I was taken aback.  She and I had met after a long decade.  Discussing what I had been up to, I had mentioned my application of the work of Renford Bambrough to economic theory in my 1989 book Philosophy of Economics.

“Oh, Renford? He’s a genius!” –  Dharma repeated blandly, seeming surprised that I did not get it.

“Oh, Renford? He’s a genius!” – she said a third time more slowly, and then, seeing my uncomprehending stare,  explained to me that that was the common saying at Cambridge about the young Renford Bambrough back in the post-War years when she had herself arrived there as an undergraduate.

Now, finally, I got it.  “Oh, Renford? He’s a genius!”

In “Conflict and the Scope of Reason”, Renford Bambrough recounted that he had, around 1948, crossed the great Bertrand Russell himself at a meeting of the Labour Club.  Russell had made a proposal (which he apparently denied later ever having made) of preventive atomic war against the USSR.  Sooner or later there would be conflict between the USSR and the West, the argument went, on balance it would be worse  to live under pax Sovietica than pax Americana; therefore, Russell had argued, the West’s existing power should be used to ensure the Soviets never acquired the same.   At question-time, young Renford, aged 22, asked Russell why, from a purely philosophical point of view, it mattered  “if the human race did destroy itself rather than die of natural causes later”.  There was laughter among the audience, and then Russell said he had enormously liked the question, and wished he could “achieve the degree of detachment here displayed by one so young.  But I confess that I, for my part, have never been able to overcome my feelings of concern for the welfare of the species of which I am a member”.  Russell had misunderstood the question or deftly avoided it, but even so he had noticed in his young interlocutor the calm detachment that would mark all his later thought.

John Renford Bambrough was born on April 29 1926 and died on January 17th 1999.  I have written a little about him here and shall write more fully about him anon.

Subroto Roy

Kolkata

]]> http://independentindian.com/2009/09/07/oh-renford-hes-a-genius-a-post-war-cambridge-story/feed/ 0 drsubrotoroy http://independentindian.com/2009/08/03/thoughts-words-deeds-my-work-1973-2010/ http://independentindian.com/2009/08/03/thoughts-words-deeds-my-work-1973-2010/#comments Mon, 03 Aug 2009 08:49:09 +0000 drsubrotoroy http://independentindian.com/?p=4436 ]]> Thoughts, words, deeds

My work 1973-2010

Subroto Roy

This is an incomplete bibliography of my writings, public lectures etc 1973-2010 including citations, reviews, comments.  I have been mostly an academic economist who by choice or circumstance over 36 years has had to venture also into science, philosophy, public policy, law, jurisprudence, practical politics, history, international relations, military strategy, financial theory, accounting, management, journalism, literary criticism, psychology, psychoanalysis, theology, aesthetics, biography, children’s fables, etc.   If anything unites the seemingly diverse work recorded below it is that I have tried to acquire a grasp of the nature of human reason and then apply this comprehension in practical contexts as simply and clearly as possible. Hence I have ended up following the path of Aristotle, as described in modern times (via Wittgenstein and John Wisdom) by Renford Bambrough.  The 2004 public lecture in England, “Science, Religion, Art & the Necessity of Freedom”, may explain and illustrate all this best.  A friend has been kind enough to call me an Academician, which I probably am, though one who really needs his own Academy because the incompetence, greed and mendacity encountered too often in the modern professoriat is dispiriting.

1-289 refer mostly to writings and publications printed on paper; 290-382 refer to  writings or items not printed on paper — as new media break space, cost and other  constraints of traditional publishing, a little repetition and overlap has occurred too. Also in a few cases, e.g., Aldous Huxley’s essay on DH Lawrence, nothing has been done except discover and republish.  Several databases have been created and released in the public interest, as have been some rare maps.  There is also some biographical and autobiographical material.  Several inconsequential errors remain in the text, which shall take time to be rectified as documents come to be rediscovered and collated.

1973

1. “Behavioural study of mus musculus”, Haileybury College, Supervised by J de C Ford-Robertson MA (Oxon). (Due to be published here 2010).

2. “Chemistry at Advanced & Special Level: Student Notes 1972-73” (Due to be published here 2010).

3. “Biology at Advanced & Special Level: Student Notes 1972-73”, (Due to be published here 2010).

4.  “Physics at Advanced Level: Student Notes 1972-73”, (Due to be published here 2010).

5. “Revolution: theoria and praxis”, London, mimeo (Due to be published here 2010).

6. “Gandhi vs Marx”, London, mimeo (Due to be published here 2010).

1974

7. “Relevance of downward money-wage rigidity to the problem of maintaining full-employment in the classical and Keynesian models of income determination”, London School of Economics, mimeo (Due to be published here 2010).

8. “Testing aircraft fuels at Shell Finland”.

1975

9. “Oxford Street experiences: down and out in London town”.

10. “SE Region Bulk Distribution Survey”, Unilever, Basingstoke.

11. “Four London poems”, in JCM Paton (ed)  New Writing (London, Great Portland Street: International Students House).  (Due to be republished here 2010)

12. “On economic growth models and modellers”, London School of Economics, mimeo. (Due to be published here 2010).

1976

13. “World money: system or anarchy?”, lecture to Professor ACL Day’s seminar, London School of Economics, Economics Department, April. (Due to be published here 2010).

14. “A beginner’s guide to some recent developments in monetary theory”, lecture to Professor FH Hahn’s seminar, Cambridge University Economics Department, November 17 (Due to be published here 2010). See also “Announcement of My “Hahn Seminar”,  published here June 14 2008.

1977

15. “Inflation and unemployment: a survey”, mimeo, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. (Due to be published here 2010).

16. “On short run theories of dual economies”, Cambridge University Economics Department “substantial piece of work” required of first year Research Students.  Examiner: DMG Newbery, FBA. (Due to be published here 2010).

1978

17. “Pure theory of developing economies 1 and 2”, Delhi School of Economics mimeo (Due to be published here 2010).

18. “Introduction to some market outcomes under uncertainty”, Delhi School of Economics mimeo (Due to be published here 2010).

19. “On money and development”, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, mimeo, September.  (Due to be published here 2010)

20. “Notes on the Newbery-Stiglitz model of sharecropping”, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, mimeo November.  (Due to be published here 2010).

1979

21. “A theory of rights and economic justice”, Corpus Christi College Cambridge mimeo. (Due to be published here 2010).

22. “Monetary theory and economic development”, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, mimeo  (Due to be published here 2010).

23. “Foundations of the case against ‘development planning’”, Corpus Christi College Cambridge, mimeo, November.   (Due to be published here 2010).

1979-1989

24. Correspondence with Renford Bambrough (1926-1999), philosopher of St John’s College, Cambridge (Due to be published here 2010).

1980

25. “Models before the monetarist storm”, New Statesman letters

26. “Disciplining rulers and experts”, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, mimeo.  (Due to be published here 2010).

1981

27. “On liberty & economic growth: preface to a philosophy for India”, Cambridge University doctoral thesis, supervisor FH Hahn, FBA; examiners CJ Bliss, FBA; TW Hutchison, FBA  (Due to be published here 2010). 27a Response of FA Hayek on a partial draft February 18 1981.  27b Response of Peter Bauer, 1982.  27c Response of Theodore W Schultz, 1983.  27d. Response of Frank Hahn 1985.

1982

28. “Knowledge and freedom in economic theory Parts 1 and 2”, Centre for Study of Public Choice, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, Working Papers.

29. “Economic Theory and Development Economics”. Lecture to American Economic Association, New York, Dec 1982.  Panel: RM Solow, HB Chenery, T Weisskopf, P Streeten, G Rosen, S Roy. Published in 29a.

1983

29a “Economic Theory and Development Economics: A Comment”. World Development, 1983. [Citation: Stavros Thefanides "Metamorphosis of Development Economics", World Development 1988.]

30. “The Political Economy of Trade Policy (Comment on J. Michael Finger)”, Washington DC: Cato Journal, Winter 1983/84. See also 000 “Risk-aversion explains resistance to freer trade”, 2008.

1984

31. “Considerations on Utility, Benevolence and Taxation”, History of Political Economy, 1984.   31a Response of Professor Sir John Hicks May 1 1984.

[Citations: P. Hennipman, "A Tale of Two Schools", De Economist 1987, "A New Look at the Ordinalist Revolution", J. Econ. Lit. Mar 1988; P. Rappoport, "Reply to Professor Hennipman", J. Econ. Lit. Mar 1988; Eugene Smolensky et al "An Application of A Dynamic Cost-of-Living Index to the Evaluation of Changes in Social Welfare", J. Post-Keynesian Econ.IX.3. 1987.]

32. Pricing, Planning and Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India, London: Institute of Economic Affairs, London 1984.

[Citations: Lead editorial of The Times of London May 29 1984, “India’s economy”, Times letters June 16 1984. John Toye "Political Economy & Analysis of Indian Development", Modern Asian Studies, 22, 1, 1988; John Toye, Dilemmas of Development; D. Wilson, "Privatization of Asia", The Banker Sep. 1984 etc].  See also 370 “Silver Jubilee of ‘Pricing, Planning and Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India’” 2009.

33. Review of Utilitarianism and Beyond, Amartya Sen & Bernard Williams (eds) Public Choice.

34. Review of Limits of Utilitarianism, HB Miller & WH Williams (eds.), Public Choice.

35. Deendayal lecture (one of four invited lecturers), Washington DC, May.

1987

36. (with one other) “Does the Theory of Logical Types Inform the Theory of Communication?”, Journal of Genetic Psychology., 148 (4), Dec. 1987 [Citation:

37. “Irrelevance of Foreign Aid”, India International Centre Quarterly, Winter 1987.

38. Review of Development Planning by Sukhamoy Chakravarty for Economic Affairs, London 1987.

1988

39. (with two others) “Introduction” to Lessons in Development: A Comparative Study of Asia and Latin America. San Francisco: Inst. of Economic Growth.

40. “A note on the welfare economics of regional cooperation”, lecture to Asia-Latin America conference, East West Center Honolulu, published 2009.

1989

41. Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry, London & New York: Routledge (International Library of Philosophy) 1989, paperback 1991. Internet edition 2007.   [Reviews & Citations: Research in Economics, 1992; De Economist 1991 & 1992; Manch.Sch. Econ.Studs. 59, 1991; Ethics 101.88 Jul. 1991; Kyklos 43.4 1990; Soc. Science Q. 71.880. Dec.1990; Can. Phil. Rev. 1990; J. Econ. Hist. Sep. 1990; Econ. & Phil. Fall 1990; Econ. Affairs June-July 1990; TLS May 1990; Choice March 1990; J. App.Phil. 1994, M. Blaug: Methodology of Economics, 2nd ed., Cambridge, 1992;  Hist. Methods. 27.3, 1994; J. of Inst. & Theoretical Econ.,1994;  Jahrbucker fur Nationaleconomie 1994, 573:574. Mark A Lutz in Economics for the Common Good, London: Routledge, 1999, et al].  See also 339 “Apropos Philosophy of Economics”, Comments of Sidney Hook, KJ Arrow, Milton Friedman, TW Schultz, SS Alexander, Max Black, Renford Bambrough, John Gray et al.

42. Foreword to Essays on the Political Economy by James M. Buchanan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press 1989.

43. “Modern Political Economy of India”, edited by Subroto Roy & William E James,  Hawaii mimeo May 21 1989.  This published for the first time a November 1955 memorandum to the Government of India by Milton Friedman.  See also 43a, 53.

43a. Preface to “Milton Friedman’s extempore comments at the 1989 Hawaii conference: on India, Israel, Palestine, the USA, Debt and its uses, Erhardt abolishing exchange controls, Etc”,  May 22 1989, published here for the first time October 31 2008.

44. Milton Friedman’s defence of my work  in 1989.

45. Theodore W. Schultz’s defence of Philosophy of Economics

1990

46. “Letter to Judge Evelyn Lance: On A Case Study in Private International Law” (Due to be published here in 2010).

47-49. Selections from advisory work on economic policy etc for Rajiv Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Parliament of India,  published in 47a-49a.

1991

41b Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry, Paperback edition.

50. “Conversations and correspondence with Rajiv Gandhi during the Gulf war, January 1991”   (Due to be published here 2010).

47a. A Memo to Rajiv I:  Stronger Secular Middle”, The Statesman, Jul 31 1991.

48a “A Memo to Rajiv II: Saving India’s Prestige”, The Statesman, Aug 1 1991.

49a “A Memo to Rajiv III: Salvation in Penny Capitalism”, The Statesman, Aug 2 1991  47b-49b “Three Memoranda to Rajiv Gandhi 1990-91”, 2007 republication here.

51. “Constitution for a Second Indian Republic”, The Saturday Statesman, April 20 1991.  Republished here 2009.

52. “On the Art of Government: Experts, Party, Cabinet and Bureaucracy”, New Delhi mimeo March 25 1991, published here July 00 2009.

1992

53. Foundations of India’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s Edited and with an Introduction by Subroto Roy & William E. James New Delhi, London, Newbury Park: Sage: 1992.   Citation: Milton and Rose Friedman Two Lucky People (Chicago 1998), pp. 268-269.

54. Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s Edited and with an Introduction by William E. James & Subroto Roy, Hawaii MS 1989, Sage: 1992, Karachi: Oxford 1993.

Reviews of 53 & 54 include: Bus. Today, Mar-Apr 1992; Political Studies March 1995; Econ Times 21 March 1993; Pakistan Development Review 1992. Hindustan Times 11 July 1992. Pacific Affairs 1993; Hindu 21 March 1993, 15 June 1993; Pakistan News International 12 June 1993. Book Reviews March 1993; Deccan Herald 2 May 1993; Pol.Econ.J. Ind. 1992. Fin Express 13 September 1992;  Statesman 16 Jan. 1993.  J. Royal Soc Asian Aff. 1994, J. Contemporary Asia, 1994 etc.

55. “Fundamental Problems of the Economies of India and Pakistan”, World Bank, Washington, mimeo  (Due to be published here 2010).

56.“The Road to Stagflation: The Coming Dirigisme in America, or, America, beware thy economists!, or Zen and Clintonomics,” Washington DC, Broad Branch Terrace, mimeo, November 17.

1993

57. “Exchange-rates and manufactured exports of South Asia”, IMF Washington DC mimeo.  Published in part in 2007-2008 as 58-62:

58. “Path of the Indian Rupee 1947-1993”, 2008.

59.  “Path of the Pakistan Rupee 1947-1993”, 2008.

60. “Path of the Sri Lankan Rupee 1948-1993”, 2008.

61. “Path of the Bangladesh Taka 1972-1993”, 2008.

62. “India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh Manufactured Exports, IMF Washington DC mimeo”, published 2007.

63. “Economic Assessment of US-India Merchandise Trade”, Arlington, Virginia, mimeo, published in slight part in Indo-US Trade & Economic Cooperation, ICRIER New Delhi, 1995, and in whole 2007.

64. “Towards an Economic Solution for Kashmir”, mimeo, Arlington, Virginia, circulated in Washington DC 1993-1995, cf 82, 111 infra. Comment of Selig Harrison.

1994

65. “Comment on Indonesia”, in The Political Economy of Policy Reform edited by John Williamson, Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics.

66a “Gold reserves & the gold price in anticipation of Central Bank behaviour”, Greenwich, Connecticut, mimeo. 67b. “Portfolio optimization and foreign currency exposure hedging” Greenwich, Connecticut mimeo.

1995

68. “On the logic and commonsense of debt and payments crises: How to avoid another Mexico in India and Pakistan”, Scarsdale, NY, mimeo, May 1.

69. “Policies for Young India”, Scarsdale, NY, pp. 350, manuscript.

1996

70. US Supreme Court documents, published in part in 2008 as  “Become a US Supreme Court Justice!” 70a, 70b (Due to be published in full here in 2010 as Roy vs University of Hawaii, 1989- including the expert testimonies of Milton Friedman and Theodore W Schultz.).

71. “Key problems of macroeconomic management facing the new Indian Government”, May 17.  Scarsdale, New York, mimeo.  (Due to be published here 2010).

72. “Preventing a collapse of the rupee”, IIT Kharagpur lecture July 16 1996.

73. “The Economist’s Representation of Technological Knowledge”, Vishleshlaya lecture to the Institution of Engineers, September 15 1996, IIT Kharagpur.

1997

74. “Union and State Budgets in India”, lecture at the World Bank, Washington DC, May 00.

75. “State Budgets in India”, IIT Kharagpur mimeo, June 6.

1998

76. “Transparency and Economic Policy-Making:  An address to the Asia-Pacific Public Relations Conference” (panel on Transparency chaired by CR Irani) Jan 30 1998, published here 2008.

77. Theodore W. Schultz 1902-1998,  Feb 25.

78. “The Economic View of Human Resources”, address to a regional conference on human resources, IIT Kharagpur.

79.  “Management accounting”, lecture at Lal Bahadur Shastri Academy, Mussourie,

80a “The Original Reformer”, Outlook letters, Jan 23 1998

81. “Recent Developments in Modern Finance”, IIM Bangalore Review, 10, 1 & 2, Jan.-Jun 1998. Reprinted as “From the Management Guru’s Classroom”: 81a “An introduction to derivatives”, Business Standard/Financial Times, Bombay 18 Apr 1999; 81b “Options in the future, Apr 25 1999; 81c “What is hedging?”, May 2 1999; 81d “Teaching computers to think”, May 9 1999.

82. “Towards an Economic Solution for Kashmir”, Jun 22 1998, lecture at Heritage Foundation, Washington DC.  Cf 111 Dec 2005.

83. “Sixteen Currencies for India: A Reverse Euro Model for Monetary & Fiscal Efficacy”, Lecture at the Institute of  Economic Affairs, London, June 29 1998.  Due to be published here 2010.

84. “Fable of the Fox, the Farmer, and the Would-Be Tailors”, October  (Published here July 27 2009).

85. “A Common Man’s Guide to Pricing Financial Derivatives”, Lecture to “National Seminar on Derivatives”, Xavier Labour Research Institute, Jamshedpur, Dec. 16 1998.   See 98.

1999

86. “An Analysis of Pakistan’s War-Winning Strategy: Are We Ready for This?”, IIT Kharagpur mimeo, published in part as 86a.“Was a Pakistani Grand Strategy Discerned in Time by India?” New Delhi:  Security & Political Risk Analysis Bulletin, July 1999, Kargil issue.  See also 000

80b. “The Original Reformer”, Outlook letters, Sep 13 1999.

2000

87. “On Freedom & the Scientific Point of View”, SN Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Feb 17 2000.  Cf 100 below.

88. “Liberalism and Indian economic policy”, lecture at IIM Calcutta,  Indian Liberal Group Meetings Devlali, Hyderabad; also Keynote address to UGC Seminar Guntur, March 30 2002.  (Due to be published here 2010).

89. “Towards a Highly Transparent Fiscal & Monetary Framework for India’s Union & State Governments”, Invited address to Conference of State Finance Secretaries, Reserve Bank of India, Bombay, April 29, 2000.  Published 2008.

90. “On the Economics of Information Technology”, two lectures at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, Nov 10-11, 2000.

91. Review of A New World by Amit Chaudhuri in Literary Criterion, Mysore.

2001

92. Review of AD Shroff: Titan of Finance and Free Enterprise by Sucheta Dalal, Freedom First., January.

93. “Encounter with Rajiv Gandhi: On the Origins of the 1991 Economic Reform”, Freedom First, October. See also 93a in 2005 and  93b in 2007.

94. “A General Theory of Globalization & Modern Terrorism with Special Reference to September 11”, a keynote address to the Council for Asian Liberals & Democrats, Manila, Philippines, 16 Nov. 2001.  Published as 91a.

95. “The Case for and against The Satanic Verses: Diatribe and Dialectic as Art”, Dec 22 republished in print 95a The Statesman Festival Volume, 2006.

2002

94a “A General Theory of Globalization & Modern Terrorism with Special Reference to September 11”, in September 11 & Political Freedom in Asia, eds. Johannen, Smith & Gomez, Singapore 2002.

2002-2010

96. “Recording vivid dreams: Freud’s advice in exploring the Unconscious Mind” (Due to be published here in 2010).

2003

97. “Key principles of government accounting and audit”, IIT Kharagpur mimeo.

98. “Derivative pricing & other topics in financial theory: a student’s complete lecture notes” (Due to be published here in 2010).

2004

99. “Collapse of the Global Conversation”, International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, Netherlands, Jul 2004.

100. “Science, Religion, Art & the Necessity of Freedom”, a public lecture, University of Buckingham, UK, August 24 2004.  Published here 2007.

2005

93a Rajiv Gandhi and the Origins of India’s 1991 Economic Reform (this was the full story; it appeared in print for the first time in The Statesman Festival Volume 2007).

101. “Can India become an economic superpower (or will there be a monetary meltdown)?” Cardiff University Institute of Applied Macroeconomics Monetary Economics Seminar, April 13, Institute of Economic Affairs, London, April 27, Reserve Bank of India, Bombay, Chief Economist’s Seminar on Monetary Economics, May 5.

102. Margaret Thatcher’s Revolution: How it Happened and What it Meant, Edited and with an Introduction by Subroto Roy & John Clarke, London & New York: Continuum, 2005; paperback 2006; French translation by Florian Bay, 2007.

103. “Iqbal & Jinnah vs Rahmat Ali in Pakistan’s Creation”, Dawn, Karachi, Sep 3.

104. “The Mitrokhin Archives II from an Indian Perspective: A Review Article”, The Statesman, Perspective Page, Oct 11 .

105. “After the Verdict”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Oct 20.

106.   “US Espionage Failures”, The Statesman, Perspective Page, Oct 26

107.  “Waffle But No Models of Monetary Policy”, The Statesman, Perspective Page, Oct 30.

108. “On Hindus and Muslims”, The Statesman, Perspective Page, Nov 6.

109. “Assessing Vajpayee: Hindutva True and False”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Nov  13-14″.

110. “Fiction from the India Economic Summit”, The Statesman, Front Page, Nov 29.

111. “Solving Kashmir: On an Application of Reason”, The Statesman Editorial Page

I.  “Give the Hurriyat et al Indian Green Cards”, Dec 1

II.  “Choice of Nationality under Full Information”, Dec 2

III.  “Of Flags and Consulates in Gilgit etc”, Dec 3.

2006

112. “The Dream Team: A Critique”, The Statesman Editorial Page

I : New Delhi’s Consensus (Manmohantekidambaromics), Jan 6

II: Money, Convertibility, Inflationary Deficit Financing, Jan 7

III:  Rule of Law, Transparency, Government Accounting, Jan 8.

113. “Unaccountable Delhi: India’s Separation of Powers’ Doctrine”, The Statesman, Jan 13.

114. “Communists and Constitutions”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Jan 22.

115. “Diplomatic Wisdom”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Jan 31.

116.  “Mendacity & the Government Budget Constraint”, The Statesman, Front Page  Feb 3.

117. “Of Graven Images”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Feb5.

118. “Separation of Powers, Parts 1-2”, The Statesman, Editorial Pages Feb 12-13.

119. “Public Debt, Government Fantasy”, The Statesman, Front Page Editorial Comment, Feb 22.

120. “War or Peace Parts 1-2”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Feb 23-24.

121. “Can You Handle This Brief, Mr Chidambaram?” The Statesman, Front Page  Feb 26.

122. “A Downpayment On the Taj Mahal Anyone?”, The Statesman, Front Page  Comment on the Budget 2006-2007, Mar 1.

123. “Atoms for Peace (or War)”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page Mar 5.

124. “Imperialism Redux: Business, Energy, Weapons & Foreign Policy”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Mar 14.

125.  “Logic of Democracy”,  The Statesman, Editorial Page, Mar 30.

126. “Towards an Energy Policy”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Apr 2.

127. “Iran’s Nationalism”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Apr 6.

128. “A Modern Military”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Apr 16.

129.  “On Money & Banking”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Apr 23.

130.  “Lessons for India from Nepal’s Revolution”, The Statesman, Front Page Apr 26.

131. “Revisionist Flattery (Inder Malhotra’s Indira Gandhi: A Review Article)”, The Sunday Statesman, May 7.

132. “Modern World History”, The Sunday Statesman Editorial Page, May 7.

133. “Argumentative Indians: A Conversation with Professor Amartya Sen on Philosophy, Identity and Islam,” The Sunday Statesman,  May 14 2006.  “A Philosophical Conversation between Professor Sen and Dr Roy”,  2008.  Translated into Bengali by AA and published in 00.

134. “The Politics of Dr Singh”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, May 21.

135. “Corporate Governance & the Principal-Agent Problem”, lecture at a conference on corporate governance, Kolkata May 31.  Published here 2008.

136. “Pakistan’s Allies Parts 1-2″, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Jun 4-5.

137. “Law, Justice and J&K Parts 1-2″, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Jul 2, The Statesman Editorial Page Jul 3.

138. “The Greatest Pashtun (Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan)”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Jul 16.

139. “Understanding Pakistan Parts 1-2”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Jul 30, The Statesman Editorial Page Jul 31.

140.  “Indian Money and Credit”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Aug 6.

141.  “India’s Moon Mission”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page,  Aug 13.

142. “Jaswant’s Journeyings: A Review Article”, The Sunday Statesman Magazine, Aug 27.

143. “Our Energy Interests, Parts 1-2”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Aug 27, The Statesman Editorial Page Aug 28.

144. “Is Balochistan Doomed?”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Sep 3 2006.

145. “Racism New and Old”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Sep 8 2006

146. “Political Economy of India’s Energy Policy”, address to KAF-TERI conference, Goa Oct 7, published in 146a.

147. “New Foreign Policy? Seven phases of Indian foreign policy may be identifiable since Nehru”, Parts 1-2, The Sunday Statesman, Oct 8, The Statesman Oct 9.

148. “Justice & Afzal:  There is a difference between law and equity (or natural justice). The power of pardon is an equitable power. Commuting a death-sentence is a partial pardon”, The Sunday Statesman Editorial Page Oct 14

149. “Non-existent liberals (On a Liberal Party for India)”, The Sunday Statesman Editorial Page Oct 22.

150. “History of Jammu & Kashmir Parts 1-2”,  The Sunday Statesman, Oct 29, The Statesman Oct 30, Editorial Page.

151. “American Democracy: Does America need a Prime Minister and a longer-lived Legislature?”, The Sunday Statesman Nov 5.

152. “Milton Friedman A Man of Reason 1912-2006”, The Statesman Perspective Page,  Nov 22.

153. “Postscript to Milton Friedman Mahalanobis’s Plan  (The Mahalanobis-Nehru “Second Plan”) The Statesman Front Page Nov 22.

154.  “Mob Violence and Psychology”, Dec 10,  The Statesman, Editorial Page.

155. “What To Tell Musharraf: Peace Is Impossible Without Non-Aggressive Pakistani Intentions”, The Statesman Editorial Page Dec 15.

156. “Land, Liberty and Value: Government must act in good faith treating all citizens equally – not favouring organised business lobbies and organised labour over an unorganised peasantry”,  The Sunday Statesman Editorial Page Dec 31.

2007

157. “Hypocrisy of the CPI-M: Political Collapse In Bengal: A Mid-Term Election/Referendum Is Necessary”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Jan 9.

158. “On Land-Grabbing: Dr Singh’s India, Buddhadeb’s Bengal, Modi’s Gujarat have notorious US, Soviet and Chinese examples to follow ~ distracting from the country’s real economic problems,” The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page Jan 14.

159. “India’s Macroeconomics:  Real growth has steadily occurred because India has shared the world’s technological progress. But bad fiscal, monetary policies over decades have led to monetary weakness and capital flight” The Statesman Editorial Page Jan 20.

160. “Fiscal Instability: Interest payments quickly suck dry every year’s Budget. And rolling over old public debt means that Government Borrowing in fact much exceeds the Fiscal Deficit”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Feb 4.

161. “Our trade and payments Parts 1-2”  (“India in World Trade and Payments”),The Sunday Statesman, Feb 11 2007, The Statesman, Feb 12 2007.

162. “Our Policy Process: Self-Styled “Planners” Have Controlled India’s Paper Money For Decades,” The Statesman, Editorial Page, Feb 20.

163. “Bengal’s Finances”, The Sunday Statesman Editorial Page, Feb 25.

164. “Fallacious Finance: Congress, BJP, CPI-M may be leading India to Hyperinflation” The Statesman Editorial Page Mar 5.

165. “Uttar Pradesh Polity and Finance: A Responsible New Govt May Want To Declare A Financial Emergency” The Statesman Editorial Page, Mar 24

166. “A scam in the making” in The Sunday Statesman Front Page Apr 1 2007, published here in full as “Swindling India”.

167. “Maharashtra’s Money: Those Who Are Part Of The Problem Are Unlikely To Be A Part Of Its Solution”, The Statesman Editorial Page Apr 24.

146a. “Political Economy of Energy Policy” in India and Energy Security edited by Anant Sudarshan and Ligia Noronha, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, New Delhi 2007.

168.  “Presidential Qualities: Simplicity, Genuine Achievement Are Desirable; Political Ambition Is Not”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, May 8.

169. “We & Our Neighbours: Pakistanis And Bangladeshis Would Do Well To Learn From Sheikh Abdullah”, The Statesman, Editorial Page May 15.

170. “On Indian Nationhood: From Tamils To Kashmiris And Assamese And Mizos To Sikhs And Goans”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, May 25.

171. A Current Example of the Working of the Unconscious Mind, May 26.

172. Where I would have gone if I was Osama Bin Laden, May 31.

173. “US election ’08:America’s Presidential Campaign Seems Destined To Be Focussed On Iraq”,  The Statesman, Editorial Page, June 1.

174. “Home Team Advantage: On US-Iran talks and Sunni-Shia subtleties: Tehran must transcend its revolution and endorse the principle that the House of Islam has many mansions”,  The Sunday Statesman Editorial Page, June 3

175. “Unhealthy Delhi: When will normal political philosophy replace personality cults?”,  The Statesman, Editorial Page, June 11.

176. “American Turmoil: A Vice-Presidential Coup – And Now a Grassroots Counterrevolution?”,  The Statesman, Editorial Page, June 18

177.  “Political Paralysis: India has yet to develop normal conservative, liberal and socialist parties. The Nice-Housing-Effect and a little game-theory may explain the current stagnation”,  The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, June 24.

177. “Has America Lost? War Doctrines Of Kutusov vs Clausewitz May Help Explain Iraq War”,  The Statesman, Editorial Page, July 3.

178. “Lal Masjid ≠ Golden Temple: Wide differences are revealed between contemporary Pakistan and India by these two superficially similar military assaults on armed religious civilians”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page July 15

179 “Political Stonewalling: Only Transparency Can Improve Institutions”, The Statesman, Editorial Page July 20.

180. “Gold standard etc: Fixed versus flexible exchange rates”, July 21.

181. “US Pakistan-India Policy: Delhi & Islamabad Still Look West In Defining Their Relationship”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, July 27.

182. “Works of DH Lawrence” July 30

183. “An Open Letter to Professor Amartya Sen about Singur etc”, The Statesman, Editorial Page,  July 31.

184.  “Martin Buber on Palestine and Israel (with Postscript)”, Aug 4.

185. “Auguste Rodin on Nature, Art, Beauty, Women and Love”,  Aug 7.

186. “Saving Pakistan: A Physicist/Political Philosopher May Represent Iqbal’s “Spirit of Modern Times”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Aug 13.

187. Letter to Forbes.com  16 Aug.

188. “Need for Clarity: A poorly drafted treaty driven by business motives is a recipe for international misunderstanding”, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Aug 19.

189. “No Marxist MBAs? An amicus curiae brief for the Hon’ble High Court”,  The Statesman, FrontPage, Aug 29.

190. On Lawrence, Sep 4.

191. Dalai Lama’s Return: In the tradition of Gandhi, King, Mandela, Sep 11.

192. Of JC Bose, Patrick Geddes & the Leaf-World, Sep 12.

193. “Against Quackery: Manmohan and Sonia have violated Rajiv Gandhi’s intended reforms; the Communists have been appeased or bought; the BJP is incompetent  Parts 1-2”, in The Sunday Statesman and The Statesman, Editorial Pages of Sep 23-24.

194. Karl Georg Zinn’s 1994 Review of Philosophy of Economics, Sep 26.

195. DH Lawrence’s Phoenix, Oct 3.

93b. “Rajiv Gandhi and the Origins of India’s 1991 Economic Reform”, Statesman Festival Volume.

196. “Iran, America, Iraq: Bush’s post-Saddam Saddamism — one flip-flop too many?”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Oct 16.

197. “Understanding China: The World Needs to Ask China to Find Her True Higher Self”,  The Statesman, Editorial Page, Oct 22.

198. “India-USA interests: Elements of a serious Indian foreign policy”,  The Statesman, Editorial Page, Oct 30.

199. “China’s India Aggression : German Historians Discover Logic Behind Communist Military Strategy”,  The Statesman, Editorial Page Special Article, Nov 5.

200. Sonia’s Lying Courtier (with Postscript), Nov 25.

201. “Surrender or Fight? War is not a cricket match or Bollywood movie. Can India fight China if it must?” The Statesman, Dec 4, Editorial Page.

202. Hutton and Desai: United in Error Dec 14

203. “China’s Commonwealth: Freedom is the Road to Resolving Taiwan, Tibet, Sinkiang”,  The Statesman, Dec 17.

2008

204. “Nixon & Mao vs India: How American foreign policy did a U-turn about Communist China’s India aggression. The Government of India should publish its official history of the 1962 war.”  The Sunday Statesman, Jan 6, The Statesman Jan 7  Editorial Page.

205. “Lessons from the 1962 War:  Beginnings of a solution to the long-standing border problem: there are distinct Tibetan, Chinese and Indian points of view that need to be mutually comprehended”, The Sunday Statesman, January 13 2008.

206. “Our Dismal Politics: Will Independent India Survive Until 2047?”, The Statesman Editorial Page, Feb 1.

207. Median Voter Model of India’s Electorate Feb 7.

208. “Anarchy in Bengal: Intra-Left bandh marks the final unravelling of “Brand Buddha””, The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page, Feb 10.

209. Fifty years since my third birthday: on life and death.

210. “Pakistan’s Kashmir obsession: Sheikh Abdullah Relied In Politics On The French Constitution, Not Islam”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Feb 16.

211.  A Note on the Indian Policy Process  Feb 21.

212. “Growth & Government Delusion: Progress Comes From Learning, Enterprise, Exchange, Not The Parasitic State”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Feb 22.

213.  “How to Budget: Thrift, Not Theft, Needs to Guide Our Public Finances”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, Feb 26.

214. “India’s Budget Process (in Theory)”, The Statesman, Front Page Feb 29.

215.  “Irresponsible Governance: Congress, BJP, Communists, BSP, Sena Etc Reveal Equally Bad Traits”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, March 4.

216. “American Politics: Contest Between Obama And Clinton Affects The World”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, March 11.

217. “China’s India Example: Tibet, Xinjiang May Not Be Assimilated Like Inner Mongolia And Manchuria”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, March 25.

218. “Taxation of India’s Professional Cricket: A Proposal”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, April 1.

219. “Two cheers for Pakistan!”,  The Statesman, Editorial Page, April 7.

220. “Indian Inflation: Upside Down Economics From The New Delhi Establishment Parts 1-2”, The Statesman, Editorial Page, April 15-16.

221. “Assessing Manmohan: The Doctor of Deficit Finance should realise the currency is at stake”, The Statesman, Editorial Page Apr 25.

222. John Wisdom, Renford Bambrough: Main Philosophical Works, May 8.

223.  “All India wept”: On the death of Rajiv Gandhi,  May 21.

224. “China’s force and diplomacy: The need for realism in India” The Statesman, Editorial Page May 31.

226. Serendipity and the China-Tibet-India border problem  June 6

227. “Leadership vacuum: Time & Tide Wait For No One In Politics: India Trails Pakistan & Nepal!”, The Statesman Editorial Page June 7.

228. My meeting Jawaharlal Nehru Oct13 1962

229.  Manindranath Roy 1891-1958

230. Surendranath Roy 1860-1929

231.  The Roys of Behala 1928.

232. Sarat Chandra visits Surendranath Roy 1927

233. Nuksaan-Faida Analysis = Cost-Benefit Analysis in Hindi/Urdu Jun 30

234.  One of many reasons John R Hicks was a great economist July 3

236.  My father, Indian diplomat, in the Shah’s Tehran 1954-57  July 8

237 Distribution of Govt of India Expenditure (Net of Operational Income) 1995 July 27

238. Growth of Real Income, Money & Prices in India 1869-2008, July 28.

239. Communism from Social Democracy? But not in India or China!  July 29

240. Death of Solzhenitsyn, Aug. 3

240a. Tolstoy on Science and Art, Aug 4.

241. “Reddy`s reckoning: Where should India’s real interest rate be relative to the world?” Business Standard Aug 10

242. “Rangarajan Effect”, Business Standard Aug 24

243. My grandfather’s death in Ottawa 50 years ago today  Sep 3

244. My books in the Library of Congress and British Library Sep 12

245. On Jimmy Carter & the “India-US Nuclear Deal”, Sep 12

246. My father after presenting his credentials to President Kekkonen of Finland Sep 14 1973.

247. “October 1929?  Not!”, Business Standard, Sep 18.

248. “MK Gandhi, SN Roy, MA Jinnah in March 1919: Primary education legislation in a time of protest”

249. 122 sensible American economists Sept 26

250. Govt of India: Please call in the BBC and ask them a question Sep 27

251. “Monetary Integrity and the Rupee:  Three British Raj relics have dominated our macroeconomic policy-making” Business Standard Sep 28.

252a.  Rabindranath’s daughter writes to her friend my grandmother Oct 5

252b.  A Literary Find: Modern Poetry in Bengal, Oct 6.

253. Sarat writes to Manindranath 1931,  Oct 12

254. Origins of India’s Constitutional Politics 1913

255. Indira Gandhi in Paris, 1971

256. How the Liabilities/Assets Ratio of Indian Banks Changed from 84% in 1970 to 108% in 1998, October 20

257a. My Subjective Probabilities on India’s Moon Mission Oct 21

258. Complete History of Mankind’s Moon Missions: An Indian Citizen’s Letter to ISRO’s Chairman, Oct 22.

259. Would not a few million new immigrants solve America’s mortgage crisis? Oct 26

260. “America’s divided economists”, Business Standard Oct 26

261. One tiny prediction about the Obama Administration, Nov 5

262. Rai Bahadur Umbika Churn Rai, 1827-1902,  Nov 7 2008

263. Jawaharlal Nehru invites my father to the Mountbatten Farewell  Nov 7 2008

70a. “Become a US Supreme Court Justice! (Explorations in the Rule of Law in America) Preface” Nov 9

70b. “Become a US Supreme Court Justice! (Explorations in the Rule of Law in America) Password protected.” Nov 9.

257b. Neglecting technological progress was the basis of my pessimism about Chandrayaan,  Nov 9.

264. Of a new New Delhi myth and the success of the University of Hawaii 1986-1992 Pakistan project Nov 15

265. Pre-Partition Indian Secularism Case-Study: Fuzlul Huq and Manindranath Roy Nov 16

266. Do President-elect Obama’s Pakistan specialists suppose Maulana Azad, Dr Zakir Hussain, Sheikh Abdullah were Pakistanis (or that Sheikh Mujib wanted to remain one)?  Nov 18

267. Jews have never been killed in India for being Jews until this sad day, Nov 28.

268. In international law, Pakistan has been the perpetrator, India the victim of aggression in Mumbai,  Nov 30.

269. The Indian Revolution, Dec 1.

270. Habeas Corpus: a captured terrorist mass-murderer tells a magistrate he has not been mistreated by Mumbai’s police Dec 3

271. India’s Muslim Voices (Or, Let us be clear the Pakistan-India or Kashmir conflicts have not been Muslim-Hindu conflicts so much as intra-Muslim conflicts about Muslim identity and self-knowledge on the Indian subcontinent), Dec 4

272. “Anger Management” needed? An Oxford DPhil recommends Pakistan launch a nuclear first strike against India within minutes of war, Dec 5.

273. A Quick Comparison Between the September 11 2001 NYC-Washington attacks and the November 26-28 2008 Mumbai Massacres (An Application of the Case-by-Case Philosophical Technique of Wittgenstein, Wisdom and Bambrough), Dec 6

274. Dr Rice finally gets it right (and maybe Mrs Clinton will too) Dec 7

275. Will the Government of India’s new macroeconomic policy dampen or worsen the business-cycle (if such a cycle exists at all)? No one knows! “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise.”  Dec 7

276. Pump-priming for car-dealers: Keynes groans in his grave (If evidence was needed of the intellectual dishonesty of New Delhi’s new macroeconomic policy, here it is) Dec 9.

277. Congratulations to Mumbai’s Police: capturing a terrorist, affording him his Habeas Corpus rights, getting him to confess within the Rule of Law, sets a new world standard  Dec 10

278. Two cheers — wait, let’s make that one cheer — for America’s Justice Department, Dec 10

279. Will Pakistan accept the bodies of nine dead terrorists who came from Pakistan to Mumbai? If so, let there be a hand-over at the Wagah border, Dec 11.

280. Kasab was a stupid, ignorant, misguided youth, manufactured by Pakistan’s terrorist masterminds into becoming a mass-murdering robot: Mahatma Gandhi’s India should punish him, get him to repent if he wishes, then perhaps rehabilitate him as a potent weapon against Pakistani terrorism Dec 12.

281. Pakistan’s New Delhi Embassy should ask for “Consular Access” to nine dead terrorists in a Mumbai morgue before asking to meet Kasab, Dec 13

282. An Indian Reply to President Zardari: Rewarding Pakistan for bad behaviour leads to schizophrenic relationships Dec 19

283. Is my prediction about Caroline Kennedy becoming US Ambassador to Britain going to be correct?  Dec 27

284. Chandrayaan adds a little good cheer! Well done, ISRO!, Dec 28

285. How sad that “Slumdog millionaire” is SO disappointing! Dec 31

289. (with Claude Arpi) “Transparency & history: India’s archives must be opened to world standards” Business Standard New Delhi Dec 31, 2008, published here Jan 1 .

2009

290. A basis of India-Pakistan cooperation on the Mumbai massacres: the ten Pakistani terrorists started off as pirates and the Al-Huseini is a pirate ship Jan 1.

291. India’s “pork-barrel politics” needs a nice (vegetarian) Hindi name! “Teli/oily politics” perhaps? (And are we next going to see a Bill of Rights for Lobbyists?) Jan 3

292. My (armchair) experience of the 1999 Kargil war (Or, “Actionable Intelligence” in the Internet age: How the Kargil effort got a little help from a desktop)  Jan 5

293. How Jammu & Kashmir’s Chief Minister Omar Abdullah can become a worthy winner of the Nobel Peace Prize: An Open Letter,  Jan 7

294. Could the Satyam/PwC fraud be the visible part of an iceberg? Where are India’s “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles”? Isn’t governance rather poor all over corporate India? Bad public finance may be a root cause Jan 8

295. Satyam does not exist: it is bankrupt, broke, kaput. Which part of this does the new “management team” not get? The assets belong to Satyam’s creditors. Jan 8

296. Jews are massacred in Mumbai and now Jews commit a massacre in Gaza!  Jan 9

297. And now for the Great Satyam Whitewash/Cover-Up/Public Subsidy! The wrong Minister appoints the wrong new Board who, probably, will choose the wrong policy Jan 12

298. Letter to Wei Jingsheng  Jan 14

299. Memo to the Hon’ble Attorneys General of Pakistan & India: How to jointly prosecute the Mumbai massacre perpetrators most expeditiously Jan 16

300. Satyam and IT-firms in general may be good candidates to become “Labour-Managed” firms Jan 18

301. “Yes we might be able to do that. Perhaps we ought to. But again, perhaps we ought not to, let me think about it…. Most important is Cromwell’s advice: Think it possible we may be mistaken!” Jan 20.

302. RAND’s study of the Mumbai attacks Jan 25

303. Didn’t Dr Obama (the new American President’s late father) once publish an article in Harvard’s Quarterly Journal of Economics? (Or did he?) Jan 25.

304. “A Dialogue in Macroeconomics” 1989 etc: sundry thoughts on US economic policy discourse Jan 30

305. American Voices: A Brief Popular History of the United States in 20 You-Tube Music Videos Feb 5

306. Jaladhar Sen writes to Manindranath at Surendranath’s death, Feb 23

307. Pakistani expansionism: India and the world need to beware of “Non-Resident Pakistanis” ruled by Rahmat Ali’s ghost, Feb 9

308. My American years Part One 1980-90: battles for academic integrity & freedom Feb 11.

309. Thanks and well done Minister Rehman Malik and the Govt of Pakistan Feb 12

310. Can President Obama resist the financial zombies (let alone slay them)? His economists need to consult Dr Anna J Schwartz Feb 14

311. A Brief History of Gilgit, Feb 18

312. Memo to UCLA Geographers: Commonsense suggests Mr Bin Laden is far away from the subcontinent Feb 20

313. The BBC gets its history and geography deliberately wrong again Feb 21

314. Bengal Legislative Council 1921, Feb 28

315. Carmichael visits Surendranath, 1916, Mar 1

316. Memo to GoI CLB: India discovered the Zero, and 51% of Zero is still Zero Mar 10

317. An Academic Database of Doctoral & Other Postgraduate Research Done at UK Universities on India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Other Asian Countries Over 100 Years, Mar 13

318. Pakistan’s progress, Mar 18

319. Risk-aversion explains resistance to free trade, Mar 19

320. India’s incredibly volatile inflation rate!  Mar 20

321. Is “Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona” referring to an emasculation of (elite) American society?,  Mar 21

322. Just how much intellectual fraud can Delhi produce? Mar 26

323. India is not a monarchy! We urgently need to universalize the French concept of “citoyen”!  Mar 28

324. Could this be the real state of some of our higher education institutions? Mar 29

325. Progress! The BBC retracts its prevarication! Mar 30

326. Aldous Huxley’s Essay “DH Lawrence” Mar 31

327. Waffle not institutional reform is what (I predict) the “G-20 summit” will produce, April 1

328. Did a full cricket team of Indian bureaucrats follow our PM into 10 Downing Street? Count for yourself! April 3

329. Will someone please teach the BJP’s gerontocracy some Economics 101 on an emergency basis?  April 5

330. The BBC needs to determine exactly where it thinks Pakistan is!, April 5

331. Alfred Lyall on Christians, Muslims, India, China, Etc, 1908, April 6

332. An eminent economist of India passes away April 9

333. Democracy Database for the Largest Electorate Ever Seen in World History, April 12

334. Memo to the Election Commission of India April 14 2009, 9 AM, April 14

335. Caveat emptor! Satyam is taken over, April 14

336. India’s 2009 General Elections: Candidates, Parties, Symbols for Polls on 16-30 April Phases 1,2,3, April 15

337. On the general theory of expertise in democracy: reflections on what emerges from the American “torture memos” today, April 18

338. India’s 2009 General Elections: 467 constituencies (out of 543) for which candidates have been announced as of 1700hrs April 21, April 21

339. Apropos Philosophy of Economics, Comments of Sidney Hook, KJ Arrow, Milton Friedman, TW Schultz, SS Alexander, Max Black, Renford Bambrough, John Gray et al., April 22.

340. India’s 2009 General Elections: Names of all 543 Constituencies of the 15th Lok Sabha, April 22.

341. India’s 2009 General Elections: How 4125 State Assembly Constituencies comprise the 543 new Lok Sabha Constituencies, April 23.

342. Why has America’s “torture debate” yet to mention the obvious? Viz., sadism and racism, April 24

343. India’s 2009 General Elections: the advice of the late “George Eliot” (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880) to India’s voting public, April 24.

344. India’s 2009 General Elections: Delimitation and the Different Lists of 543 Lok Sabha Constituencies in 2009 and 2004, April 25

345. Is “Slumdog Millionaire” the single worst Best Picture ever?

346. India’s 2009 General Elections: Result of Delimitation — Old (2004) and New (2009) Lok Sabha and Assembly Constituencies, April 26

347. India’s 2009 General Elections: 7019 Candidates in 485 (out of 543) Constituencies announced as of April 26 noon April 26

348. What is Christine Fair referring to? Would the MEA kindly seek to address what she has claimed asap? April 27

349. Politics can be so entertaining Manmohan versus Sonia on the poor old CPI(M)!, April 28

350. A Dozen Grown-Up Questions for Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, LK Advani, Sharad Pawar, Km Mayawati and Anyone Else Dreaming of Becoming/Deciding India’s PM After the 2009 General Elections, April 28

351. India’s 2009 General Elections: How drastically will the vote-share of political parties change from 2004? May 2

352. India’s 2009 General Elections: And now finally, all 8,070 Candidates across all 543 Lok Sabha Constituencies, May 5

353. India’s 2009 General Elections: The Mapping of Votes into Assembly Segments Won into Parliamentary Seats Won in the 2004 Election, May 7

354. Will Messrs Advani, Rajnath Singh & Modi ride into the sunset if the BJP comes to be trounced? (Corrected), May 10

355. India’s 2009 General Elections: 543 Matrices to Help Ordinary Citizens Audit the Election Commission’s Vote-Tallies  May 12

356. Well done Sonia-Rahul! Two hours before polls close today, I am willing to predict a big victory for you (but, please, try to get your economics right, and also, you must get Dr Singh a Lok Sabha seat if he is to be PM) May 13

357. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee must dissolve the West Bengal Assembly if he is an honest democrat: Please try to follow Gerard Schröder’s example even slightly! May 16

358. India’s 2009 General Elections: Provisional Results from the EC as of 1400 hours Indian Standard Time May 16

359. Memo to the Hon’ble President of India: It is Sonia Gandhi, not Manmohan Singh, who should be invited to our equivalent of the “Kissing Hands” Ceremony May 16

360. Time for heads to roll in the BJP/RSS and CPI(M)!, May 17.

361. Inviting a new Prime Minister of India to form a Government: Procedure Right and Wrong  May 18

362. Starting with Procedural Error: Why has the “Cabinet” of the 14th Lok Sabha been meeting today AFTER the results of the Elections to the 15th Lok Sabha have been declared?!  May 18

363. Why has the Sonia Congress done something that the Congress under Nehru-Indira-Rajiv would not have done, namely, exaggerate the power of the Rajya Sabha and diminish the power of the Lok Sabha? May 21

364. Shouldn’t Dr Singh’s Cabinet begin with a small apology to the President of India for discourtesy? May we have reviews and reforms of protocols and practices to be followed at Rashtrapati Bhavan and elsewhere?  May 23

365. Parliament’s sovereignty has been diminished by the Executive: A record for future generations to know May 25

366. How tightly will organised Big Business be able to control economic policies this time? May 26

367. Why does India not have a Parliament ten days after the 15th Lok Sabha was elected? Nehru and Rajiv would both have been appalled May 27

368. Eleven days and counting after the 15th Lok Sabha was elected and still no Parliament of India! (But we do have 79 Ministers — might that be a world record?) May 28

369. Note to Posterity: 79 Ministers in office but no 15th Lok Sabha until June 1 2009! May 29

370. Silver Jubilee of Pricing, Planning & Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India May 29

371. How to Design a Better Cabinet for the Government of India May 29

372. Parliament is supposed to control the Government, not be bullied or intimidated by it: Will Rahul Gandhi be able to lead the Backbenches in the 15th Lok Sabha? June 1

373. Mistaken Macroeconomics: An Open Letter to Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, June 12

374. Why did Manmohan Singh and LK Advani apologise to one another? Is Indian politics essentially collusive, not competitive, aiming only to preserve and promote the post-1947 Dilli Raj at the expense of the whole of India? We seem to have no Churchillian repartee (except perhaps from Bihar occasionally) June 18

375. Are Iran’s Revolutionaries now Reactionaries? George Orwell would have understood. A fresh poll may be the only answer Are Iran’s Revolutionaries now Reactionaries? George Orwell would have understood. A fresh poll may be the only answer  June 22

376. My March 25 1991 memo to Rajiv (which never reached him) is something the present Government seems to have followed: all for the best of course! July 12

377. Disquietude about France’s behaviour towards India on July 14 2009 July 14

378. Does the Govt. of India assume “foreign investors and analysts” are a key constituency for Indian economic policy-making? If so, why so? Have Govt. economists “learnt nothing, forgotten everything”? Some Bastille Day thoughts July 14

379. Letter to the GoI’s seniormost technical economist, May 21.July 19

380. Excuse me but young Kasab in fact confessed many months ago, immediately after he was captured – he deserves 20 or 30 years in an Indian prison, and a chance to become a model prisoner who will stand against the very terrorists who sent him on his vile mission  July 20

381. Finally, three months late, the GoI responds to American and Pakistani allegations about Balochistan July 24

382.  Thoughts, words, deeds: My work 1973-2010

M1. Map of Asia c. 1900

M2. Map of Chinese Empire c. 1900

M3. Map of Sinkiang, Tibet and Neighbours 1944

M4. China’s Secretly Built 1957 Road Through India’s Aksai Chin

M5. Map of Kashmir to Sinkiang 1944

M6. Map of India-Tibet-China-Mongolia 1959

M7. Map of India, Afghanistan, Russia, China, 1897

M8. Map of Xinjiang/Sinkiang/E Turkestan

M9. Map of Bombay/Mumbai 1909

M10-M13. Himalayan Expedition, West Sikkim 1970 – 1,2,3,4

On the Blacksburg campus February 1982, my second year in America.

I had come to Blacksburg in August 1980 thanks to a letter Professor Frank Hahn had written on my behalf to Professor James M Buchanan in January 1980.

I was in an “All But Dissertation” stage at Cambridge when I got to Blacksburg; I completed the thesis while teaching in Blacksburg, sent it from there in September 1981, and went back to Cambridge for the viva voce examination in January 1982.

Professor Buchanan and his colleagues were welcoming and I came to learn much from them about the realities of public finance and democratic politics, which I very soon applied to my work on India.

Jim Buchanan had a reputation for running very tough conferences of scholars. He invited me to one such in the Spring of 1981. We were made to work very hard indeed. One of the books prescribed is still with me, In Search of a Monetary Constitution, ed. Leland Yeager, Harvard 1962, and something I still recommend to anyone wishing to understand the classical liberal position on monetary policy. The week-long 1981 conference had one rest-day; it was spent in part at an excellent theatre in a small rural town outside Blacksburg. This photo is of Jim Buchanan on the left and Gordon Tullock on the right; in between them is Ken Minogue of the London School of Economics — who, as it happened, had been Tutor for Admissions when I became a freshman there seven years earlier.

(I must have learnt something from Jim Buchanan about running conferences because nine years later in May-June 1989 at the University of Hawaii, I made the participants of the India-perestroika and Pakistan-perestroika conferences work very hard too.)

My first rooms in America in 1980 were in the attic of 703 Gracelyn Court, where I paid $160 or $170 per month to my marvellous landlady Betty Tillman. There were many family occasions I enjoyed with her family downstairs, and her cakes, bakes and puddings all remain with me today.

A borrowed electric typewriter may be seen in the photo: the age of the personal computer was still a few years away. The Department had a stand-alone “AB-Dic” word-processor which we considered a marvel of technology; the Internet did not exist but there was some kind of Intranet between geeks in computer science and engineering departments at different universities.

It was at Gracelyn Court that this letter reached me addressed by FA Hayek himself.

Professor Buchanan had moved to Blacksburg from Charlottesville some years earlier with the Centre for Study of Public Choice that he had founded. The Centre came to be housed at the President’s House of Virginia Tech (presumably the University President himself had another residence).

I was initially a Visiting Research Associate at the Centre and at the same time a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Economics Department. I was very kindly given a magnificent office at the Centre, on the upper floor, perhaps the one on the upper right hand side in the picture. It was undoubtedly the finest room I have ever had as an office. I may have had it for a whole year, either 1980-81 or 1981-82. When Professor Buchanan and the Centre left for George Mason University in 1983, the mansion returned to being the University President’s House and my old office presumably became a fine bedroom again.

I spent the summer of 1983 at a long libertarian conference in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park area in California. This is a photo from a barbecue during the conference with Professor Jean Baechler from France on the left; Leonard Liggio, who (along with Walter Grinder) had organised the conference, is at the right.

The first draft of the book that became Philosophy of Economics was written (in long hand) during that summer of 1983 in Palo Alto/Menlo Park. The initial title was “Principia Economica”, and the initial contracted publisher, the University of Chicago Press, had that title on the contract.

My principal supporter at the University of Chicago was that great American Theodore W. Schultz, then aged 81,

to whom the Press had initially sent the manuscript for review and who had recommended its prompt publication. Professor Schultz later told me to my face better what my book was about than I had realised myself, namely, it was about economics as knowledge, the epistemology of economics.

My parents came from India to visit me in California, and here we are at Yosemite.

.

Also to visit were Mr and Mrs Willis C Armstrong, our family friends who had known me from infancy. This is a photo of Bill and my mother on the left, and Louise and myself on the right, taken perhaps by my father. In the third week of January 1991, during the first Gulf War, Bill and I (acting on behalf of Rajiv Gandhi) came to form an extremely tenuous bridge between the US Administration and Saddam Hussain for about 24 hours, in an attempt to get a withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait without further loss of life. In December 1991 I gave the widow of Rajiv Gandhi a small tape containing my long-distance phone conversations from America with Rajiv during that episode.

I had driven with my sheltie puppy from Blacksburg to Palo Alto  — through Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona; my parents and I now drove with him back to Blacksburg from California, through Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia.  It may be a necessary though not sufficient condition to drive across America (or any other country) in order to understand it.

After a few days, we drove to New York via Pennsylvania where I became Visiting Assistant Professor in the Cornell Economics Department (on leave from being Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech). The few months at Cornell were noteworthy for the many long sessions I spent with Max Black. I shall add more about that here in due course. My parents returned to India (via Greece where my sister was) in the Autumn of 1983.

In May 1984, Indira Gandhi ruled in Delhi, and the ghost of Brezhnev was still fresh in Moscow. The era of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in America was at its height. Pricing, Planning & Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India emerging from my doctoral thesis though written in Blacksburg and Ithaca in 1982-1983, came to be published by London’s Institute of Economic Affairs on May 29 as Occasional Paper No. 69, ISBN: 0-255 36169-6; its text is reproduced elsewhere here.

It was the first critique after BR Shenoy of India’s Sovietesque economics since Jawaharlal Nehru’s time. The Times, London’s most eminent paper at the time, wrote its lead editorial comment about it on the day it was published, May 29 1984.

It used to take several days for the library at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg to receive its copy of The Times of London and other British newspapers. I had not been told of the date of publication and did not know of what had happened in London on May 29 until perhaps June 2 — when a friend, Vasant Dave of a children’s charity, who was on campus, phoned me and congratulated me for being featured in The Times which he had just read in the University Library. “You mean they’ve reviewed it?” I asked him, “No, it’s the lead editorial.” “What?” I exclaimed. There was worse. Vasant was very soft-spoken and said “Yes, it’s titled ‘India’s Bad Example’” — which I misheard on the phone as “India’s Mad Example” Drat! I thought (or words to that effect), they must have lambasted me, as I rushed down to the Library to take a look.

The Times had said

“When Mr. Dennis Healey in the Commons recently stated that Hongkong, with one per cent of the population of India has twice India’s trade, he was making an important point about Hongkong but an equally important point about India. If Hongkong with one per cent of its population and less than 0.03 per cert of India’s land area (without even water as a natural resource) can so outpace India, there must be something terribly wrong with the way Indian governments have managed their affairs, and there is. A paper by an Indian economist published today (Pricing, Planning and Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India by Subroto Roy, IEA £1.80) shows how Asia’s largest democracy is gradually being stifled by the imposition of economic policies whose woeful effect and rhetorical unreality find their echo all over the Third World. As with many of Britain’s former imperial possessions, the rot set in long before independence. But as with most of the other former dependencies, the instrument of economic regulation and bureaucratic control set up by the British has been used decisively and expansively to consolidate a statist regime which inhibits free enterprise, minimizes economic success and consolidates the power of government in all spheres of the economy. We hear little of this side of things when India rattles the borrowing bowl or denigrates her creditors for want of further munificence. How could Indian officials explain their poor performance relative to Hongkong? Dr Roy has the answers for them. He lists the causes as a large and heavily subsidized public sector, labyrinthine control over private enterprise, forcibly depressed agricultural prices, massive import substitution, government monopoly of foreign exchange transactions, artificially overvalued currency and the extensive politicization of the labour market, not to mention the corruption which is an inevitable side effect of an economy which depends on the arbitrament of bureaucrats. The first Indian government under Nehru took its cue from Nehru’s admiration of the Soviet economy, which led him to believe that the only policy for India was socialism in which there would be “no private property except in a restricted sense and the replacement of the private profit system by a higher ideal of cooperative service.” Consequently, the Indian government has now either a full monopoly or is one of a few oligipolists in banking, insurance, railways, airlines, cement, steel, chemicals, fertilizers, ship-building, breweries, telephones and wrist-watches. No businessman can expand his operation while there is any surplus capacity anywhere in that sector. He needs government approval to modernize, alter his price-structure, or change his labour shift. It is not surprising that a recent study of those developing countries which account for most manufactured exports from the Third World shows that India’s share fell from 65 percent in 1953 to 10 per cent in 1973; nor, with the numerous restrictions on inter-state movement of grains, that India has over the years suffered more from an inability to cope with famine than during the Raj when famine drill was centrally organized and skillfully executed without restriction. Nehru’s attraction for the Soviet model has been inherited by his daughter, Mrs. Gandhi. Her policies have clearly positioned India more towards the Soviet Union than the West. The consequences of this, as Dr Roy states, is that a bias can be seen in “the antipathy and pessimism towards market institutions found among the urban public, and sympathy and optimism to be found for collectivist or statist ones.” All that India has to show for it is the delivery of thousands of tanks in exchange for bartered goods, and the erection of steel mills and other heavy industry which help to perpetuate the unfortunate obsession with industrial performance at the expense of agricultural growth and the relief of rural poverty.”…..

I felt this may have been intended to be laudatory but it was also inaccurate and had to be corrected. I replied dated June 4 which The Times published in their edition of June 16 1984:

I was 29 when Pricing, Planning and Politics was published, I am 54 now. I do not agree with everything I said in it and find the tone a little puffed up as young men tend to be; it was also five years before my main “theoretical” work Philosophy of Economics would be published. My experience of life in the years since has also made me far less sanguine both about human nature and about America than I was then. But I am glad to find I am not embarrassed by what I said then, indeed I am pleased I said what I did in favour of classical liberalism and against statism and totalitarianism well before it became popular to do so after the Berlin Wall fell. (In India as elsewhere, former communist apparatchiks and fellow-travellers became pseudo-liberals overnight.)

The editorial itself may have been due to a conversation between Peter Bauer and William Rees-Mogg, so I later heard. The work sold 700 copies in its first month, a record for the publisher. The wife of one prominent Indian bureaucrat told me in Delhi in December 1988 it had affected her husband’s thinking drastically. A senior public finance economist told me he had been deputed at the Finance Ministry when the editorial appeared, and the Indian High Commission in London had urgently sent a copy of the editorial to the Ministry where it caused a stir. An IMF official told me years later that he saw the editorial on board a flight to India from the USA on the same day, and stopped in London to make a trip to the LSE’s bookshop to purchase a copy. Professor Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University had been a critic of aspects of Indian policy; he received a copy of the monograph in draft just before it was published and was kind enough to write I had “done an excellent job of setting out the problems afflicting our economic policies, unfortunately government-made problems!”  My great professor at Cambridge, Frank Hahn, would be kind enough to say that he thought my “critique of Development Economics was powerful not only on methodological but also on economic theory grounds” — something that has been a source of delight to me.

Siddhartha Shankar Ray told me when we first met that he had been in London when the editorial appeared and had seen it there; it affected his decision to introduce me to Rajiv Gandhi as warmly as he came to do a half dozen years later.

In the Autumn of 1984, I went, thanks to Edwin Feulner Jr of the Heritage Foundation,  to attend the Mont Pelerin Society Meetings being held at Cambridge (on “parole” from the US immigration authorities as my “green card” was being processed at the time). There I met for the first time Professor and Mrs Milton Friedman.

Milton Friedman’s November 1955 memorandum to the Government of India is referred to in my monograph as “unpublished” in note 1; when I met Milton and Rose, I gave them a copy of my monograph; and requested Milton for his unpublished document; when he returned to Stanford he sent to me in Blacksburg his original 1955-56 documents on Indian planning. I published the 1955 document for the first time in May 1989 during the University of Hawaii perestroika-for-India project I was then leading, it appeared later in the 1992 volume Foundations of India’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, edited by myself and WE James. (The results of the Hawaii project reached Rajiv Gandhi through my hand in September 1990, as told elsewhere here in “Rajiv Gandhi and the Origins of India’s 1991 Economic Reform”.) The 1956 document was published in November 2006 on the front page of The Statesman, the same day my obituary of Milton appeared in the inside pages.

Meanwhile, my main work within economic theory, the “Principia Economica” manuscript, was being read by the University of Chicago Press’s five or six anonymous referees. One of them pointed out my argument had been anticipated years earlier in the work of MIT’s Sidney Stuart Alexander. I had no idea of this and was surprised; of course I knew Professor Alexander’s work in balance of payments theory but not in this field. I went to visit Professor Alexander in Boston, where this photo came to be taken perhaps in late 1984:

Professor Alexander was extremely gracious, and immediately declared with great generosity that it was clear to him my arguments in “Principia Economica” had been developed entirely independently of his work. He had come at the problem from an American philosophical tradition of Dewey, I had done so from a British tradition of Wittgenstein. (CS Peirce was probably the bridge between the two.) He and I had arrived at some similar conclusions but we had done so completely independently.

Also, I was much honoured by this letter of May 1 1984 sent to Blacksburg by Professor Sir John Hicks (1904-1989), among the greatest of 20th Century economists at the time, where he acknowledged his departure in later life from the position he had taken in 1934 and 1939 on the foundations of demand theory.

He later sent me a copy of his Wealth and Welfare: Collected Essays on Economic Theory, Vol. I, MIT Press 1981, as a gift. The context of our correspondence had to do with my criticism of the young Hicks and support for the ghost of Alfred Marshall in an article “Considerations on Utility, Benevolence and Taxation” I was publishing in the journal History of Political Economy published then at Duke University. In Philosophy of Economics, I would come to say about Hicks’s letter to me “It may be a sign of the times that economists, great and small, rarely if ever disclaim their past opinions; it is therefore an especially splendid example to have a great economist like Hicks doing so in this matter.” It was reminiscent of Gottlob Frege’s response to Russell’s paradox; Philosophy of Economics described Frege’s “Letter to Russell”, 1902 (Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel, pp. 126-128) as “a document which must remain one of the most noble in all of modern scholarship; a fact recorded in Russell’s letter to Heijenoort.”

In Blacksburg, by the Summer and Fall of 1984 I was under attack following the arrival of what I considered “a gang of inert game theorists” — my theoretical manuscript had blown a permanent hole through what passes by the name of “social choice theory”, and they did not like it. Nor did they like the fact that I seemed to them to be a “conservative”/classical liberal Indian and my applied work on India’s economy seemed to their academic agenda an irrelevance. This is myself at the height of that attack in January 1985:

Professor Schultz at the University of Chicago came to my rescue and at his recommendation I was appointed Visiting Associate Professor in the Economics Department at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.

I declined, without thanks, the offer of another year at Virginia Tech.

On my last day in Blacksburg, a graduate student whom I had helped when she had been assaulted by a senior professor, cooked a meal before I started the drive West across the country. This is a photo from that meal:

In Provo, I gratefully found refuge at the excellent Economics Department led at the time by Professor Larry Wimmer.

It was at Provo that I first had a personal computer on my desk (an IBM as may be seen) and what a delight that was (no matter the noises that it made).  I recall being struck by the fact a colleague possessed the incredible luxury of a portable personal computer (no one else did) which he could take home with him.   It looked like an enormous briefcase but was apparently the technology-leader at the time.  (Laptops seem not to have been invented as of 1985).

In October 1985, Professor Frank Hahn very kindly wrote to Larry Wimmer revising his 1980 opinion of my work now that the PhD was done, the India-work had led to The Times editorial and the theoretical work was proceeding well.

I had applied for a permanent position at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and had been interviewed positively at the American Economic Association meetings (in New York) in December 1985 by the department chairman Professor Fred C. Hung. At Provo, Dr James Moncur of the Manoa Department was visiting. Jim became a friend and recommended me to his colleagues in Manoa.

Professor Hung appointed me to that department as a “senior” Assistant Professor on tenure-track beginning September 1986. I had bargained for a rank of “Associate Professor” but was told the advertisement did not allow it; instead I was assured of being an early candidate for promotion and tenure subject to my book “Principia Economica” being accepted for publication. (The contract with the University of Chicago Press had become frayed.)

Hawaii was simply a superb place (though expensive).

Professor James Buchanan won the Economics “Nobel” in 1986 and I was asked by the Manoa Department to help raise its profile by inviting him to deliver a set of lectures, which he did excellently well in March 1988 to the University as well as the Honolulu community at large. Here he is at my 850 sq ft small condominium at Punahou Towers, 1621 Dole Street:

In August 1988, my manuscript “Principia Economica” was finally accepted for publication by Routledge of London and New York under the title Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason In Economic Inquiry. The contract with University of Chicago Press had fallen through and the manuscript was being read by Yale University Press and a few others but Routledge came through with the first concrete offer. I was delighted and these photos were taken in the Economics Department at Manoa by a colleague in September 1988 as the publisher needed them.

Milton and Rose Friedman came to Honolulu on a private holiday perhaps in January 1989; they had years earlier spent a sabbatical year at the Department.

Here is a luncheon that was arranged in their honour. They had in the Fall of 1988 been on their famous visit to China, and as I recall that was the main subject of discussion on the occasion.

Milton phoned me in my Manoa office and invited me to meet him and Rose at their hotel for a chat; we had met first at the 1984 Mont Pelerin meetings and he wished to know me better. I was honoured and turned up dutifully and we talked for perhaps an hour. I recall making a strong recommendation that he write his memoirs, especially so that the rumours and innuendo surrounding eg the Chile episode could be cleared up; I also said a “Collected Works” would be a great idea; when Milton and Rose published their memoirs Two Lucky People (Chicago 1998) I wondered if my first suggestion had come to be taken; as to the second, he wrote to me years later saying he felt no Collected Works were necessary.

From 1986 onwards, I had been requested by the University of Hawaii to lead a project with William E James on the political economy of “South Asia” .I had said there was no such place, that “South Asia” was a US State Department abstraction but there were India and Pakistan and Sri Lanka and Bangladesh and Afghanistan etc. Sister projects on India and Pakistan had been sponsored by the University, and in 1989 important conferences had been planned by myself and James in May for India and in June for Pakistan.

I was determined to publish for the first time Milton’s 1955 memorandum on India which the Government of India had suppressed or ignored at the time. At the hotel-meeting, I told Milton that and requested him to come to the India-conference in May; Milton and Rose said they would think about it, and later confirmed he would come for the first two days.

This is a photo of the initial luncheon at the home of the University President on May 21 1989. Milton and India’s Ambassador to the USA at the time were both garlanded with Hawaiian leis. The first photo was one of a joke from Milton as I recall which had everyone laughing.

There was no equivalent photo of the distinguished scholars who gathered for the Pakistan conference a month later.

The reason was that from February 1989 onwards I had become the victim of a most vicious racist defamation, engineered within the Economics Department at Manoa by a senior professor as a way to derail me before my expected Promotion and Tenure application in the Fall. All my extra time went to battling that though somehow I managed to teach some monetary economics well enough in 1989-1990 for a Japanese student to insist on being photographed with me and the book we had studied.

I was being seen by two or three temporarily powerful characters on the Manoa campus as an Uppity Indian who must be brought down. This time I decided to fight back — and what a saga came to unfold! It took me into the United States District Court for the District of Hawaii and then the Ninth Circuit and upto the United States Supreme Court, not once but twice.

Milton Friedman and Theodore Schultz stood valiantly among my witnesses — first writing to the University’s authorities and later deposing in federal court.

Unfortunately, government lawyers, far from wanting to uphold and respect the laws of the United States, chose to deliberately violate them — compromising a judge, suborning demonstrable perjury and then brazenly purchasing my hired attorney (and getting caught doing it). Since September 2007, the State of Hawaii’s attorneys have been invited by me to return to the federal court and apologise for their unlawful behaviour as they are required by law to do.

They had not expected me to survive their illegalities but I did: I kept going.

Philosophy of Economics was published in London and New York in September 1989

The hardback quickly sold out on its own steam and the book went into paperback in 1991, and I was delighted to learn from a friend that it had been prescribed for a course at Yale Law School and was strewn along an alley in the bookshop:

The sister-volumes on India and Pakistan emerging from the University of Hawaii project led by myself and James were published in 1992 and 1993 in India, Pakistan, Britain and the United States.

As described elsewhere, the manuscript of the India-volume contributed to the origins of India’s 1991 economic reform during my encounter with Rajiv Gandhi in his last months; the Pakistan-volume came to contribute to the origins of the Pakistan-India peace process. The Indian publisher who had promised paperback volumes of both books reneged under leftwing pressure in Delhi; he has since passed away and James and I still await the University of Hawaii’s permission to publish both volumes freely on the Internet as copyright rests with the University President.

In 2004 from Britain, I wrote to the 9/11 Commission stating that it was possible that had the vicious illegalities against me not occurred at Manoa starting in 1989, we may have gone on after India and Pakistan to study Afghanistan, and come up with a pre-emptive academic analysis a decade before September 11 2001.

To be continued in Part Two.

]]> http://independentindian.com/2009/02/11/my-american-years/feed/ 1 drsubrotoroy scan00391 fhhahn-to-james-buchanan-re-roy-19801 scan00312 scan00295 fa-hayek-to-roy-1981 scan0033 scan0038 schultz yosemitesummer1983 billandlouisepaloaltosummer1983 ppp1984 londonti timesletter-11 scan0036 sydney-alexander-on-phil-of-econ sidney-alaexander-on-phil-of-econ2 jan1985 underattack mylastdayinblacksburgstudentcookedameal scan0046 scan0047 scan0048 scan0045 fhh19852 scan0050 hawaii1987 oct87 scan0067 scan0068 jmbat1621dolestree406 scan0066 scan0062 scan0056 scan0057 scan0058 scan0069 scan0070 scan0071 scan0059 scan0060 m-friedman-on-roys-work tw-schultz-on-phil-of-econ scan0001 scan0002 scan0004 scan0005 scan0013 scan0011 http://independentindian.com/2009/01/14/letter-to-wei-jingsheng/ http://independentindian.com/2009/01/14/letter-to-wei-jingsheng/#comments Wed, 14 Jan 2009 08:10:40 +0000 drsubrotoroy http://independentindian.com/?p=2329 ]]> Mr Wei Jingsheng,  Citizen of  China

Dear Sir,

I am delighted to know from news reports today that you are well and active.

This short note is merely to tell you that some 28 years ago, your name entered my doctoral thesis  submitted to the Cambridge University Faculty of Economics & Politics,  titled “On liberty & economic growth: preface to a philosophy for India”.

On page 23, the thesis said:

“We know such conversations should not be forcibly silenced, which is why it is wrong that Dr Sakharov is banished, or that Mr Wei Jingsheng is gaoled for a decade, or that Dr Tomin is brutally assaulted and not allowed to lecture on Aristotle.”

And again on page 104:

“A disciplined and united oligarchy can with careful planning maintain its rule indefinitely over an amorphous and anonymous citizenry.  The only thorns in its side will be men like Sakharov and Wei Jingsheng and Tomin whose courage is somehow signalled to the outside world and who thus become recognisable names.  But even these men can be exiled or gaoled or thrashed into silence, so extinguishing the small chance left of the the truth being told and the Leadership’s claim to unique wisdom being exposed for the sheer humbug it is.”

With my continuing admiration, I remain

Yours truly

Subroto Roy

Kolkata, India

John Wisdom (1904-1993), Main Philosophical Works:

Interpretation and Analysis, 1931
Problems of Mind and Matter 1934
Other Minds, 1952
Philosophy & Psychoanalysis, 1953
Paradox & Discovery, 1965
Logical Constructions (1931-1933),1969
Proof and Explanation (The Virginia Lectures 1957), 1991

Secondary literature:
Wisdom: Twelve Essays, R. Bambrough (ed) 1974
Philosophy and Life: Essays on John Wisdom, I. Dilman (ed) 1984.

Renford Bambrough (1926-1999), Main Philosophical Works:

“Socratic Paradox”, Philosophical Quarterly, 1960

“Universals and Family Resemblances”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1960-61

“Plato’s Modern Friends and Enemies”, Philosophy 1962

The Philosophy of Aristotle, 1963

“Principia Metaphysica”, Philosophy 1964

New Essays on Plato and Aristotle (edited by R. Bambrough), 1965

“Unanswerable Questions”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement 1966

Plato, Popper and Politics (edited by R. Bambrough), 1967

Reason, Truth and God 1969

“Foundations”, Analysis, 1970

“Objectivity and Objects”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1971-72

“How to Read Wittgenstein”, in Understanding Wittgenstein, Royal Institute of Philosophy 1972-3

“The Shape of Ignorance”, in Lewis (ed) Contemporary British Philosophy, 1976

Introduction & Notes to Plato’s Republic (Lindsay trans.), 1976

Conflict and the Scope of Reason, 1974; also in Ratio 1978

“Intuition and the Inexpressible” in Katz (ed) Mysticism & Philosophical Analysis, 1978

Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge, 1979

“Thought, Word and Deed”, Proceedings of Aristotelian Society Supplement 1980

“Peirce, Wittgenstein and Systematic Philosophy”, MidWest Studies in Philosophy, 1981

“The Scope of Reason: An Epistle to the Persians”, in Objectivity and Cultural Divergence, Royal Institute of Philosophy, 1984

“Principia Metaphysica: The Scope of Reason” also known as “The Roots of Reason”; a work and manuscript mentioned several times but now unknown.

A personal note by Subroto Roy for a public lecture delivered at the University of Buckingham, August 24 2004:

“Renford Bambrough and I met once on January 31 1982, when I had returned to Cambridge from the USA for my PhD viva voce examination. He signed and gave me his last personal copy of Reason, Truth and God. Three years earlier, in 1979, I, as a 24 year old PhD student under F.H. Hahn in economics, had written to him expressing my delight at finding his works and saying these were immensely important to economics; he invited me to his weekly discussion groups at St John’s College but I could not attend. Between 1979 and 1989 we corresponded while I worked in America on my application of his and Wisdom’s work to problems in economics, which emerged in Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry (Routledge, International Library of Philosophy 1989, 1991), a work which got me into a lot of trouble with American economists (though Milton Friedman and Theodore W. Schultz defended it). Bambrough said of it “The work is altogether well-written and admirably clear”. On another occasion he said he was “extremely pleased” at the interest I had taken in his work. The preface of my book said he was not responsible for the use I had made of his writings, which I reiterate now. Returning to Britain in 2004, I find the work of Wisdom and Bambrough unknown or forgotten, even at the great University North East of Buckingham where they had lived and worked. In my view, they played a kind of modern-day Plato and Aristotle to Wittgenstein’s Socrates; in terms of Eastern philosophy, the wisdom they achieved in their lives and have left behind for us in their work to use and apply to our own problems, make them like modern-day “Boddhisatvas” of Mahayana Buddhism. My lecture “Science, Religion, Art, and the Necessity of Freedom” purports to apply their work to current international problems of grave significance, namely the cultural conflicts made apparent since the September 11 2001 attacks on America. As I am as likely to fail as to succeed in making this application, the brief bibliography given above is intended to direct interested persons to their work first hand for themselves.”

April 2007: See also Preface 2007 to the republication here at www.independentindian.com of Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry, and also the 2004 public lecture “Science, Religion, Art & the Necessity of Freedom”.

I have also published here now for the first time a public lecture I gave as the Wincott Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Buckingham in 2004 titled “Science, Religion, Art and the Necessity of Freedom”. Also republished is “A General Theory of Globalization and Modern Terrorism” which was my keynote address to the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats at their Manila meeting in November 2001; it appeared first in September 11 & Political Freedom: Asian Perspectives (eds. Smith, Gomez & Johannen) in Singapore in 2002.

I have also published for the first time my April 29 2000 address titled “Towards a Highly Transparent Monetary & Fiscal Framework for India’s Union and State Governments” to the Reserve Bank’s Annual “Conference of State Finance Secretaries”.

Also to be found in one place are my most recent signed writings since 2005 in The Statesman and elsewhere on India’s economy and foreign policy, Jammu & Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Tibet, Taiwan, the United States, etc.

My political affiliation in India would be to a non-existent party — as may be seen from the article on a Liberal Party for India; and I trust it will be seen that I have dispensed criticism upon the present-day Congress Party, BJP/RSS and Communists equally harshly.

Readers are welcome to quote from my work under the normal “fair use” rule, but please quote me by name and indicate the place of original publication. Readers are also welcome to comment or correspond by email, though please try to introduce yourself.

The new preface of Philosophy of Economics is reproduced below as it is partly biographical.

“(Philosophy of Economics) germinated when I was 18 or 19 years of age in Paris, Helsinki and London, and it was first published when I was 34 in Honolulu. I came to economics from natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), not mathematics. It was inevitable I would be drawn to the beauty of philosophy as a theoretical discipline while being driven, as a post-Independence Indian, to economics as the practical discipline that might unlock secrets to India’s prosperity and progress. I belonged to an ancient family of political men, and my father, who had joined India’s new foreign service the year before I was born, inculcated in me as a boy an idea that I had “a mission” (though he later forgot he had done so).

I was fortunate to fail to enter Oxford’s PPE and instead go to the London School of Economics. LSE was at an intellectual peak in the early 1970s. DHN Johnson in international law, ACL Day in international monetary economics, Brian Griffiths vs Marcus Miller in monetary economics with everyone still in awe of Harry Johnson’s graduate lectures in macroeconomics, Ken Wallis, Graham Mizon, JJ Thomas, David Hendry in econometrics with the odd lecture by Durbin himself – I was exposed to a fully grown up intellectual seriousness from the day I arrived as an 18 year old. Michio Morishima as my professorial tutor told me frankly that, as an Indian, I would face less prejudice in Western academia than in the private sector, and said he was speaking from experience as a fellow-Asian. He turned out to be wrong but it was wise advice nevertheless, just as wise as his requiring pupils to read Hicks’ Value and Capital (which, in our undergraduate mythology, he himself had read inside a Japanese gunboat during war).

What was relatively weak at LSE was general economic theory. We were good at deriving the Best Linear Unbiased Estimator but left unsatisfied with our grasp of the theory of value that constituted the roots of our discipline. I managed a First and was admitted to Cambridge as a Research Student in 1976, where fortune had Frank Hahn choose me as a student. That at the outset was protection from the communist cabal that ran “development economics” with whom almost all the Indians ended up. I was wholly impecunious in my first year as a Research Student, and had to, for example, proof-read Arrow and Hahn’s General Competitive Analysis for its second edition to receive 50 pounds sterling from Hahn which kept me going for a short time. My exposure to Hahn’s subtle, refined and depthless thought as an economist of the first rank led to fascination and wonderment, and I read and re-read his “On the notion of equilibrium in economics”, “On the foundations of monetary theory”, “Keynesian economics and general equilibrium theory” and other clear-headed attempts to integrate the theory of value with the theory of money — a project Wicksell and Marshall had (perhaps wisely) not attempted and Keynes, Hicks and Patinkin had failed at.

Hahn insisted a central question was to ask how money, which is intrinsically worthless, can have any value, why anyone should want to hold it. The practical relevance of this question is manifest. India today in 2007 has an inconvertible currency, vast and growing public debt financed by money-creation, and more than two dozen fiscally irresponsible State governments without money-creating powers. While pondering, over the last decade, whether India’s governance could be made more responsible if States were given money-creating powers, I have constantly had Hahn’s seemingly abstruse question from decades ago in mind, as to why anyone will want to hold State currencies in India, as to whether the equilibrium price of those monies would be positive. (Lerner in fact gave an answer in 1945 when he suggested that any money would have value if its issuer agreed to collect liabilities in it — as a State collects taxes – and that may be the simplest road that bridges the real/monetary divide.)

Though we were never personal friends and I did not ingratiate myself with Hahn as did many others, my respect for him only grew when I saw how he had protected my inchoate classical liberal arguments for India from the most vicious attacks that they were open to from the communists. My doctoral thesis, initially titled “A monetary theory for India”, had to be altered due to paucity of monetary data at the time, as well as the fact India’s problems of political economy and allocation of real resources were more pressing, and so the thesis became “On liberty and economic growth: preface to a philosophy for India”. When no internal examiner could be found, the University of Cambridge, at Hahn’s insistence, showed its greatness by appointing two externals: C. J. Bliss at Oxford and T. W. Hutchison at Birmingham, former students of Hahn and Joan Robinson respectively. My thesis received the most rigorous and fairest imaginable evaluation from them.

I had been attracted to Cambridge partly by its old reputation for philosophy, especially that of Wittgenstein. But I met no worthwhile philosophers there until a few months before I was to leave for the United States in 1980, when I chanced upon the work of Renford Bambrough. Hahn had challenged me with the question, “how are you so sure your value judgements promoting liberty blah-blah are better than those of Chenery and the development economists?” It was a question that led inevitably to ethics and its epistemology — when I chanced upon Bambrough’s work, and that of his philosophical master, John Wisdom, the immense expanse of metaphysics (or ontology) opened up as well. “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes, He star’d at the Pacific…”

It has taken me more than a quarter century to traverse some of that expanse; when I returned to Britain in 2004 as the Wincott Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Buckingham, I was very kindly allowed to deliver a public lecture, “Science, Religion, Art and the Necessity of Freedom”, wherein I repaid a few of my debts to the forgotten work of Bambrough and Wisdom — whom I extravagantly compared with the Bodhisattvas of Mahayana Buddhism, also saying that the trio of Wittgenstein, Wisdom and Bambrough were reminiscent of what Socrates, Plato and Aristotle might have been like.

I had written to Bambrough from within Cambridge expressing my delight at finding his works and saying these were immensely important to economics; he had invited me to his weekly discussion groups at St John’s College but I could not attend. Between 1979 and 1989 we corresponded while I worked in America on my application of his and Wisdom’s work to problems in economics. We met only once when I returned to Cambridge from Blacksburg for my doctoral viva voce examination in January 1982. Six years later in 1988 he said of my Philosophy of Economics, “The work is altogether well-written and admirably clear”, and on another occasion he said he was “extremely pleased” at the interest I had taken in his work. The original preface of Philosophy of Economics said he was not responsible for the use I had made of his writings, which I reiterated in the 2004 lecture. At our meeting, he offered to introduce me to Wisdom who had returned to Cambridge from Oregon but I was too scared and declined, something I have always regretted. It is only in the last few years that I have begun to grasp the immensity of Wisdom’s achievement in comprehending, explaining and extending the work of both Wittgenstein and Freud. His famous “Virginia Lectures” of 1957 were finally published by his admirers with his consent as Proof and Explanation just before his death in 1993. As for Bambrough, I believe he may have been or become the single greatest philosopher since Aristotle; he told me in correspondence there was an unfinished manuscript Principia Metaphysica (the prospectus of which appeared in Philosophy 1964), which unfortunately his family and successors knew nothing about; the fact he died almost in obscurity and was soon forgotten by his University speaks more about the contemporary state of academic philosophy than about him. (Similarly, the fact Hahn, Morishima and like others did not receive the so-called Economics “Nobel” says more about the award than it does about them.)

All I needed in 1980 was time and freedom to develop the contents of this book, and that I found in America — which I could not have done in either Britain or India. It would take eight or nine very strenuous years before the book could be written and published, mostly spent at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (1980-1985) and University of Hawaii (1986-1990) Economics Departments, with short interludes at Cornell (Fall 1983) and Brigham Young (1985-86). I went to Virginia because James M. Buchanan was there, and he, along with FA Hayek, were whom Hahn decided to write on my behalf. Hayek said he was too old to accept me but wrote me kind and generous letters praising and hence encouraging my inchoate liberal thoughts and arguments. Buchanan was welcoming and I learnt much from him and his colleagues about the realities of public finance and democratic politics, which I quickly applied in my work on India, published in 1984 in London as Pricing, Planning & Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India and republished elsewhere here. The visit to the Cornell Economics Department was really so I could talk to Max Black the philosopher, who represented a different line of Wittgenstein’s students, and Max and I became friends until his death in 1988.

Buchanan’s departure from Blacksburg led to a gang of inert “game theorists” to arrive, and I was immediately under attack – one senior man telling me I was free to criticise the “social choice” work of Amartya Sen (since he was Indian too) but I was definitely unfree to do the same of Sen’s mentor, Kenneth Arrow, who was Jewish! (Arrow was infinitely more gracious when he himself responded to my criticism.) On top of that arose a matter of a woman, fresh off the aeroplane from India, being assaulted by a senior professor, and when I stood for her against her assailant, my time in Blacksburg was definitely up.

The manuscript of this book was at the time under contract with University of Chicago Press, and, thanks to Mrs Harry Johnson there, I had come in contact with that great American, Theodore W. Schultz. Schultz, at age 81, told me better to my face what the book was about than I had realised myself, namely, it was about economics as knowledge — its subject-matter was the epistemology of economics. Schultz wrote letters all over America on my behalf (as did Milton Friedman at Stanford and Sidney Alexander of MIT, whom I had also met and become friends with), and I was able to first spend a happy year among the Mormons at Brigham Young, and then end up at the University of Hawaii where I was given responsibility for the main graduate course in macroeconomics. I taught Harry Johnson-level IS-LM theory and Friedman-Tobin macroeconomics and then the new “rational expectations” vs Keynesian material.

I was also offered a large University grant to work on “South Asia”, which led to the books Foundations of India’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, and Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, both created by myself and WE James, and which led to the origins of India’s 1991 economic reform and the India-Pakistan peace process as told elsewhere. Also, this book came to be accepted for publication by Routledge, as the first economics book in its famed International Library of Philosophy.

Just as I was set to be evaluated for promotion and tenure at the University of Hawaii, I became the victim of a most vicious racist defamation (and there was some connection with Blacksburg). Quite fed up with the sordidness of American academia as I had experienced it, I sued in the federal court, which consumed much of the next half dozen years as the case worked its way through the United States Supreme Court twice. Milton Friedman and Theodore W. Schultz stood as expert witnesses on my behalf but you would not have known it from the judge’s ruling. There had been not only demonstrable perjury and suborning of perjury by the State of Hawaii’s officers, there was also “after-discovered” evidence of bribery of court-officers in the US District Court for the District of Hawaii, and I had to return to India in 1996 quite exhausted to recuperate from the experience. “Solicitation of counsel, clerks or judges” is “embracery curialis”, recognized as extrinsic fraud and subversion of justice since Jepps 72 E R 924 (1611), “firmly established in English practice long before the foundation” of the USA, Hazel Atlas, 322 US 238 (1943). “Embracery is an offense striking at the very foundation of civil society” says Corpus Juris 20, 496. A court of equity has inherent power to investigate if a judgement has been obtained by fraud, and that is a power to unearth it effectively, since no fraud is more odious than one to subvert justice. Cases include when “by reason of something done by the successful party… there was in fact no adversary trial or decision of the issue in the case. Where the unsuccessful party has been prevented from exhibiting fully his case, by fraud or deception practised on him by his opponent, as…where an attorney fraudulently or without authority assumes to represent a party and connives at his defeat; or where the attorney regularly employed corruptly sells out his client’s interest to the other side ~ these, and similar cases which show that there has never been a real contest in the trial or hearing of the case, are reasons for which a new suit may be sustained to set aside and annul the former judgment or decree, and open the case for a new and a fair hearing….” (Hazel Atlas). There is no time-limit in United States federal law for rectification of fraud on the court of this sort, and I remain fully hopeful today of the working of American justice in the case.

The practical result was that this book was never able to be properly publicized among economists as it would have been had I become Professor of Economics at the University of Hawaii by 1992 as expected. The hardback sold out quickly on its own steam and went into paperback by 1991, and a friend told me it was being used for a course at Yale Law School. The reviews were mostly intelligent. Upon returning to Britain as the Wincott Visiting Professor in 2004, I found times had changed and so had Routledge who would not keep it in print let alone permit a second revised edition. But I am now free to republish the book as I please, and today in 2007, with the Internet growing to a maturity which allows the young geeks at WordPress.com to want to encourage blogging worldwide, I can think of no more apt place to reproduce the first edition of this book than here at my own blog www.independentindian.com.

This is not a second or revised edition, and it is unchanged in content except for this lengthy new preface made necessary by the adventures and dramas the book’s author found himself unwittingly part of since its first publication. I am 52 now and happy to say I endorse the book just as I had published it at 34, though I do find it a little impatient and too terse in a few places. The 1991 paperback corrected a few slight errors in the 1989 hardback, and has been used. I am planning an entirely new book which shall have its roots in this one though it will be mostly in philosophy and not economics — the outlines it may take may be seen in the 2004 public lecture I gave on the work of Bambrough and Wisdom mentioned above and published elsewhere; its main aim will be to uncover for new generations the immense worth there is in their work which is in danger of being lost.

At least two names failed to appear in the original list of acknowledgements. G. Bruce Chapman, now of the University of Toronto, and I talked much of serious ethics and political philosophy when I first arrived at Cambridge in 1976. And in 1980 in Blacksburg, Anil Lal, then a graduate student and house-painter, borrowed my copy of Bambrough’s work, read it, and later made a comment on the metaphysics of John Wisdom which allowed me to see things more clearly.

Ballygunge, Kolkata,
April 7 2007″

THE POLITICS OF DR SINGH
by

Subroto Roy

First published in

The Sunday Statesman Editorial Page Special Article, May 21 2006, www.thestatesman.net

Manmohan Singh matriculated during Partition, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Punjab University in 1952 and 1954. He then went to Cambridge to read for the BA over two years. The pro-communist Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor were dominant influences in Cambridge economics at the time. Mark Tully reports Dr Singh saying in 2005 he fell under their influence. “At university I first became conscious of the creative role of politics in shaping human affairs, and I owe that mostly to my teachers Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor. Joan Robinson was a brilliant teacher, but she also sought to awaken the inner conscience of her students in a manner that very few others were able to achieve. She questioned me a great deal and made me think the unthinkable. She propounded the left wing interpretation of Keynes, maintaining that the state has to play more of a role if you really want to combine development with social equity. Kaldor influenced me even more; I found him pragmatic, scintillating, stimulating. Joan Robinson was a great admirer of what was going on in China, but Kaldor used the Keynesian analysis to demonstrate that capitalism could be made to work.”

Now, in fact, what was going on in China at that time was the notorious catastrophe caused by Mao Zedong known initially as the “Little Leap Forward” (with a Stalin-like collectivization of agriculture) and then as the “Great Leap Forward”. Mao later apologised to China’s people for his ignorance of microeconomic principles, admitting he “had not realised coal and steel do not move of their own accord but have to be transported”. If what Robinson was extolling to young Indians at Cambridge like Amartya Sen and Manmohan Singh in the mid 1950s was Mao’s China, it was manifest error.

As for Kaldor, the Canadian economist Harry Johnson independently reported that “being a man who rolls with the times fairly fast”, Kaldor “decided early on that capitalism actually was working. So for him the problem was, given that it works, it cannot possibly work because the theory of it is right. It must work for some quite unsuspected reason which only people as intelligent as himself can see.” Like Robinson, Kaldor made a handful of fine contributions to economic theory. But in policy-making he exemplified the worst leftist intellectual vanity and “technocratic” arrogance.

Returning to India, Manmohan Singh was required to spend three years at Chandigarh. In 1960, he left for Nuffield College to work for an Oxford DPhil on the subject of Indian exports. He returned to Chandigarh as required by government rules for another three years, and in 1966 left again until 1969, this time as a bureaucrat at the new UNCTAD in New York run by Raul Prebisch. A book deriving from his doctoral thesis was published by Clarendon Press in 1964.

In 1969, Dr Singh returned to India becoming Professor of International Trade at the Delhi School of Economics. A technical survey of mainstream Indian economic thinking done by his colleagues Jagdish Bhagwati and Sukhamoy Chakravarty published in the American Economic Review of 1969, made footnote references to his book in context of planning and protectionism, but not in the main discussion of Indian exports which at the time had to do with exchange-rate overvaluation.

After Indira Gandhi’s March 1971 election victory, Dr Singh came to the attention of Parameshwar Narain Haksar, who launched his career in bureaucracy after inviting him to write a political paper “What to do with the victory”. Haksar had been an Allahabad lawyer married into the Sapru family. In London as a student he was a protégé of R. Palme Dutt and Krishna Menon, and openly pro-USSR. He was close to the Nehrus, and Jawaharlal placed him in the new Foreign Service. He was four years older than Indira and later knew her husband Feroze Gandhi who died in 1960. By May 1967 Haksar was Indira’s adviser, and became “probably the most influential and powerful person in the Government” until 1974, when there was a conflict with her younger son. But Haksar’s influence continued well into the 1990s. His deeds include nationalization of India’s banks, the Congress split and creation of the Congress(I), and politicisation of the bureaucracy including the intelligence services. High quality independent civil servants became politically committed pro-USSR bureaucrats instead. Professionalism ended and the “courtier culture” and “durbar” politics began.

Haksar and T. N. Kaul were key figures negotiating the August 1971 “Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation” with the USSR, which was to run 25 years except the USSR collapsed before then. Indira had hosted Richard Nixon two years previously, and the Nixon-Kissinger attempt to get close to Zhou En Lai’s China using Pakistan’s Z. A. Bhutto and Yahya Khan (coinciding with Pakistan’s civil war) were undoubtedly factors contributing to India’s Soviet alliance.

As Haksar’s protégé, Dr Singh’s rise in the economic bureaucracy was meteoric. By 1972 he was Chief Economic Adviser and by 1976 Secretary in the Finance Ministry. The newly published history of the Reserve Bank shows him conveying the Ministry’s dictates to the RBI. In 1980-1982 he was at the Planning Commission, and in 1982-1985 he was Reserve Bank Governor (when Pranab Mukherjee was Finance Minister), followed by becoming Planning Commission head, until taking his final post before retirement heading the “South-South Commission” invented by Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, from August 1987 until November 1990 in Geneva.

Dr Singh joined Chandrashekhar’s Government on 10 December 1990, when Rajiv Gandhi was Leader of the Opposition yet supporting Chandrashekhar “from the outside”, and left when new elections were announced in March 1991. The first time his name arose in context of contemporary post-Indira Congress Party politics was on 22 March 1991 when M K Rasgotra challenged the present author to answer how Manmohan Singh would respond to proposals being drafted for a planned economic liberalisation of India by the Congress Party authorised by Rajiv since September 1990 (viz., “Memos to Rajiv” The Statesman 31 July-2 August 1991 republished here as “Three Memoranda to Rajiv Gandhi”; “The Dream Team: A Critique” The Statesman 6-8 January 2006 also republished here; see also “Rajiv Gandhi and the Origins of India’s 1991 Economic Reform” published elsewhere here, and in abbreviated form in Freedom First, October 2001).

Rajiv was assassinated on 21 May 1991, resulting in Narasimha Rao (who had been ill and due to retire) becoming PM in June 1991. Dr Singh told Tully: “On the day (Rao) was formulating his cabinet, he sent his Principal Secretary to me saying, `The PM would like you to become the Minister of Finance’. I didn’t take it seriously. He eventually tracked me down the next morning, rather angry, and demanded that I get dressed up and come to Rashtrapati Bhavan for the swearing in. So that’s how I started in politics”. In the same conversation, however, Dr Singh also said he learnt of “the creative role of politics” from Robinson, and hence he must have realised he actually became politically committed when he began to be mentored by Haksar — Indira Gandhi’s most powerful pro-communist bureaucrat. Before 1991, Dr Singh may be fairly described as a statist anti-liberal who travelled comfortably along with the tides of the pro-USSR New Delhi political and academic establishment, following every rule in the bureaucratic book and being obedient in face of arbitrary exercise of political and economic power. There is no evidence whatsoever of him having been a liberal economist before 1991, nor indeed of having originated any liberal economic idea afterwards. The Congress Party itself in May 2002 passed a resolution saying the ideas of India’s liberalisation had originated with neither him nor Narasimha Rao.

Indeed, the 1970s and 1980s saw onset of the worst macroeconomic policies with ruination and politicisation of India’s banking system, origins of the Rs 30 trillion (Rs 30 lakh crore) public debt we have today, and the start of exponential money supply growth and inflation. Along with Pranab Mukherjee, Dr Singh, as the exemplary Haksarian bureaucrat, must accept responsibility for having presided over much of that. If they are to do anything positive for India now, it has to be first of all to undo such grave macroeconomic damage. This would inevitably mean unravelling the post-Indira New Delhi structure of power and privilege by halting deficit finance and corruption, and enforcing clean accounting and audit methods in all government organisations and institutions. Even the BJP’s Vajpayee and Advani lacked courage and understanding to begin to know how to do this, allowing themselves to be nicely co-opted by the system instead. Rajiv might have done things in a second term; but his widow and her coalition government led by Dr Singh, who exemplified India’s political economy of the 1970s and 1980s, appear clueless as to the macroeconomic facts, and more likely to enhance rather than reverse unhealthy fiscal and monetary trends.

By Dr Subroto Roy

First published in Dawn (Karachi) Encounter September 3 2005

MUHAMMAD IQBAL (1877-1938) was the poetic and spiritual genius who (at least in the 20th Century) inspired the notion of a Muslim homeland in northwestern India. His seminal 1930 presidential speech to the Muslim League in Allahabad laid the foundation stone of the new country that was yet to be. He said “I would like to see the Punjab, Northwest Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state. Self-government within the British Empire or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North West Indian Muslim state appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims at least of Northwest India…”.

Iqbal did not see such a Muslim state being theocratic and certainly not one filled with anti-Hindu bigotry:

“A community which is inspired by feelings of ill-will towards other communities is low and ignoble. I entertain the highest respect for the customs, laws, religious and social institutions of other communities… Yet I love the communal group which is the source of my life and my behaviour… Nor should the Hindus fear that the creation of autonomous Muslim states will mean the introduction of a kind of religious rule in such states… I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interests of India and Islam. For India it means security and peace resulting from an internal balance of power, for Islam an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian Imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilise its law, its education, its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and the spirit of modern times”.

Now such a Muslim country as conceived by Muhammad lqbal — and which, as it happens, constitutes more or less the territory of present-day Pakistan other than East Punjab— did not necessarily have to receive the name it did come to receive. It might have been named “Dar-e-Islami-Hind” or the “Indus Islamic Republic” or “Indic Islamabad” or “The Republic of North-Western India” or some other such appropriate appellation — even “Iqbalistan” perhaps or some name deriving from Iqbal’s notion of “khudi” which he had developed from his admiration as a young man for the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nor did Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948) himself, the explicit and acknowledged political founder of the new country, use the appellation that it did come to have, not even when he introduced the Lahore Resolution in the 1940 meeting of the Muslim League which aimed to implement Iqbal’s idea. It was Iqbal who persuaded Jinnah to return to India from England, where Jinnah had settled in a law practice again after his first stint in Indian politics, and in 1934 Jinnah had done so when elected to the Central Legislative Assembly in a reserved seat for Bombay Muslims.

By 1938 Jinnah had declared his permanent opinion: “Congress leaders may shout as much as they like that the Congress is a national body. But … (the) Congress is nothing but a Hindu body”. Finally, at the Lahore session of the Muslim League in 1940, Jinnah introduced the idea: “That geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute Independent States in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign”.

Who had seconded Jinnah’s Lahore Resolution? It had been Sikander Hyat Khan, leader of the Punjab Muslims, and Fazlul Haq, leader of the Bengal Muslim peasantry. Jinnah as of 1940 had been most conspicuously a leader of Muslims only in the Muslim-minority provinces of British India, and clearly had felt it necessary to demonstrate that in proposing the Lahore Resolution he had the support of the two leaders of the two largest Muslim-majority provinces, Punjab and Bengal.

Sikander Hyat Khan had been due to become Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India in Bombay in 1936 when instead he returned to Punjab to lead the Unionist Party of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu landlords in 1937. “The Sikander-Jinnah pact stipulated that the Unionist Party of the Punjab, led by Sikander, would retain full autonomy of the affairs of the province.” Fazlul Haq would later conceive with Sarat Bose (elder brother of Subhash Bose) of a Muslim majority “United Bengal” in an attempt to keep Calcutta out of the new India, a notion which would have Jinnah’s backing but otherwise would not get anywhere. Support for the Lahore Resolution among the Muslims of the princely states like Jammu and Kashmir or Hyderabad was conspicuous by its absence. Neither were they mentioned in Iqbal’s seminal 1930 speech nor in Jinnah’s 1940 Lahore Resolution backed by Sikander Hyat Khan and Fazlul Haq. What has been called the “Paradox of Kashmir” is that prior to 1947 Jammu and Kashmir did not seem to appear in any discussion whatsoever, and yet it has consumed almost all discussion ever since.

To this must be added now another newly understood dimension having to do with the conceptualization and foundation of the new country not only by lqbal the poet and Jinnah the politician, but by the third and upstart founder of Pakistan: its young radical Islamist ideologue, Chowdhury Rahmat Ali (1895-1951).

Official Pakistan has venerated Iqbal and accorded Jinnah due honour and respect but has apparently treated Rahmat Ali as the lunatic uncle who has needed to be locked up secretly in the attic. Yet Rahmat Ali’s impact on the creation of Pakistan and events in the subcontinent equalled those of his two better educated, more respectable and eminent compatriots — and may yet come to exceed them (not necessarily salubriously).

Rahmat Ali was born in a village in Hoshiarpur district of Punjab in 1895, making him almost 20 years younger than Iqbal and Jinnah. He matriculated from Jullunder and graduated in 1919 from Islamia College, Lahore. About 1931, having “accumulated some money as a legal advisor to a Baluchi landlord”, he arrived in England and took admission in Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

By way of studies, Rahmat Ali may have passed a set of Part I exams but not perhaps the Part  II. There does not seem to be any record of him attending the Inns of Court or of being called to the Bar, though he styled himself “Barrister at Law” in his writings. According to the obituary he received in the Emmanuel College Magazine of 1950-51, “he made Cambridge his home, shifting a little unhappily from lodging to lodging, and using, perhaps rather more than was proper, the College as an accommodation address.”

Interviews with his landlady and housekeeper-secretary, conducted by Dr Taufiq Shelley in 1970-71, yielded that Rahmat Ali was a devout pious Muslim who along with a few compatriots had been secretly and secretively very active as a pamphleteer from England creating and spreading among India’s Muslims a radical Islamist ideology for Pakistan, even founding something called the “Pakistan National Liberation Movement”.

Rahmat Ali was inspired by Iqbal’s 1930 call for a Muslim state in northwest India but felt Iqbal had been too vague and was disappointed that Iqbal had not pressed the issue at the Third Round Table Conference. In 1933, apparently on the top floor of a London bus, Rahmat Ali invented for Iqbal’s imagined political entity the name “PAKSTAN”, the P standing for his native Punjab, the A for Afghania, K for Kashmir, S for Sind, and the STAN allegedly doubling up for Balochistan.

Rahmat Ali sought a meeting with Jinnah in London, met him and pressed the name ‘Pakstan’ upon him as a possible nomenclature. “Jinnah disliked Rahmat Ali’s ideas and avoided meeting him”. Jinnah pointed out to Rahmat Ali he had failed to consider the other Muslim majority province, Bengal, as well as Muslim minority regions.

At this, Rahmat Ali produced a general scheme of Muslim domination all over the subcontinent: there would be “Pakistan” in the northwest including Kashmir, Delhi and Agra; “Bangistan” in Bengal; “Osmanistan” in Hyderabad; “Siddiquistan” in Bundelhand and Malwa; “Faruqistan” in Bihar and Orissa; “Haideristan” in UP; “Muinistan” in Rajasthan; “Maplistan” in Kerala; and even “Safiistan” in “Western Ceylon” and “Nasaristan” in “Eastern Ceylon”, etc. The map deriving from such a crank view of history was published by Rahmat Ali in 1934 and came to be widely circulated in his pamphleteering among Indian Muslims at the time.

Rahmat Ali was vituperative in his bigotry against Hindus, referring to the Indian nationalist movement as a “British-Banya alliance” presumably in reference to MK Gandhi’s caste. He even declined to refer to an “India” as having ever existed at all and instead personally renamed the entire subcontinent as “Dinia”, and the oceans and the seas around India as the “Pakian Sea”, the “Osmanian Sea” etc. He urged Sikhs to rise up against the Hindus in a “Sikhistan” (and might have interacted with Master Tara Singh), and indeed urged all of India’s peoples who were not Hindus to rise up in war against Hindus. Given the obscurity of the facts of his life before his arrival at Emmanuel College, what experiences may have led him to such extreme bigotry towards Hindus are not known.

When in 1947 a new but “moth-eaten” country had come to be named with the word he had coined on a London bus more than a dozen years earlier, and was a country which had two “wings” after a partition — the more populous “East Pakistan” and the more arrogant “West Pakistan” — Rahmat Ali turned his wrath from England upon its new government. He condemned Jinnah as being treacherous, and then newly re-interpreted his letters P, A, K, I, S, T, A, N to now refer to Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Iran, Sindh, Tukharistan (sic), Afghanistan, and Balochistan.

The word “pak” coincidentally meant pure in Arabic, so Rahmat Ali began to speak of Muslim believers anywhere as being the “Pak” i.e. “the pure” people, and of how the national destiny of the new Pakistan should be to liberate “Pak” people everywhere, including the new India, and create a “Pak Commonwealth of Nations” stretching from Arabia to the Indies. The map he now drew placed the word “Punjab” over Jammu & Kashmir. Thus as of 1947 or so, Rahmat Ali’s crank view of history led to an Asia dominated by a “Pak” empire: However, when Rahmat Ali landed in the new country whose name had been invented by him, he was apparently placed under arrest and deported back to England immediately. In a previous visit to Sikander Hyat’s Punjab, he had been apparently assaulted. He had not been invited to the promulgation of the Lahore Resolution, which, even though it did not refer to his name Pakistan, came to be called the Pakistan Resolution.

Shunned by the officialdom of the new country which now carried the name he had invented, Rahmat Ali died in poverty and obscurity in England during an influenza epidemic in 1951; the Master of Emmanuel College paid for his funeral and was later reimbursed for this by the Government of Pakistan.

In recent years Rahmat Ali has been undergoing a restoration, and his grave at Cambridge has become a site of pilgrimage today for Pakistan’s Islamist ideologues, while his maps, writings and rantings have been reprinted in, e.g., The Nation newspaper in Pakistan as recently as February 2005.

At best, Rahmat Ali may be described as a pious and devout Muslim who was a sincere and ardent Islamist ideologue. At worst he was a deeply bigoted crank and a reactionary Muslim imperialist. His views on Hindus are not far in the level of their depravity from the views of the author of Mein Kampf on the Jews — and ironically the author of Mein Kampf had been a model for a few Hindu authors at the time who wrote with equal bigotry about the Muslims of India.

Indeed Rahmat Ali’s views against Hindus may be classified with those of other bigoted views at the time such as those against Jews or against Muslims, which may all well have been examples or models or counterfoils for one another in the crank fringes of rival ideological movements at the time.

The anti-Hindu bigotry of Rahmat Ali’s views would explain why they were anathema to Jinnah, the secular-minded constitutionalist. Like other Muslim nationalists of his time such as Attaturk, Nasser, Mossadeq or even Saud himself, Jinnah would have been embarrassed to be promoting a reactionary Islamic imperialism in that modernising era that was the middle of the 20th century.

Dr Roy along with WE James created the book Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s (Sage, Delhi, OUP, Karachi 1992). His most recent book is one edited with John Clarke, Margaret Thatcher’s Revolution: How it Happend and What it Meant (Continuum, London & New York 2005, 2006).

Author’s Note May 2008: The family of Rajiv Gandhi received a copy of this when it was first written in July 2005. An earlier abbreviated version “Encounter with Rajiv Gandhi: On the Origins of India’s 1991 Economic Reform” was published in October 2001 in Freedom First, Bombay, a journal founded by the late Minoo Masani and now edited by S V Raju. A copy of that article was received by all Congress MPs of the 13th Lok Sabha. In May 2002, the Congress Party passed an official resolution stating Rajiv Gandhi and not Narasimha Rao or Manmohan Singh was to be credited with having originated the 1991 economic reforms. This article has now been published in print in The Statesman Festival Volume, October 2007.  It may be profitably followed by “The Dream Team: A Critique”, “Solving Kashmir”, “Law, Justice & J&K”, “What to tell Musharraf”, “India’s Macroeconomics”, “Fiscal Instability”, “India’s Trade and Payments”, “Fallacious Finance”, “Against Quackery”, etc. My original advisory memoranda to Rajiv in 1990-1991 were published in The Statesman’s Editorial Pages July 31-August 2 1991, and now have been republished elsewhere here as well.

I met Rajiv Gandhi for the first time on 18th September 1990 thanks to an introduction by S. S. Ray. We met a half dozen or so times until his assassination in May 1991. Yet our encounter was intense and consequential, and resulted directly in the change of the Congress Party’s economic thinking prior to the 1991 elections. I had with me results of an interdisciplinary “perestroika-for-India” project I had led at the University of Hawaii since 1986. This manuscript (later published by Sage as Foundations of India’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s edited by myself and W. E. James) was given by me to Rajiv, then Leader of the Opposition, and was instrumental in the change of thinking that took place. In interests of fairness, I tried to get the work to V. P. Singh too because he was Prime Minister, but a key aide of his showed no interest in receiving it.

The Hawaii project manuscript contained inter alia a memorandum by Milton Friedman done at the request of the Government of India in November 1955, which had been suppressed for 34 years until I published it in May 1989. Milton and Rose Friedman refer to this in their memoirs Two Lucky People (Chicago 1998). Peter Bauer had told me of the existence of Friedman’s document during my doctoral work at Cambridge under Frank Hahn in the late 1970s, as did N. Georgescu-Roegen in America. Those were years in which Brezhnev still ruled in the Kremlin, Gorbachev was yet to emerge, Indira Gandhi and her pro-Moscow advisers were ensconced in New Delhi, and not even the CIA had imagined the Berlin Wall would fall and the Cold War would be over within a decade. It was academic suicide at the time to argue in favour of classical liberal economics even in the West. As a 22-year-old Visiting Assistant Professor at the Delhi School of Economics in 1977, I was greeted with uproarious laughter of senior professors when I spoke of a possible free market in foreign exchange. Cambridge was a place where Indian economists went to study the exploitation of peasants in Indian agriculture before returning to their friends in the well-known bastions of such matters in Delhi and Calcutta. It was not a place where Indian (let alone Bengali) doctoral students in economics mentioned the unmentionable names of Hayek or Friedman or Buchanan, and insisted upon giving their works a hearing.

My original doctoral topic in 1976 “A monetary theory for India” had to be altered not only due to paucity of monetary data at the time but because the problems of India’s political economy and allocation of resources in the real economy were far more pressing. The thesis that emerged in 1982 “On liberty and economic growth: preface to a philosophy for India” was a full frontal assault from the point of view of microeconomic theory on the “development planning” to which everyone routinely declared their fidelity, from New Delhi’s bureaucrats and Oxford’s “development” school to McNamara’s World Bank with its Indian staffers.

Frank Hahn protected my inchoate liberal arguments for India; and when no internal examiner could be found, Cambridge showed its greatness by appointing two externals, Bliss at Oxford and Hutchison at Birmingham, both Cambridge men. “Economic Theory and Development Economics” was presented to the American Economic Association in December 1982 in company of Solow, Chenery and other eminences, and then Pricing, Planning and Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India published by London’s Institute of Economic Affairs, provoking the lead editorial of The Times on May 29 1984. The Indian High Commission sent the editorial to the Finance Ministry where it caused a stir as the first classical liberal attack on post-Mahalonobis Indian economic thought since B. R. Shenoy’s original criticism decades earlier. The “perestroika-for-India” project was to follow at Hawaii starting in 1986. New Delhi was represented at the project’s conference held between May 22-27 1989 by the accredited Ambassador of India to the USA, the accredited Consul General of India to San Francisco, and by the founder-director of ICRIER (see photo).

All this I brought into that first meeting with Rajiv Gandhi on September 18 1990. That first day he came to the door to greet me. He was a handsome tall man with the most charming smile and manner, seemed pleased to see me and put me at ease at once. I gave him my books as well as the manuscript of the “perestroika for India” project. He gave me a celebratory volume that had just been published to mark his grandfather’s centenary. He began by talking about how important he felt panchayati raj was, and said he had been on the verge of passing major legislation on it but then lost the election. He asked me if I could spend some time thinking about it, and that he would get the papers sent to me. I said I would and remarked panchayati raj might be seen as decentralized provision of public goods, and gave the economist’s definition of public goods as those essential for the functioning of the market economy, like the Rule of Law, roads, fresh water, and sanitation, but which were unlikely to appear through competitive forces.

I distinguished between federal, state and local levels and said many of the most significant public goods were best provided locally. Rajiv had not heard the term “public goods” before, and he beamed a smile and his eyes lit up as he voiced the words slowly, seeming to like the concept immensely. It occurred to me he had been by choice a pilot of commercial aircraft. Now he seemed intrigued to find there could be systematic ways of thinking about navigating a country’s governance by common pursuit of reasonable judgement. I said the public sector’s wastefulness had drained scarce resources that should have gone instead to provide public goods. Since the public sector was owned by the public, it could be privatised by giving away its shares to the public, preferably to panchayats of the poorest villages. The shares would become tradable, drawing out black money, and inducing a historic redistribution of wealth while at the same time achieving greater efficiency by transferring the public sector to private hands. Rajiv seemed to like that idea too, and said he tried to follow a maxim of Indira Gandhi’s that every policy should be seen in terms of how it affected the common man. I wryly said the common man often spent away his money on alcohol, to which he said at once it might be better to think of the common woman instead. (This remark of Rajiv’s may have influenced the “aam admi” slogan of the 2004 election, as all Congress Lok Sabha MPs of the previous Parliament came to receive a previous version of the present narrative.)

Our project had identified the Congress’s lack of internal elections as a problem; when I raised it, Rajiv spoke of how he, as Congress President, had been trying to tackle the issue of bogus electoral rolls. I said the judiciary seemed to be in a mess due to the backlog of cases; many of which seemed related to land or rent control, and it may be risky to move towards a free economy without a properly functioning judicial system or at least a viable system of contractual enforcement. I said a lot of problems which should be handled by the law in the courts in India were instead getting politicised and decided on the streets. Rajiv had seen the problems of the judiciary and said he had good relations with the Chief Justice’s office, which could be put to use to improve the working of the judiciary.

The project had worked on Pakistan as well, and I went on to say we should solve the problem with Pakistan in a definitive manner. Rajiv spoke of how close his government had been in 1988 to a mutual withdrawal from Siachen. But Zia-ul-Haq was then killed and it became more difficult to implement the same thing with Benazir Bhutto, because, he said, as a democrat, she was playing to anti-Indian sentiments while he had found it somewhat easier to deal with the military. I pressed him on the long-term future relationship between the countries and he agreed a common market was the only real long-term solution. I wondered if he could find himself in a position to make a bold move like offering to go to Pakistan and addressing their Parliament to break the impasse. He did not say anything but seemed to think about the idea. Rajiv mentioned a recent Time magazine cover of Indian naval potential, which had caused an excessive stir in Delhi. He then talked about his visit to China, which seemed to him an important step towards normalization. He said he had not seen (or been shown) any absolute poverty in China of the sort we have in India. He talked about the Gulf situation, saying he did not disagree with the embargo of Iraq except he wished the ships enforcing the embargo had been under the U.N. flag. The meeting seemed to go on and on, and I was embarrassed at perhaps having taken too much time and that he was being too polite to get me to go. V. George had interrupted with news that Sheila Dixit (as I recall) had just been arrested by the U. P. Government, and there were evidently people waiting. Just before we finally stood up I expressed a hope that he was looking to the future of India with an eye to a modern political and economic agenda for the next election, rather than getting bogged down with domestic political events of the moment. That was the kind of hopefulness that had attracted many of my generation in 1985. I said I would happily work in any way to help define a long-term agenda. His eyes lit up and as we shook hands to say goodbye, he said he would be in touch with me again.

The next day I was called and asked to stay in Delhi for a few days, as Mr. Gandhi wanted me to meet some people. I was not told whom I was to meet but that there would be a meeting on Monday, 24th September. On Saturday, the Monday meeting was postponed to Tuesday because one of the persons had not been able to get a flight into Delhi. I pressed to know what was going on, and was told I was to meet former army chief K.V. Krishna Rao, former foreign secretary M. K. Rasgotra, V. Krishnamurty and Sam Pitroda.

The group met for the first time on September 25 in the afternoon. Rasgotra did not arrive. Krishna Rao, Pitroda, Krishnamurty and I gathered in the waiting room next to George’s office. The three of them knew each other but none knew me and I was happy enough to be ignored. It seemed mysterious while we were gathering, especially when the tall well-dressed General arrived, since none of us knew why we had been called by Rajiv, and the General remarked to the others he had responded at once to the call to his home but could not get a flight into Delhi for a day.

Rajiv’s residence as Leader of the Opposition had a vast splendid meeting room, lined with high bookshelves on one or two walls, a large handsome desk on one side, two spacious comfortable sofa sets arranged in squares, and a long conference table with leather chairs occupying most of the rest of the room. The entrance to it was via a small 10 ft by 10 ft air-conditioned anteroom, where George sat, with a fax machine, typewriters and a shredding machine, plus several telephones, and a used copy of parliamentary procedures on the shelf. Getting to George’s office was the final step before reaching Rajiv. There were several chairs facing George, and almost every prospective interviewee, no matter how senior or self-important, had to move from one chair to the next, while making small talk with George, as the appointment with Rajiv drew near. Opening into George’s office was a larger and shabbier waiting room, which is where we sat, which was not air-conditioned, and which opened to the outside of the building where a plainclothes policeman sometimes stood around with a walkie-talkie. There were large photographs of Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and Indira Gandhi on the wall, and a modern print also hung incongruously. A dozen or more plastic chairs lined the walls. There were faded torn issues of a few old magazines on the plastic coffee-table, and on one occasion there was a television playing the new sporadic domestic cable news and weather information for the entertainment of the many visitors waiting. Via this waiting room went the vast majority of people who were to meet Rajiv in his office. To reach the waiting room, one had to walk a hundred yards along a path lined by splendid high hedges from the initial reception desk at the rear-gate, manned by Congress Seva Dal volunteers in khadi wearing Gandhi-caps. These persons were in touch with George’s office by telephone, and would check with George or his assistant Balasubramaniam before sending a visitor along. The visitor would then pass through a metal-detector manned by a couple of policemen. If someone’s face came to be known and had been cleared once, or if someone acted to the policemen like a sufficiently important political personage, such a person seemed to be waved through. Outside, the front-entrance of the premises were closed unless extremely important people were entering or exiting, while at the rear-entrance there were usually two or three jeeps and several plainclothes policemen, who might or might not challenge the prospective visitor with a kind of “Who goes there?” attitude before the visitor reached the Seva Dal reception desk. The whole arrangement struck me from the first as insecure and inefficient, open to penetration by professional assassins or a terrorist squad, let aside insiders in the way Indira Gandhi had been assassinated. I could not imagine counter-terrorist commandos would suddenly appear from the high hedges in the event of an emergency.

On that Tuesday when Rajiv finally called in our group, we entered hesitantly not knowing quite what the meeting was going to be about. Rajiv introduced me to the others and then spoke of why he had gathered us together. He wanted us to come up with proposals and recommendations for the direction the country should take on an assumption the Congress Party was returned to power in the near future. He said it would help him to have an outside view from specialists who were not party functionaries, though the others obviously had been closely involved with Congress governments before. Rajiv said we were being asked to write a draft of what may enter the manifesto for the next election, which we should assume to be forthcoming by April 1991. I asked what might have become of the “perestroika” manuscript I had given him at our previous meeting. He said he had gotten it copied and bound, and that along with my 1984 monograph, it had been circulated among a few of his party colleagues who included P. Chidambaram and Mani Shankar Aiyar.

The initial meeting left us breathless and excited. Yet within a few days, the others became extremely tied up for personal causes, and I found myself alone in getting on with doing what we had been explicitly asked to do. I felt I should get done what I could in the time I had while keeping the others informed. Rajiv had said to me at our first meeting that he felt the Congress was ready for elections. This did not seem to me to be really the case. He actually seemed very isolated in his office, with George seeming to be his conduit to the outside world. I decided to start by trying to write a definite set of general principles that could guide and inform thought about the direction of policy. I spent the evening of October 26 in the offices at Rajiv’s residence, preparing an economic policy memorandum on a portable Toshiba computer of his, the first laptop I ever used. After Rajiv’s assassination, this was part of what was published in The Statesmen’s center pages July 31-August 2, 1991.

Rajiv read the work and met me on October 30 or 31, even though he was down badly with a sore throat after his sadbhavana travels around the country; he looked odd clad in khadi with a muffler and gym shoes. He said he liked very much what I had written and had given it to be read by younger Congress leaders who would discuss it for the manifesto, for an election he again said, he expected early in 1991. I said I was grateful for his kind words and inquired whom he had shown the work to. This time he said Chidambaram and also mentioned another name that made me wince. In December 1990, I was back in Hawaii when I was called on the phone to ask whether I could come to Delhi. With the rise of Chandrashekhar as Prime Minister, Rajiv had called a meeting of the group. But I could not go.

In January 1991, the Gulf War brought an odd twist to my interaction with Rajiv. On January 15, the UN deadline for the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait passed without Iraqi compliance, and American-led forces started the heavy aerial bombardment of Iraq. The American media had built up the impending war as one of utter devastation and mass killing, especially when the American infantry became engaged. Estimated casualties on the American side alone were being wildly exaggerated by the number of “body-bags” being ordered by the Pentagon. An even larger conflagration was being imagined if Israel entered the fighting, while Saddam Hussein had vowed to set fire to Kuwait’s oil-fields before retreating. I like everyone else erroneously believed the media’s hyperbole about the impending regional catastrophe. On January 16, just after the bombing of Iraq had begun, I called an American family friend who had retired from a senior foreign policy role and who had known me from when I was an infant. In informal conversation, I mentioned to him that since other channels had by then become closed, an informal channel might be attempted via India, specifically via Rajiv who was still Leader of the Opposition but on whom the Chandrashekhar Government depended. The sole aim would be to compel an immediate Iraqi withdrawal without further loss of life. What transpired over the next few days was that a proposal to that effect was communicated at Rajiv’s decision to a high level of the Iraqis on the one hand, and evidently received their assent, while at the same time, it was mentioned to the authorities on the American side. But nothing came of it. Rajiv initiated a correspondence with Chandrashekhar beginning January 19, demanding a coherent formulation of Indian policy in the Gulf war, and faxed me copies of this. By February 8, the Times of India led by saying Rajiv’s stand “on the Gulf War demonstrates both his experience and perspicacity … in consonance with an enlightened vision of national interest”, and urged Rajiv to “give the nation some respite from [the] non-government” of Chandrashekhar. I taped my phone conversations with Rajiv during the Gulf War because notes could not be taken at the necessary speed; in late December 1991, I was to give his widow a copy of the tape for her personal record.

I returned to Delhi on Monday, March 18, 1991 as new elections had been announced. Rasgotra said I should be in touch with Krishna Rao, and the next day March 19 Krishna Rao met me for several hours. I told him what I thought were the roots and results of the Gulf war. He in turn generously told me what had happened while I had been away. He said the group had met Rajiv in December with the proposal that Rajiv better organize his time by having an “office manager” of larger political stature than George. The name of a UP Congressman of integrity had been put forward, but nothing had come of it. Rajiv had been advised to keep Chandrashekhar in power through the autumn of 1991, as Chandrashekhar was doing Rajiv’s work for him of sidelining V. P. Singh. The idea was to cooperate with Chandrashekhar until he could be pushed up to the Presidency when that fell vacant. Rajiv had been advised not to work in a Chandrashekhar cabinet, though in my opinion, had we been like the Scandinavians, it was not impossible for a former prime minister to enter another cabinet on the right terms in the national interest of providing stable government, which was imperative at the time. Things seem to have slipped out of control when Chandrashekhar resigned. At that point, Rajiv called the group together and instructed them to write a draft of the manifesto for the impending elections. I had advised readiness back in September but the lack of organization had prevented much tangible progress at the time. Our group was to now report to a political manifesto-committee of three senior party leaders who would report to Rajiv. They were Narasimha Rao, Pranab Mukherjee and Madhavsingh Solanki. Krishna Rao liased with Narasimha Rao, Krishnamurty with Mukherjee, Pitroda with Solanki. While Rajiv would obviously lead a new Congress Government, Mukherjee was the presumptive Finance Minister, while Narasimha Rao and Solanki would have major portfolios though Narasimha Rao was expected to retire before too long.

Krishna Rao said I should be in touch with Krishnamurty who was preparing the economic chapters of the draft of the manifesto. Krishnamurty told me he had brought in A. M. Khusro to the group, and there would be a 5 p.m. meeting at Khusro’s office at the Aga Khan Foundation. I arrived early and was delighted to meet Khusro, and he seemed pleased to meet me. Khusro seemed excited by my view that India and Pakistan were spending excessively on defence against each other, which resonated with his own ideas, and he remarked the fiscal disarray in India and Pakistan could start to be set right by mutually agreed cuts in military spending. (Khusro was eventually to accompany Prime Minister Vajpayee to Lahore in 1999).

Krishnamurty had prepared a draft dated March 18 of several pages of the economic aspects of the manifesto. After our discussions, Krishnamurty was hospitable enough to open the draft to improvement. That evening, the 19th, I worked through the night and the next morning to get by noon copies of a revised version with all the members of the group. At 4 p.m. on the 20th there was a meeting at Andhra Bhavan of the whole group except Pitroda, which went on until the night. The next day the 21st , Krishnamurty, Khusro and I met again at Andhra Bhavan for a few hours on the economic aspects of the draft. Then in mid-afternoon I went to Rasgotra’s home to work with him and Krishna Rao. They wanted me to produce the economic draft which they could then integrate as they wished into the material they were dictating to a typist. I offered instead to absorb their material directly on to my laptop computer where the economic draft was. Rasgotra was reluctant to let go control, and eventually I gave in and said I would get them a hard copy of the economic draft, which they then planned to re-draft via a stenographer on a typewriter. At this, Rasgotra gave in and agreed to my solution. So the work began and the three of us continued until late.

That night Krishna Rao dropped me at Tughlak Road where I used to stay with friends. In the car I told him, as he was a military man with heavy security cover for himself as a former Governor of J&K, that it seemed to me Rajiv’s security was being unprofessionally handled, that he was vulnerable to a professional assassin. Krishna Rao asked me if I had seen anything specific by way of vulnerability. With John Kennedy and De Gaulle in mind, I said I feared Rajiv was open to a long-distance sniper, especially when he was on his campaign trips around the country.

This was one of several attempts I made since October 1990 to convey my clear impression to whomever I thought might have an effect that Rajiv seemed to me extremely vulnerable. Rajiv had been on sadhbhavana journeys, back and forth into and out of Delhi. I had heard he was fed up with his security apparatus, and I was not surprised given it seemed at the time rather bureaucratized. It would not have been appropriate for me to tell him directly that he seemed to me to be vulnerable, since I was a newcomer and a complete amateur about security issues, and besides if he agreed he might seem to himself to be cowardly or have to get even closer to his security apparatus. Instead I pressed the subject relentlessly with whomever I could. I suggested specifically two things: (a) that the system in place at Rajiv’s residence and on his itineraries be tested, preferably by some internationally recognized specialists in counter-terrorism; (b) that Rajiv be encouraged to announce a shadow-cabinet. The first would increase the cost of terrorism, the second would reduce the potential political benefit expected by terrorists out to kill him. On the former, it was pleaded that security was a matter being run by the V. P. Singh and then Chandrashekhar Governments at the time. On the latter, it was said that appointing a shadow cabinet might give the appointees the wrong idea, and lead to a challenge to Rajiv’s leadership. This seemed to me wrong, as there was nothing to fear from healthy internal contests for power so long as they were conducted in a structured democratic framework. I pressed to know how public Rajiv’s itinerary was when he travelled. I was told it was known to everyone and that was the only way it could be since Rajiv wanted to be close to the people waiting to see him and had been criticized for being too aloof. This seemed to me totally wrong and I suggested that if Rajiv wanted to be seen as meeting the crowds waiting for him then that should be done by planning to make random stops on the road that his entourage would take. This would at least add some confusion to the planning of potential terrorists out to kill him. When I pressed relentlessly, it was said I should probably speak to “Madame”, i.e. to Mrs. Rajiv Gandhi. That seemed to me highly inappropriate, as I could not be said to be known to her and I should not want to unduly concern her in the event it was I who was completely wrong in my assessment of the danger. The response that it was not in Congress’s hands, that it was the responsibility of the V. P. Singh and later the Chandrashekhar Governments, seemed to me completely irrelevant since Congress in its own interests had a grave responsibility to protect Rajiv Gandhi irrespective of what the Government’s security people were doing or not doing. Rajiv was at the apex of the power structure of the party, and a key symbol of secularism and progress for the entire country. Losing him would be quite irreparable to the party and the country. It shocked me that the assumption was not being made that there were almost certainly professional killers actively out to kill Rajiv Gandhi — this loving family man and hapless pilot of India’s ship of state who did not seem to have wished to make enemies among India’s terrorists but whom the fates had conspired to make a target. The most bizarre and frustrating response I got from several respondents was that I should not mention the matter at all as otherwise the threat would become enlarged and the prospect made more likely! This I later realized was a primitive superstitious response of the same sort as wearing amulets and believing in Ptolemaic astrological charts that assume the Sun goes around the Earth — centuries after Kepler and Copernicus. Perhaps the entry of scientific causality and rationality is where we must begin in the reform of India’s governance and economy. What was especially repugnant after Rajiv’s assassination was to hear it said by his enemies that it marked an end to “dynastic” politics in India. This struck me as being devoid of all sense because the unanswerable reason for protecting Rajiv Gandhi was that we in India, if we are to have any pretensions at all to being a civilized and open democratic society, cannot tolerate terrorism and assassination as means of political change. Either we are constitutional democrats willing to fight for the privileges of a liberal social order, or ours is truly a primitive and savage anarchy concealed beneath a veneer of fake Westernization.

The next day, Friday March 22, I worked from dawn to get the penultimate draft to Krishna Rao before noon as planned the night before. Rasgotra arrived shortly, and the three of us worked until evening to finish the job. I left for an hour to print out copies for a meeting of the entire group, where the draft we were going to submit would come to be decided. When I got back I found Rasgotra had launched an extended and quite unexpected attack on what had been written on economic policy. Would someone like Manmohan Singh, Rasgotra wanted to know, agree with all this talk we were putting in about liberalization and industrial efficiency? I replied I did not know what Manmohan Singh’s response would be but I knew he had been in Africa heading something called the South-South Commission for Julius Nyrere of Tanzania. I said what was needed was a clear forceful statement designed to restore India’s credit-worthiness, and the confidence of international markets. I said that the sort of thing we should aim for was to make clear, e.g. to the IMF’s man in Delhi when that person read the manifesto, that the Congress Party at least knew its economics and was planning to make bold new steps in the direction of progress. I had argued the night before with Rasgotra that on foreign policy we should “go bilateral” with good strong ties with individual countries, and drop all the multilateral hogwash. But I did not wish to enter into a fight on foreign policy which he was writing, so long as the economic policy was left the way we said. Krishnamurty, Khusro and Pitroda came to my defence saying the draft we had done greatly improved on the March 18 draft. For a bare half hour or so with all of us present, the draft was agreed upon. Later that night at Andhra Bhavan, I gave Krishna Rao the final copy of the draft manifesto which he was going to give Narasimha Rao the next day, and sent a copy to Krishnamurty who was liaising with Pranab Mukherjee. Pitroda got a copy on a floppy disc the next day for Solanki.

In its constructive aspects, the March 22 1991 draft of the Congress manifesto went as follows with regard to economic policy: “CHAPTER V AGENDA FOR ECONOMIC ACTION 1. Control of Inflation …. The Congress believes the inflation and price-rise of essential commodities… is a grave macroeconomic problem facing the country today. It has hit worst the poorest and weakest sections of our people and those with fixed incomes like pensioners. The Congress will give highest priority to maintaining the prices of essential commodities, increasing their production and supply using all appropriate economic instruments. 2. Macroeconomic Policy Framework To control inflation of the general price-level, the Congress will provide a predictable long-term policy framework. The average Indian household and business will not have their lives and plans disrupted by sudden changes in economic policy. Coherent monetary policy measures will be defined as called for by the Report of Experts of the Reserve Bank of India in 1985. The Long-Term Fiscal Policy introduced by the Congress Government of 1984-1989 will be revived. Medium and long-term export-import policies will be defined. The basis for a strong India must be a strong economy. The Congress believes a high rate of real growth is essential for securing a strong national defence, social justice and equity, and a civilized standard of living for all. As the party of self-reliance, Congress believes resources for growth must be generated from within our own economy. This means all wasteful and unproductive Government spending has to be cut, and resources transferred from areas of low priority to areas of high national priority. Subsidies have to be rationalized and reduced, and productivity of investments already made has to be improved. The widening gap between revenue receipts and revenue expenditure must be corrected through fiscal discipline, and the growing national debt brought under control as a matter of high priority. These policies in a consistent framework will create the environment for the freeing of the rupee in due course, making it a hard currency of the world of which our nation can be proud. Public resources are not unlimited. These have to be allocated to high priority areas like essential public services, poverty-reduction, strategic sectors, and protection of the interests of the weaker sections of society. Government has to leave to the initiative and enterprise of the people what can be best done by themselves. Government can now progressively vacate some areas of activity to the private, cooperative and non-government sectors. Black money in the parallel economy has become the plague of our economic and political system. This endangers the social and moral fabric of our nation. Artificial price controls, excessive licensing, capacity restrictions, outmoded laws on rent control and urban ceiling, and many other outdated rules and regulations have contributed to pushing many honest citizens into dishonest practices. The Congress will tackle the problem of black money at its roots by attacking all outmoded and retrograde controls, and simplifying procedures in all economic spheres. At the same time, the tax-base of the economy must be increased via simplification and rationalization of tax-rates and coverage, user-fees for public goods, and reduction of taxes wherever possible to improve incentives and stimulate growth. 3. Panchayati Raj India’s farmers and khet mazdoors are the backbone of our economy. Economic development is meaningless until their villages provide them a wholesome rural life. The Congress will revitalize Panchayat Raj institutions to decentralize decision-making, so development can truly benefit local people most effectively. 4. Rural Development Basic economic infrastructure like roads, communications, fresh drinking water, and primary health and education for our children must reach all our villages. The Congress believes such a policy will also relieve pressures from migration on our towns and cities…… Through the Green Revolution which the Congress pioneered over 25 years, our farmers have prospered. Now our larger farmers must volunteer to contribute more to the national endeavour, and hence to greater equity and overall economic development. Equity demands land revenue should be mildly graduated so that small farmers holding less than one acre pay less land revenue per acre…. 9. Education and Health The long-run prosperity of our nation depends on the general state of education, health and well-being of our people. Small families give themselves more choice and control over their own lives. Improving female literacy, promoting the welfare of nursing mothers and reducing infant mortality will have a direct bearing on reducing the birth-rate and improving the health and quality of all our people. Primary and secondary education has high social returns and is the best way in the long-run for achievement of real equality. Efforts will be made to reduce the cost of education for the needy through concessional supply of books and other study materials, scholarships and assistance for transportation and residential facilities. The Congress Party pledges to dedicate itself to promoting education, especially in rural areas and especially for girls and the weaker sections of society. The next Congress Government will prepare and launch a 10-year programme for introduction of free and compulsory primary education for all children of school age. It will continue to emphasize vocational bias in education, integrating it closely with employment opportunities…. 11. Industrial Efficiency Our industrial base in the private and public sectors are the core of our economy. What we have achieved until today has been creditable, and we are self-reliant in many areas. Now the time has come for industry to provide more efficiency and better service and product-quality for the Indian consumer. The public sector has helped the Indian economy since Independence and many national goals have been achieved. Now it has become imperative that the management of public sector units is made effective, and their productivity increased. Major steps must be taken for greater accountability and market-orientation. Failure to do this will make our country lose more and more in the international economy. Budgetary support will be given only for public sector units in the core and infrastructure sectors. Emphasis will be on improving performance and productivity of existing investments, not on creating added organizations or over manning. Units not in the core sector will be privatised gradually. Even in core sectors like Telecommunications, Power, Steel and Coal, incremental needs can be taken care of by the private sector. The Government-Enterprise interface must be properly defined in a White Paper. The Congress believes privatisation must distribute the profits equitably among the people of India. In order to make our public enterprises truly public, it is essential that the shares of many such enterprises are widely held by the members of the general public and workers. Congress pledges to allot a proportion of such shares to the rural Panchayats and Nagarpalikas. This will enhance their asset-base and yield income for their development activities, as well as improve income-distribution. 12. Investment and Trade Indian industry, Government and professional managers are now experienced enough to deal with foreign companies on an equal footing, and channel direct foreign investment in desired directions. Foreign companies often bring access to advanced technological know-how, without which the nation cannot advance. The Congress Government will formulate a pragmatic policy channelling foreign investment into areas important to the national interest. Every effort must be made also to encourage Indians who are outside India to invest in the industry, trade and real estate of their homeland. Because of the protected and inflationary domestic market, Indian industry has become complacent and the incentive for industrial exports has been weakened. When all production is comfortably absorbed at home, Indian industry makes the effort to venture into exports only as a last resort. This must change. A Congress Government will liberalize and deregulate industry to make it competitive and export-oriented, keeping in mind always the interests of the Indian consumer in commercial policy. Export-oriented and predictable commercial policies will be encouraged. Existing procedural constraints and bottlenecks will be removed. Quotas and tariffs will be rationalized. Thrust areas for export-development will be identified and monitored. Efforts will be made to develop a South Asian Community. Trade and economic cooperation among South Asian countries must be increased and simplified.”

This March 22 1991 draft of the Congress’s intended economic policies got circulated and discussed, and from it rumours and opinions appeared that Congress was planning to launch a major economic reform in India. Economic Times said the manifesto “is especially notable for its economic agenda” and Business Standard said “if party manifestos decide election battles” Congress must be “considered home and dry”. A senior IMF official told me three years later the manifesto had indeed seemed a radical and bold move in the direction of progress, which had been exactly our intended effect. When I met Manmohan Singh at the residence of S. S. Ray in September 1993 in Washington, Ray told him and his senior aides the Congress manifesto had been written on my computer. Manmohan Singh smiled and said that when Arjun Singh and other senior members of the Congress had challenged him in the cabinet, he had pointed to the manifesto. Yet, oddly enough, while the March 22 draft got discussed and circulated, and the Indian economic reform since July 1991 corresponded in fundamental ways to its contents as reproduced above, the actual published Congress manifesto in April 1991 was as tepid and rhetorical as usual, as if some party hack had before publication put in the usual nonsense about e.g. bringing down inflation via price-controls. Certainly the published manifesto was wholly undistinguished in its economic aspects, and had nothing in it to correspond to the bold change of attitude towards economic policy that actually came to be signalled by the 1991 Government.

On March 23, our group was to meet Rajiv at noon. There was to be an event in the inner lawns of Rajiv’s residence in the morning, where he would launch Krishna Rao’s book on India’s security. Krishna Rao had expressly asked me to come but I had to wait outside the building patiently, not knowing if it was a mistake or if it was deliberate. This was politics after all, and I had ruffled feathers during my short time there. While I waited, Rajiv was speaking to a farmers’ rally being held at grounds adjoining his residence, and there appeared to be thousands of country folk who had gathered to hear him. When it was over, Rajiv, smiling nervously and looking extremely uncomfortable, was hoisted atop people’s shoulders and carried back to the residence by his audience. As I watched, my spine ran cold at the thought that any killer could have assassinated him with ease in that boisterous crowd, right there in the middle of Delhi outside his own residence. It was as if plans for his security had been drawn up without any strategic thinking underlying them.

Krishna Rao arrived and graciously took me inside for his book launch. The event was attended by the Congress’s top brass, including Narasimha Rao whom I met for the first time, as well as foreign military attaches and officers of the Indian armed forces. The attaché of one great power went about shaking hands and handing out his business card to everyone. I stood aside and watched. Delhi felt to me that day like a sieve, as if little could be done without knowledge of the embassies. One side wanted to sell arms, aircraft or ships, while the other wanted trips abroad or jobs or green cards or whatever for their children. And I thought Islamabad would be worse — could India and Pakistan make peace in this fetid ether?

Proceedings began when Rajiv arrived. This elite audience mobbed him just as the farmers had mobbed him earlier. He saw me and beamed a smile in recognition, and I smiled back but made no attempt to draw near him in the crush. He gave a short very apt speech on the role the United Nations might have in the new post-Gulf War world. Then he launched the book, and left for an investiture at Rashtrapati Bhavan. We waited for our meeting with him, which finally happened in the afternoon. Rajiv was plainly at the point of exhaustion and still hard-pressed for time. He seemed pleased to see me and apologized for not talking in the morning. Regarding the March 22 draft, he said he had not read it but that he would be doing so. He said he expected the central focus of the manifesto to be on economic reform, and an economic point of view in foreign policy, and in addition an emphasis on justice and the law courts. I remembered our September 18 conversation and had tried to put in justice and the courts into our draft but had been over-ruled by others. I now said the social returns of investment in the judiciary were high but was drowned out again. Rajiv was clearly agitated that day by the BJP and blurted out he did not really feel he understood what on earth they were on about. He said about his own family, “We’re not religious or anything like that, we don’t pray every day.” I felt again what I had felt before, that here was a tragic hero of India who had not really wished to be more than a happy family man until he reluctantly was made into a national leader against his will. We were with him for an hour or so. As we were leaving, he said quickly at the end of the meeting he wished to see me on my own and would be arranging a meeting. One of our group was staying back to ask him a favour. Just before we left, I managed to say to him what I felt was imperative: “The Iraq situation isn’t as it seems, it’s a lot deeper than it’s been made out to be.” He looked at me with a serious look and said “Yes I know, I know.” It was decided Pitroda would be in touch with each of us in the next 24 hours. During this time Narasimha Rao’s manifesto committee would read the draft and any questions they had would be sent to us. We were supposed to be on call for 24 hours. The call never came. Given the near total lack of system and organization I had seen over the months, I was not surprised. Krishna Rao and I waited another 48 hours, and then each of us left Delhi. Before going I dropped by to see Krishnamurty, and we talked at length. He talked especially about the lack of the idea of teamwork in India. Krishnamurty said he had read everything I had written for the group and learned a lot. I said that managing the economic reform would be a critical job and the difference between success and failure was thin.

I got the afternoon train to Calcutta and before long left for America to bring my son home for his summer holidays with me. In Singapore, the news suddenly said Rajiv Gandhi had been killed. All India wept. What killed him was not merely a singular act of criminal terrorism, but the system of humbug, incompetence and sycophancy that surrounds politics in India and elsewhere. I was numbed by rage and sorrow, and did not return to Delhi. Eleven years later, on 25 May 2002, press reports said “P. V. Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh lost their place in Congress history as architects of economic reforms as the Congress High command sponsored an amendment to a resolution that had laid credit at the duo’s door. The motion was moved by…. Digvijay Singh asserting that the reforms were a brainchild of the late Rajiv Gandhi and that the Rao-Singh combine had simply nudged the process forward.” Rajiv’s years in Government, like those of Indira Gandhi, were in fact marked by profligacy and the resource cost of poor macroeconomic policy since bank-nationalisation may be as high as Rs. 125 trillion measured in 1994 rupees. Certainly though it was Rajiv Gandhi as Leader of the Opposition in his last months who was the principal architect of the economic reform that came to begin after his passing.

On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry

Subroto Roy
© 1989, 1991, 2007 Subroto Roy

First published by Routledge of London & New York , 1989, in the International Library of Philosophy,

Library of Congress HB72.R69 1989

British Library 330’.01-dc19
Economics – philosophical perspectives
ISBN 0-415-03592-9

Reprinted in paperback, 1991
Library of Congress HB72.R69.1991
British Library 330’.01-dc20
ISBN0-415-06028-1

Preface to 2007 WordPress.com Republication

This book germinated when I was 18 or 19 years of age in Paris, Helsinki and London, and it was first published when I was 34 in Honolulu. I came to economics from natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), not mathematics. It was inevitable I would be drawn to the beauty of philosophy as a theoretical discipline while being driven, as a post-Independence Indian, to economics as the practical discipline that might unlock secrets to India’s prosperity and progress. I belonged to an ancient family of political men, and my father, who had joined India’s new foreign service the year before I was born, inculcated in me as a boy an idea that I had “a mission” (though he later forgot he had done so).

I was fortunate to fail to enter Oxford’s PPE and instead go to the London School of Economics. LSE was at an intellectual peak in the early 1970s. DHN Johnson in international law, ACL Day in international monetary economics, Brian Griffiths vs Marcus Miller in monetary economics with everyone still in awe of Harry Johnson’s graduate lectures in macroeconomics, Ken Wallis, Graham Mizon, JJ Thomas, David Hendry in econometrics with the odd lecture by Durbin himself – I was exposed to a fully grown up intellectual seriousness from the day I arrived as an 18 year old. Michio Morishima as my professorial tutor told me frankly that, as an Indian, I would face less prejudice in Western academia than in the private sector, and said he was speaking from experience as a fellow-Asian. He turned out to be wrong but it was wise advice nevertheless, just as wise as his requiring pupils to read Hicks’ Value and Capital (which, in our undergraduate mythology, he himself had read inside a Japanese gunboat during war).

What was relatively weak at LSE was general economic theory. We were good at deriving the Best Linear Unbiased Estimator but left unsatisfied with our grasp of the theory of value that constituted the roots of our discipline. I managed a First and was admitted to Cambridge as a Research Student in 1976, where fortune had Frank Hahn choose me as a student. That at the outset was protection from the communist cabal that ran “development economics” with whom almost all the Indians ended up. I was wholly impecunious in my first year as a Research Student, and had to, for example, proof-read Arrow and Hahn’s General Competitive Analysis for its second edition to receive 50 pounds sterling from Hahn which kept me going for a short time. My exposure to Hahn’s subtle, refined and depthless thought as an economist of the first rank led to fascination and wonderment, and I read and re-read his “On the notion of equilibrium in economics”, “On the foundations of monetary theory”, “Keynesian economics and general equilibrium theory” and other clear-headed attempts to integrate the theory of value with the theory of money — a project Wicksell and Marshall had (perhaps wisely) not attempted and Keynes, Hicks and Patinkin had failed at.

Hahn insisted a central question was to ask how money, which is intrinsically worthless, can have any value, why anyone should want to hold it. The practical relevance of this question is manifest. India today in 2007 has an inconvertible currency, vast and growing public debt financed by money-creation, and more than two dozen fiscally irresponsible State governments without money-creating powers. While pondering, over the last decade, whether India’s governance could be made more responsible if States were given money-creating powers, I have constantly had Hahn’s seemingly abstruse question from decades ago in mind, as to why anyone will want to hold State currencies in India, as to whether the equilibrium price of those monies would be positive. (Lerner in fact gave an answer in 1945 when he suggested that any money would have value if its issuer agreed to collect liabilities in it — as a State collects taxes – and that may be the simplest road that bridges the real/monetary divide.)

Though we were never personal friends and I did not ingratiate myself with Hahn as did many others, my respect for him only grew when I saw how he had protected my inchoate classical liberal arguments for India from the most vicious attacks that they were open to from the communists. My doctoral thesis, initially titled “A monetary theory for India”, had to be altered due to paucity of monetary data at the time, as well as the fact India’s problems of political economy and allocation of real resources were more pressing, and so the thesis became “On liberty and economic growth: preface to a philosophy for India”. When no internal examiner could be found, the University of Cambridge, at Hahn’s insistence, showed its greatness by appointing two externals: C. J. Bliss at Oxford and T. W. Hutchison at Birmingham, former students of Hahn and Joan Robinson respectively. My thesis received the most rigorous and fairest imaginable evaluation from them.

I had been attracted to Cambridge partly by its old reputation for philosophy, especially that of Wittgenstein. But I met no worthwhile philosophers there until a few months before I was to leave for the United States in 1980, when I chanced upon the work of Renford Bambrough. Hahn had challenged me with the question, “how are you so sure your value judgements promoting liberty blah-blah are better than those of Chenery and the development economists?” It was a question that led inevitably to ethics and its epistemology — when I chanced upon Bambrough’s work, and that of his philosophical master, John Wisdom, the immense expanse of metaphysics (or ontology) opened up as well. “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes, He star’d at the Pacific…”

It has taken me more than a quarter century to traverse some of that expanse; when I returned to Britain in 2004 as the Wincott Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Buckingham, I was very kindly allowed to deliver a public lecture, “Science, Religion, Art and the Necessity of Freedom”, wherein I repaid a few of my debts to the forgotten work of Bambrough and Wisdom — whom I extravagantly compared with the Bodhisattvas of Mahayana Buddhism, also saying that the trio of Wittgenstein, Wisdom and Bambrough were reminiscent of what Socrates, Plato and Aristotle might have been like.

I had written to Bambrough from within Cambridge expressing my delight at finding his works and saying these were immensely important to economics; he had invited me to his weekly discussion groups at St John’s College but I could not attend. Between 1979 and 1989 we corresponded while I worked in America on my application of his and Wisdom’s work to problems in economics. We met only once when I returned to Cambridge from Blacksburg for my doctoral viva voce examination in January 1982. Six years later in 1988 he said of my Philosophy of Economics, “The work is altogether well-written and admirably clear”, and on another occasion he said he was “extremely pleased” at the interest I had taken in his work. The original preface of Philosophy of Economics said he was not responsible for the use I had made of his writings, which I reiterated in the 2004 lecture. At our meeting, he offered to introduce me to Wisdom who had returned to Cambridge from Oregon but I was too scared and declined, something I have always regretted since. It is only in the last few years that I have begun to grasp the immensity of Wisdom’s achievement in comprehending, explaining and extending the work of both Wittgenstein and Freud. His famous “Virginia Lectures” of 1957 were finally published by his admirers with his consent as Proof and Explanation just before his death in 1993. As for Bambrough, I believe he may have been or become the single greatest philosopher since Aristotle; he told me in correspondence there was an unfinished manuscript Principia Metaphysica (the prospectus of which appeared in Philosophy 1964), which unfortunately his family and successors knew nothing about; the fact he died almost in obscurity and was soon forgotten by his University speaks more about the contemporary state of academic philosophy than about him. (Similarly, the fact Hahn, Morishima and like others did not receive the so-called Economics “Nobel” says more about the award than it does about them.)

All I needed in 1980 was time and freedom to develop the contents of this book, and that I found in America — which I could not have done in either Britain or India. It would take eight or nine very strenuous years before the book could be written and published, mostly spent at Virginia Polytechnic Institute (1980-1985) and the University of Hawaii (1986-1990) Economics Departments, with short interludes at Cornell (Fall 1983) and Brigham Young (1985-86). I went to Virginia because James M. Buchanan was there, and he, along with FA Hayek, were whom Hahn decided to write on my behalf. Hayek said he was too old to accept me but wrote me kind and generous letters praising and hence encouraging my inchoate liberal thoughts and arguments. Buchanan was welcoming and I learnt much from him and his colleagues about the realities of public finance and democratic politics, which I quickly applied in my work on India, published in 1984 in London as Pricing, Planning & Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India and republished elsewhere here. The visit to the Cornell Economics Department was really so I could talk to Max Black the philosopher, who represented a different line of Wittgenstein’s students, and Max and I became friends until his death in 1988.

Buchanan’s departure from Blacksburg led to a gang of inert “game theorists” to arrive, and I was immediately under attack – one senior man telling me I was free to criticise the “social choice” work of Amartya Sen (since he was Indian too) but I was definitely unfree to do the same of Sen’s mentor, Kenneth Arrow, who was Jewish! (Arrow was infinitely more gracious when he himself responded to my criticism.) On top of that arose a matter of a woman, fresh off the aeroplane from India, being assaulted by a senior professor, and when I stood for her against her assailant, my time in Blacksburg was definitely up.

The manuscript of this book was at the time under contract with University of Chicago Press, and, thanks to Mrs Harry Johnson there, I had come in contact with that great American, Theodore W. Schultz. Schultz, at age 81, told me better to my face what the book was about than I had realised myself, namely, it was about economics as knowledge — its subject-matter was the epistemology of economics. Schultz wrote letters all over America on my behalf (as did Milton Friedman at Stanford and Sidney Alexander of MIT, whom I had also met and become friends with), and I was able to first spend a happy year among the Mormons at Brigham Young, and then end up at the University of Hawaii where I was given responsibility for the main graduate course in macroeconomics. I taught Harry Johnson-level IS-LM theory and Friedman-Tobin macroeconomics and then the new “rational expectations” vs Keynesian material.

I was also offered a large University grant to work on “South Asia”, which led to the books Foundations of India’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, and Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, both created by myself and WE James, and which led to the origins of India’s 1991 economic reform and the India-Pakistan peace process as told elsewhere. Also, this book came to be accepted for publication by Routledge, as the first economics book in its famed International Library of Philosophy.

Just as I was set to be evaluated for promotion and tenure at the University of Hawaii, I became the victim of a most vicious racist defamation (and there was some connection with Blacksburg). Quite fed up with the sordidness of American academia as I had experienced it, I sued in the federal court, which consumed much of the next half dozen years as the case worked its way through the United States Supreme Court twice. Milton Friedman and Theodore W. Schultz stood as expert witnesses on my behalf but you would not have known it from the judge’s ruling. There had been not only demonstrable perjury and suborning of perjury by the State of Hawaii’s officers, there was also “after-discovered” evidence of bribery of court-officers in the US District Court for the District of Hawaii, and I had to return to India in 1996 quite exhausted to recuperate from the experience. “Solicitation of counsel, clerks or judges” is “embracery curialis”, recognized as extrinsic fraud and subversion of justice since Jepps 72 E R 924 (1611), “firmly established in English practice long before the foundation” of the USA, Hazel Atlas, 322 US 238 (1943). “Embracery is an offense striking at the very foundation of civil society” says Corpus Juris 20, 496. A court of equity has inherent power to investigate if a judgement has been obtained by fraud, and that is a power to unearth it effectively, since no fraud is more odious than one to subvert justice. Cases include when “by reason of something done by the successful party… there was in fact no adversary trial or decision of the issue in the case. Where the unsuccessful party has been prevented from exhibiting fully his case, by fraud or deception practised on him by his opponent, as…where an attorney fraudulently or without authority assumes to represent a party and connives at his defeat; or where the attorney regularly employed corruptly sells out his client’s interest to the other side ~ these, and similar cases which show that there has never been a real contest in the trial or hearing of the case, are reasons for which a new suit may be sustained to set aside and annul the former judgment or decree, and open the case for a new and a fair hearing….” (Hazel Atlas). There is no time-limit in United States federal law for rectification of fraud on the court of this sort, and I remain fully hopeful today of the working of American justice in the case.

The practical result was that this book was never able to be properly publicized among economists as it would have been had I become Professor of Economics at the University of Hawaii by 1992 as expected. The hardback sold out quickly on its own steam and went into paperback by 1991, and a friend told me it was being used for a course at Yale Law School. The reviews were mostly intelligent. Upon returning to Britain as the Wincott Visiting Professor in 2004, I found times had changed and so had Routledge who would not keep it in print let alone permit a second revised edition. But I am now free to republish the book as I please, and today in 2007, with the Internet growing to a maturity which allows the young geeks at WordPress.com to want to encourage blogging worldwide, I can think of no more apt place to reproduce the first edition of this book than here at my own blog www.independentindian.com.

This is not a second or revised edition, and it is unchanged in content except for this lengthy new preface made necessary by the adventures and dramas the book’s author found himself unwittingly part of since its first publication. I am 52 now and happy to say I endorse the book just as I had published it at 34, though I do find it a little impatient and too terse in a few places. The 1991 paperback corrected a few slight errors in the 1989 hardback, and has been used. I am planning an entirely new book which shall have its roots in this one though it will be mostly in philosophy and not economics — the outlines it may take may be seen in the 2004 public lecture I gave on the work of Bambrough and Wisdom mentioned above and published elsewhere; its main aim will be to uncover for new generations the immense worth there is in their work which is in danger of being lost.

At least two names failed to appear in the original list of acknowledgements. G. Bruce Chapman, now of the University of Toronto, and I talked much of serious ethics and political philosophy when I first arrived at Cambridge in 1976. And in 1980 in Blacksburg, Anil Lal, then a graduate student and house-painter, borrowed my copy of Bambrough’s work, read it, and later made a comment on the metaphysics of John Wisdom which allowed me to see things more clearly.

Ballygunge, Kolkata,
April 7 2007

TO: R.A.R.

Contents

Preface

1. Introduction

Part I

2. Hume and the Economists

3. Understanding the Consensus

4. Difficulties with Moral Scepticism

Part II

5. Objectivity and Freedom

6. Expertise and Democracy

Part III

7. An Example from Microeconomics

8. A Dialogue in Macroeconomics

9. Mathematical Economics and Reality

10. Remarks on the Foundations of Welfare Economics

Envoi

Notes and References

Select Bibliography

Preface to First Edition
The publication of this work marks the end of an adventure of more than a decade and a half, most of the writing being done between 17 December 1980 and 22 May 1987. It has been quite perilous at times, especially as a foreigner in the West, and over the years many teachers, colleagues, friends and members of family have contributed to the author’s learning with their thoughts and actions. A number of senior scholars in economics and philosophy — especially Professor Frank Hahn, Professor James Buchanan, Professor Sidney Alexander, Professor Milton Friedman, Professor Max Black, Professor Sidney Alexander, Professor Amartya Sen, Professor Peter Bauer, Professor T. W. Hutchison and Dr C. J. Bliss, have lent their support to the work as it developed, even when they may have not known of its final form, or disagreed with its content, or been themselves a subject of its criticism. Most especially, the work has been honoured in the last six years with the unwavering encouragement of Professor T. W. Schultz of the University of Chicago. And Professor Ted Honderich of University College London has shown it the kindest consideration, without which publication would have been much delayed. Finally, a large philosophical debt will be seen to be owed to the work of Mr. Renford Bambrough of St. John’s College, Cambridge; however he should not be considered responsible for the use that has been made here of his writings.
HONOLULU
15 AUGUST 1988.

1. Introduction

1. IN this book, some of the central philosophical questions facing the modern economist will be raised. Most attention will be given to the question of the appropriate relationship between the positive and the normative, as well as to its parent question of the appropriate scope of objective reasoning in the making of evaluative judgements. Closely related is the question of the appropriate role of the economic expert in society, while slightly more distant questions have to do with the significance of interpersonal comparisons of utility, with the philosophical status of the concepts and theorems of mathematical economics, and with how judgements of probability should be understood. It is this family of questions which will be the concern of the present work.

Economics is a science with potentially important practical bearing upon the lives of men and nations. The state of the modern world may have been affected more profoundly and subtly by the use or misuse of economic knowledge than by many another science. Yet anyone familiar with the intellectual history of the field will know it to have seen more conflicts, and often conflicts of a more destructive kind, than may be reasonably expected or tolerated in the development of a scholarly discipline. The reader will be familiar with the many explicit and implicit divisions of opinion that have occurred upon theories and methods and evidence and policies, which have sometimes torn apart individual university departments and even threatened the integrity of the science itself. Indeed the modern economist in a despondent mood might be inclined to say of the state of his discipline as David Hume once said of philosophy: “There is nothing which is not the subject of debate, and in which men of learning are not of contrary opinions. The most trivial question escapes not our controversy, and in the most momentous we are not able to give any certain decision. Disputes are multiplied, as if everything was uncertain, and they are settled with the utmost warmth, as if everything was certain.”
At the same time as there have been deep and persistent divisions on substantive questions of economic theory and method and evidence and policy, there has been a deliberate or inadvertent consensus about the answer to an important question in the theory of knowledge. Modern economists happen to have been practically unanimous in their opinion on the possible scope of objective reasoning in the making of judgements, and thus in their opinion on the appropriate relationship between the positive and the normative. A broad consensus has developed to the effect that while common reasoning can have some scope in evaluative discussion, it is quite possible in practice and in principle for this scope to become exhausted. At such a point of the exhaustion of reason, only sheer and unadulterated subjective differences will be found to remain between people. Put another way, it has been believed possible for judgements ultimately to become immune to rational question and criticism.

Many of the pioneers of twentieth century economic thought, Kenneth J. Arrow, Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, Sir John Hicks, Oskar Lange, Gunnar Myrdal, Lionel Robbins, Joan Robinson, Paul Samuelson, Joseph Schumpeter, Jan Tinbergen, to name but a few, who between themselves would represent all of the main schools of contemporary economics, may be found to have shared such a thesis in the theory of knowledge, differing amongst themselves only upon the relatively minor question of the precise amount of room reasoning should be considered to have: some saying a great amount, others saying almost none, but all agreeing that whatever the exact amount it is a finite amount, both actually and potentially. The theory of demand, the theory of macroeconomic policy, the theory of welfare economics, the theory of social choice — each has in whole or in part rested upon an epistemological premise of this kind. If such a consensus can be shown to have existed, the reader may agree it to be something of a remarkable fact, since it would be difficult indeed to find a single substantive proposition of theory or method or evidence or policy to which a similar measure of consensus among modern economists might obtain.
One of the objects of the present work will be to argue that the fact there have been tremendous disharmonies on substantive economic questions, may not be independent of the fact there has been this kind of harmony in the theory of knowledge among many of the pioneers of twentieth century economics as well as the many more who have followed them. If the epistemological point hitherto accepted as true happens in fact to be false, it becomes possible that the scope of objective reasoning on substantive questions has been artificially prevented from being extended as far as it could have and should have been. Evaluative judgements are clearly of indefinite variety: attitudes towards goods or people, expectations of the future, recommendations to buy or sell, advice to a friend or a student or a government, etc. — roughly, all judgements taken by an individual or social agent about a right or optimal course of action in given circumstances. We shall find the consensus has been that it is possible for reasoning to come to a necessary halt in the process of coming to such judgements, whether the maker of the judgement is a public body or a private individual acting in the capacity of consumer or voter. A large amount (and possibly the whole amount) of what may deserve to be within the domain of common and objective reasoning comes to be placed instead under the rule of subjective will and caprice. Not only must we live with the fact that discussions between citizens or economists or politicians or spouses or states do frequently come to end without resolution, because there happens to be a lack of patience or tolerance or perseverance or good humour or whatever, but also that such outcomes may be written into the script from the start. In any normative discussion, we are to be permitted to call a unilateral halt merely by declaring “Well that is a value judgement of mine” or “That is a personal opinion of mine”, with the implication that any further questioning is out of bounds and unacceptable. Given a theory which allows us in this way to declare as we please what to call objective science and what to call subjective opinion, and given that it may be but human nature to be sceptical of the other fellow’s dogma while being oblivious to one’s own, we may have some explanation of how the consensus among economists in the theory of knowledge may have caused and preserved a state of affairs in which rival substantive dogmas can thrive — because the processes of common reasoning and even communication itself may have been allowed too often to come to a virtual standstill. (Or move at a snail’s pace.) “Disputes are multiplied, as if everything was uncertain, and they are settled with the utmost warmth, as if everything was certain.”

The gist of the present work will be that the present consensus in the theory of economic knowledge is logically inconsistent. It is therefore untenable and deserves to be abandoned. Men can aspire to, and in fact do attain and possess, certain and objective knowledge in an indefinite number of contexts. At the same time, there is no proposition of any kind held by anyone which must be thought of as necessarily closed to further question on grounds of reason or evidence. This simple maxim is something that may be found to hold in any field of human inquiry or endeavour one cares to mention — mathematics or medicine, ethics or physics, history or probability, logic or theology — and it will be our purpose in this work to examine its consequences in the context of economics in particular.

§2. Our study is one in what may be called theory of economic knowledge, and it may be worth a moment to consider what may be meant by this.

Bertrand Russell said of pure mathematics that it was a subject “in which we do not know what we are talking about” — meaning that the pure mathematician does not normally intend to refer in his theorems to substantive factual truths about the world. The epistemology or theory of knowledge of a discipline may be thought of similarly as being not concerned with either affirming or denying, corroborating or refuting the substantive propositions that happen to be made within the discipline. The study of the theory of economic knowledge may be thought of as not making any commitment one way or another to the substantive propositions which are to be found within the department of economics itself. Instead it is a more abstract undertaking, which seeks to examine certain kinds of questions from outside the department in the practical hope of dissolving or at least clarifying the character of substantive questions and controversies that may be occurring within. For example, to ask whether a criterion of truth and falsity can be applied to economic propositions, or whether objective knowledge is possible in the field, or how the kinds of propositions made in economics are to be justified, or how they compare and contrast with propositions made in other departments of inquiry — these would be the kinds of question we might see asked in the theory of economic knowledge; from which too the importance can be seen of generally abstaining from making substantive commitments in the process.

Much of the present work, especially Parts I and II, may be understood to be an attempt to provide a theory of economic knowledge of this kind. Thus the reader will not find in it commitments made to any substantive economic propositions. There is no theorem reported of the existence or efficiency of some new kind of economic equilibrium, no new model or evidence offered of the influence of the supply of money on prices, no new theory of how the expectations of economic agents may be formed or fulfilled or disappointed, no new evidence or explanation of why some country may be experiencing rapid growth or high inflation or increasing unemployment. No new result within economic science; one might almost say, nothing substantive! The present work will offer no more than “a machine to think with” on certain philosophical aspects of economics; it intends to leave economics as it is — and yet in so doing to have shown the way out of some of the philosophical difficulties that are encountered in its study. “For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.”

Yet the practical purpose to making an investigation of this kind may be stated quite readily. For suppose, for sake of argument, we granted the truth of our simple maxim and assumed the epistemological concepts ‘knowledge’ and ‘doubt’, and their allied concepts ‘objectivity’ and ‘freedom’, should not be seen as incompatible in the project of inquiry. What consequences would follow from accepting such a viewpoint? Clearly first of all, we would be placed in a happy position of being able to say that no matter how deep or persistent the actual disagreements between economists or between citizens on economic questions happened to be, there is knowledge to be had in the study of economics. Not just high sophistry or rhetoric or political posturing or the opinions and prejudices of different people — but certain and objective knowledge about those actions, events, and phenomena that are part of the economic context. We would be able to say, in other words, there are at least some propositions in economics which are true, and which moreover can be known to be true.

An important ambiguity is possible here in asking whether there is knowledge about a given matter, insofar as such a question can be taken either as asking whether it is possible for there to be any knowledge about the matter, or as asking whether it is known that someone actually possesses such knowledge and how that has been determined. Defining as an expert someone who has the most reasonable and justifiable answer to give to a question, we need to distinguish, in other words, the relatively cool logical question of whether here can be any such thing as expert knowledge from the more heated political question of who is supposed to be such an expert and how we are supposed to know that. For instance, a question like “Is there a proof to Fermat’s last theorem?” can be understood either in the manner of the pure mathematician, as asking whether there can be a proof to the proposition it is impossible xn + yn = zn for positive integers x, y, z, n, and n > 2; or in the manner of the historian of mathematics, as asking whether any human being has come up with such a proof, as Fermat himself claimed to have done but of which no record exists. Among the great thinkers, Plato is the most influential to have crossed these wires in suggesting it possible not only for there to be objective knowledge about mathematics and ethics and statesmanship, but also for a special and closed set of experts to come to be identified to whom such knowledge should be thought of as being exclusively given. Plato’s theory can be and has been interpreted as giving license to elitism and dictatorship, yet the natural protest which the ideas of these would evoke in most of us may lead to an equal and opposite error of denying the very possibility of knowledge because we feared or wished to reject the idea of being ruled by a closed set of self-described experts. Once these wires are uncrossed, we may see it to be quite possible to maintain there can be objective knowledge and expertise in economics, without making any commitments toward specifying who should be considered an expert on some economic issue, or how we are supposed to determine that, or for that matter claiming any such knowledge or expertise for ourselves.

A second consequence of our simple maxim may seem more troubling. For by its second part, we should also have to say that even while there is objective knowledge in economics, there is nevertheless no proposition in the field which must be thought of as being necessarily closed to further question. Not the proposition that every human act is a rational act, nor the proposition that economic agents continually maximize utility, or are well modelled as doing so, nor the proposition that the market economy cannot be expected to reach full employment and needs to be and can be actively supplemented by macroeconomic policy, nor the proposition that the growth of money is necessary and sufficient for inflation, nor the proposition that free trade will maximize world output given factor immobility, nor the proposition that externalities imply a possible scope for taxes and subsidies, nor the proposition that the histories of nations is a history of class struggle.

By the second part of the maxim, there is no axiom or theorem of economic theory, no finding of economic history, no estimate of the value of an economic coefficient, no prediction of the course of an economic variable, no proposal of economic policy, which must be thought of as being closed to further question. None whatsoever. “No statement is immune to revision” (Quine).

Taken together, then, the net consequence of supposing objectivity and freedom, knowledge and doubt, to be compatible concepts deserving of equal respect, is that we shall be able to chart a course which steers us clear of two perennial and opposing hazards besetting all projects of human inquiry, viz., Scepticism and Dogmatism — the modern origins of which were traced by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce to the cartesian proposal that philosophy “must begin with universal doubt, whereas scholasticism had never questioned fundamentals.” In the pages to follow, we will be denying universal doubt and we shall be free to question fundamentals. In an indefinite number of contexts, there is certain and objective knowledge to be had. Scepticism, understood technically as a logical thesis denying that we can possibly have or know that we have certain knowledge, is therefore a false thesis. At the same time, there is no proposition which is necessarily closed to question. Dogmatism, understood technically as a logical thesis implying there can be or must be some propositions which are absolutely and incorrigibly true, is therefore an equally false thesis. In place of a theory of knowledge restricting the scope of common reasoning to the finite or even the potentially finite, it is possible to have a theory of knowledge extending this scope to the potentially infinite. In particular, while normative proposals in economics or elsewhere may be supposed to be objectively better or worse depending on the soundness of the positive grounds given in their support, there are no unquestionable normative proposals — because there are no unquestionable positive grounds. The simple practical result of making the present investigation is that it will permit a sure and safe course to be found between Scepticism and Dogmatism for any project of economic inquiry.

§3. Would such a simple and straightforward thesis be new to economics in any way? To what extent would the argument which has been summarized above and which will be developed in the chapters to follow not been expressed before? The reader may wish an answer to such a question, and the author presently takes this to be as follows. With respect to the general debate which has occurred about knowledge and scepticism especially in moral philosophy, there will be little if anything in the present work which is a direct or novel contribution to it. While the philosophers have not been concerned with political economy at all, we shall be passive participants to their discussions, listening in to see what can be learned for our purposes and not intending to add to them directly. It may be remembered of course that it has not been long since economics formally broke away from philosophy to become a specialized discipline in its own right, in the belief the concerns of economics are of a more concrete and practical kind than those of philosophy. Since then we have made many highly abstract and theoretical claims, while also becoming scornful of philosophical thinking and believing ourselves to be exempt from its influences. Yet serious philosophical thought constitutes a mature and magnificent conversation which it would be foolish for any serious science to be deaf to. Moreover, it has been quite widely believed that there have been significant advances in philosophical understanding in the present century, and we are responsible to take such a claim seriously. It will be one of the aims of the present work to apply what may be learned from these discussions towards resolving, or at least clarifying, some of the main substantive disputations in modern economic science.

These are two broad traditions of moral philosophy relevant to our subject-matter, one deriving from Aristotle, the other from Hume (and a line of sceptics before him). Even though it would be unwise to expect agreement within either tradition, we may for convenience speak of an aristotelian and a humean tradition respectively. With respect to the discussions among economists on the relationship of the positive to the normative, we shall find an eminent consensus to have appeared on the humean side. This work will declare for the other side, and in so doing shall have to dissent from the humean consensus upon which all of the theory of social choice and much of the theory of welfare economics and theory of economic policy have appeared to rest. As far as is known by the author, there seem to have been but two published dissents on similar lines among economists in recent decades: those of Sidney Alexander and Amartya Sen. Of these, Professor Sen’s dissent has been very short and hesitant, and he would seem to have withdrawn it in other writings. Professor Alexander’s dissent has been clear and vigourous, but unlike his work on the balance of payments, his philosophical work has not received attention, and the present work was mostly developed in complete ignorance of its existence.

By the end of this work however, a clear choice should have been set out for the reader on the question of the relationship of the positive to the normative — between the consequences of accepting the humean consensus among economists and the consequences of the position of Professor Alexander and the author and possibly Professor Sen. The simple maxim “Objective knowledge is possible and yet there is no proposition which is closed to question” should not undermine its own content by being closed to question itself — instead it is supposed to refer and apply to itself as well. It may be true and deserving of our belief but it is not self evidently so, and will have to earn its credentials at the common bar of reason. Ultimately it will have to be the reader’s individual judgement whether it has been successfully shown that, contrary to what has been supposed by many of the pioneers of twentieth century economics, no conflict must arise between knowledge and doubt, objectivity and freedom. The history of the discussion may accord to our side the advantage J. S. Mill had seen to be enjoyed by all minority opinions: if the opinion of one or a few is false then not much will be lost by believing in it, while if it proves better able to stand the tests of time then much may be gained by allowing it to replace error. Put differently, it may seem quite risky that the pioneers of modern economic science have placed all their philosophical eggs in the humean basket — just in case it is Hume himself who happens to be mistaken.

§4. In Part I of the work will be found described the received theory of economic knowledge and its possible justification, as well as an account of the logical difficulties that arise with it. Chapter 2 has the task of documenting as fully as possible the existence of a humean consensus among economists in recent decades. Chapter 3 then examines the kinds of reasons that may incline us to be persuaded to such a view, and which may go to explaining how it has seemed to be an attractive theory to so many economists. These reasons appear to have been of two different but related sorts.

First the concept of value as used in ordinary life and ethics may have become confounded with the concept of economic value or scarcity or rareté in Walras’s term. Where economists have referred to a theory of value, they may have meant to refer more accurately to a theory of relative prices as determined by conditions of scarcity. The advance of the original neoclassicals in the late nineteenth century was to establish the importance of subjective estimations of economic agents to the determination of the relative prices of goods — as opposed to say how much labour went into different production processes as the classical economists might have said, or how much intrinsic value God had placed in the goods as the scholastics might have said. While it is clear by now that such an observation is broadly correct, it would be a mistake to go from a premise that market prices are determined in part by subjective estimations to a conclusion that the relative prices thus determined in any sense establish an order of how goods deserve to be valued or not. Goods are indeed valued the way they are because people happen to value them. Yet equally, in most cases, people seem to value goods in the way they do because the goods deserve to be thus valued — for example, because, like food or clothing or shelter, the goods are conducive to some valuable human purpose.
Secondly, it is possible the consensus has been motivated by a desire to find an effective shield against dogmatism and tyranny. For example, the context of an open parliamentary democracy presupposed by the modern theory of economic policy may have derived out of the experience of the great tyrannies of twentieth century history. There may have been a natural and understandable desire that the choices and decisions of citizens in the capacity of voters or consumers should be treated with the fullest due respect, and a humean scepticism may have been adopted because it has been believed to be something which is necessary and sufficient for this kind of respect to be shown. This would be an outstanding reason for adopting a humean point of view, and one which any critic must be required to account for. Yet it also places in relief the fatal self-contradiction that is present within the humean theory. For example, a theory of economic policy which has to rely upon an assumption of the polity being open and democratic would have to be silent about the conduct of economic policy in societies which were demonstrably not open or democratic, making it a theory very special and contingent in its range of application. Moreover, to give the defence of political or economic or religious freedom as a reason for holding a subjectivist epistemology would be to have left freedom entirely defenceless and toothless from those who would attack it from within precisely the same subjectivist framework. For example, if we conflated a general right to express an opinion freely with an idea that what such an opinion expresses is itself a matter of subjective opinion, then clearly, by the same token, an opinion that opinions should be freely expressed might also be considered merely subjective, and therefore no better or worse than its contrary. Within a subjectivist theory of knowledge, there ultimately can be nothing to choose between freedom and tyranny.

Chapter 4 is a survey of these kinds of logical difficulties with the humean position stated in Chapters 2 and 3. Its main result will be that the anti dogmatic campaign of the humean cannot succeed, and in fact comes to make the Sceptic resemble the Dogmatist more than anything else. It is possible this happens because both Sceptic and Dogmatist are sharing the same deductivist model of justification, to the effect that we cannot know a proposition to be true or right unless we have deduced it as the conclusion of a set of premises of whose truth or rightness we are certain. The Sceptic sees the threat of infinite regress that is implicit in such a model, and then denies we can be certain of anything. The Dogmatist sees the potential regress too, but responds to it by calling a halt at some arbitrary point, denying the need or possibility of going any further. In Part II a fresh picture will be given which attempts to preserve the truths the Sceptic and Dogmatist would each like us to take notice of, while correcting for the distortions both would force upon us by their unequivocal adoption of a deductivist model of justification. Chapter 5 reframes the main philosophical problems of Part I in the terms of the ancient dualism between Nominalism and Realism, and brings to light a possible resolution of this which has been advanced by a number of modern philosophers. Chapter 6 develops the argument further and applies it to the question of the appropriate role of expertise in a democracy. Taken together, Part II contains the main outlines of a fresh theory of economic knowledge with which to replace the flawed and inconsistent theory to which so many economists have thus far subscribed.

Part III of the work consists of a series of diverse illustrations and possible applications of the theory of knowledge developed in Part II. Chapters 7-10 all give examples of how inquiry and criticism can be seen to proceed in economics without sacrifice of either objectivity or freedom. Chapter 7 examines an actual debate on a concrete question of microeconomic policy, which may be compared and contrasted with the more academic examples of later chapters. Chapter 8 examines aspects of the division in macroeconomics and monetary theory since J. M. Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Chapter 9 considers a question with wide and general reference to economic theory: how the relationship between mathematical economics and real economic phenomena might be best understood. This has been the subject of long and bitter disputation, and some light is attempted to be shed on it from the vantage point of the philosophy of mathematics. It is possible that certain views in the philosophy of mathematics have been presupposed in modern mathematical economics; once these are exposed and aired, some of the conceptual problems which have been faced in this discussion may come to be dissolved. The theory of probability and expected utility and the theory of general equilibrium will be used as brief illustrations. Finally, in Chapter 10, the possible philosophical sources of the controversy surrounding the question of interpersonal comparisons of utility will be described, and a possible resolution suggested. This will be argued to have bearing on received understanding of the foundations of welfare economics.

§5. It will be found in the present work, then, that we shall be denying universal doubt on the one hand, while yet being free to question fundamentals on the other. Such a project will entail a critical examination of the philosophical premises and assumptions advanced by some of the most distinguished contemporary scholars in our field, and it is to be hoped the spirit in which the present criticism is offered will not be misunderstood. Every generation holds a peculiar advantage over preceding generations in having available to it what has gone before, while not being able to anticipate the criticisms of its own beliefs that will certainly come in the future. This kind of advantage that the present holds over the past may be thought of as being quite arbitrary, and we can expect it to carry with it a responsibility of taking what has gone before into serious account. Since no individual is able to do so on his own, we find every generation as a whole attempting to provide itself with critical discussions, which, when integrated over time, constitute the grand and unending conversation we call the history of human thought. It is with such a model in mind of a continuing and self-critical tradition of scholarship that we shall seek to address the questions raised at the beginning about the foundations of economic knowledge, while not making any pretence whatsoever to finality, and instead leaving the entire treatment as open as it can be made to the examination and criticism of others.

PART I

2. Hume and the Economists
THERE has been a broad and long standing consensus among economists about the character of the relationship between positive and normative propositions, as well as about the related question of the appropriate scope and limits of economic expertise in society. Joining in this consensus have been many of the pioneers of twentieth century economic thought: Kenneth J. Arrow, Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, Sir John Hicks, Oskar Lange, Gunnar Myrdal, Lionel Robbins, Joan Robinson, Paul A. Samuelson, Joseph Schumpeter, Jan Tinbergen, to name but a few. Many others are likely to be found in explicit or implicit agreement, while a survey by Professor T. W. Hutchison suggests that some of the most renowned figures of nineteenth century economics should probably be included as well. The main purpose of this chapter will be to provide enough documentary evidence to show that such a consensus has in fact existed. When we think of how many deep and wide differences there have been over the years in the field that was once called political economy and is now called economic science, differences on questions of method and theory and evidence and recommendations of policy, the existence of such a consensus may seem quite a remarkable fact.

Very briefly, what appears to have been accepted is that it is possible to identify a body of progressively changing knowledge called ‘positive economics’, which is the main contribution of economists to human knowledge and understanding in general. It consists of such things as the microeconomic and macroeconomic descriptions of present and past states of an economy, conditional predictions of such states in the future, hypothetical or substantive explanations of what economic causes may have what economic effects, the deduction and analysis of theorems of economic significance, and so on. That is to say, positive economics has been supposed to consist of the domain of propositions in an economic context which have to do in one way or another with questions of what is the case, or with what has been the case in the past or may be expected to be the case in the future. In contrast, evaluative or prescriptive or ‘normative’ propositions, having in one way or another to do with what ought to be done or not done by a government or a private economic agent, have been believed to fall into quite a different category. These have been believed to amount sooner or later to being expressions of subjective personal opinion, either on the part of the individual economist himself or of those whom he may happen to be advising.

Most economists who have considered the matter have allowed that there is usually at least some scope, and sometimes much scope, for common reasoning on logical and empirical grounds to be brought to bear in normative discussion; making it possible that at least some of the disagreements between economists or citizens or politicians on normative questions can come to be objectively resolved. But it has been believed possible also for the processes of common reasoning to become exhausted in discussions of normative questions like those of economic policy or ethics or jurisprudence, in a way they are not supposed to become exhausted in discussions of positive questions like those of economic theory or econometrics or natural science or mathematics. Once such a point of the exhaustion of reason has been reached, any residual conflict which remains is to be considered necessarily irreconcilable and of a sheer normative kind. And such sheer normative opinions, upon which it is not possible to bring to bear any further objective consideration, are to be supposed to express the purely subjective attitudes and feelings of the individual person, opinions which might happen to be shared by others too, but which are certainly closed to further argumentation, whether in public or in the person’s own mind. Put a little differently, the theory of knowledge and policy which we shall see to have been widely accepted by many economists in the twentieth century, has made an assumption that while all questions of analysis and evidence can have objectively true or false answers, only some and not all questions of evaluation and prescription can have objectively right or wrong answers.

§2. Underlying the consensus among economists has been a more general thesis in the theory of knowledge or epistemology. It is a thesis which may be called ‘moral scepticism’, and its most brilliant and influential exponent in the modern period has been David Hume (1711-1776). Among those to have advanced influential and persuasive points of view of a similar kind in twentieth century moral and political philosophy have been C. L. Stevenson, R. M. Hare, A. J. Ayer, and Karl Popper.

In the course of a critique of dogmatic religion and ethics, the young Hume was to attack with a sceptical scalpel what he took to be the illogic of trying to deduce evaluation and prescription from analysis and description: “In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with… the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning… when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses a new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.” While the precise context and implications of this passage continue to divide philosophers, it will be adequate for our present purpose to follow the sympathetic and influential modern interpretation given by the Oxford moral philosopher R. M. Hare, and obtain for an economic context what may be called Hume’s First Law: No normative conclusion, for example, about what a private economic agent or a government ought to do or not do, can be validly deduced from a set of solely positive premises, i.e., from premises which only describe what is the case. No normative conclusion can be deduced without at least one normative premise having been made. A dualism of this kind between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ has been frequently supposed to separate science from ethics, the objective from the subjective, the rational from the irrational, public knowledge from private opinion.

Hume was to reinforce this opinion a decade later in a more recondite form of words: “[A]fter every circumstance and every relation is known, the understanding has no further room to operate, nor any object on which it could employ itself. The approbation or blame which then ensues cannot be the work of the judgement, but of the heart; and is not a speculative proposition or affirmation, but an active feeling or sentiment.” This passage too continues to divide philosophers, but for our present purpose R. M. Hare’s recent writing is once more helpful in obtaining a modern interpretation. Hare asks whether, in addition to logical questions and factual questions about how the world is, there can be “irreducibly evaluative or prescriptive questions” as well; once we have “done all we can” by way of reasoning and adducing evidence, “will there remain something to be done which is neither logic nor fact finding but pure evaluation or prescription?” Hare answers yes it is possible, and in the same vein we may restate the idea to obtain for an economic context what may be called Hume’s Second Law: After every empirical question and every logical and mathematical question has been answered in an economic problem, there is no further scope for common reasoning to work. If an evaluative statement is made at such a point, then it can express no more than a subjective attitude or feeling of the individual economist towards the subject.

This is a maxim which does grant that a measure of common reasoning and evidence can be brought to bear upon particular normative questions, and so some normative disagreements may come to be objectively resolved. But it also allows for the potential for such reasoning to become exhausted, leaving merely a subjective residue of personal sentiment or feeling which people might or might not happen to share with one another but which would be beyond further question and discussion. In the pages to follow, a position will be referred to as ‘humean’ if it implicitly or explicitly endorses one or both of Hume’s Laws as stated above. The small h is used to suggest that a close examination of Hume’s works may show him to have been not entirely clear in his own meaning, as well as to suggest that the question of what Hume himself may have actually or fully meant is not of as direct importance for the present purpose as the question of what he has been taken to mean by contemporary economists.

The remainder of this chapter is given to documenting at fair length the fact that a number of the pioneers of twentieth century economics have quite unambiguously seemed to endorse a humean point of view in the theory of knowledge. Chapter 3 will be given to placing this fact in an appropriate historical context. This needs to be done not only in order to understand the nature of the consensus as fully as possible, but also to realize how close economists have been to one another on a central question in the theory of knowledge, even while being engaged in any number of deep and well known and seemingly interminable disputes on substantive matters. The reader who may be impatient with a detailed record of this kind, or who is prepared for the present to take its existence for granted, may wish to move on directly to Chapter 3 without losing the main threads of the argument.

§3. Friedman. Following Neville Keynes, Professor Milton Friedman has clearly and emphatically argued the importance of extending the scope of common reasoning in economics: “Positive economics is in principle independent of any particular ethical position or normative judgments…. [it] is, or can be, an ‘objective’ science, in precisely the same sense as any of the physical sciences…. Normative economics and the art of economics, on the other hand, cannot be independent of positive economics…. differences about economic policy among disinterested citizens derive predominantly from different predictions about the economic consequences of taking action — differences that in principle can be eliminated by the progress of positive economics — rather than from fundamental differences in basic values, differences about which men can ultimately only fight.” It is well known that in this and other works, Friedman has argued for the extension of common reasoning and evidence, or positive economics, as the surest means to resolving normative disputations. Yet from the passage quoted, it is clear that Friedman has also accepted something like Hume’s Second Law, to the effect that while common reasoning can have some and indeed much scope, a point of ultimate and sheer normative disagreement can still be reached, distant though it might be, where reasoning must be considered to have become exhausted and “men can ultimately only fight”. In the same essay, Friedman added that it was the practical importance of economics which impeded objectivity and promoted confusion between “scientific analysis and normative judgment”, suggesting an endorsement of Hume’s First Law as well.

Myrdal. Gunnar Myrdal argued for many years that a number of economic concepts purporting to be analytical or descriptive in character in fact had evaluative or prescriptive overtones. Myrdal and his editor and translator, Professor Paul Streeten, argued that a view that there is no place for normative judgments in economic science has been a guise for the advocacy of a specifically liberal political economy, a thesis which might well be endorsed by many marxian and keynesian economists. While postponing an assessment of this claim to a later chapter, we may note that Myrdal also happened to endorse the extension of the scope of positive economics, with as much emphasis as Friedman would do after him: “By subjecting to impartial criticism those arguments in political controversies which concern the facts and the causal relations between them, economic science can make an important contribution to the political sphere. As often as not, conflicting political opinions spring not so much from divergent valuations about the best possible future state of society and the proper policy for securing it, as from subjectively coloured and therefore distorted beliefs regarding actual social conditions.” Myrdal went on to endorse Hume’s First Law in recommending that the economist leave the supply of evaluative premises to the politician. While the economist can provide descriptions, explanations and conditional predictions, “the scientist must not venture beyond this. If he wishes to go further he needs another set of premises, which is not available to science: an evaluation to guide him in his choice of the effects which are politically desirable and the means permissible for achieving them.” Finally, Myrdal reached the humean conclusion that the normative differences between economists are ultimately beyond objective resolution: “[E]conomic reasoning is often obscured by the fact that normative principles are not introduced explicitly, but in the shape of general ‘concepts’. The discussion is thus shifted from the normative to the logical plane. On the former there is either harmony or conflict; conflict can only be stated, not solved by discussion. On the logical plane we should define our concepts clearly and then operate with them in a logically correct manner. What is ‘correct’ and what ‘false’ can be discussed with the methods of logic, whereas conflicting interests can be recognized, never solved scientifically.”

Robbins. In his influential writings over many years, Lionel Robbins made a distinction between ‘economic science’, having to do with such questions as how best to allocate scarce resources between alternative ends, and ‘political economy’ or normative theories of economic policy, prescribing the ends themselves and the weights to be attached to them. In his well known methodological work we read as clear a statement of Hume’s First Law as might be found in economics: “Propositions involving ‘ought’ are on an entirely different plane from propositions involving ‘is’…. Economics is neutral as between ends. Economics cannot pronounce on the validity of ultimate judgements of value…. Economics deals with ascertainable facts; ethics with values and obligations. The two fields of inquiry are not on the same plane of discourse. Between the generalizations of positive and normative studies there is a logical gulf fixed which no ingenuity can disguise and no juxtaposition in space or time can bridge over.” Robbins’s endorsement of the Second Law was equally emphatic. While positive economics extends the scope of common reasoning, it is still possible to find normative differences which are rationally irresoluble: “If we disagree about ends it is a case of thy blood or mine — or live and let live according to the importance of the difference or the relative strength of our opponents. But if we disagree on means, then scientific analysis can often help us to resolve our differences. If we disagree about the morality of the taking of interest (and we understand what we are talking about), then there is no room for argument.”
Samuelson. Professor Paul Samuelson has seemed to feel a tension in the humean position, but also that its logic compelled him to follow closely in Robbins’s path: “It is fashionable for the modern economist to insist that ethical value judgments have no place in scientific analysis. Professor Robbins in particular has insisted upon this point, and today it is customary to make a distinction between the pure analysis of Robbins qua economist and his propaganda, condemnations and policy recommendations qua citizen. In practice, if pushed to extremes, this somewhat schizophrenic rule becomes difficult to adhere to, and it leads to rather tedious cicumlocutions. But in essence Robbins is undoubtedly correct. Wishful thinking is a powerful deterrent of good analysis and description, and ethical conclusions cannot be verified in the same way that scientific hypotheses are inferred or verified.”

Hicks. Like Samuelson, Professor Sir John Hicks has seemed to feel a tension in the humean position, yet he too must be considered as having endorsed at least an important version of it. On the one hand, Hicks has seemed critical of mid-century positivism and emotivism, and claimed the main rationale of the “new welfare economics” to be that it allowed a route of escape from them. “During the nineteenth century, it was generally considered to be the business of an economist, not only to explain the economic world as it is and as it has been, not only to make prognostications (so far as he was able) about the future course of economic events, but also to lay down principles of economic policy, to say what policies are likely to be conducive to social welfare, and what policies are likely to lead to waste and impoverishment.” Since then positivism had declared that explanation and only explanation may be part of scientific economics, and any move to prescribe “must depend upon the scale of social values held by the particular investigator. Such conclusions can possess no validity for anyone who lives outside the circle in which these values find acceptance. Positive economics can be, and ought to be, the same for all men; one’s welfare economics will inevitably be different according as one is a liberal or a socialist, a nationalist or an internationalist, a christian or a pagan.” But such a position is “rather a dreadful thing to have to accept”, one which might “become an excuse for the shirking of live issues, very conducive to the euthanasia of our science.” Fortunately we are not compelled to accept it, since the new welfare economics advanced by Kaldor, Hotelling and Hicks himself was a viable alternative, not open to the objections the positivists had raised to the utilitarianism of Pigou and others.

Yet we may ask, what had the new welfare economics been about? And did it in fact make a break with the positivism which seemed to be troubling Hicks, or had it not been prompted precisely by humean doubts? As is well known, the new welfare economics had to do with questions such as whether the potential gainers from a change in policy could possibly compensate the potential losers from the change by enough so as to get them to go along with it, or conversely for the losers from a change to compensate the gainers from the change by enough so as to get them to go along without it, and so on. As Hicks himself makes clear, it was a discussion very much motivated by the belief that while the Pareto criterion was not a wholly adequate substitute for the utilitarianism of Pigou, any emendation of the paretian theory must leave untouched its basic positivistic premise, viz., that interpersonal comparisons cannot be conceived of as anything but purely subjective judgements, outside the scope of objective reasoning. Hicks claimed it was because the new welfare economics avoided making interpersonal comparisons that it should be considered a positive advance, a scientific advance. And Hicks has emphasized that he, like Robbins, has not wanted any truck with interpersonal comparisons. The old welfare economics of Pigou required one “to admit the possibility of comparing the satisfactions derived from their wealth by different individuals. This is where Professor Robbins parts company; for my part, I go with him.” More recently: “A single individual… shows by his choices that he prefers one thing to another; we may put this, if we like, in the form of saying that he derives (or thinks he derives) greater satisfaction from the one than from the other. But there is no similar way in which we can see that the satisfaction derived by one individual from one good is greater than the satisfaction derived by another individual from another good; these satisfactions are not compared in any actual choice, so that for the comparison between them there is not the same evidence.”
While we shall be returning to these questions in Chapter 10, what we may note here is that since interpersonal comparisons certainly amount to being a particular species of evaluative judgement, Hicks’s scepticism with respect to the possibility of making them objectively must be considered to amount to an endorsement of at least a species of moral scepticism. If so, it would seem to sit uncomfortably with Hicks’s opinion that he had not cared much for the positivist dichotomy between explanatory science and subjective prescriptions, which was said to have prompted the search for the new welfare economics in the first place.

Robinson. Writing on the theory of employment, Joan Robinson was to give a superbly clear account of the humean position at its best, which requires no commentary: “[All economic] controversies should be capable of resolution. The rules of logic and the laws of evidence are the same for everyone, and in the nature of the case there can be nothing to dispute about. Controversies arise for five main reasons. First, they occur when the two parties fail to understand each other. Here patience and toleration should provide a cure. Second, controversies occur in which one (or both) of the parties have made an error of logic. Here the spectators at least should be able to decide on which side reason lies. Third, two parties may be making, unwittingly, different assumptions, and each maintaining something which is correct on the appropriate assumptions…. Here the remedy is to discover the assumptions and to set each argument out in a manner which makes clear that it is not inconsistent with the other. Fourth, there may not be sufficient evidence to settle a question of fact conclusively one way or the other. Here the remedy is for each party to preserve an open mind and to assist in the search for further evidence. Fifth, there may be differences of opinion as to what is a desirable state of affairs. Here no resolution is possible, since judgements of ultimate values cannot be settled by any purely intellectual process…. argument in the nature of the case can make no difference to ultimate judgements based on interest or moral feeling. The ideal is to set out all the arguments fairly on their merits, and agree to differ about ultimate values. On questions of policy, the differences can never be resolved.”

Hayek. Professor F. A. Hayek has stated an unambiguous commitment to Hume’s First Law, as when he wrote recently: “Our starting point must be the logical truism that from premises containing only statements about cause and effect, we can derive no conclusions about what ought to be.” In his earlier discussion of the economics of socialism, Hayek had hinted at the Second Law as well, saying that “problems of ethics, or rather of individual judgements of value… [are]… ones on which different people might agree or disagree, but on which no reasoned arguments would be possible.” If the questions about socialist planning are ethical by this definition then “no scientist, least of all the economist” would have anything to say about them. Positive argument presumes there to be some common values between the participants: “Meaningful discussion about public affairs is clearly possible only with persons with whom we share at least some values. I doubt if we could even fully understand what someone says if we had no values whatever in common with him. This means, however, that in practically any discussion it will be in principle possible to show that some of the policies one person advocates are inconsistent or irreconcilable with some other beliefs he holds.” In particular, the argument over socialist planning should be seen to be one on positive grounds: “[E]veryone desires, of course, that we should handle our common problems as rationally as possible and that, in so doing, we should use as much foresight as we can command. In this sense, everybody who is not a complete fatalist is a planner, every political act is (or ought to be) an act of planning, and there can be differences only between good and bad, between wise and foresighted and foolish and shortsighted planning. An economist, whose whole task is to study how men actually do and how they might plan their affairs is the last person who could object to planning in this general sense.” The dispute between socialists and their critics is “not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals.”

Lange. Oskar Lange, the famous adversary of Hayek and Robbins on the question of socialist planning, was agreed with them that the only task within the scope of scientific economics was the determination of the best means, with economic ends having been decided politically. He gave this infelicitous analogy to the economist’s role: “The situation may be compared with that of two physicians treating a patient. There is no necessity of interpersonal agreement about the objective of the treatment. One physician may want to heal the patient, the other may want to kill him (e.g., the patient may be a Jew in a Nazi concentration camp; one physician may be a fellow prisoner who wants to help him, the other may be a Nazi acting under orders to exterminate Jews). But once the objective is set for the purposes under discussion (either of the two physicians may, of course, refuse to act upon it), their statements as to whether a given treatment is conducive to the end under consideration have interpersonal validity. Any disagreement between them can be settled by appeal to fact and to the rules of scientific procedure.”

Schumpeter. In discussing the wertfrei controversy between Carl Menger and the German historical school, Joseph Schumpeter was to suggest that the epistemological matters involved were neither difficult nor interesting and could be disposed of shortly. The distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ had been correctly and adequately drawn already, so it only needed to be accepted that an ‘ought’ statement “that is to say, a precept or advice, can for our purpose be reduced to a statement about preference or ‘desirability’.” Schumpeter went on to endorse Hume’s First Law, saying that an acceptance of one value judgement always requires the acceptance of others. This “is of little moment when the ‘ultimate’ value judgments to which we are led up as we go on asking why an individual evaluates as he does, are common to all normal men in our cultural environment.” Unlike Lange, Schumpeter gave the physician as a negative analogy: “[T]here is no harm in the physician’s contention that the advice he gives follows from scientific premises, because the — strictly speaking extra-scientific — value judgment involved is common to all normal men in our cultural environment. We all mean pretty much the same thing when we speak of health and find it desirable to enjoy good health. But we do not mean the same thing when we speak of the Common Good, simply because we hopelessly differ in those cultural visions with reference to which the common good has to be defined in any particular case.” I.e., common reasoning can proceed in normative discussion but only so long as we find common values among “all normal men in our cultural environment”, which is to suggest reasoning may be helpless with abnormal men or those who are outside our cultural environment. Further, siding with Menger, Schumpeter suggested that the bitterness of the wertfrei controversy could be explained because it had been not so much a logical dispute as one between those who were practising and those who were protesting a kind of scholarly deceit, viz., the propagation of personal dogmas within an ostensible pursuit of objective knowledge: “Those who profess to be engaged in the task of widening, deepening, and ‘tooling’ humanity’s stock of knowledge and who claim the privilege that civilized societies are in the habit of granting to the votaries of this particular pursuit, fail to fulfil their contract if, in the sheltering garb of the scientist, they devote themselves to what really is a kind of political propaganda.”

Arrow. In opening his famous paper on the theory of social choice, Professor Kenneth J. Arrow was to refer explicitly to the ancient ontological dualism between Nominalism and Realism. To take aggregate rankings of “social states” as independent of individual rankings “is to assume, with traditional social philosophy of the Platonic realist variety, that there exists an objective social good defined independently of individual desires. This social good, it was frequently held, could be best apprehended by the methods of philosophic inquiry. Such a philosophy could be and was used to justify government by elite, secular or religious, although the connection is not a necessary one. To the nominalist temperament of the modern period the assumption of the existence of the social ideal in some Platonic realm of being was meaningless.” Nineteenth century utilitarianism had “sought instead to ground the social good on the good of individuals”, which, when combined with a hedonistic psychology, implied “each individual’s good was identical with his desires” and “the social good was in some sense to be a composite of the desires of individuals.” Such a view “serves as a justification of both political democracy and laissez faire economics, or at least an economic system involving free choice of goods by consumers and of occupations by workers.”
While Arrow found it necessary to remark that a connection between elitist rule and a Realist ontology was “not a necessary one”, he did not also remark upon whether he took a connection between democratic rule and a Nominalist ontology to be logically necessary. If not, then we might of course entertain other cases equally well, such as Nominalism being associated with elitist rule, or Realism with democratic rule, or perhaps more subtle cases which may arise from a denial of the dualism altogether — matters to which we shall return more explicitly in Part II. In any case, it would seem evident Arrow’s sympathy has been with the humean thesis, which he endorses strongly in suggesting, like Schumpeter, that no distinction can be made between a personal preference and a judgement of value: “One might want to reserve the term ‘values’ for a specially elevated or noble set of choices. Perhaps choices in general might be referred to as ‘tastes’. We do not ordinarily think of the preference for additional bread over additional beer as being a value worthy of philosophical inquiry. I believe, though, that the distinction cannot be made logically, and certainly not in dealing with the single isolated individual. If there is any distinction between values and tastes it must lie in the realm of interpersonal relations.” That Arrow believes normative questions to be only personally and subjectively answerable is further suggested by his remarks that “[t]he only rational defense of what may be termed a liberal position… is that it is itself a value judgment”; that his own values are such he is willing “to go very far indeed in the direction of respect for the means by which others choose to derive their satisfactions”; that he personally shares “a strongly affirmed egalitarianism, to be departed from only when it is in the interest of all to do so”; that he is personally “in favor of very wide toleration”; and so on. In Chapters 9 and 10, we shall return to examine certain aspects of the theories of general equilibrium and social choice which Professor Arrow has helped pioneer.

Blaug. In his influential writings in the history and methodology of economics, Professor Mark Blaug has appealed directly to Hume, declaring that the “orthodox Weberian position on wertfrei social science is essentially a matter of logic: as David Hume taught us, ‘you can’t deduce ought from is’.” Blaug grants that scientific practice does continually call for the exercise of judgement, but he wishes to distinguish “methodological” judgements, having to do with such questions as “the levels of statistical significance, selection of data, assessment of their reliability, and adherence to the canons of formal logic”, from “normative” or “appraising” judgements, which “refer to evaluative assertions about states of the world, including the desirability of certain kinds of behavior and the social outcomes that are produced by that behavior; thus all statements of the ‘good society’ are appraising value judgments.” It is judgements of this latter sort which are “incapable of being eliminated in positive science”. In support of such a dualism Blaug claims “there are long established, well tried methods for reconciling different methodological judgments” but none “for reconciling different normative value judgments — other than political elections and shooting it out at the barricades.” Blaug’s acceptance of Hume’s Second Law is as explicit as may be found in contemporary economics. There sometimes can be rational discussion over normative differences “and that is all to the good because there is a firmer tradition for settling disputes about facts than for settling disputes about values. It is only when we distill a pure value judgment… that we have exhausted the possibilities of rational analysis and discussion.” Echoing Robbins, Blaug suggests that at such a terminal point we are left with “factual statements and pure value judgments between which there is indeed an irreconcilable gulf on anyone’s interpretation.” Like Arrow, Blaug also makes reference to an ontological division between Realism (or “essentialism”) and Nominalism, and hints at a necessary link between a Realist ontology and dogmatism and tyranny. From Plato and Aristotle up through the nineteenth century, Western thought had been under the malign and mistaken impression that “it is the aim of science to discover the true nature or essence of things”. Such a view “raises its ugly head” even today, and Blaug charges the authors of a recent marxian thesis as being one such recent manifestation: “Adherents of essentialism are inclined to settle substantive questions by reaching for a dictionary of their own making, and Hollis and Nell exemplify this tendency to perfection: reproduction is the ‘essence’ of economic systems because we tell you so!”

Hahn. Professor Frank Hahn reports that contemporary economists “in keeping with the Positivist perspective” make “a thorough distinction of ‘is’ from ‘ought’ (positive from normative).” While Hahn has been mostly guarded in his own opinion as to the precise relationship between positive and normative, he has suggested recently that while normative questions are subject to reasonable argument, and economic theory is intended to widen this scope of common reasoning, “the intention is to take a small step in distilling what are genuinely questions of values.” Such a remark would seem to place Hahn among the moderate humeans like Joan Robinson and Milton Friedman — which in turn would make it an interesting fact that while Hahn has had long and well known disputes on substantive matters with both Friedman and Robinson, he would appear closely agreed with them on a point in the theory of knowledge, viz., that while there is much room for objective discussion to take place, it is possible for sheer differences of a normative kind to exist and come to be identified.

A few others. To take some final examples, Professor Robert Sugden affirms “Hume’s Law reflects a liberal view of the universe”; Professor William Baumol and Professor Allan Blinder write in their textbook that the economist defines rational decisions as those “that are most effective in helping the decision maker achieve his own objectives, whatever they may be”; Professor James Quirk writes in his textbook that “normative economics is based on a system of axioms, but these axioms concern ethics” and because these and any propositions derived from them are not “verifiable through empirical observation”, a person is “free to accept or reject the conclusions of normative economics as he wishes, simply by accepting or rejecting the axiom system — there are no scientific issues involved.” And Professor Jack Hirschleifer wrote in his textbook that “if one economist prefers Maoism and another capitalism, or if one prefers to exterminate and the other to tolerate an inconvenient minority group, the fundamental sources of contention are almost surely divergences in ethical values… [which] will not be eliminated by advances in scientific economics.”

3. Understanding the Consensus
THE great German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege suggested at one place that we should not “ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition.” In the same vein, it may be said the meaning of a proposition or a hypothesis should not be asked for except in relation to the particular context in which it has been advanced. And we can maintain this without requiring the description of such a context to be fully explicit or even one which can be easily expressed in words. A proposition needs to be understood in relation to the fullest possible description of its implicit and explicit context — which may be a good sense too in which to understand the reference by Wittgenstein to the concept of a “language game” .

In the previous chapter, we have marshalled considerable evidence for our initial thesis that there has been a broad measure of consensus among many of the pioneers of modern economics about the appropriate relationship of the positive to the normative. Irrespective of their many and well known substantive differences, they have seemed all to share an affinity with a humean thesis of moral scepticism, whether in a radical way like Schumpeter and Professor Arrow when they say there can be no difference in kind between personal preferences and value judgements, or in a more moderate way like Joan Robinson and Professor Friedman and Professor Hahn, when they say there can be a great amount of room for objective argumentation to take place about normative questions before a naked and irreconcilable difference will be found to appear. The first question that needs now to be addressed is how this consensus should be understood, and this will require as full a description as can be attempted in this work of the context in which it has occurred. The second question would be whether or not the consensus is correct and justified — whether or not there are firm and adequate grounds for us to think we should join it, and so take the is ought dualism to be a barrier which it is neither possible nor necessary to surmount. The reader will have known from the Introduction that it is a main purpose of this study to make the argument that such grounds are not in fact available, that a humean position is ultimately untenable and misleading, and deserves to give way to a theory of economic knowledge and policy which treated objectivity and freedom as compatible concepts deserving of equal respect. Nevertheless we are first obliged to identify the strengths and motivations of a humean point of view, if only so that we might explain how it has come to command the kind of assent it has done among many of the most eminent of twentieth century economists as well as the many more who have followed them. When expressed as thoroughly as it has been by some, a humean point of view is certainly a respectable and recondite one to hold in the theory of knowledge; there seems nothing obvious that is wrong with it; to the contrary, it may seem foolhardy to try to refute it or even place its merits under scrutiny. In other words, a well thought-out moral scepticism deserves the respect of its critics, and any difficulties with it may be expected to be of a relatively subtle and not self evident kind.
The purpose of this chapter will be then to give as full a description as possible of the historical and political context — of the “language game” or the civilization — within which it is possible for the humean consensus in modern economics to be understood. The economists quoted in Chapter 2 do not appear to have attempted such descriptions themselves, and may even have assumed a humean point of view on the positive and normative to be self-evidently justified, for little thought seems to have been given as to why we should want to endorse it. Thus it will be fair to caution the reader that while a possible justification and explanation of a humean point of view will be given here, it will be one which has been constructed by a critic. Furthermore, the discussion will refer first to a more distant and then a more proximate context, and the discussion of the former will have to be speculative and greatly simplified — a mere thumbnail sketch of an actual drama of indefinite proportions.

§2. The adoption of moral scepticism in twentieth century economics may be most briefly explained as having been motivated by a genuine desire to shield against dogmatism and tyranny, whether in political, economic, scientific, or religious contexts. As scientist and scholar, the economist has been naturally concerned to extend the scope of common reasoning, as well as to protect the objectivity of the findings of his science from the imposition of personal or political dogma. Equally, it has been felt that the choices of the individual agent who is studied by economists, whether as consumer or voter, deserve to be treated with the fullest respect. A humean scepticism may have been adopted because it has been believed to be necessary and possibly sufficient for this kind of respect to be shown to the results of popular choice, whether in parliament, the market place, or in private life. This is summarized in for instance Sugden’s remark “Hume’s Law reflects a liberal view of the universe”, as well as in Schumpeter’s suggestion that the wertfrei controversy had been merely one between those who practised and those who protested a kind of scholarly deceit, namely, the propagation of personal dogma in the guise of a pursuit of knowledge. In other words, someone might become a moral sceptic because he wishes to defend, and wishes perhaps to be seen as defending, the freedom of the individual person to form and hold his or her own normative beliefs, as well as the objectivity of science from being compromised by the forced imposition of the beliefs of any one or a few people. In particular, the modern humean economist is likely to wish to contrast his theory as sharply as possible with the famous theory given by Plato, both directly with the political philosophy which is to be found in Plato’s writings, as well as indirectly, with the medieval scholasticism which came to be deeply influenced by the rediscovered works of Plato and Aristotle and to which the origins of modern economic and political thought can be traced.

Now the question of whether there is any objective knowledge in a field of inquiry is open to be understood either as asking whether there possibly can be any knowledge in the field, or as asking who should be thought of as possessing such knowledge and how they may have been identified. The first of these senses can be thought of as epistemological and the second as political in character. In Republic, Plato offered answers to both questions with respect to the knowledge of the statesman, and the answers he gave were yes — not only is it logically possible for there to be objective knowledge of use to the statesman, but it is practically possible to identify certain men and women in society as actually possessing or being considered fit to possess such knowledge. It is these special people who are the only true lovers of wisdom in society, and since we surely should want the policies of a state in which we lived to be the wisest and most prudent possible, informed by the best available knowledge, it appears to follow at once that what needs to be done is unite knowledge with authority and make these special people our guardians and rulers.

Plato’s ideal city-state is a place where individual freedom is conspicuous by its absence. Its rulers are to be imagined as being about as perfect rulers as there can be: the single and genuine source of all true wisdom and justice, and deserving therefore to be granted absolute authority on all significant questions of private and political conduct, including the right to suppress dissent, since any dissent would be misguided by definition. This is not to say the philosopher-kings would be entitled to a life of luxury or even ordinary comforts. To the contrary, since those who deserve to be philosopher-kings may well be disinclined to seek power and privilege for themselves in the normal course of politics, they may have to be first discovered and then forcibly drafted to take the office which rightfully should be theirs. In preparation for the serious business of piloting the ship of state, they will be placed in seclusion and rigourously educated in such disciplines as aesthetics and gymnastics and mathematics and music, their lives certainly without any of the signs of corruption that we would frequently associate with the exercise of power. At the end of the tenure of one generation of such rulers, they will be retired and replaced by a new generation, bred and educated through a similar and careful programme of eugenics and training in the arts and sciences of statesmanship. Finding actual examples of such extraordinary beings may be quite impossible; perhaps some appropriate mixture of the Dalai Lama, Gandhi, Attaturk and Mozart’s Sarastro might help our modern imagination.
A number of modern political thinkers have roundly condemned Plato for having written a theory hostile to democratic political institutions, and even for having provided the blueprints for the tyrannies of modern history. Yet while there is no question that Plato was no friend of democracy, or at least of the kind of democracy which had brought about the judicial murder of his friend and teacher Socrates, a fair-minded reader of Republic is unlikely to find in it any justification of tyranny at all. If we were to define tyranny in the way Plato and his contemporaries would have done as the rule of the ignorant and capricious, it would be a state of affairs Plato found abhorrent, the complete antithesis of his own ideal of a full union between knowledge and authority, of rule by the genuinely wise and the genuinely good; even the faulted system of democracy would be preferable to it. Moreover, Plato was to discuss at length the dynamics of how even his ideal city-state would be likely to degenerate into a tyranny; and besides, his single attempt to put theory into practice ended in pathetic failure, when he accepted an invitation to train a fatuous prince, who was incapable of and soon became bored with the rigorous education Plato had in mind for him, and who eventually became the worst of tyrants, much to Plato’s disgust. In fact Kant, the modern lover of freedom, was led to come to the defence of Plato, the ancient authoritarian, precisely because the logical possibility of a utopia is suggested to the reader of Republic — a state of affairs in which everyone is a genuine lover of wisdom, everyone a philosopher-king, and therefore all external government made redundant. Republic is a masterpiece of philosophy and mathematics and literature and political economy as well, and it would be a mistake to suppose its author to have been so inexperienced of human nature and society as to provide it as a textbook for grand or petty tyrannies, whether of his own time or of ours.

What is true however what is true is that the theological culture of medieval Europe would come to be deeply influenced by the rediscovered works of Plato and Aristotle, with which a synthesis of medieval Christianity was sought to be made. And it may also be fair to say that regardless of Plato’s intentions, Republic came to provide something of a model for the tyrannies to be experienced in subsequent European history.
Social and economic life in medieval Europe is marked by a four-fold division of society into the nobility, the clergy, free artisans and tradesmen self governed within a system of guilds and corporations, and the peasantry. The medieval church is seen as an eternal institution representing divine will on earth, deserving to be endowed with final and absolute authority on all significant questions of right conduct, somewhat perhaps in the manner of Plato’s philosopher-kings. Specific duties and rights belong to the members of different occupations, and it is within one’s calling that one is expected to lead one’s life in accordance with the divine law as interpreted by the church and the natural law as discovered by the temporal authorities. In particular, there is a notion that economic activities may be licit or illicit in nature, and since the general moral question of what ought to be done is closely identified with whether there is the sanction of the church for it to be done, whether a particular economic activity is to be approved of or not comes to depend on whether or not it has such a sanction. There is an idea too of economic goods having a ‘true’ or ‘intrinsic’ or ‘natural’ value endowed in them by God — an idea which will become perhaps a precursor of the labour theory of value of classical economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Determining this intrinsic value establishes the ‘just’ price of a good or service, i.e., the price at which it ought to be traded, even if the actual market price as determined by the subjective estimates and actions of traders happens to contingently differ from this. There is a related concept of ‘equivalence’ in transactions, with a suggestion that one party to a trade can gain from it only at the expense of the other. Merchants and middlemen thus come to be treated with some disdain, since it does not seem apparent they are adding anything to the intrinsic values of goods, making the just price of their services seem hard to determine. Indeed the unabashed pursuit of wealth by anyone is probably the object of some considerable social and religious disapproval. Similar thinking may underlie the condemnation of usury, since, given a premise of money having no intrinsic worth, what is perceived to be the lending out of money should seem to have a just price of nought.

The common medieval culture and economy was to be transformed drastically though differently across Europe between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. The sea routes are discovered, nation states emerge competing with one another in trade and war, the age of modern science begins, a long and rapid succession of scientific discoveries and technological inventions takes place, there is a vast expansion of commerce and population and the settlement of European colonies in other continents. Accompanying these transformations in some places are intellectual rebellions against the medieval church, and almost everywhere in Europe a decline in the influence of formal faith. The assertion of individual will and conscience as the principal guides of human conduct is a challenge directed at church doctrine and dogma; but given that the medieval concept of reasoning is one of reason ultimately bounded by the doctrines and dogmas of faith, the assertion of a subjective individual will may have been assumed to amount to being a challenge to the full possibilities of objective reasoning itself.

In this new mercantilist age, the pursuit of material gain must come to be freed of the sanction of the church, and once more, since right and wrong are closely identified with such sanction and prohibition, a declaration of the independence of economic activity from the sanction of the church amounts virtually to a declaration of its independence from ethics as well. In particular, the medieval notion of ‘equivalence’ in the intrinsic value of goods in a transaction is transformed with the aid of mechanistic analogies at hand into a concept of ‘equilibrium’ in trade, such that each party to a trade is conceived of as gaining from it as an individual and continuing to transact until the prospect of such gain has come to be exhausted. It is understandable perhaps that England and Holland will be in the vanguard of the mercantilist revolution, given their theological distance from Rome as well as their growing commercial interests and naval power. Nor does it seem obviously foolish, at least in the early mercantilist years, for the wealth of a nation to be identified with its ability to export and its holdings of precious metals, when the circumstances of the time make it a first priority of the business of government to have liquid payment available for navies and armies. In France there comes to be the liberal protest of the physiocrats against the iniquities upon the peasantry, a protest which serves to rehabilitate a more secular version of the natural law of the scholastics. But the calls of men like Quesnay and Turgot for reform are too late, and the system of physiocracy is itself swept away with the onset of the French Revolution.

Adam Smith however has admired and learned from the physiocrats, while observing at first hand the dismal effects of a staling British mercantilism. This he rises to condemn in The Wealth of Nations, thereby starting an intellectual revolution of his own, ringing in a new century of free enterprise and imperial expansion, and establishing the concern of the economist with the workings of individual interest and the market economy which continues to this day. Forty years later it is David Ricardo who introduces to political economy the practice of an abstract hypothetical method, by which it is a body of abstract and general principles that the economist’s speculations and ratiocinations are intended to discover, detached from the rush of concrete economic realities. And Ricardo and his immediate followers exemplify the application of the new method to a main subject of Smith’s preoccupation, namely, the workings of individual self interest and the market economy.

In the musty passage-ways of Victorian thought, the new methods of abstraction in political economy must have been felt to be as invigorating as fresh air. Jevons, Walras, Menger and the other original neoclassicals firmly insist upon making the plain and simple observation that in the case of many and perhaps most goods, the prime determinant of relative value is not how much labour went into the different production processes, nor how much intrinsic value God might have placed in the goods, but rather the subjective estimations of economic agents in the market place. The victory seems complete. Out of the medieval notion of the scope of reasoning being limited by the dictates of doctrine and dogma, is eventually born the neoclassicals’ notion of the concept of value as fully and exactly synonymous with the concept of scarcity or market value, or rareté in Walras’s term. Economists are seemingly freed to speak of ‘a theory of value’ when meaning to refer more specifically to a theory of scarcity-determined relative prices, determined by conditions of supply and demand in the marketplace. From an idea that something is or is not a good only and merely because the church happens to say so, the wheel comes full circle to an idea that something is or is not a good only and merely because of the price it happens to command in the marketplace. The moral absolutism of the platonist and the scholastic gives way to the moral scepticism of the humean, and we reach the threshold of the modern period of economics in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

§3. Briefly then, the development of the kind of sceptical and subjectivist point of view represented by Hume and the humean economists may be seen as the democratic reaction which occurs to medieval and platonist authoritarianism. And in parallel with these democratic developments occurring in the marketplace and economic thought, there occurs between the medieval and the modern period an emancipation of the political mind as well. No more will it be for clergy and aristocracy to dictate divine and temporal laws respectively. Men are born equal — which is to say there are not grounds ex ante why one human being should be supposed to deserve more or less authority or dignity than another merely in virtue of his or her humanity. The political process must reflect this new emancipation, and displace the hierarchies of the past with the equalitarian notion that every man’s vote should count the same, and the most popular choice be established to rule.

The modern institutional context of a parliamentary democracy, bound by formal or informal constitutional principles and precedents, may be roughly sketched somewhat as follows. From among the body of citizens, some will choose to run for elected office. While reasonable restrictions may be placed on who can so choose (e.g., they must be adult nationals) any citizen normally will be free to be a candidate. Before a vote is conducted, a reasonable time will be allowed for candidates to put their respective cases to the public. There will be some constitutional rule, like first-past-the-post or proportional representation, agreed upon more or less unanimously in advance of the vote, which will map how the actual balloting will induce particular outcomes as to the composition of the parliament. The individual voter casts his or her ballot, reflecting some private mixture of interest, prejudice, caprice or good sense about the common welfare. The rule is applied, and the largest coalition of winning candidates come to constitute the new government, with smaller coalitions constituting the loyal opposition. Once elected, a government will be expected prima facie to carry out the agenda it had proposed to the public before the election and not something different. What it actually does will be the subject of constant scrutiny and criticism by the opposition, the press, and the public at large, but the laws finally enacted will have jurisdiction over all. After a certain maximum time, elections must be held again and the process repeated, with an incoming government either maintaining or changing the policies of its predecessor in large or small measure. The system may be considered indirectly democratic insofar as that at any given time citizens shall have given themselves, via their elected representatives, the policies and laws under which they are themselves to live.

While a government would be expected to implement the agenda chosen indirectly in this way by the public, it will be expected also to elicit expert advice upon the best means to be employed towards achieving the chosen ends. Yet the expert must be appropriately humbled, brought down from the high altar where Plato had placed him to being the modest and self-effacing servant of the popular will. The scientist in government is to take as given the ends of his political masters, under a presumption that these reflect the democratic choice and any interference or criticism would be impertinent. More generally, the competence of the expert in a democratic society is not to extend to questioning the uses to which his expertise may be put. Thus Popper was to write: “No amount of physics will tell a scientist that it is the right thing for him to construct a plough, or an aeroplane, or an atomic bomb. Ends must be adopted by him, or given to him; and what he does qua scientist is only to construct means by which these ends can be realised.” Or as Myrdal put it in the passage quoted in the previous chapter, the expert must not go beyond advising on the means, for he would otherwise require premises of a normative kind which have not been given to science, but which are to be presumed available instead to the elected politican. And Robbins wrote of how economists ought not to judge the ends to which economics is put, indeed that ultimately “there is no room for argument” about ends, but rather how the quintessence of economics is the study of the optimal allocation of scarce resources between competing ends. It is only the question of the best or optimal means towards such an allocation that is within the scope of rational inquiry, and therefore within the competence of the economist qua scientist; it is not for the economist to question the ends given to him by the representatives of the public.

Now the widespread view since that there is a unique and quintessential economic problem, and that in particular it is the problem of the allocation of scarce resources between competing ends, is of course one initially advanced in the course of the neoclassical revolution. As Marshall put it: “if a person has a thing which he can put to several uses, he will distribute it among these uses in such a way that it has the same marginal utility in all. For if it had a greater marginal utility in one use than another, he would gain by taking some of it from the second use, and applying it to the first.” The housewife must decide how much yarn should be put to making socks and how much to making vests so “as to contribute as much as possible to family well-being”; she will have allocated the yarn efficiently if the marginal increase in family well-being is the same whether she puts the last ball of yarn to making an extra pair of socks or to making an extra vest. In modern terms, the problem is one of constrained maximization in which a concave objective function is to be maximized subject to a number of linear or non-linear constraints. We might imagine, for example, a hospital administrator who must allocate fixed quantities of various resources at his disposal like medical staff, beds, dressings, and so on, between a number of alternative outputs which have to be produced in different hospital wards, with the aim of maximizing an objective function containing these outputs as concave arguments. The objective function itself, that is, the relative weights which should be given to the various outputs, is not ultimately for the administrator to decide, but rather to be taken by him as a parameter from an appropriate authority. If the necessary conditions for a maximum are met, an optimal allocation would be one in which (a) the ratio of marginal increases in the objective function from marginal increases in the output of any two goods equalled the implicit shadow prices of their technologies; and (b) the marginal increase in the objective function from increased use of a resource in any two production activities would be the same and equalled the shadow price of the particular resource. Thus the marginal hour of a nurse’s skills would be equally well applied whether in assisting mothers in labour or in providing aid in the Emergency Room. Similarly, a humean view of the expertise of economists would be one in which the economist did not question the social objective function but rather takes as his task the statement and solution of the formal problem of the allocation of scarce resources between the defined ends.

With the necessary change of detail, the same has been required in the influential theory of macroeconomic policy advanced by Professor Jan Tinbergen and his principal expounder, Professor Henri Theil. In this theory, normative premises are seen as being given to the expert economist by a representative of the political process, for instance “the Minister of Finance or Economic Affairs, who is interested in the employment level of his country and its balance of payments”. Such a person is assumed to know the set of variables relevant to determining the present state of the economy, which are divided into those whose values can be changed (“instruments”) and those whose values cannot be changed (“targets”), with a change in the value of an instrument being defined as a “policy measure”. The expert economist is called upon to specify as best as possible the structural relations between targets, instruments, and exogenous disturbances, and predict as best as possible the future course of the targets under alternative assumptions about the instruments. As Theil put it, the policy-maker is to receive from his forecasters “conditional expectations about the time-patterns of non-controlled variables, the conditions being alternative measures to be taken by himself in the present and the future.” Alternative futures of the economic model are then to be evaluated one against the other by means of a social utility function decided upon by the policy-maker. Its arguments could be a pair of macroeconomic ills such as inflation and unemployment implying the function should be minimized, or a pair of microeconomic goods like efficiency and equity implying the function should be maximized subject to the relevant constraints, with the relative weights given to the ends presumed to be reflecting the democratic mandate. An optimal vector of targets is determined which yields the least possible social disutility or the highest possible social utility; the values of the instruments which would result in this optimal vector are calculated, and changes from the present values of these instruments to these optimal values define the optimal set of policy measures to be taken.
Such briefly was the kind of theory of economic policy Tinbergen put forward in the early years after the Second World War. It was soon to have much influence among macroeconomists, especially in the United States. Fairly or not to both Keynes and Tinbergen, the models themselves came to be called “Keynesian”, yet their influence has been significant enough that contemporary critics of Keynes and Tinbergen have described their method and purpose in similar terms. For keynesians and their critics, the macroeconomist principally has a positive role, extending the scope of reasoning and discussion on logical and empirical grounds as far as he is able to. He assumes a constitutional democracy, and takes for granted that the normative premises of the policy-maker reflect the popular will.

§4. Drawing together, then, the main threads of this highly simplified and summary discussion, it may be possible to explain the adoption by twentieth century economists of a humean theory of knowledge by the widespread belief that such a theory provides a necessary and even a sufficient defence against dogmatism and tyranny. It is part of the democratic reaction to medieval authoritarianism. The modern civilization which has adopted the moral scepticism of Hume is one born out of the great medieval civilizations which had been influenced by the authoritarianism of Plato. And just as Plato’s theory was affected by his disgust with the doings of the democracy of his time, so it may be the theory of knowledge which has come to be adopted by as eminent and diverse economists as Robbins and Friedman and Samuelson and Hicks and Robinson and Myrdal and Arrow and Hayek and Lange and Tinbergen and Hahn and Schumpeter, and the many others who have followed them, has been conditioned in part by their disgust with the tyrannies and ideologies of twentieth century history, and their desire to protect from these both the objectivity of economic science as well as the individual in his capacity of consumer and voter.

The question arises however, whether, in making their escape from Plato, the pioneers of twentieth century economic thought have not become entranced by Hume.

4. Difficulties with Moral Scepticism

We have now a description of some of the main features of the theory of economic knowledge most widely accepted in the twentieth century, and we have seen also how its plausibility and influence may be explained by placing it in appropriate historical and political context. In this chapter we shall examine some of the main difficulties and paradoxes which happen to arise with this theory. These have been serious in their implications, and the more general problems from which they derive have been well known to many contemporary philosophers, yet they do not appear to have been given adequate notice by modern economists.
Briefly, the difficulties are two-fold.
First, if the justification of adopting a humean theory of knowledge by contemporary economists is to be what we have taken it to be, viz., that such a theory and only such a theory can provide an adequate bulwark for science and the individual against tyranny and dogmatism, then we clearly have the makings of an internal contradiction on our hands — since what is patently a moral purpose would have been advanced within a theory of knowledge whose ostensible aim was to deny the possibility of moral knowledge! In a theory in which all moral propositions are taken ultimately to be statements of mere personal opinion, the defence of the freedom of the individual or of the integrity of science must also be taken ultimately to be matters of mere personal opinion, and the declared or undeclared purpose of protecting freedom by adopting moral scepticism would have been internally defeated by that very scepticism itself.
Secondly, we shall find that sceptical attacks just as powerful as Hume’s attack on the possibility of moral knowledge can be made upon the possibility of knowledge in a number of non-moral contexts as well. Hume himself is responsible for one such attack when he raised his famous doubts about the possibility of induction, and analogous attacks can be made in diverse other contexts such as those of science, history, mathematics, or psychology. The result of recognizing these new possibilities for scepticism is to make evident that an acceptance of moral scepticism on its own may force a choice between either sliding into total scepticism, the position of believing there is ultimately nothing whatsoever that can be objectively known, or forsaking parity of reasoning, and denying that what may be sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. Either the possibilities of mathematical knowledge and scientific knowledge and historical knowledge all come to be denied ultimately because we wish in a consistent way to deny the possibility of moral knowledge, or one sort of knowledge is accepted and another sort rejected when there are reasons to think they must stand or fall together. Either all of positive economics is attacked with just as much scepticism as anything in normative economics, or we accept one and reject the other when instead there are reasons to think they share the same ultimate grounds and must be accepted or rejected together.
Such will be the main hazards we shall find on the humean course taken in the theory of knowledge by the economists quoted in Chapter 2. Their precise locations however are subtle and quite well hidden, so if we are to avoid them we must move here as carefully and precisely as possible.

§2. Let us recall at the outset Hume’s First Law as saying to the effect that a normative conclusion cannot be validly deduced from solely positive premises; that a normative conclusion cannot be deduced without at least one normative premise being made. Faced with a normative proposition then, a moral sceptic will ask to see the set of prior positive and normative premises from which it is to derive. To take a simple example, if you were to say “I think the government should reduce the rate of growth of the money supplym from 6% to 3%”, a moral sceptic may ask “Could you say why you think so, since your proposition is plainly normative and cannot have derived from a set of solely positive premises?” (We can suppose this not to be meant rhetorically, that some opinion like “What a stupid idea!” is not being surreptitiously introduced in the guise of asking a question, but rather that a genuine inquiry is being made to be told the grounds that may go to support the proposal.) If you were to reply “Well the government should try to reduce the rate of inflationp , it is necessary and/or sufficient to reducem in order to reducep , that is why I think the government should reducem ,” it would remain open for the sceptic to respond “Certainly I can agree if your premises are true then your conclusion follows. But your premises once more are not solely positive ones, including as they do one that is plainly normative. Could you now say why you think the government should try to reducep in the first place?”
It is not difficult to imagine a fair reply being given to this as well, such as perhaps “Well inflation has been rampant and the election was fought and won on a promise inflation would be curbed, election promises should be attempted to be kept, that is why the government should make a determined attempt to reducep .” But in practice the economist would typically and rightly allow such discussion to fade into the background — since an important and difficult task would already have been defined for him, which is to ask whether it is likely a reduction inm by the stated amount will succeed in reducingp , assuming that the government should be trying to do this in the first place. Trying to answer it will require abiding by the practices of language and logic and scientific method; but the question itself is a positive and not a normative one insofar as it asks what is the case, or what has been the case or is likely to be the case, and the desire to keep it distinct for analytical convenience from the explicitly normative may be understandable. The modern economist is one of many kinds of expert in civil society, and as such is expected to have some special theoretical or practical knowledge not possessed by the non-economist. And economists everywhere are in fact being called upon to evaluate whether or not a dam or a highway should be built, a budget balanced or unbalanced, a bond released or redeemed, a tax or a tariff levied or lifted; to judge whether the argument of a government or a colleague or a student or a critic is valid, substantiated, compelling, sound, cogent. In any such investigation, it may well be useful for purposes of clarity and analytical convenience to work with a dualism between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, the descriptive and the prescriptive — just as it is commonly useful to work with a dualism between an analytical sense of ‘is’ as in “two plus two is four”, and a descriptive sense of ‘is’ as in “the cat is on the mat”.
Yet from saying it may be useful to make working dualisms between what is possible and what is actual or between what is the case and what ought to be done, it does not follow there are any absolute or ineradicable lines to be drawn. Taking a set of normative premises as given and from there proceeding to extend the scope of positive reasoning would not imply the normative premises are unquestionable — only that they are not now in question, not presently in question. It is as if they have been temporarily taken out of the game while we attempted to see how far we may proceed without them. They can still be brought back and others taken out — indeed, in the game of inquiry, we might even wonder if there needs to be any proposition which must be so privileged as never to be benched, so indispensable that we must fear the whole project will collapse without it.

§3. We may recall next Hume’s Second Law to the effect that while it may be possible to bring to bear objective reasoning in some normative discussions, a point of sheer and unadulterated difference over ‘basic’ or ‘ultimate’ values can nevertheless come to be reached. The moderate humean may allow for much room for common reasoning to take place, but he takes the further step of supposing such reasoning to have a limit, a finite limit. In any normative discussion, it is eventually possible for the scope of objective reasoning to become exhausted and a difference of a sheer normative kind to come to be identified. While it is clear the economists quoted in Chapter 2 have meant to refer to a limit of this sort being reached, it is strictly speaking not clear if they have meant to refer to such a limit being reached just as a contingent matter of fact — in actual arguments and discussions — or whether they have meant to refer to such a limit being possible in principle as well. In other words, whether it is merely intended to be an empirical possibility that a disagreement will come to end without resolution, or whether it is also intended for this to be the logically necessary outcome. If a residue of disagreement remains after the processes of common reasoning have been allowed to work, is this residue to consist of differences which just happen to be closed to further discussion in a particular case, say because the discussants lack patience or good humour or tolerance or perseverance or whatever, or is it supposed to consist of sheer and naked differences over ‘basic’ values which must be thought of as necessarily beyond the scope of further discussion?
If it is the first interpretation alone which has been intended, then only a fairly small claim would have been made, which may need to be clarified and fully set out but which would not need to be disputed by someone wishing to attribute a greater scope to reason than does the moral sceptic. For it is quite evident that actual arguments and discussions frequently do come to end without full resolution — those between physicists, mathematicians, biologists, doctors or engineers no less perhaps than those between politicans, economists, writers, historians, spouses, or nation states. Yet an observation of this sort of the frequency or intensity of disagreement would not be directly relevant to the theory of knowledge, insofar as the fact an argument happens to stop where it does, does not bear upon whether a question in dispute is capable of having a true or a right answer. It is possible for the true or right answer to a question not to be available to those who happen to be discussing it, or even to others in their generation or those in later generations; that there can be an objectively true or right answer to a question is a different question from whether it has been found or will be found today or tomorrow or next year. What the answers happen to be to the questions raised by Darwin or Freud or Keynes is a different question from what they themselves might have thought the answers to be, or what their contemporary state of opinion happened to think the answers to be, or what the state of opinion in our own time or in some future time happens to think the answers to be. It is of course natural to want to know the true or right answer to a question, to know whether the answer which we think is true or right is true or right, and certainly we should be surprised and find it incongruent if someone said he or she believed something even while knowing it was not true, or approved of something even while knowing it was not right — we normally want to know what is true and what is right and make our beliefs congruent with it. In other words, we may distinguish the actual and contingent history of inquiry and conflict from the logic of inquiry and conflict.
Moreover, some concepts and propositions will be found to form a context or a background in any disagreement, being understood by both sides and being unnecessary to be made explicit. If we were discussing the monetary history of the United States in the 1980s for example, we would take for granted such facts as that the United States was not at war or civil war or in the throes of any major social convulsion during this time; assumptions which may not have formed the implicit background if we were instead discussing the monetary history of the 1960s or the 1860s. Not every feature of a description may be relevant to a particular question at hand nor must it be made explicit. And an observation of this kind may be made of any dispute in economics, once it has been carefully and thoroughly characterized, whether on method or theory or evidence or policy, in microeconomics or macroeconomics, whether between mathematical economist and applied economist, or keynesian and quantity theorist, or marxian and mainstream. Some aspects of any description will be implicitly understood or taken for granted by the participants in a discussion.
More strictly, it has been argued by the Cambridge philosopher Renford Bambrough that it is necessary for the participants in a discussion to be in at least some agreement before they can be even said to be in any disagreement at all: “You and I cannot be known to be in conflict unless it is possible to identify a proposition that I assert with a proposition that you deny; no such proposition can be identified unless there is some expression that you and I use in the same way; if we use an expression in the same way then we regard the same steps as relevant to determining the truth or falsehood of what is expressed by it; for a disagreement about what is relevant is or involves a disagreement about what the dispute is that we are engaged in, and when such a case of cross-purposes is resolved it resolves itself either into agreement or into a disagreement to which all these conditions again apply.” In other words, it must be either that the participants in a dispute are giving different answers to the same question or that they are giving answers to different questions. If the first, we have identified a genuine case of disagreement; if the second, we have what is strictly speaking not a genuine disagreement at all but a case of cross-purposes, where each is giving a different answer to the question as to what the question they are disagreeing over happens to be. The English literary critic F. R. Leavis suggested at one place that critical inquiry proceeds as if one person declares to another “This is so, isn’t it?”, and the other replies “Yes, but…”. When A declares “This is so, isn’t it?” he has invited both the challenge and collaboration of others. B’s yes in reply would indicate a certain agreement, while his “but…” would indicate the agreement was not total, that there perhaps is some case or circumstance to which what A has said will be found not to apply. In effect, the “but…” amounts to being a fresh “This is so, isn’t it?”, inviting in turn the collaboration and challenge of A, and so on. Applying such a scheme to our example of a simple debate over economic policy, we would obtain an abstract form of the following sort:
A : n1.
B : Why n1?
A : Given n2, p1 implies n1.
B : Granted (p1), but why n2?
A : Given n3, p2 implies n2.
B : Granted (p1, p2), but why n3?
A : Given n4, p3 implies n3.
B : Granted (p1, p2, p3), but why n4?
A can think B to be stupid or stubborn or self-seeking, and B can think the same of A, and neither or one or both of them may be partly or wholly correct in thinking so, and all these may be facts which go to explaining how their dispute actually happens to proceed or fail to proceed over time — yet the correct answer, the most reasonable and justifiable answer, to the question to which different answers may be given at any stage will be independent of all this. We should want to distinguish, in short, questions of the logic of thought from questions in the history of thought.
Thus if someone becomes persuaded to a moderate moral scepticism only through observing that as a matter of fact many normative disputations seem heated or interminable, then we need only to demonstrate that such an observation does not and should not be allowed to bear upon the theory of knowledge or epistemology we come to hold. Certainly the scope of objective reasoning may be found to be finite in practice in actual disagreements and disputations between people, because there happens to be a lack of patience or good humour or tolerance or perseverance or whatever. But from that it does not follow at all that there is no further room for discussion, or indeed that reasoning cannot be thought of as being of potentially indefinite scope.
If however, as seems equally likely, the economists who have endorsed a humean theory of knowledge have meant it to be possible not only in practice but also in principle for the scope of objective reasoning to become exhausted, then a much more serious claim would have been made, which deserves appropriately more rigorous scrutiny. It would then have been claimed that it is logically possible for A and B to be in total and justifiable agreement about all the empirical evidence and about every logical relation, and still for each to declare in favour of a sheer and contradictory ‘ultimate’ value.
B : Granted (p1, p2, p3,…, pω-2); but why nω-1?
A : Given nω, pω-1 implies nω-1.
B : Granted (p1, p2, p3,…, pω-2, pω-1); but why nω ?
A : nω that’s why! (Go jump in the lake if you don’t accept it too.)
B : I deny nω that’s all! (And it’s you who can jump in the lake.)
Not only in practice but also in principle the scope of common reasoning would be supposed to have a finite limit. Not only is it a handicap we have to live with that many disputes between economists or scientists or citizens or spouses or nation-states do come to halt without full and justifiable resolution, through lack of patience or tolerance or good humour or whatever, but it is inevitable that common reasoning will become exhausted and only sheer and unadulterated differences remain over ‘basic’ or ‘ultimate’ values over which only the irrational holds sway. Hume and Hare among philosophers certainly may be interpreted to have taken such a view, and, on the basis of the writings quoted in Chapter 2, it would not be unfair to interpret at least some of the economists to have meant the same. However no proof or example of the existence of a sheer dispute over ‘basic’ or ‘ultimate’ values between people who are in justifiable agreement over everything else, has ever been offered by Hume or any philosopher or economist after him. It seems merely to have been asserted or taken for granted that a point can come where the scope of reason must have become exhausted and nothing further could remain to be said or done.

§4. We are in position to have a clear sighting at last of the first major hazard which is present on the humean course: It is possible that the declared purpose of the humean economist of extending objectivity and thwarting dogmatism will be contradicted by an ultimate adoption of irrationality and personal dogmatism. Huge and invaluable edifices of inquiry and argument can crumble to the ground because the scope of reasoning must sooner or later become exhausted, and mere personal prejudice take its place. The presence of a single ‘ought’ would signal the presence of another, and then another, and another… until some set of private moral primes or absolutes or supreme principles are supposed to be reached, which others might or might not share but which are in any event beyond further question. According to the received theory of knowledge, the economist is ultimately able only to persuade or coax or cajole or perhaps bribe others into accepting the absolutes he may himself wish to endorse, but common reasoning is of no further avail. Sooner or later the advice of the expert economist cannot but express the personal dogmas and prejudices of the adviser (or those of his employer).
It was a tension of this kind in the humean doctrine that Professor Samuelson may have felt when he called it a “somewhat schizophrenic rule” even as he endorsed it in the passage quoted in Chapter 2. Yet while Samuelson was not afraid to describe the role of the economist in society that follows from the humean thesis, he did not see the paradox to which it leads. Following Robbins and in keeping with the modern theory of economic policy, Samuelson said we should keep distinct the economist qua scientist from the economist qua citizen. The former expresses objective knowledge (“pure analysis”), the latter expresses subjective opinions (“propaganda, condemnations and policy recommendations”). Thus when Professor Samuelson himself writes from his offices at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we must take him to be doing so qua rational, objective, scientific economist, while if the very same person writes from his home qua citizen of the United States, we must take him to be expressing a subjective and possibly irrational personal point of view. Or must Samuelson expect himself to sign and stamp everything he writes either as being a claim to objective knowledge made by the eminent economist which he is and deserving the world’s attention, or as being a subjective and possibly irrational opinion expressed by the ordinary citizen and human being which he also is, and perhaps not deserving nearly as much of the world’s attention? What would happen if the same human being came to say the same thing in both scientific and civic capacities? Clearly we would be in a quandary of having to decide whether it should be considered objective or subjective, public knowledge or private opinion, rational or irrational, economic science or personal prejudice. In the previous chapter we have seen that the humean economist is likely to want to sharply contrast his theory of the role of economic expertise from the famous theory given by Plato in Republic. Now we are able to see that there seems to be a less well known similarity too between the moral scepticism of the humean and the moral absolutism of the platonist. For just as in Plato’s theory so in the modern humean theory, there is evidently no way of telling from within the theory who is supposed to be the expert. Either the humean has to join the platonist whom he takes to be his enemy and declare there to be some arbitrary and unspecified way of distinguishing expert from layman, philosopher from commoner. Or the humean has to part company with Plato and the scholastics, and say that there is ultimately no objective distinction possible between knowledge and opinion, expert and layman, science and prejudice. What appears to be at stake when the merits of the humean epistemology are brought under critical scrutiny in this way, therefore, is nothing less than whether there ultimately can be objective knowledge in economics; and so, whether or not the economist can rightly consider himself to be a seeker after such knowledge — or whether we are all involved merely in some highly evolved and sophisticated branch of rhetoric, having “the semblance of wisdom without the reality” whose teacher and practitioner is just “one who makes money from an apparent but unreal wisdom.”

§5. The problem we are observing here with the received theory of economic knowledge can be placed in relief by comparing the moderate moral sceptic with his more radical cousin, the emotivist. For the emotivist is one who flatly denies there to be any scope at all for common reasoning to occur upon normative questions, maintaining instead that normative propositions amount only to being the expressions of personal feeling or emotive attitude. Thus a statement like “the government should reducem from 6% to 3%” would be taken by the emotivist to express merely the personal feelings or preferences of the individual, its full meaning and implications being equally well described if the speaker had said “I wish the government would reducem from 6% to 3%”, just as someone might say “I wish to have my coffee black” or “I do not like boiled vegetables” or “I like to wear colourful shirts”.
Now the feelings and emotions and attitudes of a speaker or author may be naturally and normally involved in the making of evaluative or prescriptive statements, in a way they may not be in the making of logical or empirical statements. When I propose something should be done I must mean what I say, or I would not be being sincere, what I outwardly expressed would be incongruent with what I inwardly felt, I would be engaged in a kind of self-contradiction or inner dissonance. Yet this sort of involvement of matters of personal sincerity and authenticity in the making of normative judgements does not imply these are all that is involved, or even the most important of what is involved, or that common reasoning cannot make headway in normative discussion. The emotivist correctly observes the involvement of the emotions in normative discussion but exaggerates its significance, perhaps by the confounding of simple and literal uses of concepts like “taste” and “preference” as in “I have a taste for ice-cream” or “I prefer my vegetables lightly cooked” with looser and more metaphorical and so more complex uses of the same concepts like “I prefer Truman to Dewey” or “I have no taste for public executions”. Where the moderate moral sceptic supposes a residue of irrational difference to remain after every relevant empirical and logical question has been answered, the emotivist wants to call a halt the instant a normative proposition is sighted. The difference is one of degree and not of kind. If a moderate moral sceptic like R. M. Hare or Milton Friedman or Joan Robinson remonstrated with the emotivist saying “Look you really should try to bring to bear as much logic and evidence as you possibly can in a normative dispute”, the emotivist has only to coolly reply “Sorry, but what you have just said is patently normative. Since, as you know, I take all normative propositions to amount to being expressions of personal taste or emotive attitude, I cannot take what you have said to be anything more than that either. That does not mean I cannot share the same emotive attitude as you, but that is no reason to think we can construct an objective justification for it.” The humean can bang his head in frustration at the emotivist’s behaviour, but he may not without circularity argue against it.
A more dramatic illustration of this sort of difficulty with the humean doctrine may be found in the writings of Hare and Popper, suggesting that even the most tough-minded and critical of moral sceptics may have allowed themselves to admit an ultimate irrationalism. Hare considers a fanatic who so fervently believes some group of innocent people should be put to death that he is prepared to be made such a victim himself if his own ancestors transpired to be of the same group. And the fanatic is closed to all further discussion of the matter. This, Hare takes it, would be a case of an ultimate value judgement, impervious both in practice and in principle to further question. Hare says that “fortunately” there are few fanatics who would be found to hold such an “extreme” position, leaving unsaid that if they were found then they should be just as entitled to their opinion as anyone else — not merely in the sense of having a legal right to hold such an opinion but in the more significant sense that such an opinion ultimately must be considered to be just as good, just as reasonable, just as cogent, just as sound, as its contrary. We could try to persuade or cajole or bribe our fanatic to give up his opinion and to hold ours, but there is no way for us to say he is simply wrong in his belief. If it turned out there were more fanatics than there were of us, it could of course become their turn to persuade or cajole or bribe us away from our opinions, yet none of their acts could be condemned, since, in the last analysis, there cannot be any such thing as moral knowledge.
Popper has written frankly that he knows of no rational grounds for recommending a rational temperament: “It is impossible to determine ends scientifically. There is no scientific way of choosing between two ends. Some people, for example, love and venerate violence. For them a life without violence would be shallow and trivial. Many others, of whom I am one, hate violence. This is a quarrel about ends. It cannot be decided by science…. you cannot, by means of argument, convert those who suspect all argument, and who prefer violent decisions to rational decisions. You cannot prove to them that they are wrong….” “I frankly confess that I choose rationalism because I hate violence, and I do not deceive myself into believing that this hatred has any rational grounds. Or to put it another way, my rationalism is not self-contained, but rests on an irrational faith in the attitude of reasonableness. I do not see that we can go beyond this.” But if Popper is entitled to have an irrational faith in being reasonable, then the fanatic is surely entitled as well to have an irrational faith in being unreasonable. Thus Professor Max Black responds on behalf of the fanatic who engages Popper thus: “Bravo! You hate violence, but I hate argument (a sneaking use of force by other means). You call me irrational, but I glory in that title. Like you, I hold that there are no ultimate reasons for my irrationality (for that would detract from the purity of my position). The difference between us is like that between a Protestant and a Catholic: your faith is my heresy; my faith is your heresy. That’s all there is to say.” (Yet Black himself does not say why differences between protestant and catholic must be supposed beyond discussion!)

§6. This kind of internal contradiction we are observing here to be associated with moral scepticism can be seen in a slightly more positive light as well. For we may ask, what does the moral sceptic’s recognition that dogma and tyranny should not be imposed upon science or the individual amount to being except a manifest example of a moral recognition? Or a proposal that the integrity of science as well as the freedom of the individual as consumer and voter should be preserved, except a manifest example of a moral proposal? All the economists quoted in Chapter 2 have recommended and practised the extension of the scope of common reasoning in economic science; what sort of recommendation would that be except a patently moral recommendation? When the theory of economic policy requires the economist to respect the ends of the elected politician, what sort of a premise does that rest upon except a moral premise that the institutions of constitutional democracy should be respected and not abused? It would presuppose in turn such things as that parliamentary elections do take place periodically and are in fact genuine and not fraudulent elections, that citizens will be judicious and well enough informed in their voting so that a good indication of what things are conducive to the common welfare will come to be determined as closely as possible given the size and diversity of the electorate, that the policies of a resulting administration are sincere attempts to reflect the ends chosen by the voters, that candidates for elected office and private citizens and scientists and scholars and others are not subject to being shot or jailed or persecuted for saying publicly what they think these ends should or should not be, and so on. It is implicitly or explicitly within the context of a free and open society, and one which probably has working democratic institutions, that the modern theory of economic policy makes sense at all, that positive questions like “Does the evidence support the hypothesis that reducingm from 6% to 3% is necessary and/or sufficient to reducep ?” are supposed to be discussed in the first place. Regardless of what the humean economist happens to say or suppose himself to be doing or not doing by adopting the theory of knowledge which he does, we are entitled to conclude that he is in fact far from asserting there cannot be any such thing as objective moral knowledge — since he himself may have advanced his moral scepticism precisely upon substantive moral grounds. Put differently, it does not seem possible without contradiction to start with a set of moral premises and arrive at a conclusion that there cannot be moral knowledge.
Equally, if the received theory of economic policy must presuppose a context of a free and open society and working democratic institutions, then it would seem it must be silent where such a context cannot be presumed. When we consider that most societies most of the time probably have not been very open or very democratic (and in such a count we must consider societies not only on the scale of nation-states but also families and clubs and corporations and university departments and armies and religions, and so on) this would at once make the received theory one of quite special and contingent application. Indeed it is a theory which must be silent about the appropriate role of the expert not only under conditions of tyranny (Solzhenitsyn: “The prison doctor was the interrogator’s and executioner’s right-hand man. The beaten prisoner would come to on the floor only to hear the doctor’s voice: ‘You can continue, the pulse is normal’” ); but also where the duly elected government of an open and democratic society proceeded to do things patently wrong or tyrannical (the imprisonment of the Japanese Americans). Hence Popper’s “paradox of democracy” and “tyranny of the majority”. It is ironic that the economist who may have adopted a humean epistemology as a reaction to dogmatism and tyranny in the first place, will come to be prevented by his own moral scepticism from condemning an act of tyranny whether it is committed in the name of the popular will or by an outright despotism. A theory of economic policy which both assumes a free and open society and bases itself upon a moral scepticism cannot have anything to say ultimately about the objective reasons why a free and open society may be preferred to an unfree or closed society, or about the good or bad outcomes that may be produced by the working of democratic processes.
A parallel difficulty arises for the humean economist with respect to market institutions and their possible outcomes. Ultimately, the received theory of economic knowledge cannot allow that there may be objective reasons why market institutions may be preferable (or not preferable) to non-market ones, whether one is speaking roughly and generally in a theory of political economy or more precisely and specifically about some actual set of concrete circumstances. Just as the medieval scholastics might have said that a good was a good only because the church said it was a good, so the modern humeans may have to say that a good is a good only because market forces have made it a good — i.e., because it happens to have a positive price in an equilibrium of supply and demand. And just as the church may have said a lot of things were goods which were indeed good, so market forces make a lot of things goods which indeed are good — for instance, like food, clothing and shelter, because they are conducive to some valuable human purpose. But also, just as there could have been things which the church said were good but were not, and things which were good but which the church said were not, so it is not at all hard for any of us to find in experience things which the market may have put a high value on but which were not in fact valuable, as well as things which the market did not value but which were indeed valuable.

§7. Drawing these simple threads together then, a first set of reasons why the modern economist may think himself poorly served by a subjectivist theory of knowledge has to do with the fact that it is a theory which falters and fails even in its own declared purpose of being an adequate shield against dogmatism and tyranny. In a theory in which nothing, ultimately, can be considered objectively right, it cannot be objectively right to extend the scope of reasoning in economics, or to preserve the integrity of science, or to protect the individual from dogmatism or tyranny. In a theory in which nothing, ultimately, can be considered objectively wrong, it cannot be wrong to block or subvert reason or to force dogma and tyranny upon science or the individual. If all moral propositions are ultimately taken to be matters of mere personal opinion, then the defence of individual freedom or the integrity of science also must be taken ultimately to be matters of mere personal opinion. Professor Arrow remarks: “The only rational defense of a liberal position… is that it is itself a value judgment.” Combine with this the idea that judgements are subjective, and you would have the result that no objective justification can be given ultimately for a liberal position, or for any other position either for that matter. When all has been said and done, protecting individual freedom is no better or worse than attacking it, preserving the integrity of science is no better or worse than destroying it. “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Such fragile things as the preservation of human freedom and the integrity of science would seem to have been left exposed by the accepted epistemology in twentieth century economics to the shifting whims of popular opinion. The purposes that many eminent economists may have had in adopting the humean thesis, and these may have been invaluable purposes, would seem to be able to be fulfilled only in a theory which denied the humean thesis that nothing can be right or wrong but thinking makes it so.

§8. We have now sketched the first important set of dangers that are present on the humean course which has been adopted by modern economists. There happens also to be a second set with equally serious implications, calling for us to continue to move as carefully and precisely as possible. The reader who may have been unconvinced by the argument so far will therefore have a fresh set of challenges to consider, while the author will have to ask for the patience of the reader who may have agreed that there does happen to be something wrong at the foundations of the received theory of economic knowledge.
In short, there is the problem that an adoption of moral scepticism on its own may lead by parity of reasoning to total scepticism, to the ‘pyrrhonism’ which Hume himself had drawn back from. For what will come to be noticed by the truly serious and tough-minded sceptic is that the general logic employed in Hume’s First Law is in fact extremely powerful, more powerful than Hume or the modern humean economist may wish or intend it to be. For the tough-minded sceptic will look at Hume’s First Law and say: Why stop at ethics? Why so half-hearted? That it is not legitimate to deduce one kind of statement from another kind of statement is surely an argument of more general application. Just as a sceptical attack can be launched upon the possibility of ethics, so why not launch sceptical attacks everywhere: on the possibilities of science and history and induction and deduction and everything? In particular, the tough-minded sceptic will say to the humean economist: Why do you stop with normative economics? — Surely you can and you must destroy all of positive economics as well!
It was shown some years ago by the English philosopher John Wisdom how sceptical attacks analogous to Hume’s attack on ethics in fact can be made in a number of other contexts as well. Let us consider an example similar to one given by Wisdom to show how easily it may be possible to proceed to be sceptical of something so obvious as our knowledge of the past. A sceptic says “Do we really know anything about what has happened in the past? Can we be certain about anything that has happened at all before this very instant?” You say to him “What do you mean? Surely you don’t mean that while we know some things for certain such as that we are now having this conversation, we don