Understanding
Sen-measure of poverty
By Badal
Mukherji
AS the news of the Nobel Prize for
Economics to Amartya Sen came, a tidal wave of phone
calls and television cameras inundated us at the Delhi
School of Economics.
Portable instruments
converted most of our offices into instant studios. We
suffered gladly; there are so few things to be genuinely
happy about in this country today that we appreciate the
popular joy.
Plus, we are particularly
pleased as Prof. Sen taught at the DSE from 1963 to 1981,
continues to be an Honorary Professor in the Department
of Economics of the DSE, and wrote some great papers on
the theory of development and social choice and his
two-volume classic "Choice and Welfare" while
in DSE.
But the Golden Jubilee of
the DSE begins on November 14 this year, to be
inaugurated by President K.R. Narayanan who was himself a
Visiting Fellow at the DSE in 1953-54 and the closing
lecture in a very distinguished series will be given a
year later by — you guessed it right — Prof.
Sen.
But what I write now was
somewhat unexpectedly triggered by a question asked by a
TV correspondent who was taking pictures of some books of
Prof. Sen in our library. When a book fell open
accidentally, he saw the page and got alarmed at what he
saw: page after page of mathematical deduction, logical
notation, graphs and equations!
Of course, those are what
all his students, including myself have to sweat out
through, all researchers in these areas must mandatorily
know and, what is most important to realise, it is this
bedrock of hard logical structure on which his subsequent
historical/institutional work on poverty, hunger, famines
and inequality rests.
That is what gives them
their robustness. It is becoming so very important to
remind ourselves that there is no contradiction between
ethics and morality on the one hand and hard cold logic
on the other. If you thought otherwise, see A.K. Sen.
"... I was
introducing a new mathematical technique by which regions
formerly abandoned to the vagueness of philosophers were
conquered for the precisions of exact formulae,"
wrote Bertrand Russell in his autobiography about his own
work.
I kept thinking of this
line of Russell’s when I heard of the award to Prof.
Sen, and more so, when I read the citation. For good
reason; I suggest a very close similarity with the way
Amartya Sen attacked the analysis of poverty and
deprivation all his intellectual life, even although
there is some anxiety of annoying Amartya Sen the
philosopher.
I think we will do great
disservice to him if we ignore the hard bedrock of
analytical work that supports the structures that he
built.
Biographical details are
now well-known, so I can be brief. Born in Shantiniketan,
West Bengal, christened by Rabindranath Thakur
(popularised to the world as ‘Tagore’ by the
British), educated in the Presidency College, Calcutta,
Ph.D. at Cambridge, a short stint at Jadavpur University,
Calcutta, eight years at the DSE, Cambridge, Harvard
(joint appointment in the Departments of Economics and
Philosophy), Master of Trinity, Cambridge, Amartya Kumar
Sen, Nobel Laureate.
In 1943 there was a
terrible famine in what was then undivided Bengal. By his
own account, this had an enormous impact on Prof. Sen,
and the question the nine-year-old child asked is what
the 64-year-old scholar has tried to answer all his life:
"Why did not any of our relatives or friends die
while hundreds were dying on the streets?" It is
essential to understand the progress of the intellectual
pilgrim in finding an answer to this question and that is
what makes the quote from Russell so strikingly
appropriate.
Sen started at the
logical, mathematical deep end of the problem; sorted
them out in the pages of Econometrica, The Review of
Economic Studies and other frontline journals, in the
jackets of OUP, Blackwell and the like, and then took on
Third World reality.
The most significant
departure that he makes can be highlighted by the
so-called Sen-measure of poverty. As opposed to a head
count of people below an accepted poverty line, what it
does is roughly keep giving weight to the deprivation of
a person; the further below the line she is, the heavier
is the weightage given to her in the measure.
It is not only the
distribution (or, maldistribution) of income; it is the
distribution of welfare in a society that this measure is
trying to capture.
The path of
thought-evolution runs from microeconomics to the Theory
of Choice to welfare economics to the Sen-measure. Now
Sen is ready to take on the levity of the West as well as
the apathy of the East.
Certainly, quite a bit of
his writing on poverty, hunger and famines can be read
(with great joy by anyone for, he is, both in writing and
in words, a great expositor) avoiding the formal
foundation. But that will completely miss the
intellectual power of his work which is what makes him so
compelling for the Western world.
"You want
‘proof’? Can you handle my theorem 337.2"
asks Sen. There must be some way to bring rationality
around to ethics?
This is where Prof.
Sen’s position on democracy is to be judged. Yes, a
totalitarian regime might be more efficient in the
production of goods but, through a free press, a
democratic form will be more efficient in the
distribution of welfare; certainly, to avoid the extreme
misery of death due to starvation in a famine which is
what he wants. Who does not?
At the same time, a
democracy might tolerate for an unacceptably long time a
lot of poverty, a lot of deprivation and misery. Sen will
call for state intervention at this point more
aggressively than only a system of universal adult
suffrage would imply.
"The best lack all
conviction," wrote W.B. Yeats at the beginning of
the twentieth century. Nearly one hundred years later, we
have a counter example.
It was also Yeats’
ominous forecast that some rough beast was
"slouching towards Bethlehem to be born". Let
us hope that the twenty-first will see the birth, not of
a "rough beast" yet again but of humanism at
last. (IANS)
(The
writer is Director of the Delhi School of Economics)
|
