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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Bhagwati versus Sen: What's going on?-Mihir S Sharma

Bhagwati versus Sen: What's going on?-Mihir S Sharma

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published Published on Jul 24, 2013   modified Modified on Jul 24, 2013
-The Business Standard


7 things you should know in the Bhagwati vs Sen slugfest

Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen are the two Indian economists who are most respected for their work. Both have worked on a broad spectrum of issues, though Sen is best known for his work on public choice and development and Bhagwati for his work on trade. They are both liberal, neoclassical economists, who support deregulation and disapprove of existing subsidies.

Yet their minor disagreements have become amplified into a shouting match - well, a one-way shouting match, with Bhagwati repeatedly attacking Sen in public and in print, and Sen expounding on his point through interviews and op-eds largely without mentioning Bhagwati or his views.

This is not surprising in one way: Bhagwati has long disapproved of Sen, and both of them have competing, co-authored, books in the market. In his latest broadside against Sen, Bhagwati managed to mention his book frequently, insisting that he had proved there how Sen was "anti-growth", a point many reviewers surprisingly failed to mention.

But that doesn't entirely explain why the dispute has really taken off. One reason, of course, is that Sen has spoken about food security, released a book on Bihar and expressed a preference that Narendra Modi not become prime minister, which immediately means that the luminous intellectuals of the Internet, and those in the respectable media that follow their lead, immediately assumed that he somehow represents the Congress.

Meanwhile, Bhagwati's co-author Arvind Panagariya had praised Gujarat's growth numbers in several pieces, so immediately that made Bhagwati Modi's best friend - and any further differences between the two could be conveniently slotted into the pre-prepared Modi-versus-Congress mould that is apparently compulsory for news stories today.

If there's anything worth taking away from what has become an increasingly unseemly and uninformative spectacle, it is the sobering realisation that academics continue to be divided over the simple mechanisms of how growth can be achieved - purely through deregulation, as Bhagwati would argue, or with a simultaneous push to education and health, as Sen wants.

Here are 7 things you should know on who said what, whether it's true, and what the real differences and similarities are between Sen and Bhagwati.

7 things you should know in the Bhagwati vs Sen slugfest

Perhaps it was inevitable: with their new books competing for market share, and an ever more shallow Indian commentariat searching for issues that can be declared to be the divisions or debates of the day, partisans of the economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen have declared open war. Here's a simple guide to what's going on, and some common misconceptions that will help you cut through the silliness, and be the envy of all your confused friends:

1. Do Bhagwati and Sen have similar stature as academics?

Sen may have won a Nobel Prize for his work on social choice and welfare, but Bhagwati is a pathbreaking trade theorist. Sen's PhD students have included Kaushik Basu; Bhagwati's, Paul Krugman.

In fact, Bhagwati is far more an economist's economist than is Sen - who at Harvard, for example, used to have an office at the philosophy department but not in the economics department. Sen is unique, perhaps, in that he is also one of the most respected living academic philosophers, and a close associate and fellow teacher of both the left-of-centre John Rawls, the leading philosopher of the 20th century, and the libertarian icon Robert Nozick.

2. Is Sen close to the Congress, and Bhagwati to the BJP?

Actually, Sen was awarded the Bharat Ratna by an NDA government in 1999, though some sections of the BJP want it taken away now because he has said he doesn't think Narendra Modi should be PM - a belief in Modi's spotless virtue is not known to be a necessary qualification for the award.

Bhagwati, meanwhile, has fellowships named for him at Columbia University, paid for by the Indian taxpayer - set up in 2010, at the direction of the UPA government. (It is unsual for such to be named after a member of the university's faculty.) Both Bhagwati and his associate Arvind Panagariya - who holds the, yes, "Jagdish Bhagwati Chair in Indian Political Economy" at Columbia - have frequently talked about their long interaction and friendship with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

So, in a word, no. The desire to impose a politically partisan lens on an academic disagreement shows how shallow and debased is the understanding of economics in the Indian public sphere, as well as how devoid of thought-provoking content is the actual political debate between the Congress and the BJP.

3. Is it really Sen versus Bhagwati?

No. It's Bhagwati versus Sen. Sen has almost completely avoided commenting on Bhagwati's views, although Bhagwati has become increasingly personal and petty in his attacks on Sen.

Sen broke his Bhagwati-as-Voldemort rule in a recent letter to The Economist. The liberal British magazine had run a review of Sen and Jean Dreze's new book; the reviewer happened to mention Bhagwati in passing, without specifying that he, Bhagwati, was right and that Sen was wrong. This was a red rag to Bhagwati, who wrote in and explained that Sen only paid "lip service" to growth. This was too much for Sen, who wrote in explaining that he did his PhD on how to stimulate growth, and the first collection of his essays, published in 1970, was titled "Economic Growth." Sen is in fact perhaps the greatest living scholar of the original philosopher of the free market, Adam Smith.

Sen must regret his moment of weakness, because Bhagwati then wrote an article for Mint that basically returned, even more harshly, to his complaints about Sen. Bhagwati's books are littered with disparaging remarks about Sen; indeed, reading between the lines of his last book reveals even more such remarks, some of them from resentments that date back to the early 1960s, when they were both young professional economists in New Delhi.

4.Is Sen anti-reform? Is Bhagwati anti-public funding of schools?

No, and no. Sen has often and publicly argued in favour of greater liberalisation, ending red tape, labour law reform, and cutting fuel, power and fertiliser subsidies. It may be convenient for both his friends and enemies to paint him as some kind of socialist - but he isn't. Meanwhile, Bhagwati has also argued for a "second track" of reform in social-sector areas, though he would prefer that the public money be spent on, say, school vouchers that let poor parents pay for private schools.

5.Has either of them soured on the India growth story, and blamed the UPA?

No. Both are unfazed by the fall in India's growth rate. Sen argues that it has fallen as much as its competitors; Bhagwati has blamed tight monetary policy and the freeze-up in clearances following outrage over scams, adding that many government proposals could reverse the slide. Both of these are, pretty much, what the government also claims.

6. So what's the real difference between Sen and Bhagwati's policy prescriptions?

Merely a difference in emphasis. Sen would like more public funding (as distinct from public provision) of basic goods; Bhagwati argues that this is secondary to focusing on growth.Why? Sen says that growth depends on creating a dynamic workforce, capable of learning on the job, which needs health and education. Bhagwati believes that laissez-faire growth will raise incomes sufficiently for the workforce to be able to invest in their own health and education. Of course, both these mechanisms can be true. In fact, both probably are true, which means the differences are even smaller than is claimed - just a question of which can work faster and more effectively. One path can hardly be abandoned for the other, both mechanisms will need government attention. Nor is either major political party likely to act on only one mechanism, at the cost of the other.

7. So why all the fuss?

As I said: duelling books; people who don't bother to read the duelling books, but instead read headlines written by journalists who haven't bothered to read the duelling books, or only partially understood them; and the eternal quest in the Indian media to make absolutely everything about Narendra Modi versus Rahul Gandhi.

The Business Standard, 24 July, 2013, http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/bhagwati-versus-sen-what-s-going-on-113072400516_1.html


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