is nowhere to demonstrate the workers' power because you haven't got the workers to demonstrate that with. Pragmatism is an essential approach to practical reasoning.

Industrialization and Activism
You can do very good environmental planning along with a programme of industrial expansion. The conflict is not with the economic growth. The conflict is with the type of growth and care we take of the environment.

So, the idea that any kind of attempt at having large industry must be combined with neglect of the environment, that actually is not a good way of thinking about it. Because there is no reason that must be the case.

Revival of Humanities as a discipline
There has been no decline within Humanities. There has been a shift away from Humanities to the Sciences.

Tagore once complained about the lack of Science education. It could be certainly better, but scientific education has definitely progressed. Our best students and relatively smaller in number, and when there is competing priority they give priority to Science. Humanities tend to fall short.

I think the IITs are good, and so are the likes of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

Image credit: Indiatimes