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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Snakes and ladders by Amartya Sen

Snakes and ladders by Amartya Sen

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published Published on Feb 3, 2012   modified Modified on Feb 3, 2012
Like many board games that were developed in India, of which chess is perhaps the most important and famous, the game of “snakes and ladders” too emerged in this country a long time ago. With its balancing of snakes that pull you down and ladders that take you up, this game has been used again and again as a metaphor for life, telling us about our fortunes and misfortunes, and going further, about the consequences of good deeds and bad actions. Good decisions yield handsome rewards – taking us rapidly up a ladder – and bad moves yield severe penalties – making us suffer a precipitate decline through the mouth of a long snake, all the way down to its distant tail.
 
Britain too found in this board game from their colony a good way of expressing their traditional ethical tales, illustrating, for example, the simple moralistic world of what was called “Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished” – a game that became very popular in early 19th century. The English version used the graphic illustrations of the snakes and ladders to depict traditional English moral tales that made this old Indian game popular first in England and then in the British-dominated global world of the nineteenth century. The Indian names – from Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu and other subcontinental languages – for the qualities that respectively yielded rewards and punishment were replaced in the English version into the names of classical English virtues such as penitence, pity, obedience and self-denial yielding ascent up the ladders, while time-honoured vices of depravity, cruelty, dandyness made one slip rapidly down through the body of a snake.

The diagnosis of virtues and vices is, of course, adaptable, and the richness of the analogy of snakes and ladders can be put to use today in discussing modern problems as well – even the contemporary challenges of economic and social policies. We can well ask: what are the nasty snakes we face today in thinking about economic policies in our troubled world, and what helpful ladders we should try to climb up in moving an economy and society forward – in a world full of opportunities as well as serious dangers. The distinctions are quite important for the emerging economies which are trying to decide where to emerge. We do not want to emanate from the bottom end of snakes, and would rather emerge at the top of elevating ladders. How can we do this?

Snakes in the developed world

I begin with snakes. I cannot hide from this audience my belief that a great many countries in the West seem to be doing their best to go straight into the mouth of a fairly hefty snake. In an economic world that is still emerging very slowly from the gigantic crises of 2008, with the continuation of huge unemployment, very low growth, and languishing demand – as is the case in many of the traditionally rich countries, particularly in the bulk of Europe – it is hard to think that anything can be further from a ladder and as close to a snake as huge programmes of comprehensive economic austerity. It is certainly true that many countries in Europe need – and have needed for some time – a better system of economic accountability and more responsible management of the economy. But to regard large-scale cutting of every kind of government expenditure, including those that decimate the quality of vulnerable human lives and the bases of centrally important human security, and create havoc to the possibility of economic growth, would be a very odd vision of a ladder. The result has been spiralling catastrophe, engulfing more and more countries in Europe, and inviting the United States in this journey down the belly of a snake.
 
This is not to deny that there are issues of financial responsibility and accountability in making use of large governmental expenditure. 
 
But to move from that frying pan of mismanagement to the fire of indiscriminate cuts to satisfy the creditors and to placate the rating agencies (with their simple-minded theories of sound finance) has not been helping these countries to move into a responsible forward-looking recovery programme.

The popularity of the strategy of “blood, sweat and tears” approach to deficit reduction shared by governments, bond markets and rating agencies gave some deceptive plausibility to what was being generally advocated for all, and being imposed in particular on many of the more precarious European countries like Greece or Portugal. A similar – if less extreme – strategy of huge austerity was chosen voluntarily by the British government, based on economic reasoning that was peculiarly one-sided (I remember recollecting Bernard Shaw’s remark that an Englishman feels moral when he is merely uncomfortable).

The tendency to ignore the importance of economic growth in generating public revenue should be a major item for international, including European, critical scrutiny. The connection of growth and public revenue – that fast economic growth is the simplest way of generating public revenue – has of course been widely observed in developing countries, from China to India and Brazil. That connection is important not only in development planning – as has been widely acknowledged – it is also important for thinking clearly about good ways of reducing the burden of public debt and deficit in the Western world. There are lessons from history here. The big public debts of many countries when the Second World War ended caused huge anxieties, but the burden diminished rapidly thanks to fast economic growth.
 
The recent attempts at renegotiating the European treaty may have the welcome effect of generating more coordinated cooperation between them, which is certainly needed, and may also help the immediate liquidity crisis with more supportive financial aid, but they do not do much to show how economic growth is going to be practically – not just theoretically – revived.

India’s missing ladders

It is certainly to the credit of India – and of many other traditionally poorer countries in the world – that they typically have not chosen the austerity route. India may be missing some very important ladders, and to this I must now turn, but the fact that we have avoided the pied piper of snake charmers must be something to celebrate.
 
But what are the ladders we are missing as we dodge the snakes? Fast economic growth of Gross National Product contributes to development not merely through raising the incomes of people, but very powerfully through generating public revenue. In fact, public revenue very often grows much faster than the GNP. The price-adjusted public revenue in India today seems to be about four times what it used to be merely twenty years ago – a much faster expansion than even the fast-growing gross domestic product. But there are important contrasts in the way different countries are using the growing basket of public revenue.
 
To take a classic contrast – that between China and India – India may be now growing almost as fast as China does, but China seems to be making much greater use of this opportunity for development purposes. For example, government expenditure on health care in China is nearly five times that in India. China does, of course, have a larger population and a higher per-capita income than India, but even in relative terms, China spends a much higher proportion of its GDP in governmental expenditure on health care (more than 50 per cent higher than India as a percentage of GDP).

The allocation of government expenditure is extremely important in itself, but in addition, it also serves as an indicator of how much priority the country – its government and ultimately its political system – tends to give to concerns such as quality of life and the development of human capabilities. Even though India is now growing nearly as rapidly as China in terms of GDP, the gap between the two countries is growing – rather than diminishing – in terms of values of most social indicators of living standards, such as life expectancy, infant mortality rate, mean years of schooling, the coverage of immunization. To comment on the last, 97 per cent of the Chinese children are immunized with the DPT vaccine, in contrast with India’s meagre figure of 66 per cent.

However, it is not merely China, but even contrasted with our neighbours in South Asia, India’s relative position has persistently declined over the last two decades, compared with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and even Bhutan. Bangladesh, which has overtaken India in nearly all the social indicator, may be blessed with an activist NGO movement that is a world beater, and also Bangladeshi women seemed to have been more mobilized for the cause of economic and social and political change in a way that India has not been able to match.
 
But these ladders are clearly available to India also – and to all other countries – if it takes the objectives of good quality of life and development of human capability as seriously as it should.

Getting ahead in the game

Of course, development involves more than the social indicators which receive the bulk of the attention these days. As was articulated by the Millennium Declaration, which was adopted by the United Nations in the year 2000, there are other aspects of development as well, including democracy and human rights. Economic growth may not be especially effective in advancing these additional objectives of development, but in our policy making, we have to be particularly careful that these broader objectives are not neglected or undermined in the pursuit of other causes. For example, the largely successful practice of democracy in India cannot be regarded as irrelevant to the quality of life of Indians. The interest in political and social participation seems to stretch even to the poorest parts of the Indian population.
 
This recognition raises, however, another question: could it be that India’s democratic system is a barrier to using the fruits of economic growth for the purpose of enhancing health, education and other features of “social development”? In addressing this question in an essay in the New York Review, I confessed to having a sense of nostalgia. When India had a very low rate of economic growth, as was the case until the 1980s, a common argument coming from the critics of democracy was that democracy was hostile to fast economic growth. It was hard for us, on the other side, to convince the anti-democratic advocates that fast economic growth depends on the friendliness of the economic climate, rather than on the fierceness of the political system. That debate on the contradiction between democracy and economic growth has now ended (not least because of the high economic growth rates of democratic India), but a similar scepticism about democracy seems to be emerging, dealing with alleged inability of democratic systems to pursue public health, public education and other socially supportive arrangements.

Relatively authoritarian systems are able to change quickly their policies when the leaders want that, and it is to the huge credit of the Chinese political leaders that they have focused so much on social interventions in education, health care, and other supportive mechanisms to advance the quality of life of the Chinese people. But authoritarianism does not, of course, provide any kind of guarantee that the social commitments will undoubtedly emerge or be sustained. And there is, in fact, no real barrier in combining multi-party democratic governance with growth-mediated development. But what would be needed is much greater public engagement in the central demands of justice and development through more vigorous democratic practice – what Walter Bagehot and John Stuart Mill saw as “government by discussion.” The history of the emergence of the welfare state in Europe provides, with some ups and downs, quite a robust example of this. Public reasoning led and shaped the transformation that generated the hugely effective welfare state system, setting an example from which the world would learn – those were the glory days of Europe (somewhat in contrast with Europe today).

The winning throw?

Coming back to India, public debate is very powerful in India, but the range of engagement has often been quite limited. The India-China comparisons tend to concentrate mostly on the horse race of relative rates of overall economic growth, rather than their comparative performance on the respective use of the fruits of economic growth. Underlying this dialogic narrowness there is a social picture. A big part of the Indian population – a fairly small minority but still quite large in absolute numbers – has been doing very well indeed, through the process of high growth alone; they do not depend on social mediation. In contrast, more vigorous mediation would be very important for other Indians – many more in fact – who have various deprivations. Some are even undernourished, unschooled, and medically uncared.

The gains of those who have done well are, of course, positive achievements, and there is nothing wrong in celebrating their better lives. But an exaggerated concentration on their lives, fed partly by media interest, gives an unreal picture of the rosiness of what is happening to Indians in general, and this does not help a broader public dialogue. There is a strong need for determined broadening of the democratic political agenda. And so there is for changing the rhetoric of China-India comparisons from an obsession with comparative economic growth rates to the contrasting achievements in the quality of life – from those in education, health care, nourishment, immunization, to the practice of democracy and the safe-guarding of personal and political liberties.

Given the nature of Indian democratic politics, a social concern can become effective only by making it an integral part of the democratic process including media discussion and political debates. This is happening at long last with the recognition of corruption as a big issue. Even though the temptation to try to deal with corruption through means that weaken our democratic system, rather than strengthening its force and reach, also carry dangers, it is welcome that attention is now being paid to this long-standing problem. But this broadening of public debate has to happen over a much larger front.

This is an edited version of a lecture given in New Delhi in December 2011

The Financial Times, 24 December, 2011, http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2011/12/24/amartya-sen-playing-snakes-and-ladders/#

Tagged with: Human Development



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