I plan to start to provide at a nominal cost of INR 400 the 100 page History chapters from the 1970 volume Soviet Ukraine given to my father in Kyiv before we left Odessa. It’s probably the version of history being used by the Russian Government and President.

To book your pdf copy Email SubrotoRoyLibrary@gmail.com.

(My mother was given a marvellous Ukrainian cookbook, which we have never been able to read!)

also added in for free will be the British account of Ukraine and of Ukrainian Literature in the 1964 Encyclopedia Britannica.

2021

A footballer kicks the ball hard and straight towards its target, the goal. The goalie has seen it and is ready in place to block and collect it. But it accidentally hits a defending player and ricochets into an unprotected corner of the goal…is that “Chance”? Or “Luck”? Good luck for one side, bad luck for the other…? (a real case from ISL 2021 but common enough everywhere…)

How fragile is life…a teenager cycles to her Sanskrit exam…is killed by a lorry trying to escape corrupt police… (a real case from 2017)

[Footnote Is it (objectively) worse that the teenager killed was cycling to a Sanskrit exam and not, say, a drug dealer? It is… Is it worse that the lorry killed her not due to some unpredictable mechanical failure but because it was avoiding corrupt police? It is..
A lorry kills a drug dealer accidentally due to mechanical failure isn’t as bad as if due to corruption it kills a girl going to an exam; a lorry accidentally kills a drug dealer is different from the same lorry due to corruption killing a girl going to her Sanskrit exam… What happened @WBPolice @MamataOfficial to the lorry driver who killed the girl cycling to her Sanskrit exam?…
Sanskrit a hard rich esoteric subject, the girl cycling to her Sanskrit exam must have been the pride of her family… The family expected her to come home safely, talk of how hard it was, aim for college, become a teacher, a mother herself… Instead she was killed by a speeding lorry trying to escape paying a bribe to the police…the family in sudden shock…]

The girl cycling to her Sanskrit exam, killed by a lorry trying to escape corrupt police. Is that “Chance” or “Luck”? Luck is Chance without any probability distribution

…Luck is Chance without any probability distribution…, I say… (and am reminded of Milton Friedman telling me decades ago he believed such a thing existed as luck, good or bad… )… It is bad luck for one team, good luck for the other that the ball ricochets off the defensive player into the goal… There is no probability distribution… Or is there one lurking beneath? Can a team through, say, much practice, reduce its “bad luck” in defensive situations? Similarly, the girl killed cycling to her Sanskrit exam by a speeding lorry escaping corrupt police, is it a “one-off” event of bad luck or is there a probability distribution lurking beneath? Viz., if governance improved, corruption was reduced, the chance of such deaths falls?

These are two disparate cases of what might be called Random Events…. where there is no underlying probability distribution at least prima facie… (contrast the “Random Variable” usually seen in statistical/stochastic theory!)…

a Random Event is one of Chance without any probability distribution discernible prima facie…

if upon inspection/scrutiny/study we think we find a probability distribution, it’s no longer a case of Chance, Randomness, Luck…but one of Causation…

There’s a world of difference between saying that B was a random event & saying that B was the result of or caused by something else called A…

I.e. there’s Randomness/Chance/Luck in one corner without any probability distribution possible to be discerned; and there’s Causation and Probability in the opposite corner…

I.e., a Random Event/case of Chance/Luck is one of 0 ex ante or prima facie probability… No one expected it or *could have* expected it => inspection/scrutiny/study follows:

— if that yields nothing, it remains Random

— if a probability distribution is detected/discerned, there’s Causation…

The end result of an inspection/ scrutiny/study is then

Either “We found nothing; B is a genuine Random Event”

Or “We found A might have caused B” …

“Chance visits the prepared mind” said Pasteur famously… if you can work to reduce your “bad luck”, can you also work to improve your “good luck”? Perhaps sometimes in each case… Perhaps where Statistical theory went wrong ab initio, is starting with a “Random Variable”… I start with a Random Event instead…

start with a Random Event, not the Random Variable of usual stochastic/statistical theory…

A Random Event is one which no-one in the population has placed a non-zero ex ante/prior probability on, ie everyone has placed a 0 ex ante/prior probability on… this includes finding the possibility unimaginable. Eg, no one could have imagined the girl cycling to her Sanskrit exam would be killed by a lorry fleeing corrupt police.

Tackling probability theory seriously, using Keynes Jeffreys IJ Good Emile Borel and everyone else, is going to be very hard … stretching from good or bad luck in human situations to positions of particles in Quantum Mechanics… maybe a hundred different cases like the two above will illustrate…

2017 Chapter 3 Facts, Hypotheses, and Guesses

3.1.  A scientific fact is something for which the evidence is overwhelming, to deny which would be naive or foolish or unreasonable.

3.2.  Two central facts of physics established over the centuries are the heliocentric solar system & the spherical Earth (its curved surface).

3.3.  Other scientific facts we certainly know today include that we inhale oxygen needed for our metabolism and exhale carbon dioxide as a waste, that oxygen enters & carbon dioxide exits through the lungs, that both are transported everywhere in our mammalian bodies by the blood pumped by the  heart, and so on.

3.4. It is best to keep quite small the number of such illustrations of certain scientific knowledge for reason of Rutherford’s Common Man: “An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid”.  What the barmaid and Rutherford share is rationality, reasonableness, comprehension, language.  Perhaps pubs in college towns should supply bartenders to witness doctoral viva voces in science and everything else…

3.5. Chapter 6 of my 1989  Philosophy of Economics is titled “Expertise & Democracy”.  It doesn’t say the Common Man should judge quality but that the road for the Common Man to do so should be open.  The road to judge whether an advance has been made, a contribution to knowledge, new facts established, should be open to everyone including Rutherford’s barmaid.

3.6. Many people have not thought about the flatness or curvature of Earth’s surface, nor know about their own respiration & metabolism.  (The easiest way to improve a nation’s health incidentally, may be by greater general understanding of the science of respiration, metabolism  etc.) Many people especially in India & China endorse a geocentric solar system today when they act as they do believing in astrology’s horoscopes. (Astrology could be only a trivial pastime, or at least we have to hope so as believers may include those purporting to science!)  Russell cynically said “Many people would sooner die than think, in fact they do”.

3.7.  Other facts can be deduced or conjectured from central facts like heliocentrism.  Eddington noted we are transported by the Earth & Sun: the Earth as our vehicle we travel at 20 miles per second around the Sun which in turn carries us at 12 miles a second through the galactic system, which carries us at 250 miles a second amid the spiral nebulae…

3.8.  Eddington’s 1927 Gifford lectures *The Nature of Physical Reality* had a laudable if unsuccessful aim of expressing in words Electromagnetism, Relativity, Entropy, Gravitation, Quantum Theory, all the new physics!  A member of the audience asked about relativity “You must find the journey between Cambridge & Edinburgh tiring.  I can understand the fatigue if you travel to Edinburgh but why are you tired if Edinburgh travels to you?”.  Physics isn’t without its humour.  Eddington had to reply, “If motion could tire, we ought to be dead tired” referring to our carriage by the Earth, Sun, galaxies.

3.9.  Beyond relatively few central facts, physics has uncountable multitudes of “surmised facts” consisting of hypotheses & conjectures,  guesses & speculations.

3.10.  Boundaries between facts and hypotheses or between hypotheses and guesses need not be hard and fast or dogmatically precise…  We can always ask in a given case, is this a known accepted fact or a surmise or just an informed guess, what is the situation?  Earth’s curved surface or the heliocentric solar system are established facts; Eddington’s calculations of  speeds at which we travel thru galaxies are less so.

3.11.  Between hypotheses and guesses the boundaries may be imprecise again but with a broad difference: With guesses there is no known empirical or even conceptual test available or possible, with hypotheses some test giving a yes/no answer may be possible.

3.12  At least 1/3 of all stars is a “double” or two stars together with no planets, reports Eddington from the important research of his colleague JH Jeans.  Jeans concluded double star formation to be typical,  formation of a solar system to be “a freak”.   Jeans’s theory of our solar system’s formation is that a thousand million years ago another star passed not far from what became the planet Neptune, this star passing by caused “big protruberances” of the Sun, big enough for the formation of the planets by eruption from the Sun.

3.13.  JH Jeans’s description of how another star once passed by our Sun causing it to disgorge the planets of the solar system is a guess or speculation which can’t be empirically tested.

3.14.   Yet Jeans’s guess is reasonable & comprehensible, following as it does a line of reasoning from less uncertain facts. As such it is more plausible than if we instead guessed the planets emerged because the Sun sneezed like a human.

3.15.  Jeans and Eddington concluded the chances of planets arising from any star are remote.  Compound that with the chances of water, photosynthesis, oxygen, life arising,  and the likelihood of a Da Vinci elsewhere in the Universe becomes remoter still.  Humankind may be alone (is my surmise)!

3.16.  A contemporary view from Helen Klus is “There may be millions of other planets in our galaxy that contain life”.  If so Jeans and Eddington were wrong, and I too to believe them.

3.17.  Popper proposed we try to falsify our guesses and findings to come to know what is scientific truth at a given time, that we adopt a critical attitude to our own and others’ scientific claims.  Everything we think we know we seek to re-examine critically if we are to progress with and advance our knowledge.

3.18.  Jeans conjectures a star passed by causing the Sun to disgorge planets a 1000 million years ago?  Popper says look at the reasoning and facts again.

3.19.   A youngster is sceptical seeing a ship disappear over the horizon.  Good.   Bring him/her back the next day & the next, to see more ships doing the same… But how do we know the ships aren’t just falling off the edge? the child asks… Excellent question… Let’s take a helicopter, chase after it.  Or imagine we do so notionally if we can’t afford one.  “We haven’t got the money, so we’ll have to think” (Rutherford).  Ok, says the child, I accept the Earth’s surface seems curved in this region, but how can we tell it is so everywhere? To Jules Verne!

3.20.  The vast bulk of physical facts may be surmises midway between guesses/speculations on one hand, and known central facts on the other. This bulk of surmised facts I describe as hypotheses/conjectures open to hypothesis testing: offering yes/no results to empirical or even just conceptual experiments…

3.21.  Heisenberg’s  “thought experiment” led to his declaring we can know the location or velocity of a particle as precisely as we want but not both together at the same time… Heisenberg’s superb *Principles* is the exemplary doctoral thesis of the star pupil of Sommerfeld… You describe one two three four extant empirical experiments that you say everyone finds puzzling, inadequately explained, anomalous…You provide your criticism of the existing theory or theories used in these experiments, then propose a theory to replace them…Then you discuss possible criticisms and extensions of the theory you’ve newly offered. Then apply it to reexamining the original empirical experiments.  Finally you place in an appendix the “Mathematical Apparatus” you’ve used, mathematics in its place as the servant not master of physics.

3.22.  Heisenberg admits with utmost honesty after all his new theory that most of the empirical experiments remain explicable classically!

[GEMoore:  “You aren’t denying the electron exists, you’re saying we can’t tell where it is.”

Heisenberg: “Exactly so! (Well, almost!)”.]

3.23   Eddington suggested a “thought experiment” of an empty vessel with a sliding door halfway: in the left half is air; the closed right half is a vacuum; opening the sliding door causes the air molecules to diffuse thru the vessel, hitting each other & the walls randomly, never again congregating back to the initial left side.  Eddington used it to show increasing entropy, “the running down of the Universe”, a “loss” in the initial “organization” of the molecules..

3.24.  Complicated experiments on a hard subject were those of Clauser, and later Aspect, seeking to test Bell’s theorem in the contest between Einstein and the Quantum Mechanics of the “Copenhagen School”.   The latter “won”, for the time being at least.  But Popper’s scientific method would require them and everyone else to think again!  Try to refute your own findings!  Was Bell’s theory adequate?  Were the Clauser and Aspect experiments adequate?

3.25.   John Wisdom gave a deliberately easy empirical experiment with a yes/no answer: a room seems empty, nothing to see feel hear smell taste in it.  A declares “It’s empty”, B declares “It’s not”, throws a lighted match in it, there’s an explosion. “Gas” says B….

3.26.   Empirical questions should be nice enough to provide us a binary choice of answers: Yes/No; True/False; or, if we like, probability ≈ 1 probability ≈ 0.  Until a binary choice is available the question is not purely empirical but still theoretical.  John Wisdom was keen to argue that even *after* all facts, all empirical results, are in, there may still not be a conclusion until we have  *reflected* about all that’s before us.

3.27  Other than probability ≈ 1, probability ≈ 0, the only probability number   of interest is the halfway point 0.5, which is, as it were a point of “Ignorance” or “Indifference”, an *unstable* point which must move either towards 1 or towards 0, ie towards certain knowledge in one direction or other.

3.28.  I suggest physics define

probability ≈ 1 as our *rational degree of belief* in the heliocentric solar system,

probability ≈ 0 as its contrary….

Or we can normalize with probability ≈ 0 as the Earth being flat, probability ≈ 1 its contrary.

3.29.  JH Jeans’ surmised description of the formation of the solar system (of how another star once passed by our Sun causing it to disgorge the planets) is a guess we may place at probability = 0.5.

3.30.  My proposal is, in other words, that we calibrate our rational degrees of belief by certainty eg heliocentrism prob ≈ 1, by JH Jeans’s Guess prob =0.5, and a lower limit of certainty again prob ≈ 0 eg the Earth being flat.

3.31. Certain knowledge  prob ≈ 1 is not “absolute knowledge” prob = 1.  Our slogan remains “This is where we got to”.  It is not *logically* impossible Copernicus & everyone got it wrong… Before Copernicus, Ptolemy was certain knowledge.  What can be certain knowledge in one era may be expected to change as evidence advances with time.

3.32.  Calibrating with certainty prob ≈ 1, a Guess prob=0.5, a lower limit of certainty again prob≈0, every other case must be compared and contrasted to these three in turn.  Moving  from a Guess at probability 0.5 positively towards certain knowledge prob ≈ 1 or negatively towards certain knowledge prob ≈ 0 is the process of hypothesis testing given improving evidence.  Our confidence in our belief increases away from 0.5 towards 1, or decreases away from 0.5 towards 0… call it positive, negative confidence respectively.

3.33.  A person applies for a job, he’s at 0.5, doesn’t know if he will get it…As evidence improves his confidence moves  positively towards 1 or negatively towards 0.  The initial Ignorance point 0.5 is unstable: it’s as if the 0.5 point belongs to Leibniz and movement in directions positive to 1 or negative to 0 both belong to Bayes.

3.34.  We may have the rudiments of the probability theory that eluded Keynes Ramsey de Finetti  Good etc…who may have at different stages in different ways confused objective and subjective.  (In turn, Quantum Mechanics theorists, not having time to investigate probability themselves, may have confused themselves with the dogmas of probability theorists!)

3.35.  Ramsey said we bet all the time in life: we go to the railway station betting the train will depart…or we would have stayed home… In my terms we go to the railway station betting the train will depart because we place the probability above our JH Jeans Guess of 0.5, below the probability of heliocentrism ≈ 1

3.36.  Two commuters place a probability 0.9 each day of the train departing; one day A doesn’t turn up, B does & finds the train doesn’t run. B asks A the next day, she says yes my son told me the train wasn’t going to run because there’d been a mishap down the line so I stayed home.  A’s assessment of the evidence had changed due to the new information hence her rational degree of belief, her probability, changed too… In Bayesian terms, A’s “prior probability” 0.9 the train would run crashed to a “posterior probability” ≈ 0 based on her son’s information.

3.37  From the Ignorance point 0.5 we act in one direction as prob -> 1, we act in the opposite direction as prob -> 0.   Our confidence in our belief increases away from 0.5 towards 1, or away from 0.5 towards 0… positive or negative confidence.

Alternatively, the 0.5 point is a point of Ignorance, 1 and 0 are the points of Rational Belief and Rational Disbelief respectively….

Alternatively, probability  1 is  T in “truth tables”, probability 0 is F…. 0.5 is, say, I for Ignorance or Indifference, an unstable point, moving with learning towards either T or F.

Rational Belief______Ignorance_______Rational Disbelief
Probability ≈  1                =  0.5                        ≈ 0
True T                           Ignorance I                False F

We rationally believe in heliocentrism, rationally disbelieve the Earth is flat, & we guess JH Jeans’ theory of planet formation is correct.  Once we have three such points, every other case of belief/disbelief that arises for anyone may be compared & contrasted with each of these

3.38  The 0.5 Guess point is the unstable one of “insufficient evidence”; moving in either direction increases evidence with hypothesis testing.  Moving  from a Guess at prob 0.5 positively towards certain knowledge prob ≈ 1 or negatively towards certain knowledge prob ≈ 0 is the process of hypothesis testing given improving evidence.   “It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence…” said Clifford.  (Clifford, dead at 33 in 1879, the same year Einstein is born, anticipated Einstein on gravitation by a generation, and Einstein knew it in his Berne years.)

3.39  Games of chance like rolling dice or choosing a card from a shuffled pack are artificial human contrivances to simulate states of ignorance.

In my terms, a 6-sided fair die before it is rolled would be represented by a six element vector (0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5); its possible outcomes are the rows of a 6×6 identity or unit matrix (1,0,0,0,0,0), (0,1,0,0,0,0), (0,0,1,0,0,0), (0,0,0,1,0,0), (0,0,0,0,1,0), (0,0,0,0,0,1).

With 52 cards, obviously if we know the initial order & how precisely it is shuffled (say in slow motion by a machine) we know the new order.  Our ignorance is deliberately contrived in a pack of cards to create randomness & chance for amusement; it may be a mistake to think nature is like that.

In a randomly shuffled pack, what is the top card is in my terms a 52 dimensional vector of (0.5) s, 52 possible results by a 52 dimensional identity or unit matrix.

The 0.5 would still represent the halfway between 1 and 0 in each case but otherwise = 1/6 is an ex ante “probability” in case of the die, 1/52 in case of the cards.

3.40  Einstein saying (if he did) of Quantum Mechanics “God does not roll dice” may have just meant to say: “Don’t confuse our contrived games of chance for our real ignorance of Nature…!”.   Max Born, Heisenberg and others may have tossed in prevalent probability ideas/dogmas without having the time to think them all through…

2021 Preface
Three or four points are necessary by way of a Preface in 2021 for this work created by myself and the late Ted James at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, & East West Center starting 1986. First it was Ted’s initiative along with his colleague the late Seiji Naya at the East West Center that we work on “South Asia” as soon as they had heard I had gotten to the University in 1986. The moneys officially came from the University, ie the State of Hawaii, from funds owed as rent to the State by the East West Centre, ie by the US Government. So, formally speaking, the State of Hawaii may take credit for the sponsorship.

It was at my insistence that we decided to create a distinct Pakistan project in parallel to our initial purpose of a “perestroika for India” project. The sister volume on India was entirely of my design; yes these projects arose from Hawaii, not grander universities whose India-policy programs were Johnny-come-latelies a decade or more later…

Both India and Pakistan volumes were published initially by the late Tejeshwar Singh for Sage in Delhi; the Pakistan volume was also published by Oxford in Karachi to good reviews, but then came to be, shall we say, lost. The reviews will also be made available here. “(I)t was Rajiv’s arrival in office and Benazir’s initial return to Pakistan, along with the rise of Michael Gorbachev in the changing USSR, that inspired me in far away Hawaii in 1986 to design with Ted James the perestroika-projects for India and Pakistan which led to our two volumes….There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune….”

This Pakistan volume was of our joint design; I invited the Francis Robinson, Akbar Ahmed, John Adams chapters; Ted invited all the others; both of us agreed on all decisions. The military and religious clergy had been deliberately not invited by us though the name of Pervez Musharraf had I think arisen, and the military and religious clergy in fact came to rule the roost through the 1990s in Pakistan; this volume, almost three decades old, takes on fresh relevance with the new civilian governments of recent years.

Francis Robinson, Akbar Ahmed, Shirin Tahir-Kehli, Robert La Porte Jr, Shahid Javed Burki, Mohsin Khan, Mahmood Hasan Khan, Naved Hamid, John Adams and Shahrukh Khan are the set of authors here, and each has copyright of his/her own chapter; the copyright of the whole collection is with the President of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and was delegated to the editors formally in 1996. Ted and I pleaded with the publishers for paperback editions, and in case of the Pakistan volume an Urdu translation, but we failed. Ted did obtain in 1996 the President’s permission for us to reproduce the works freely in interest of knowledge, and now I am finally uploading it as pdf copies that may be downloaded. Ted died prematurely in 2010, and I am in search of a co-editor who may take his place for the further development of perhaps second editions.
In 2004 I said “… if our plan to study Afghanistan after India and Pakistan had not been thwarted by malign local forces among our sponsors themselves, we, a decade before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the USA, may  just have come up with a pre-emptive academic analysis.   It was not to be.”
Finally, my assessment of the Kashmir problem in the Introduction is something that came to be lifted without acknowledgement by two major Pakistani politicians and one major Indian politician; but I have explicitly withdrawn it myself as being naiive and ignorant. My assessments since then are linked here.

Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, edited by William E James & Subroto Roy

2021 Preface
Three or four points are necessary by way of a Preface in 2021 for this work created by myself and the late Ted James at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, & East West Center starting 1986.  First it was Ted’s initiative along with his colleague the late Seiji Naya at the East West Center that we work on “South Asia” as soon as they had heard I had gotten to the University in 1986. The moneys officially came from the University, ie the State of Hawaii, from funds owed as rent to the State by the East West Centre, ie by the US Government. So, formally speaking, the State of Hawaii may take credit for the sponsorship.

It was at my insistence that we decided to create a distinct sister project on Pakistan in parallel to our initial purpose of a “perestroika for India” project. In 2004 I said “… if our plan to study Afghanistan after India and Pakistan had not been thwarted by malign local forces among our sponsors themselves, we, a decade before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the USA, may  just have come up with a pre-emptive academic analysis.  It was not to be.”

This volume on India was entirely of my design; yes these projects arose from Hawaii, not grander universities whose India-policy programs were Johnny-come-latelies a decade or more later…

Both India and Pakistan volumes were published initially by the late Tejeshwar Singh for Sage in Delhi; the Pakistan volume was also published by Oxford in Karachi to good reviews, but then came to be, shall we say, lost. The reviews will also be made available here. “(I)t was Rajiv’s arrival in office and Benazir’s initial return to Pakistan, along with the rise of Michael Gorbachev in the changing USSR, that inspired me in far away Hawaii in 1986 to design with Ted James the perestroika-projects for India and Pakistan which led to our two volumes….There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune….”

Each author has copyright of his own chapter; the copyright of the whole collection is with the President of the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and was delegated to the editors formally in 1996. Ted and I pleaded with the publishers for paperback editions but we failed. Ted did obtain in 1996 the President’s permission for us to reproduce the works freely in interest of knowledge, and now I am finally uploading it as pdf copies that may be downloaded. Ted died prematurely in 2010, and I am in search of a co-editor who may take his place for the further development of perhaps second editions.

India’s notable economists Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, Manmohan Singh will not be seen in the group photograph dated 21 May 1989 at the UH President’s House.  The Government of India was represented by the Ambassador to Washington, PK Kaul, as well as the Consul General in San Francisco, KS Rana (later Ambassador to Germany), besides the founding head of ICRIER who had invited himself.  We had a very serious attitude that was inspired a bit, I might say, by Oppenheimer’s secret “Manhattan project” and we wanted neither press-publicity nor anyone to become the star who ended up hogging the microphone or the limelight. There were many demands from Indian economic bureaucrats and from the press to be present, which came to be resisted.

The revenge against me of Dr Manmohan Singh and his friend, Harvard Professor Amartya Sen, has been to pretend that my work did not exist 😀 !

In true Soviet style, there has been a Stalinist wipe-out of Trotsky (later Brezhnev of Khruschev) 😀 !

Trotsky In, Trotsky Out! Decades before Photoshop!@INCIndia @wangxiangweihk @SCMP_News pic.twitter.com/rtvXmirMjA

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) November 23, 2015

But this is the modern age, and the fact is now established that I, and not Manmohan Singh or Narasimha Rao, sparked the 1991 economic reform when the results of the Hawaii perestroika-for-India project led by myself and Ted James reached first Siddhartha Shankar Ray and then Rajiv Gandhi in August-October 1990.

I do not say there has been plagiarism by Dr Singh, because I do not think there is plagiarism in politics… which has to do with contests of political power… I do say there has been plagiarism by his academic friend Professor Sen…

I don't say Manmohan Singh plagiarized my work re 🇮🇳 policy because I don"t see plagiarism to apply in politics in any significant way. I do say it applies in academia and I, w regret, may charge Manmohan's @Harvard friend #AmartyaSen w plagiarism in re Wittgenstein & EconTheory https://t.co/ziDb5PAa2D

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) August 3, 2021

T N Srinivasan was charged by us to write the excellent chapter that he came to do titled “Planning and Foreign Trade Reconsidered”. The other main economist author we had hoped for was Sukhamoy Chakravarty from Delhi University and the Government of India’s Planning Commission, whom I had known since 1977 when I had been given his office at the Delhi School of Economics as a Visiting Assistant Professor while he was on sabbatical; despite my pleading he would not come due to ill health; he strongly recommended C Rangarajan, telling me Rangarajan had been the main author with him of the crucial 1985 RBI report on monetary policy; and he signed and gave me his last personal copy of that report dating it 14 July 1987.  Rangarajan said he could not come and recommended the head of the NIPFP, Amaresh Bagchi, promising to write jointly with him the chapter on monetary policy and public finance.  Along with Milton Friedman’s suppressed 1955 memorandum which I was publishing for the first time in 1989, TN Srinivasan and Amaresh Bagchi authored the three main economic policy chapters that we felt we wanted.  Other chapters we commissioned had to do with the state of governance (James Manor), federalism (Bhagwan Dua), Punjab and similar problems (PR Brass), agriculture (K Subbarao, as proposed by CH Hanumantha Rao), health (Anil Deolalikar, through open advertisement), and a historical assessment of the roots of economic policy (BR Tomlinson, as proposed by Anil Seal).  On the vital subject of education we failed to agree with the expert we wanted very much  (JBG Tilak, as proposed by George Psacharopolous) and so we had to cover the subject cursorily in our introduction mentioning his work.  And decades later, I apologised to Professor Dietmar Rothermund of Heidelberg University for having been so blinkered in the Anglo-American tradition at the time as to not having obtained his participation in the project.  Others I missed were B M Bhatia, Holly Sims, and more.

Finally, my assessment of the Kashmir problem in the Pakistan volume Introduction is something that came to be lifted without acknowledgement by two major Pakistani politicians and one major Indian politician; but I have explicitly withdrawn it myself as being naiive and ignorant. My assessments since then are linked here.

Foundations of India’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s, edited by Subroto Roy & William E. James

Critique of Amartya Sen:

A Tragedy of Plagiarism, Fake News, Dissimulation

by

Subroto Roy

July-December 2021 and continuing

This will be an extended ongoing critique of Amartya Sen’s works, starting today 26 July 2021 when his latest book reached my hand… it will continue sporadically… I will inform Professor Sen’s Harvard University office of this start today… Any reply by or on behalf of Professor Sen shall be published here unedited, not only in the Comments but as a special Post too or alternatively, following the text.

Contents:

1. Those Soviet Communists — Bukharin, Khruschev (initial)

2. Cambridge 1961 : Hahn (& Kaldor & Arrow & DH Robertson & Sukhamoy)

3. The SC Bose Nazism Whitewash/Cover-Up, MK Gandhi’s Five Rupees, Rabindranath & the Babies

4. Wittgenstein & Economic Theory I 1989: KJ Arrow’s response to the Subroto Roy criticism

5. Wittgenstein & Economic Theory II 2006 : Subroto Roy Amartya Sen dialogue

6. “I was never in the Communist Party (nor ever tempted to join it)”: Amartya Sen, Non-Party communist?

7. Tokenism! the Non-Communist names of Robertson, Hicks, Buchanan, Bauer mentioned! And why does the Amartya Sen Principles of Economics textbook not exist?

8. Amartya Sen’s genius insight into Soviet Communism! But also a KGB blind-spot?

9. Wittgenstein & Economic Theory III: Did Amartya plagiarize my work in his 1998 Nobel Banquet speech? Is he about to do so again?

10. Wittgenstein & Economic Theory IV: Exactly what Subroto Roy, Renford Bambrough, John Wisdom (and Wittgenstein) have already done… for the kind information of Amartya Sen & Team Amartya

11. Wittgenstein & Economic Theory V: Implications of my work for Economic Theory & Policy: Sidney Alexander, Karl Georg Zinn, TW Schultz

12. Amartya Sen’s excellent article of 1962 in the Hahn volume that he himself seems unaware of: I suggest he withdraw from publication the Team Amartya product, and he and I write an accurate biography for him instead…

to be continued…

1. Those Soviet Communists — Bukharin, Khruschev (initial)
Bukharin, we are told by Kolakowski, published three main books: Historical Materialism, English translation 1928, The ABC of Communism (with Preobrazhensky) 1924, Imperialism and World Economy, 1929.

We are told by Professor Amartya Sen in his new autobiographical work published in July 2021, he “knew well” the writings of Bukharin — not merely in his mature years as a student or professor but “a decade earlier”, ie as a boy while at Santiniketan school c. 1946!
Viz.,

Now it gives me absolutely no pleasure to have to point out errors, inconsistencies, self-contradictions, whether trivial or incorrigible, in this or other works of Amartya Sen, not least because of our initial encounter in 1964 Hindustan Park:

“8 November 2019: …. I am sorry to hear #NabaneetaDevSen #NabanitaDebSen died. “Naren Deb and Manindranath Roy were friends and neighbours, and we still have the signed copy of a book gifted by the former to the latter” I said in 2013… the book is Meghdoot in the original, the place Hindustan Park; “14 Hindustan Park Ballygunge, where the Roys had been moved during WWarII because Surendra Bhavan in Behala was requisitioned as a military hospital”… later we lived the whole of 1964 at Tapodham also at Hindustan Park and #NabanitaDebSen #NabaneetaDevSen visited us frequently; She liked me much as a Xaverian in Class IV at the time (we never met later), told me she’d introduce me to her husband when he came and he was “an economist”, first time I ever heard the word… on a sunny very hot day on the empty street at Hindustan Park, I, a noisy nine year old, met a slim tall brilliant man named Amartya Sen..”

was vital to Economics a word I first heard from her when she said her husband was an economist and travelling. But I didn't know what Mathematics meant either, we had first Number then Arithmetic. For this meeting I'm happy to search now for any insight to be found in his work.

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) November 27, 2021

Almost 50 years later a half century later, my 2013 criticism said “Amartya Sen, if anyone, really should get down to writing his memoirs, and candidly so in order to explain his own thinking and deeds over the decades to himself and to the world in order that needless confusions do not arise”… and eight years after that we have this new volume from him which are said to be his memoirs… an autobiographical work authored in his mid 80s. …

The Nobel Prize academy apparently allow information updates too and have said in Professor Sen’s case:

A person’s memories while awake, like his/her dreams while asleep, are purely subjective — until and unless these start to get to be described by the person. Once a memory or a dream is described by the person and claimed to be authentic, it becomes a subject of general logical and empirical testing like any claim to truth. When a person’s purely subjective dreams start to be described by the dreamer himself/herself, the hearer, eg a Freudian psychoanalyst, or reader of the description has to judge its authenticity and practical usefulness (is that honestly what the dream was?) … It is the same with the species of our thoughts we call memories; a person’s memories are purely subjective but once the person starts to describe such memories to himself or others they become part of language, and the reader or hearer must judge what is being said for authenticity like anything else.

Some of what Amartya Sen has published here (or perhaps Team Amartya has published in his name?) is, if not fictitious or fully fantastical, at least very unlikely or highly implausible… Amartya knowing well the works of Bukharin as a boy even before he reached Presidency College, i.e. a decade before Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin, seems one such implausible claim… One has to wonder what the point is of making such claims; it cannot be merely a result of a publisher’s sloppy editing. Why would Professor Amartya Sen in 2021 want to give out an impression that he, alone in the world in 1956, found the Khruschev denunciation of Stalin “completely unsurprising”? (Placing him with his Soviet hero Bukharin, “the leading Leninist philosopher of his time”, left of Stalin and right of Trotsky?).

There are several situations in this autobiography where, to put it charitably, the adult grown-up Amartya Sen has transposed his current mental state/ wisdom/ knowledge/experience etc upon the Boy Amartya or youthful Amartya. The result is a modern publisher’s product under the brand name of a celebrity author but not any genuine memoir or autobiography or account of history, at least in these places which are many. There are other problems too with Amartya Sen’s memoirs, specifically instances of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi… we will try to identify these one by one.

2. Cambridge 1961 : Hahn (& Kaldor & Arrow & DH Robertson & Sukhamoy)

Amartya Sen says he returned to Cambridge in 1961 to find Frank Hahn had been appointed due to an intervention of Nicholas Kaldor.

Kaldor, says Amartya, “had been very impressed by Frank after meeting him at a seminar exactly once…” Amartya “told Nicky I was very pleased that he had taken that initiative, since Frank was a splendid economist… and also… that it was very good (Kaldor) could form such a strong opinion about a person on the basis of only one meeting. Nicky replied that…”

This is just false/nonsensical. Amartya and Team Amartya are clueless on the matter and yet have published as being true and accurate an apparently false memory of either Amartya or Kaldor or both, which de facto amounts to production of disinformation or “fake news”, to use the modern term. For the kind information of Amartya Sen and Team Amartya, Kaldor was Hahn’s initial PhD supervisor at the LSE…! Robbins later became Hahn’s supervisor when Kaldor left for Geneva; it was also said Kaldor and Hahn clashed too much. Amartya was at the time starting undergraduate economics at Presidency after Santiniketan, and would have been unaware of all this. Hahn’s doctoral thesis was published in 1972 more than twenty years after it was submitted; had Amartya seen it or discussed the matter with Frank, his “close friend”, he would have known this; or even if he checked with Frank’s Wikipedia entry. He did not. Instead he has published what is evidently an imaginary/fictitious conversation with Kaldor dated 1961 about Hahn. Why do so?

Kaldor in 1961 may have backed Hahn, his former doctoral student, if he did, because Hahn and Pasinetti are acknowledged by Kaldor in 1958 doing the mathematics of a growth model of his which came to be published in 1961. NB for future reference here, there were long publishing lags back then, nothing instantaneous.

Secondly, Frank Hahn had already met Kenneth Arrow in America several years earlier, and had commenced the 17 year collaboration with Arrow that led in 1971 to publication of General Competitive Analysis. Amartya makes no reference to this major work, though he makes clear his contempt of what he imagines to be “neoclassical economics”. Viz., page 288, where Amartya dismisses “neoclassical simply as mainstream economics, with a cluster of maximizing agents — capitalists, labourers, consumers, and so on — who follow mechanical rules of maximization by equating marginal this with marginal that”.

At the same time Amartya is keen to persuade us he was introduced to Arrow’s “impossibility theorem” by Sukhamoy Chakravarty as soon as it was first published in 1951, the book flying immediately from the hot presses of RAND or the Cowles Foundation to College Street bookshops in Calcutta by jet planes not yet flying, allowing Sukhamoy to borrow a copy from a shop and discuss it with his fellow Presidency freshman Amartya Sen at once…

This from the 2017/2018 Harvard University Press edition of his 1970 book is in summary repeated in the 2021 Memoir too. Amartya Sen says he wanted to work on “social choice theory” at Cambridge from the start but was dissuaded by Joan Robinson and even Sraffa to whom he was closest at Cambridge. Does Amartya know even today that another Cambridge economist he has claimed much of a relationship with, DH Robertson, had published on utility theory & the rationality of homo oeconomicus in the early 1950s referring to the “convinced & eminent ordinalist Mr K J Arrow” while tracing thought from Marshall & Pareto to Pigou Hicks Allen Samuelson? Apparently not. Team Amartya have extremely generously given us in the new Harvard edition of the 1970 book an index reference against Robertson to a page 548… which leads only to the names of two of his essays on utility! No substantive discussion nor any mention of his Principles!

In fact, Robertson taught the central (and presumably “compulsory?” or as nearly compulsory as possible in the anarchic system at the time?) Economic Principles course of the Cambridge Economics Tripos to undergraduates between 1946/47 and 1956/57! Did Amartya miss those lectures in his undergraduate years at Cambridge 1953-1955? Does he know Robertson published those Economic Principles lectures in the late 1950s, early 1960s? As recently as June 2021, Professor Sen has told the Harvard Gazette “There was a kind of gulf, because in Calcutta, I was quite used to doing rather technical economics, and suddenly, I found myself attending classes in Cambridge with people who had done very little technical economics”. This is either preposterous in view of Robertson’s masterly lectures for undergraduates at Cambridge from 1946/47 to 1956/57 (see below), or indicative of young Amartya Sen not knowing or even knowing of Robertson’s lectures at all at the time despite the current Amartya Sen claiming Robertson was one of his teachers, a non-Communist one at that!

My own bet is on the latter. Robertson is in this volume supposed to provide balance to Amartya Sen’s Communist heroes at Cambridge, Dobb and Sraffa — except it seems in fact our protagonist knows nothing of Robertson’s economics and missed his masterly lectures (see below)! Amartya’s supervisor Joan Robinson was uglily intolerant in her opinion of Robertson and Robertson’s efforts to keep Marshall’s economics alive at Cambridge; did Amartya not know that? Besides, there was no “technical economics” being taught at Calcutta University or Presidency College or anywhere else in India at the time; mostly descriptive Indian economics.

Joan Robinson did publish on the back of one of her books a classic 1927 photo of Sraffa, Keynes, Robertson, and one might wonder if her hostility

in the 1950s along with Sraffa, Kaldor, Kahn, and other communists/leftists against Robertson was merely to contest Keynes’s legacy — Keynes, dead prematurely in 1946 in his 63rd year, himself considered his pupils Robertson and Hawtrey to be his “grandfathers” who had taught him monetary economics! Amartya Sen was evidently unfamiliar with Robertson’s economics in the 1950s and 1960s and remains so today (see below).

If Amartya had been so impressed with Arrow’s “social choice theory” which was relatively obscure in its first 1951 edition, did he write to him in America about it? If he did, why not publish that letter and any reply? Did Amartya ask Hahn about Arrow as of 1961 with whom Hahn was working already? Amartya says James Mirrless had joined as a Research Student and was sitting in on his lectures; did he not come to know Arrow would visit Cambridge too shortly, being at Churchill College with Hahn, and also being the External PhD Examiner of Mirrlees? In fact Arrow and Sen were both at Cambridge in 1963-1964 but perhaps missed meeting.

Amartya Sen says he and his wife in June 1963 “packed our things and left for Delhi” as they wanted their first child due in September/October to be born in India; that child’s Wikipedia entry today however says she is a “British Indian journalist”, born in England not India. Similar confusion arises here with our author himself saying “I came from Dhaka to Santiniketan to be born” page 8, but also telling the Pakistanis he was born in Dhaka.

I had to note @Harvard Prof @AmartyaSen_Econ eldest child says she was born in 🇬🇧 but he says she was born in 🇮🇳…… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…—
Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) November 24, 2021

Arrow’s memoir of his visit to Hahn at Cambridge in 1963-1964 mentions Kaldor, Robinson, even Sraffa, plus Mirrlees too whom he examined, but not Amartya Sen nor indeed any “social choice theory”. Did Amartya discuss Arrow or any utility theory at all with Robertson, his teacher at Trinity College he says in the late 1950s, and if so, did Robertson not get him to read what he had himself said about the “convinced & eminent ordinalist Mr KJ Arrow”? The answer is apparently “No” to all of this. So the mysteries of Amartya Sen’s new autobiographical work just get added to…

Unless of course Amartya has, accidentally and/or deliberately, gotten his dates and memories of those decades 1943-1953, 1953-1963 all wrong!

Sukhamoy might have talked to him at some point about Arrow’s theory but Amartya’s original Preface dated 1 August 1969 to his 1970 compendium Collective Choice and Social Welfare states clearly it was his Master Dobb at Cambridge who introduced him to the subject! Why has Professor Sen in 2017-2021 claimed Sukhamoy Chakravarty started him on the road to “social choice theory” in 1951 before he ever got to Cambridge, when he himself declared in 1969 it was his Cambridge teacher Dobb, the British Communist, “a decade and a half ago” ie 1954? Sukhamoy, his colleague at the Delhi School at the time, does not even get a mention in these 1969 Acknowledgments!

Has Professor Sen just invented a tale about Sukhamoy borrowing a copy from a College Street bookshop back in 1951 (as if such a copy appeared instantly at College Street after publication in America) then sharing it with Amartya Sen in heavy discussion? Why invent this? It is a mystery.

In 1969 the American Economic Review published a Survey of “Contributions to Indian Economic Analysis”, edited by Jagdish Bhagwati at MIT and Sukhamoy Chakravarty at the Delhi School. It had been commissioned by the American Economic Association under editorship of the Canadian economist Harry G Johnson (1923-1977). Harry Johnson, neoclassical economist par excellence, had taught at Cambridge (having been hired instantly by Robertson), was first a pupil and later a colleague of Maurice Dobb’s and knew the undergraduate Amartya Sen there, yet a decade and a half later in 1969 chose Bhagwati and Chakravarty as editors for the Survey. Was that Survey a source of some kind of difficulty or tension between Amartya and Sukhamoy, which led him to exclude the latter completely from his 1969 Acknowledgements, only to construct a story crediting him now decades later? We simply do not know, except there is plain self-contradiction on the part of Amartya Sen about who got him started on the Arrow “social choice” theory: Dobb in 1954 as he said in 1969 or Sukhamoy in 1951 as he says now? It cannot be both, and whichever it is, the other needs an explanation (assuming there is no yet unknown third alternative).

Sukhamoy and I had two long conversations, one in 1977 when I was given his Delhi School office, one in 1987 when I visited him at the Planning Commission trying to persuade him to join my Manoa perestroika-for-India project, and he due to ill-health recommended C Rangarajan instead and gave me and signed his last copy of his famous 1985 RBI report.

Yes Amartya Sen his college year-mate appeared in both conversations, and I seem to recall, perhaps incorrectly, Sukhamoy saying Amartya had done Arts subjects at the “IA” level, and was initially headed to read English at Presidency; but I could be wrong; Amartya has now said he was strong at Physics in Santiniketan school and “majored” in Economics with a “minor” in Mathematics at Presidency!

Sukhamoy’s death in his mid 50s in 1990 was a tragedy for Indian policy-making, and India’s economists too… Amartya dedicated an edited UN book to his memory within weeks or months of his passing…

Nor did Amartya Sen start his “dabbling” in Western philosophy until the 1960s or really much later. His initial years spent at Cambridge, Jadavpur, Warsaw, Berkeley etc were mainly spent with Dobb, Sraffa, Joan Robinson, Marglin, and other Marxists and leftists doing mostly Marxism and Marxist political economy of some kind or other, not analytical economics or philosophy! His Prize Fellowship thesis of 1955-57, which later “was also submitted for a PhD degree of Cambridge University” and published as Choice of Techniques, acknowledges his Master Dobb, the British Communist and Soviet specialist, “I owe him my interest in this particular topic”. Dobb himself published a similar book at the same time, acknowledging “Dr Amartya Kumar Sen whose ideas have in some respects developed along parallel lines to my own…”

Dobb made clear his thinking was different from Harrod’s and other growth models (of Joan Robinson, Kaldor) all about private property owning economies; his was about “analysing problems in a planned economy where capital is socially owned and hence investment is (in some sense) socially controlled”. His devoted pupil’s appears the same, making best sense only in a context of collectivized Soviet agriculture (Appendix B, pp 88-92, 1975 third edition), or perhaps, with its reference to steel furnace technologies, to Mao Zedhong’s “Little Leap Forward” and “Great Leap Forward”…

And yet there is the whole absence of Indian planning in particular! Amiya Kumar Dasgupta (1903-1992) was a close friend of Amartya Sen’s family and his father’s colleague at Dhaka University, who was also Amartya’s mentor (getting him to Cambridge?) and (with Joan Robinson) his Cambridge PhD co-supervisor. Amartya Sen’s 1981 book Poverty and Famines is dedicated most fulsomely to Amiya Dasgupta whom he calls in the text of this autobiography Amiyakaka, Uncle Amiya

Despite the first name on the list of economists advising on India’s Second Five Year Plan being none other than the same Dr A. K. Dasgupta

young Amartya Sen has no normal ambition in his 20s to put his shoulder to the wheel as an economist at Nehru’s new and highly prestigious Planning Commission! Joan Robinson, Kaldor, Peter Bauer, even Milton Friedman and numerous others are involved in Indian economic policy surrounding the Second Five Year Plan… but not India’s brightest young spark at the time, Amartya Sen. He accepts an offer in his early 20s in 1956 to start an Economics department at Jadavpur, and even visits Delhi for a little gossip and adda, but he doesn’t apparently request Amiya Dasgupta or Joan Robinson or Kaldor to get him into the Planning Commission during the Second Five Year Plan! Backed by Dasgupta, Joan Robinson, Kaldor, even Bauer, Amartya Sen would have quickly become the Emperor of Indian Economic Planning with a massive impact on government policy — for the better at least from the quasi-Soviet perspective of his Master Dobb. But he has no such ambition, and merely seems to want to return to the West as soon as possible… All the things Professor Amartya Sen has been (with his friends and allies) moaning about the Government of India not having done over the decades for India’s masses could have been possibly done if he had himself taken a leadership role in Indian planning in the mid or late 1950s. He chose not to do so himself.

Amartya’s assiduous Presidency class-mate Sukhamoy, also on the Left but not any ideological Sovietized Left, does work on Indian planning and creates this by 1959:

Amartya Sen is in the main not interested as of 1953 at Cambridge or for the next decade until his 1963 return to Delhi

either in philosophy (“you know my philosophy was not an important thing at the time”, he told me frankly in 2006), notwithstanding Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations published in 1953 being all the rage in Cambridge Philosophy;

or in Keynesian economics, being all the rage in Cambridge Economics;

or in Indian economic planning, being all the rage among policy-makers in America, Britain, India etc.

Consistent with his leftism from Santiniketan and Presidency College days, what Amartya Sen is mainly interested in is the work of the British Communist Dobb, and perhaps the ideological work of the Italian Communist Sraffa (not Sraffa’s monumental editing of Ricardo with Dobb’s help, or his 1960 theoretical book in preparation), and perhaps (like his friend Manmohan Singh) the work of Joan Robinson and Kaldor…

The Polish Communist Oscar Lange (Stalin himself reportedly got President Franklin Roosevelt to give Lange, then an American, permission to be a USA-USSR interlocutor on Poland; later Lange gave up his US citizenship), makes a point of visiting at Cambridge in 1956 young Amartya Sen from India before Sen goes to Jadavpur; two years later, after Amartya Sen returns from Jadavpur, he is invited to visit Warsaw via East Berlin and does so for two weeks in 1958 — but remembers of this only “Chopin’s beautiful home” near the city! New mysteries needing to be explained! After a few years, Arrow’s “social choice theory” material gives Amartya Sen a way back to return from his Delhi School professorship to the West, to Berkeley and Harvard and eventually LSE.

3. The SC Bose Nazism Whitewash/Cover-Up, MK Gandhi’s Five Rupees, Rabindranath & the Babies

One can have every sympathy for Professor Amartya Sen in his late 80s, approaching his 90th year, not being aware of basic misrepresentations being made in his name. But Team Amartya, of his ghost writers, chelas, chamchas, dalals, and assorted vested interests deserve only contempt for what they have done in manufacturing this publisher’s product.

Consider what they have done with reference to three Indian national heroes, Subhas Chandra Bose (SC Bose), MK Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore.

Bose is well-known to have escaped from British India and made his way to Nazi Germany, hoping to meet with Hitler. He was kept waiting by Hitler for more than a year in Berlin, granted an audience only after Hitler had launched his attack on the USSR.

Bose in 1941/1943 was hardly the first Indian Nazi sympathizer in Berlin. Nehru’s Autobiography published in 1936 referred to one Champakaraman Pillai, who died in Berlin in 1934. Nehru says this Pillai “was perfectly at home” with “the Steelhelmets”. “He was one of the very few Indians who got on with the Nazis”, wrote Nehru in 1934. And Nehru added, the Indians who had been trying since World War I to enlist German support, were in difficult straits after the War. Nehru said in 1934: “The Nazi regime since early in 1933 has added to their misfortunes, unless they fall in completely with the Nazi doctrine. Non-Nordic, and especially Asiatic, foreigners are not welcome in Germany; they are only suffered to exist so long as they behave. Hitler has pointedly declared himself in favour of British imperialist rule in India, no doubt because he wants to gain the goodwill of Britain, and he does not wish to encourage any Indians who may have displeased the British Government”.

Bose waited for Hitler, who finally shook his hand and was photographed doing so, Bose sat at the same table as Himmler for a meal or drinks, toured a few Indian PoWs held by the Nazis, and was then sent on a Nazi submarine to their Imperial Japanese ally, where he became one of Tojo’s subalterns.

None of this about SC Bose has anything at all to do with the life or work of the Thomas W Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. Yet what Team Amartya have done is use Amartya Sen’s book to assert (pages 145-146),

“… the German commitment to Indian independence seemed to Bose to be rather minimal. He decided to relocate again, and ultimately managed to reach Japan during the early months of 1943 after a perilous sea journey, mostly in a submarine…” (italics added).

Bose “decided to relocate again“? Or had tried and failed to enlist his Nazi friends’ support, was then sent by them instead to be a subaltern to their ally Tojo? Even Team Amartya’s next claim that Bose “raised a significant number of troops from the captured Indian soldiers” is false: Bose was never a soldier or officer, though is said to have dressed up in a uniform like a British Field Marshall as early as 1928, and he did not raise the “Indian National Army”; that was done by Captain Mohan Singh, from Indian PoWs who had been angered by British racism, evacuating white soldiers but leaving the Indians to be captured by the Japanese. In any event, the behaviour of the Japanese military towards the Indians was mixed, ranging from creating some subaltern Indian regiments, to murdering and even cannibalizing some Indian soldiers who refused to join them. As for Team Amartya claiming “the German commitment to Indian independence seemed to Bose to be rather minimal”, during the Nazi-Soviet pact it was known Hitler wished to see Stalin’s Russia, his biggest satellite power, take over rule of India once the British Empire had collapsed; indeed Bose was said to have moved to Berlin via Russia. “What have we done to deserve this?” Molotov moaned to the German ambassador in Moscow when Hitler attacked.

Amartya Sen, I have said, has at several points transposed his adult grown-up self’s current mental state/ wisdom/ knowledge/experience etc upon Boy Amartya or the youthful Amartya.  In the SC Bose matter, if Amartya is aware at all of what Team Amartya has tried to do, namely use his book to add to the ongoing whitewash/cover-up of Bose’s sojourn with the Nazis, Amartya has done the opposite: perhaps as a boy or youth he did not know about the Nazi connection or photographs, but surely he has learnt since then of the whole issue though seems to have consented to the whitewash/coverup!

Elsewhere in the book (page 137) may be found to be promoted the Sarat Bose/Suhrawardy idea backed by MA Jinnah of an unpartitioned Bengal! Haren Ghosh was murdered conveying to SP Mookerjee the 1946 plot of that which he had overheard waiting to meet Suhrawardy. An apt cartoon from 17 May 1947 described the Suhrawardy, SP Mookerjee, British, and MK Gandhi alternatives in Bengal:

The Pakistanis wanted India to begin at Howrah, had even suggested Calcutta could be the capital of Pakistan as Delhi would be of India. Does Amartya Sen or Team Amartya consider “a united and secular Bangladesh a feasible and elevating idea” (p. 137 italics added)? That is what they have published in 2021; yes it is an illegal wish in India, against our Constitution.

The influence of Team Amartya with or without the protagonist of the book appears too in a story on page 49 about how the Boy Amartya visited MK Gandhi in December 1945 during the latter’s Santiniketan visit, and paid a required “five rupee donation” for the great man’s autograph and the privilege to discuss issues with him briefly.

Our author reportedly says five-rupees was “a fairly small sum by any world standard” (italics added) and it was paid from his pocket money which he had “luckily” saved.

Five rupees in 1945/1946 in Bengal, India, a “fairly small sum by any world standard” says at age 12 the future eminent economist and scholar of the Bengal famine? It is beyond bizarre. It is inconceivable that these are Amartya Sen’s words or thoughts being published.

First, is it plausible MK Gandhi charged for his autograph? Very much so; Nehru himself noted Gandhi’s banya shrewdness, and it would have been good economics to put a price on his autograph. But five rupees in 1945 might have been charged to G D Birla or such friends, not a 12 year old boy in Santiniketan. Perhaps the price was five annas and Team Amartya not knowing what an anna was, made that into rupees? We do not know. Before the 1949 devaluation of Sterling and hence the Rupee with the US dollar, those five rupees exchanged quite freely for about an American dollar and a half at the time, whose purchasing power today is close to twenty dollars. Or alternatively, in terms of rupee inflation, those five rupees in 1945 might be about 350 rupees today, or several kilograms of rice in Bengal, whether then or now. It’s said Amartya paid his saved pocket money (hey, I’ve said years ago I aged 7 paid my “saved pocket money” in 1962/1963 to Nehru for the defence against PRC aggression) to get Gandhi’s autograph, which was “unadorned”, in “Devanagari”, and “only his initials and surname”. Doubtless, Amartya having invested so much in the Gandhi autograph has kept it? Especially as the great man seems to have usually signed his name in English and not Hindi?

And has Amartya kept the photographs (mentioned on page 191) of himself as a child literally on the shoulders of PC Mahalanobis, another “close family friend”? But no, this volume prepared by Team Amartya has but a few dull photos of only Amartya himself, and not any such interesting images.

As for the brief 1945 conversation with MK Gandhi that the 12 year old Amartya reportedly purchased a right to with his saved pocket money equivalent to several kilos of rice, it was said to be about the lad’s “fight against the caste system” and the great man’s fight against “the inequities of the caste system”. Definitely Gandhi fought strongly against, to use the term the West loves so much, “Untouchability” in Hindu or Indian society; is that the same aspect of the caste-system as what Amartya Sen has appeared to be against? Professor Sen appears in this book someone very self-conscious about his personal caste and its members and allies, while being antagonistic towards the “priesthood”; ie Brahmins. The caste-competition among the “higher” classes of Hindus of Bengal, ie prejudices, tensions, jealousies between “Brahmin”, “Kayasth”, “Boddi” etc, especially in the past, are generally known about. To battle against “Untouchability” as Gandhi did is a “fight against the caste system”; Kayasth and Boddi antagonism towards Brahmins or vice versa is more a fight within the caste system! As late as June 2021, Professor Sen has allowed the Harvard Gazette (see below) to say about him that he “(comes) from a long line of Hindu intellectuals and teachers”, “Teaching was in his blood”…! No Brahmins I know of would ever make such a genetic claim!

The lad also wanted to talk about Gandhi’s “dispute with Rabindranath on the Bihar earthquake” in 1934 when Amartya had been a baby but was told by the great man’s “minders” that his time was up.

Then there is that other great man and world figure, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), whom Nehru reports Gandhi to have called “Boro Dada”, Elder Brother, the founder of Santiniketan.

Amartya Sen claims a close “family friendship” with Rabindranath via his maternal grandfather Kshitimohan Sen (1880-1960), a Sanskrit scholar and school-teacher, whom Tagore invited to help run his new secondary school. Amartya has said as a baby he was named by Tagore. As it happens the Wikipedia entry of Nabaneeta Dev Sen says she too was named as a baby by Tagore some years later. For the revered patriarch of a traditional community to name babies would have been quite a normal thing. Someone would have come to Tagore and sought his blessings: “Gurudev, Omitaer chhele hoyeche, apnar ashirbad chaichhe” (Master, Amita has had a boy and seeks your blessing); in case of Nabaneeta, “Gurudev, RadhaRanir meye hoyeche, apnar ashirbad chaichhe”… (Master, Radha Rani has had a girl and seeks your blessing), and Tagore might have said “Omitar chhele ke Omorto naam dao” (Name Amita’s son Amartya), “Naren RadhaRanir meyer naam Noboneeta dao” (Name the daughter of Naren Radha Rani Noboneeta)… And that’s it. That would be that!

But no, Team Amartya, wishing to tailor things for an American Democratic Party East Coast-West Coast readership?, had to add “Rabindranath persuaded my mother that it was boring to stick to well-used names and he proposed a new name for me. Amartya… immortal…” (italics added)… I.e. Gurudev, in between his many travels at the time to Ceylon, Iran, Iraq or wherever, found the time to have (and win) a quick debate with the mother of the newborn Amartya about novel and boring names for her baby… Hmmm… Ok….

4. Wittgenstein & Economic Theory I, 1989: K. J. Arrow’s response to the Subroto Roy criticism

In September 1989, after a struggle of numerous years, my Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry was published in London and New York; the next month, I, from Honolulu, gifted a copy to Kenneth Arrow at Stanford.

My inscription praised Arrow’s work (from which I had learnt so much in its market theory aspects) and said I had always seen it as a scientific challenge. [Uploading the inscription today 29 September 2021, I find the words “inspiration and magnificent challenge” not “scientific challenge” as I remembered it, and also mean now.]

Arrow’s 17 year collaboration with Frank Hahn that resulted in General Competitive Analysis was known to me, and Hahn had paid me fifty pounds sterling back in 1976/1977 to proof-read it for a second edition. Arrow and I had met briefly in the early 1980s at an American Economic Association meeting, and I had sent him in 1982 “Knowledge and Freedom in Economic Theory Parts I and II”, a discussion paper I had published with Jim Buchanan’s Center for Study of Public Choice. The thrust of my criticism at that time was the contradiction present in Arrow’s work between his assumptions about information in market theory (or general equilibrium) work and in his “social choice” theory. An earlier draft of this had been sent to F A Hayek in Freiburg, and Hayek had very encouragingly said:

“I was grateful for the reminder of the passage of Aristotle at which I had not looked for many years and found the criticism of Arrow well justified and important.”

I do not think Arrow understood this aspect of my criticism but by the time of the 1989 book

there had been a vast expansion and development of my thinking. Arrow’s response in 1989 was both gracious and accepting: “I shall have to ponder your rejection of the Humean position which has, I suppose, been central in not only my thought but that of most economists. Candidly, I have never understood what late Wittgenstein was saying, but I have not worked very hard at his work, and perhaps your book will give guidance”.

Amartya Sen arrived at Cambridge in 1953, the year Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was published, two years after his death. Professor Sen told me, in 2006 (see below), John Wisdom and C D Broad both knew him at the time, all at Trinity College; if anyone, Amartya Sen should have conveyed to Kenneth Arrow in America in the 1960s and 1970s the implications for economic theory of Wittgenstein’s later work. But he never did.  Instead I had to do so in 1989. The attempt by Amartya to distract from that fact ever since by some Marxist spin on Gramsci and Sraffa being what Wittgenstein was really all about I find disingenuous and anti-scientific…

The last letter I have from Amartya is from Harvard to Honolulu in 1987, and said he had put the manuscript of my book on the back-burner.

My 1987 manuscript contracted at the time for several years with University of Chicago Press came to be instead published in 1989 by Routledge in its International Library of Philosophy, the first work by an economist in that series, known earlier as the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method and even before that as the International Scientific Series. It sold out quickly and was in paperback two years later. I had asked the publisher to send Amartya at Harvard a complimentary copy which I think he received though did not acknowledge. Imagine my surprise hearing Amartya Sen’s Nobel Banquet Speech nine years later in 1998 sound as if I’d written a bit of it :D… (see below)! Amartya had every right to put my manuscript on the back-burner in 1987 but has not had a right to lift from it or the book that resulted in 1989 or any of my later or earlier work without acknowledgement. It’s called plagiarism.

Did Ken Arrow or Frank Hahn talk of Suby Roy’s 1989 criticism, trying to solve some theoretical problems in economics by applying the later Wittgenstein? Of course they did. But Amartya Sen was not going to follow up his 1987 letter saying to a fellow-Indian : “Dear Suby, Congratulations on your book and thanks for the copy. Ken Arrow was talking to me about it, and I think we should like to hear you give a talk about your criticisms of our social choice theories…” That’s a letter I did not get… ! Amartya as of 1989 and much earlier (Hahn told me at Stanford in the summer of 1983) was in single-minded pursuit of you know what, and couldn’t take any kind of academic risk exposing the Arrow-Sen “social choice theory” to be “not merely wrong but even absurd” as my Blacksburg colleague I. J. Good, Cambridge probability and statistical theorist and co-worker of Turing during the World War II code-breaking at Bletchley Park, said upon reading my criticism. Besides, Amartya might have seen himself as Arrow’s gate-keeper as far as any other Indians were to be allowed access to the great man… and what I had and have done is not only bypass him completely but identify the errors of Arrow as well as his own; the “social choice theory” peddled by Professor Sen and his friends Eric Maskin, Kaushik Basu et al has been long sunk by the work of myself and Sidney Alexander. It is Zombie economics I said in 2017:

"Within economics, Alexander and I were pirate ships blowing holes and permanently sinking the positivist Armada of “social choice theory” etc" I've said. So what do I make of Maskin & Sen flattering Arrow's ""impossibility theorem" as recently as 2014? Zombie economics… https://t.co/FgrYV9ynXs

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) November 29, 2017

5. Wittgenstein & Economic Theory II, 2006 : the Subroto Roy Amartya Sen dialogue

In 2006 The Statesman was invited by the publisher of a new book by Amartya Sen to send someone to talk to him about it, as long as it was recorded on tape; the Editor asked me if I would like to; I said yes but Professor Sen knew me and should expect a broad discussion not confined to his new book. Amartya sent a message back that he hadn’t met me for a long while and would be happy to chat.

The published on the record result follows:

ROY: …The philosophers Renford Bambrough and John Wisdom would have been with you at Cambridge….
SEN: Wisdom I knew better; he was at my College; but you know my philosophy was not an important thing at the time. Among the philosophers there, it was C. D. Broad with whom I chatted more. But Wisdom I knew, and he mainly tried to encourage me to ride horses with him, which I didn’t.
ROY: You went to Cambridge in …
SEN: I went to Cambridge in 1953.
ROY: So Wittgenstein had just died…
SEN: Wittgenstein had died.
ROY: Only just in 1952 (sic; in fact he died in 1951.
SEN: But I knew a lot about the conversations between Wittgenstein and Sraffa because Sraffa was alive; I did a paper on that by the way.
ROY: Well that’s what I was going to ask, there is no trace of your work on Wittgenstein and the Wittgensteinians.
SEN: I don’t know why. My paper was published in the Journal of Economic Literature a couple of years ago. Now mind you it’s not a conclusion, just an interpretation, what was the role of Gramsci in the works of Sraffa and Wittgenstein, what is it that Sraffa actually did in intermediating between them.
ROY: In your book Identity and Violence, I was curious to find you call yourself a “dabbler” in Philosophy yet at the same time you are an eminent Professor of Philosophy at Harvard for decades. The question that arose was, were you being modest, and if so, truly or falsely?
SEN (laughs): I think if you make a statement which you suspect might have been made out of modesty and then I said it was because of modesty I think I would have eliminated the motivation for the statement as you identify it. I am not going to answer the question as to what I think.
ROY: But surely you are not a “dabbler” in Philosophy?
SEN: I am interested in Philosophy is what I meant, and whether I am a dabbler or whether I’ve succeeded in making some contribution is for others to judge. But not for me to judge.
ROY: Okay.
SEN: As for me, the right description is that I am a dabbler in Philosophy. But then that diagnostic is… mine, and I won’t go to war with others if someone disputes that. But it’s not for me to dispute it.
ROY: Would you, for example in reference to our discussion about Wittgenstein, say that you have contributed to Philosophy in and of itself regardless of Economics?
SEN: Most of my work on Philosophy has got nothing to do with Economics. It is primarily on Ethics, to some extent on Epistemology. And these are not “economic” subjects. I have never written on the “Philosophy of Economics” at all.
ROY: How about Ontology? I mean the question “What there is” would be…..
SEN: I am less concerned with Ontology or with Metaphysics than some people are. I respect the subject but I have not been involved.
ROY: You have not been involved?
SEN: Well, I have read a lot but I haven’t worked on it. I have worked on Ethics and Political Philosophy and I have worked on Epistemology and I have worked a little bit on Mathematical Logic. Those are the three main areas in which I have worked.
ROY: Why I say that is because, if the three main philosophical questions are summarised as “What is there?” (or “Who am I?”), “What is true?”, “What should I do?”, then the question “Who am I?” is very much a part of your concern with identity and a universal question generally, while “Is this true?” is relevant to Epistemology and “What should I do?” is obviously Ethics. Morton White summarised philosophy in those three questions. It seems to me you have in this book had to look at…
SEN: At all three of them.
ROY: Well, some Ontology at least.
SEN: But you know I agree with your diagnostic that the second question “What I regard myself to be, is that true?”, is a question of Epistemology, because that’s the context in which “Is it true?” comes in. The second is primarily an epistemological question. The third is, as you said, primarily an ethical question, though I do believe that the dichotomy between Epistemology and Ethics is hard to make. On that subject I would agree with Hilary Putnam’s last book, namely when he speaks of “the collapse of the fact-value dichotomy” which is sometimes misunderstood and described as the collapse of the fact-value distinction, which is not what Hilary Putnam is denying, he’s arguing that the dichotomy is very hard to sustain, because the linkages are so strong, that pursuit of one is always taking you into the other. But the first question you are taking to be an ontological question, “Who am I?”, and at one level you can treat it as that, but there is a less profound aspect of “Who am I?”, namely what would be the right way of describing me, to myself and to others, and that has a deep relationship with the second question. If the separation or dichotomy between the second and third raises some philosophical questions of significance, the dichotomy between the first and second would too. So “Who am I?” can be interpreted at a profound ontological level but it could also be interpreted at a level which is primarily fairly straightforward Epistemology. And it is at that level that I am taking that question to be. Namely: Am I a member of many different groups? Do I see myself as members of many different groups? If I do not see myself as members of many different groups, am I making a mistake in not seeing that I belong to many different groups? Is it the case that implicitly I often pursue things which are dependant on my seeing myself as being members of other groups than those which I explicitly acknowledge? These are the central issues of the “Who am I?” question in this book.
ROY: Well you haven’t used the word “identity” here but when you speak in your book of people having a choice of different identities, you are plainly not referring to multiple identities in the sense of the psychologist; are you not merely saying that everyone has different aspects or dimensions to his or her life, and is required to play different roles at different times in different contexts? Or is there something beyond that statement in your notion of “choice of identities”?
SEN: What I mean by “multiple identities” is, at one level, the most trivial, common but, at another level, most profoundly important recognition that we belong to many different groups: I’m an Indian citizen, I’m a British or American resident, I’m a Bengali, the poetry I like is Bengali poetry, I’m a man, I’m an economist, I belong to all these groups. Nothing complicated about that, and the multiple identity issues of the psychologist that you’re referring to indicate a certain level of complexity of humanity, and sometimes even of pathology perhaps, but that’s not what I am concerned with here, it’s just a common fact that there are many different groups to which any person belongs. And it’s on that extraordinarily simple fact that I am trying to construct a fairly strong, fairly extensive set of reasonings, because that forces us to see the importance of our own choice, our own decisions in deciding on how should I see myself, how would it be correct to see myself given the problems I am facing today, and given the priorities that I will have to examine.
ROY: But if we don’t use the word “groups” just for a minute, then we are not too far wrong to just say that everyone has different aspects or dimensions to their lives, so one dimension could be nationality, one dimension sexuality, one dimension one’s intellectual upbringing, then any person, any character in a novel would have different dimensions….
SEN: The difficulty with that, Subroto, is that in the same aspect we may have more than one…
ROY: Dimension?
SEN: Well dimension tries to capture in a Cartesian space a rather more complex reality, and you know I don’t think this is a metric space we are looking at, so dimensionality is not a natural thought in this context. One thing I am very worried about is when something which is very simple appears to people as being either profoundly right or profoundly mistaken. I’ll try to claim that it is right and it is not very profound but that it is not very profound does not mean people don’t miss it and end up making mistakes. In terms of the aspects of my life which concern my enjoying poetry, there may be many different groups to which I belong, one of them is that I can appreciate Bengali poetry in a way that I will not be able to appreciate poetry in some language which I speak only very little, like Italian poetry for example. But on the other hand, in addition to that, in the same aspect of my appreciating poetry, there may be the fact that I am not as steeped into historical romance which also figures in poetry or patriotic poetry and these are all again classifications which puts me in some group, in the company of some and not in the company of others, and therefore an aspect does not quite capture with the precision the group classification that I was referring to does capture.
ROY: Well, groups we can quarrel about perhaps because groups may not be well- defined…
SEN: Don’t go away Subroto but that does not make any difference, because many groups are not well-defined but they are still extremely important…
ROY: Of course there are overlapping groups…
SEN: Not only overlapping, but you know that is a different subject on the role of ambiguity, that is a very central issue in Epistemology, and the fact of the matter is that there are many things for which there are ambiguities about border which are nevertheless extremely important as part of our identity. Where India begins and China ends or where China begins and India ends may not be clear, but the distinction between being an Indian and being Chinese is very important, so I think that this border dispute gets much greater attention in the social sciences than it actually deserves.
ROY: Well, one of the most profoundly difficult and yet universally common dilemmas in the modern world has to do with women having to choose between identities outside and inside the home. Does your theory of identity apply to that problem, and if so, how?
SEN: I think the choice is never between identities, the choice is the importance that you attach to different identities all of which may be real. The fact of the matter is that a woman may be a member of a family, a woman is also a member of a gender, namely being a woman, a woman may also have commitment to her profession, may have commitment to a politics…
ROY: Does your theory help her in any way, specifically?
SEN: The theory is not a do-it-yourself method of constructing an identity. It is an attempt to clarify what are the questions that anyone who is thinking about identity has to sort out. It is the identification of questions with which the book is concerned, and as such, insofar as the woman is concerned… indeed the language that you use Subroto, that what you have to choose between identities, I would then say that what I am trying to argue is that’s not the right issue, because all these would remain identities of mine but the relative importance that I attach to the different identities is the subject in which I have to make a choice, and that’s the role of the theory…
ROY: They are all different aspects of the same woman.
SEN: Yes indeed. If not explicitly then implicitly, but that is part of the recognition that we need, it is not a question that by giving importance to one of those compared with the others you’re denying the other identities. To say that something is more important than another in the present context is not a denial that the other is also an identity. So I think the issue of relative importance has to be distinguished from the existence or non-existence of these different identities.
ROY: Well, you’ve wished to say much about Muslims in this book….
SEN: That’s not entirely right. I would say that I do say something about the Muslims in this book….
ROY: … yet one gets the impression that you have not read The Quran. Is that an accurate impression?
SEN: No, it’s not.
ROY: You have read The Quran?
SEN: Yes.
ROY: In English, presumably?
SEN: In Bengali to be exact. Not in Arabic, you probably have read it in Arabic.
ROY (laughs): No, just in English. Is it possible to understand a Muslim’s beliefs until and unless one sees the world from his/her perspective? I had to read The Quran to see if I could understand — attempt to understand — the point of view of Muslims. Does one need to read The Quran in order to see their perspective?
SEN: Well it depends on how much expertise you want to acquire. That is, if you have to understand what the Quranic beliefs are, to which Muslims as a group – believing Muslims, who identify themselves as believing and practising Muslims – as opposed to Muslims by ancestry and therefore Muslims in a denominational sense, yes indeed, if you want to pursue what practising and believing Muslims practise and believe then you would have to read The Quran. But a lot of people would identify themselves as Muslim who do not follow these practises or for that matter beliefs, but who would still identify themselves as Muslims because in the sense of a community they belong to that. I mean even Mohammad Ali Jinnah did not follow many of the standard Muslim practises, that did not make him a non-Muslim because a “Muslim” can be defined in more than one way. One is to define somebody who is a believing and practising Muslim, the other is somebody who sees himself as a Muslim and belongs to that community, and in the context of the world in which he lives that identity has some importance which it clearly had in the case of Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
ROY: Well, Muslims like Jews and Christians believe the Universe had a deliberate Creation; Hindus and Buddhists may not quite agree with that. Muslims will further believe that the Creator spoke once and only once definitively through one man, namely Muhammad in the 7th Century in Arabia. Would you not agree that no person can deny that and still be a Muslim?
SEN: I think you’re getting it wrong Subroto. It said Muhammad was the last prophet, it does not deny that there existed earlier prophets. Therefore it’s not the case as you said that God spoke alone and uniquely and only once.
ROY: Definitively?
SEN: No, no, Muslims believe that it was definitely spoken at each stage — as a follow up, like Christians misunderstood what message the prophet called Jesus was carrying and they deified Jesus, there was a need for turning a page, that’s the understanding; it’s not the case that’s what Muslims believe, that is not the Quranic view at all, that God spoke only once to Muhammad, that’s not the Quranic belief
ROY: True, true enough..
SEN: But you said that Subroto!
ROY: What I meant was “definitively”, the word “definitively” meaning that…
SEN: Definitively they would say that at each stage there was a memory, and the memory and the understanding got corrupted over time and that’s why they were also so wild about idolatry for example
ROY: Well the Ahmadiyas, for example, are considered non-believers by many Muslims because they claim that there …
SEN: That also brings out the point I was making, that Ahmadiyas see themselves as Muslim….
ROY: Indeed.
SEN: …and in terms of one of the definitions of Muslim that I am giving you, namely as a person who sees himself as a Muslim, or herself as a Muslim, and regards that identity to be important is a Muslim according to that definition; another one would apply a test which is what many of the more strict Sunnis and Shias do, namely, that whether they accept Muhammad as the last prophet, and insofar as Ahmadiyas don’t accept that, then they would say then you are not Muslim…
ROY: Well they do actually…
SEN: Well they do, but in terms…I think what I am telling you is that in terms of the Shia-Sunni orthodox critique they say that in effect they don’t accept that, that is the charge against them, but those who believe that would say that on that ground Ahmadiyas are not Muslim. So I think there is a distinction in the different ways that Muslims can be characterized…

6. “I was never in the Communist Party (nor ever tempted to join it)”: Amartya Sen, Non-Party communist?

This on page 333-334

“I was never in the Communist Party (nor ever tempted to join it)”

is the most important statement made by Professor Sen in his 400+ page Memoirs. It will come as a relief to Professor Sen’s many associates, friends and colleagues.

Father Laszlo Ladany in The Communist Party of China and Marxism, 1921-1985, Stanford 1988 said of Zhou Enlai he was “one of those men who never tell the truth and never tell a lie. For them there is no distinction between the two. The speaker says what is appropriate to the circumstances. Zhou Enlai was a perfect gentleman; he was also a perfect Communist”.

It will be a relief to Professor Sen’s friends and associates that he, who has been an eminent British and American and Indian academic, never thought about joining the Communist Party as a member.

Of course formal Communist Party membership remains a somewhat peculiar thing, worldwide. Mr Jack Ma for example has been apparently a Chinese Communist Party member, along with some 82 million others in PRC, some fraction of his large income going to the Party as his contribution, almost a tithe you might say. In Bengal under the Communist regime eventually ousted after decades by Mamata Banerjee, it was an open secret Government officials, academics, schoolteachers, etc were encouraged to be Party-members, though apparently under an altered similar sounding name in code! So for example, a “Sushmita Mitra” might be renamed by the Party in its confidential records as being a “Smita Maitra” and that latter name would be the code-name used by Party functionaries in Party meetings! I know this thanks to a Party-insider friend! Hadn’t Lenin and Koba/Stalin themselves acquired Party names before the Revolution?! And everyone always knew the Americans demand of foreigners landing in the USA whether they have been a member of the Communist Party! As it happens, before our 2006 discussion began at the Taj Bengal Hotel, Amartya Sen joked that he as a State of West Bengal guest was now being protected by the Bengal Police, which he found ironic since these were the same police who had been after him decades ago as a communist or leftist youth! I was supposed to appreciate the joke but I don’t think I did…

As of 2006/2007, when Mamata Banerjee in Opposition was in full and lonely cry against the Communist misrule in Bengal, Amartya Sen weighed in on the side of his Communist friends, Asim Dasgupta and others. I had to publish an open letter in The Statesman that he during his flying visits from Harvard may have wholly misapprehended the situation in backing his Communist friends against Mamata: “Dear Professor Sen, Everyone will be delighted that someone of your worldwide stature has joined the debate on Singur and Nandigram; The Telegraph deserves congratulations for having made it possible on July 23. I was sorry to find though that you may have missed the wood for the trees and also some of the trees themselves. Perhaps you have relied on Government statements for the facts. But the Government party in West Bengal represents official Indian communism and has been in power for 30 years at a stretch. It may be unwise to take at face-value what they say about their own deeds on this very grave issue! Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and there are many candid communists who privately recognise this dismal truth about themselves. To say this is not to be praising those whom you call the “Opposition” ~ after all, Bengal’s politics has seen emasculation of the Congress as an opposition because the Congress and communists are allies in Delhi. It is the Government party that must reform itself from within sua sponte for the good of everyone in the State….. Bengal did, as you say, have industries at the time the Europeans came but you have failed to mention these were mostly “agro-based” and, if anything, a clear indicator of our agricultural fecundity and comparative advantage. If “deindustrialization” occurred in 19th Century India, that had nothing to do with the “deindustrialization” in West Bengal from the 1960s onwards due to the influence of official communism…..I am afraid the relevance of (your) mention of Fa Hiaen to today’s Singur and Nandigram has thus escaped me. You say “In countries like Australia, the US or Canada where agriculture has prospered, only a very tiny population is involved in agriculture. Most people move out to industry. Industry has to be convenient, has to be absorbing”. Last January, a national daily published a similar view: “For India to become a developed country, the area under agriculture has to shrink, urban and industrial land development has to take place, and about 100 million workers have to move out from agriculture into industry and services. This is the only way forward for bringing prosperity to the rural population”. Rice is indeed grown in Arkansas or Texas as it is in Bengal but there is a world of difference between the technological and geographical situation here and that in the vast, sparsely populated New World areas with mechanized farming! Like shoe-making or a hundred other crafts, agriculture can be capital-intensive or labour-intensive ~ ours is relatively labour-intensive, theirs is relatively capital-intensive. Our economy is relatively labour-abundant and capital-scarce; their economies are relatively labour-scarce and capital-abundant (and also land-abundant). Indeed, if anything, the apt comparison is with China, and you doubtless know of the horror stories and civil war conditions erupting across China in recent years as the Communist Party and their businessman friends forcibly take over the land of peasants and agricultural workers, e.g. in Dongzhou. All plans of long-distance social engineering to “move out” 40 per cent of India’s population (at 4 persons per “worker”) from the rural hinterlands must also face FA Hayek’s fundamental question in The Road to Serfdom: “Who plans whom, who directs whom, who assigns to other people their station in life, and who is to have his due allotted by others?”
Your late Harvard colleague, Robert Nozick, opened his brilliant 1974 book Anarchy, State and Utopia saying: “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights)”. You have rightly deplored the violence seen at Singur and Nandigram. But you will agree it is a gross error to equate violence perpetrated by the Government which is supposed to be protecting all people regardless of political affiliation, and the self-defence of poor unorganised peasants seeking to protect their meagre lands and livelihoods from state-sponsored pogroms. Kitchen utensils, pitchforks or rural implements and flintlock guns can hardly match the organised firepower controlled by a modern Government. Fortunately, India is not China and the press, media and civil institutions are not totally in the hands of the ruling party alone. In China, no amount of hue and cry among the peasants could save them from the power of organised big business and the Communist Party. In India, a handful of brave women have managed to single-handedly organise mass movements of protest which the press and media have then broadcast that has shocked the whole nation to its senses…. (Our) agriculture has undergone a Green Revolution, at least in wheat if not in rice, and a White Revolution in milk and many other agricultural products. But catastrophic collapses in agricultural incentives may still occur as functioning farmland comes to be taken by government and industry from India’s peasantry using force, fraud or even means nominally sanctioned by law. If new famines come to be provoked because farmers’ incentives collapse, let future historians know where responsibility lay. West Bengal’s real economic problems have to do with its dismal macroeconomic and fiscal position which is what Government economists should be addressing candidly. As for land, the Government’s first task remains improving grossly inadequate systems of land-description and definition, as well as the implementation and recording of property rights. With my most respectful personal regards, I remain, Yours ever Suby”

Even so Professor Sen’s Memoirs are an interesting source of material as two of his favourite teachers during his Cambridge years, Dobb and Sraffa, were prominent Communists of Britain and Italy respectively, while Joan Robinson, Professor Sen’s thesis supervisor and herself a pupil of Dobb, was an expounder of Marxist economic doctrine and openly sympathetic to the new Communist China and North Korea.

The Canadian economist Harry G Johnson, in his second stint at Cambridge teaching as a lecturer, attended his fellow lecturer Dobb’s lectures; they were on the Economics of Socialism, and Dobb would start with “40 or 50 students” end up with only his colleague Johnson and “a very small band of Communist Party members who felt obliged to reciprocate the services he had done for the party by listening to the lectures”.

Dobb, of whom Amartya Sen was an admitted “devotee” (page 368) had “visited the Soviet Union in 1921 and when his train crossed the frontier he said, “how thrilling to be moving across this sacred soil at last”; he was reported to have been intimately involved in Communist recruitment, and under police scrutiny.

“Between 1925 and 1928, Dobb lived in the Soviet Union, and produced one of the first serious accounts of the transformation of the Russian economy under the Bolsheviks. In 1937, he produced one of his most famous works Political Economy and Capitalism helping update Marxian theory into a critique of Neoclassical economic theory, which earlier Marxists had largely ignored, drawing particular attention and emphasis on the question of value theory. In 1948 Dobb returned to the Soviet experience and produced one of the first detailed accounts of the Soviet planning debate, bringing him into the arena of development economics more generally, which he would continue pursuing parallel to his work on Marxian economic theory.”

Amartya Sen, Dobb’s future Indian student and “devotee”, had been “bowled over” (page 346) in Calcutta undergraduate days by Dobb’s 1937 book.

“Dobb joined the Communist Party in 1920 and in the 1930s was central to the burgeoning Communist movement at the university. One recruit was Kim Philby, who later became a high-placed mole within British intelligence. It has been suggested that Dobb was a “talent-spotter” for Comintern. Dobb was a highly placed communist revolutionary in Britain at the time. He was politically very active and spent much time organizing rallies and presenting lectures on a consistent basis. As an economist commonly focused on vulnerability to economic crisis and pointed to the United States as a case of capitalist money assisting military agendas instead of public works.” (A recent documentary on Philby says the euphemism of Comintern recruitment was “to work for peace” or “against fascism”).

Trinity College Chapel has honoured Maurice Dobb and Pierro Sraffa with commemorative brasses inscribed in Latin. The English explanation in case of the former even mentions his recruitment of Philby, whose own grave as a KGB officer is in Moscow! The British are so tolerant!

marvellous tolerance of 🇬🇧 knows no bounds! @10DowningStreet @Keir_Starmer @GordonBrown Dobb recruits Philby (whose KGB grave is in Moscow 😂@russianembassy) & @TrinCollCam give him a Brass in Latin in the Chapel. #AmartyaSen has both his Communist teachers Dobb & Sraffa there! https://t.co/FisWHf5PrK pic.twitter.com/iJFVVPHsGa

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) October 15, 2021

Trinity College Chapel informed me they could not identify when a commemorative brass gets put up except it would be at least five years after the death of the person being honoured. Professor Sen has remained a Fellow of the College and was Master too between 1998 and 2004; it would be interesting to know if the Dobb and Sraffa commemorations were put up during his tenure as Master, a tribute to his two teachers.

7. Tokenism! the (Non-Communist) names of Robertson, Hicks, Buchanan, Bauer mentioned! And why does the Amartya Sen Principles of Economics textbook not exist?

Now oddly enough, Professor Sen titles his Chapter 22 “Dobb, Sraffa and Robertson”, the last being Sir Dennis Robertson, the pupil colleague collaborator and critic of Maynard Keynes:

Amartya Sen claims all three as his teachers, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels at Cambridge.  Yet while Dobb and Sraffa, both prominent Communists, were Amartya Sen’s main interlocutors according to his autobiography, there is absolutely no hint or scrap of evidence from him that he knew of, let aside attended, Robertson’s Economic Principles lectures for undergraduates at Cambridge, held from 1946/47 to 1956/57!  Robertson published these in three slim volumes, and also, much later, in one joint volume too:

The Canadian economist Harry G Johnson, in his first stint at Cambridge after World War II still dressed in his corporal’s uniform, found Robertson’s lectures “brilliant” though “you had to know at least enough economics for a PhD before you could understand them” The Shadow of Keynes, 1978, p. 129. 

Joan Robinson somehow concluded Robbins considered Robertson “pathetic”: in fact Robbins’ actual review of Robertson’s Principles lectures was this:

Whether or not under influence of Joan Robinson, Sraffa, Dobb it is clear Amartya Sen did not attend Robertson’s Principles course if he even knew it existed. Nor did Amartya apparently know Dennis Robertson had as of 1954 started discussion of Amartya’s American hero, “the convinced & eminent ordinalist Mr K J Arrow”.  

The Cottage Industry backing Professor Sen which I have named Team Amartya has in October 2021 put out a trial balloon suggesting the two main intellectual influences upon him have been…. Tagore and Adam Smith! 

In fact, as far as is known publicly at present, Amartya Sen had in his youth a Bolshevik hero, the murdered Bukharin (tho not the also murdered Trotsky!), and then a British Stalinist hero, Dobb; later came the American “social democrat” hero Arrow who allowed the Sen “social choice theory” work to arise; and now recently appears the long-dead Italian Gramscian Communist Sraffa, to create a most tenuous of claimed links to Cambridge philosophy!   So that’s it, the four intellectual heroes of Amartya Sen as far as may be ascertained were: Bukharin, Dobb, Arrow, Sraffa… no Tagore really, and definitely no Adam Smith!

(The case of Amiya Dasgupta seems special; family friend of the same Hindu caste and culture as the Sens, academic colleague at Dhaka University of Amartya Sen’s father, co-supervisor of Amartya Sen’s PhD thesis at Cambridge, of whom Professor Sen said in 1981

and of whom he wrote a fulsome obituary in the Economic Journal in 1994. The Dasgupta and Sen families apparently had their close personal relationship over decades; Amiya Dasgupta’s daughter Alaknanda, later Mrs I G Patel, was a few years junior to Amartya at Santiniketan school, whom Professor Sen refers to as a “sister” in this autobiography; her younger brother is the noted British economist Partha Dasgupta (who has published the photo above of his family on the Internet), colleague and co-author of Amartya Sen at LSE but who finds no mention in the autobiography — perhaps resulting from a massive rumoured professional row altercation between the two men in recent times.)

And speaking of Tagore, Adam Smith, Aristotle, is it not the case there was no Indian economist in the West in the post World War II era who ever discussed them before my May 1984 monograph did? Professor Sen when he gave his 1986 Royer lectures at Berkeley published as On Ethics and Economics, fully knew this work of mine which had been the subject of the lead editorial of The Times of London on 29 May 1984, but refused to mention it with its references to Tagore, Smith, Aristotle, and proceeded instead with his own first mentions of Aristotle and Smith.

As noted earlier, Professor Sen has told the Harvard Gazette in June 2021 “There was a kind of gulf, because in Calcutta, I was quite used to doing rather technical economics, and suddenly, I found myself attending classes in Cambridge with people who had done very little technical economics”. This seems preposterous in view of Robertson’s masterly lectures for undergraduates that young Amartya did not seem to know of despite the current Amartya Sen claiming Robertson was one of his teachers! Besides Calcutta or India as a whole had no “technical economics” being taught anywhere at the time, only descriptive Indian economics.   Is Amartya willing to admit today, as I think he must,
“I did not know of or I neglected to attend Dennis Robertson’s masterly lectures on Economic Principles at Cambridge held during my time there that Suby Roy has now brought to my attention. What I have indicated in my Memoirs is merely that Dennis and I were friendly acquaintances at Trinity. I really knew nothing then and know nothing now of Dennis Robertson’s economics. Had I known of his lectures or mastered them I would have definitely used them in some manner in my teaching at Jadavpur, in America, at Cambridge, Warsaw, Delhi and LSE. But I seem not to have done, or at least have no records of having done so“?

In my first year as an undergraduate at LSE, 1973-74, Economic Principles were divided into three streams examined separately: Economics A taught by Amartya Sen; Economics B taught by Meghnad Desai and George Psacharopolous and others, Economics C taught by Kenneth Binmore. Economics C was specified as for those with A-level mathematics only and would be an applied mathematics paper; Economics B was for most of us intending to continue with Economics; and Economics A was supposed to be for those in History, Politics, International Relations etc who absolutely did not intend to continue with Economics after a year but wanted a nominal introduction to it. George Psacharopolous made clear to us that Meghnad Desai had wished to talk about Sraffa’s system a bit and had been allowed to do so by his colleagues only as a way to enter Leontief models, and was then quickly required to cover normal microeconomics and macroeconomics (the influence of Frank Hahn and Harry G Johnson being strong at LSE then though each had left recently); as for Economics A by Amartya, this was said by his colleagues to be something of a vanity course for the fashionable — and a fashionable friend of mine who took it told me the students were thrilled to be addressed by such an eminent Professor but had no idea what it was all about.

This aside, the fact remains Amartya Sen seems never to have tried to write up a normal Economics textbook for undergraduates, something even his supervisor Joan Robinson did at one point with John Eatwell. Even if Amartya Sen has no textbook in Economics, perhaps he can publish his lecture notes (or better still, the notes taken by an assiduous student) on what he has taught over the decades as being principles of the subject as he has seen it. My own nascent Economics as a Beautiful Subject is on the anvil.

Similar phenomena to that of Dennis Robertson seem to take place in the Amartya Sen autobiography with respect to Hicks’s Value and Capital and also the public finance work of, of all people, Jim Buchanan — Subroto Roy, viz., myself, having been sent by Hahn to work with Jim in 1980, and having been the first Indian with whom Buchanan and Tullock worked!

Then too there is the new praise of Amartya Sen for Peter Bauer despite Bauer being allegedly “right wing”.

Milton Friedman happened to be a Fulbright lecturer visiting the Cambridge Economics Department in Amartya’s first year at Trinity as an undergraduate 1953/54. Milton was at Gonville & Caius College, along with Stanley Denison and Peter Bauer (before they moved to becoming Professors at Hull and LSE respectively). Milton’s 1998 Memoirs with his wife Rose report the following conversation with Peter about one of his undergraduate supervisees who, if it was not Amartya himself, was like Amartya a follower of the Communist Maurice Dobb:

Peter and I became friends after I had left LSE and was at Cambridge as a Research Student under Frank Hahn, and later when I moved to work with Jim Buchanan in America. It was Peter who specifically made it a point of telling me in 1979/1980 about the economic policy memorandum Milton Friedman had been invited to write by the Government of India in November 1955 which the Government had then suppressed — and which I eventually published for the first time at Manoa in May 1989.

"a young Indian by the name of Subroto Roy" did this in the 1980s after being informed of it by Peter Bauer of it c. 1978/79; did Bauer not tell a young Indian by the name of @AmartyaSen_Econ #AmartyaSen of it in the 1950s 1960s 1970s at Cambridge/LSE? https://t.co/lCk1P0f46M https://t.co/Ev5vyovtAl

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) October 30, 2021

Friedman in his 1998 memoirs said “a young Indian by the name of Subroto Roy” finally published his 1955 Memorandum to the Government of India; I did so in 1989 after having been specifically informed of it by Bauer of it c. 1978/79; how is it Bauer did not tell a young Indian by the name of Amartya Sen in the 1950s 1960s 1970s at Cambridge or LSE? Or did Bauer tell Amartya Sen but the latter, being a Non-Party communist, did not think it important that Milton Friedman’s advisory opinion on India be known generally?

On 29 May 1984, The Times of London wrote its lead editorial about my critique of Indian economic policy, published that same day by the Institute of Economic Affairs, deriving from my Cambridge doctoral work. The result was a massive impact on policy and opinion at the time. I later found this editorial had been authored by the former editor William Rees-Mogg with his friend Peter Bauer. On 16 June 1984, I had to publish a letter correcting The Times on one aspect, namely I had not said anything about famines in India and they had:

I knew Amartya had been writing about famines though I did not know what, and I did not want to enter that particular debate at that time. More of these issues about Indian economic policy anon.

8. Amartya Sen’s genius insight into Soviet Communism! But also a KGB blind-spot?

I have noted at the outset the incredible insight of genius into Soviet Communism that Professor Sen has claimed of finding the Khruschev denunication of Stalin “completely unsurprising“ (italics added).

The Soviet Communist Party had not expected the speech, viz., Roy Medvedev, Khruschev 1982:

Khruschev himself as a Stalin protege took three years to gather the courage to give the speech; it was kept strictly confidential though apparently “foreign communist leaders” at the February 1956 Soviet Congress got to read it just ahead of time but got no copy; it is said a Russian Jew present at the Congress got it to Israeli domestic intelligence, thence it reached the CIA, who released it to a few Western newspapers at the end of June 1956. The first time it appeared in the Western press is said to to be then, at the end of June 1956. However, the mastery of young Amartya Sen of the nuances of Soviet ideology and Stalinist practices was such that he, alone in the world, had “a decade earlier” anticipated all the USSR’s rot under Stalin and its inevitable exposure. One of Amartya’s Indian Communist associates tells him in Calcutta 1956 “I hate Khruschev more than any revolting little insect” to which Amartya acquiesces sufficiently to publish it in his 2021 Memoirs though he himself remains loyal enough to the cause not to name who this “old loyalist” may have been!

The great Harvard Russia scholar Adam B Ulam (teacher of a not great Harvard Russia scholar named Henry Kissinger) noted de-Stalinization in the USSR took at least another four years to start, with the 1960 Soviet Congress, and only after one of Lenin’s female comrades in her dotage suddenly turned up at the Congress and declared that Lenin had appeared in a dream to her and demanded the moving of Stalin’s mummified body from beside his own to somewhere else.

But Professor Sen’s Memoir contains too an unusual account of his 1958 two week visit to Warsaw via East Berlin to deliver some unspecified academic lectures, even though he felt himself “totally under-qualified”, as it was before he received his PhD degree. Two years earlier in 1956, the noted Polish Communist Oskar Lange — who, while an American economist, was known to Stalin himself, and who later renounced his American citizenship as a Polish-American — visited Cambridge we are told specifically to meet, via Dobb and Sraffa, the young Amartya Sen of India and discuss matters with him. Amartya Sen two years later in 1958 is invited to visit Warsaw via East Germany for two weeks, the sojourn seeming notable in this volume only for his visit to Chopin’s “beautiful home nearby” as well as meeting students, pages 300-301.

Coming from an Indian foreign service background, my personal curiosity has been provoked by this Warsaw incident for the following reason: in the winter of 1970/71,

my father then India’s Consul General in Odessa, immediately vetoed an apparent KGB honey-trap plot that I, to celebrate my 16th birthday, visit Leningrad alone in the company of the lovely 25 year old Tanya; my mother was sent too by him as a chaperone!

Young Amartya Sen, not being a Communist Party member though fraternizing or working closely with College Street and later Cambridge University Communists, was able to acquire unique foresight and insight about the Soviet system predicting Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin a decade before it happened, hence finding it “completely unsurprising” when it did. But a reader of his Memoirs is left longing to know more about his two week 1958 Warsaw visit…! Whom did he meet? What did he lecture on for two weeks? How much did he receive as honorarium (he refers to a phonecall, I think but will have to check the text, that said his hosts could not send him cash in East Berlin where he was short of it for travel but would make up for it when he got to Warsaw)? There was no Berlin Wall in 1958; did he make any diary notes at the time observing differences between West and East Berlin, between West and East Germany? In retrospect is he able to see any apparent KGB attempt to compromise him, in Warsaw itself or somewhere else? Was he drugged and unwittingly transported to Moscow briefly perhaps 😀 ?! Or, perhaps, had his Master Dobb shared with him the feeling of Soviet land being “sacred soil”, and arranged an official visit to it? Inquiring minds want to know! But all we get to learn is that Chopin’s “beautiful home” is near the city 😦 …

9. Wittgenstein & Economic Theory III: Did Amartya plagiarize my work in his 1998 Nobel Banquet speech? Is he about to do so again?

I have every reason to think Amartya’s responses in 2006 to my first questions were completely genuine, viz.,

ROY: …The philosophers Renford Bambrough and John Wisdom would have been with you at Cambridge….
SEN: Wisdom I knew better; he was at my College; but you know my philosophy was not an important thing at the time. Among the philosophers there, it was C. D. Broad with whom I chatted more. But Wisdom I knew, and he mainly tried to encourage me to ride horses with him, which I didn’t.
ROY: You went to Cambridge in …
SEN: I went to Cambridge in 1953.
ROY: So Wittgenstein had just died…
SEN: Wittgenstein had died.
ROY: Only just in 1952 (sic; in fact he died in 1951.
SEN: But I knew a lot about the conversations between Wittgenstein and Sraffa because Sraffa was alive; I did a paper on that by the way.
ROY: Well that’s what I was going to ask, there is no trace of your work on Wittgenstein and the Wittgensteinians.
SEN: I don’t know why. My paper was published in the Journal of Economic Literature a couple of years ago. Now mind you it’s not a conclusion, just an interpretation, what was the role of Gramsci in the works of Sraffa and Wittgenstein, what is it that Sraffa actually did in intermediating between them.
ROY: In your book Identity and Violence, I was curious to find you call yourself a “dabbler” in Philosophy yet at the same time you are an eminent Professor of Philosophy at Harvard for decades. The question that arose was, were you being modest, and if so, truly or falsely?
SEN (laughs): I think if you make a statement which you suspect might have been made out of modesty and then I said it was because of modesty I think I would have eliminated the motivation for the statement as you identify it. I am not going to answer the question as to what I think.
ROY: But surely you are not a “dabbler” in Philosophy?
SEN: I am interested in Philosophy is what I meant, and whether I am a dabbler or whether I’ve succeeded in making some contribution is for others to judge. But not for me to judge.

Amartya said to me in 2006 most honestly and plausibly about his arrival at Cambridge in 1953 “you know my philosophy was not an important thing at the time”. Now fifteen years later in 2021 in this book the mental state in 1952/53 of the young Amartya Sen has been transmogrified by himself and Team Amartya! It has become: “I also knew a fair amount… about Russell, Whitehead, Moore and Wittgenstein” (p. 240)… all before he had even applied to Trinity College! Besides knowing all about Dobb, Sraffa, Robertson, and Newton, Bacon, Dryden, Marvell, Byron, Tennyson, Housman, Hardy, Littlewood, Ramanujan too! Amartya says he, sitting in Calcutta, chose Trinity because of all this rich heritage!… It is, frankly, preposterous that an Indian undergraduate in 1952/53 would have even listed all these names as a reason to choose a Cambridge College, let aside been a master of their works.

The one person Amartya had plausibly read was his Master Dobb… Indeed Dobb had lectured at the Delhi School in 1951, two years after it had been founded, when Amartya Sen was an undergraduate at Presidency. Hahn, my doctoral supervisor at Cambridge 1976-1980, at one point, perhaps 1979 or 1980, said to me “Look I’m not advocating it in any way but I am advising you to look at the Marxian perspective too”… and I did… and it was good advice… I however did not read the work of Dobb which had “bowled over” Amartya Sen, and it is linked here now. Dobb died in 1976, and was I think associated with Jesus College at the time; due to his Communist Party membership, Dobb may have been pushed in and out of different Colleges, Pembroke, Jesus, Trinity among them. Harry Johnson immediately after the War found Dobb to be at Jesus College, not Trinity, where he was said to have become a Fellow in 1948; he also joined Sraffa in 1948 as an assistant in editing the works of Ricardo, and Sraffa had been a long-standing Fellow at Trinity College (and brought out of war-time internment as an “enemy alien” by Maynard Keynes himself)…

Amartya now claims he “knew a fair amount… about Russell, Whitehead, Moore and Wittgenstein” even before he got to Cambridge in 1953, whereas in 2006 he had told me, most plausibly and credibly, “you know my philosophy was not an important thing at the time”. Amartya even claims (page 354) he knew as of 1953 about the Sraffa Wittgenstein conversations (which had ended years earlier) : “When I arrived in Trinity (sic) in 1953, not long after Wittgenstein’s death, I was aware that there had been something of a rift between the two friends”, Sraffa and Wittgenstein!

Fake news conversation 1953: Porters’ Lodge: “Good day Mr Sen, Sir, welcome to Trinity College! May we help you with your bags? And do you know Sir, the discussions between Dr Sraffa and Dr Wittgenstein ended some years ago?” Young Amartya: “Yes, thank you for confirming that now that I have arrived at Trinity; I had surmised it to be so from Calcutta“.

The claim Professor Sen makes is that “by the time I met him”, Sraffa “had already helped to bring about one of the most critical developments in contemporary … Anglo-American philosophy, namely Ludwig Wittgenstein’s momentous rejection of his early position in his path-breaking book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the development instead of his later philosophy published in Philosophical Investigations” p. 351-352. Sen claims “between 1958 and 1963 we had long walks after lunch nearly every day”. “Was Sraffa thrilled by the impact that his ideas had on, arguably, the leading philosopher of our times? When I asked him that question more than once in our regular afternoon walks, he said no, he was not” (page 354).

These “long” “regular afternoon walks” of Sraffa and Sen between 1958 and 1963 “after lunch nearly every day” presumably were only when both were in Cambridge, not one in Italy or America or Warsaw etc. A modest estimate, excluding times away from Cambridge, weekends, etc, would yield several hundred purported Sraffa Sen post-lunch conversations including most especially about Wittgenstein (nothing else is mentioned), yet Amartya Sen never mentions his Sraffa experience anywhere apparently until two decades after Sraffa’s 1983 death (and more than a dozen years after publication of my 1989 Philosophy of Economics which Arrow and he both knew.)

Where is the Amartya Sen obituary notice of his friend and teacher Sraffa? Such an obituary would definitely have mentioned these hundreds of conversations with Sraffa especially about Wittgenstein if they in fact took place. Professor Sen conducts a “joint seminar” at Harvard in 1968-1969 with two luminaries, Kenneth Arrow and John Rawls, he profusely thanks both in the 1 August 1969 Acknowledgements to his 1970 compendium Collective Choice and Social Welfare

but he keeps secret from the world — from Arrow, Rawls, and everyone else at Harvard, Delhi, Cambridge — his supposed hundreds of after-lunch conversations a decade earlier with Sraffa about Wittgenstein! Are we asked to believe he was saving these for his Memoirs now in 2021 half a century later?

Rawls was the pupil of Malcolm, who had been Wittgenstein’s pupil and friend and host in America! Amartya Sen telling Rawls in 1968/69 of his hundreds of conversations with Sraffa a decade earlier about Wittgenstein, would have made him the talk of the town! You must go and tell Malcolm all this, Rawls would have insisted. Whatever Amartya Sen has wished to theorize now about Wittgenstein, Sraffa, Gramsci would have been said in the 1960s and not forty or fifty years afterwards. But none of that happened, either because Amartya Sen had a memory block for more than a half century, or because it is in fact imaginary or wildly exaggerated. No conclusion may be reasonably arrived at except that these many conversations on this subject did not happen. For that matter, did Sraffa write copiously or even talk much to anyone else about Wittgenstein anywhere? Of course he did not. David Dewhirst, astronomer, told us amusing stories at lunchtime in Cambridge about Dirac; Sraffa may well have done the same about Wittgenstein. That’s it.

I have said “I would be sincerely grateful if any of Harvard Professor Amartya Sen’s fans or pupils or friends was able to locate in this list of his works leading to the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics the slightest reference to any of the following: Wittgenstein Sraffa “Reason” “Dogmatism”“.

Professor Sen’s 1998 Nobel Prize Banquet Speech did resoundingly endorse “Reason” and deplore “Dogmatism”… just like my 1989 book Philosophy of Economics: On the Scope of Reason in Economic Inquiry had done 😀 !!… as we have seen, Amartya acknowledged in 1987 having received my manuscript at Harvard from me at Manoa! There is no similar discussion by Professor Sen anywhere as far as I know before 1998 let alone before 1989 or 1987 which might have made him seem to be, as of 1998, the big critic of Dogmatism and the big backer of Reason that he seemed to be claiming to be in the 1998 speech! Of course I had pointed out in 2013 too:
“Can you see any reference in this 1997 survey to TW Schultz’s 1960 American Economic Association Presidential Address or to Schultz’s classic 1964 book Transforming Traditional Agriculture or to his 1979 Bank of Sweden Prize address?  I could not.   If one did not know better, one might have thought from Professor Sen’s 1997 survey that there was nothing done worth talking about on the subject of “human capital” from the time of Adam Smith and David Hume until Amartya Sen finally came to the subject himself.” 
So at least I am in the eminent company of my friend and benefactor Ted Schultz in having been evidently plagiarized by Amartya Sen! As I have said, Amartya Sen had every right to put my manuscript on the back-burner in 1987 but has not had a right to lift from it or the book that resulted in 1989 or any of my later or earlier work without acknowledgement. It’s called plagiarism.

Generally, the attempt of Amartya Sen, claiming by some Marxist spin on Gramsci and Sraffa that that was what Wittgenstein was really all about, to distract from the fact that my 1989 work was the first robust bridge between modern economic theory and modern philosophy, I find disingenuous and anti-scientific…

I should add at once that I do not think the plagiarism of Amartya Sen is that of the schoolboy peeking at the notes of his class-mate…! it may not even be wholly conscious and is vastly more subtle! For example in August 2013, I noted:

“Reflecting on Amartya Sen’s works over the 40 year period that I have known them…. I wonder in fact if it might be fairly said that Sen has been on his own subjective journey over the decades around the world seeking to reinvent economics and political economy from scratch, and inventing his own terminology like “capabilities”, “functionings” and yes “entitlements” etc. to help him do so, while trying to assiduously avoid mention of canonical works of  modern world economics like Marshall’s Principles, Hicks’s Value and Capital, Debreu’s Theory of Value, or Arrow and Hahn’s General Competitive Analysis, all defining the central neoclassical tradition of the modern theory of value. But no contemporary science, economics and political economy included, is open to be re-invented from scratch, and what Amartya Sen has ended up doing instead is seeming to be continually trying to reinvent the wheel, possibly without having had the self-knowledge to realise this.  Wittgenstein once made a paradoxical statement that one may know another’s mind better than one knows one’s own…  Here is a current example. Professor Sen says “First, unlike the process of development in Japan, China, Korea and other countries, which pursued what Jean Drèze and I have called “Asian economic development” in our book, India has not had enough focus on public spending on school education and basic healthcare, which these other countries have had….” Does Sen really believe he and Drèze  have now in 2013 discovered and christened an economic phenomenon named “Asian economic development”?  Everyone, from Japan and Bangkok and Manila, to Hawaii and Stanford to the World Bank’s East Asia department, including  especially my Hawaii colleague Ted James, and many many others including especially Gerald M Meier at Stanford, was publishing about all that every month — in the mid 1980s!  In fact, our project on India and Pakistan arose in the 1980s from precisely such a Hawaiian wave!  Everyone knows all that from back then or even earlier when the Japanese were talking about the “flying geese” model.  (And, incidentally,  Communist China did not at the time belong in the list.)  Where was Amartya Sen in the mid 1980s when all that was happening?  Jean Drèze was still a student perhaps. Is Professor Sen seeking to reinvent the wheel again with “Asian Economic Development” being claimed to be invented in 2013 by him and Drèze now? Oh please!  That just won’t fly either!”

Professor Sen’s plagiarism, whether of myself or TW Schultz or in development economics or elsewhere, is not one of the schoolboy at a loss for words peeking at his classmate’s papers; rather it is one of supreme feudal Leninist apparatchik arrogance! “I am Amartya Sen, I knew the works of Bukharin as a boy, I knew Dobb and Robinson and Sraffa at their peak, Lange himself came to invite me to Warsaw at the height of the Cold War, I ran a seminar with Arrow and Rawls at Harvard in the 1960s… I choose whatever I work on, whether it is liberalism or human capital or famines or development or Adam Smith or Wittgenstein; when I turn to a subject, I do not care about anything or anyone before me; I am the first in everything I have said; it all belongs to me; no one else is relevant”….

If Lenin expropriated private property ostensibly for public purposes, do Leninists after him need to recognize private intellectual property? Of course they do not. Is it plagiarism in a normal sense or understanding of the word? Of course it is. But Freud or John Wisdom might have detected working of a delusional unconscious mind. Unconscious or half-conscious plagiarism! Scholarship since Socrates or Delphi has known “Know thyself”, and since Dostoevsky has known “Above all never lie to yourself”… Hannah Arendt in Truth and Politics diagnosed it in a most clinical manner:

“man carries within himself a partner from whom he can never win release… since thought is the silent dialogue carried out between me & myself, I must be careful to keep the integrity of this partner intact, for otherwise I shall surely lose the capacity for thought altogether" pic.twitter.com/RBTxZz09Wv

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) September 20, 2019

Professor Sen’s plagiarism is not schoolboy plagiarism but unconscious or half-conscious professional plagiarism stemming from self-delusion about his own work in relation to others! Let’s pretend Ted Schultz never gave his presidential address in 1960 on Investment in Human Capital or a Nobel lecture in 1979; let’s pretend Subroto Roy’s 1984 critique of Indian planning or 1989 Philosophy of Economics never happened, etc. Hence All Hail the Great Feudal Leninist Lord Amartya Sen as He Himself enters these spaces and claims them as His Own. Is it plagiarism in a normal sense or understanding of the word? Of course it is. A schoolboy or student or journalist who tried doing the same would be quickly punished. It may have begun as early as his experience with his own Master Dobb! Maurice Dobb rushes into print in 1959-1960 with a slim book (see above), two of whose chapters have “Choice of Technique” in them, and politely mentions in his Preface “Dr Amartya Kumar Sen” “whose ideas have in some respects developed along parallel lines to my own…” A teacher’s greatest glory is the pupil who becomes greater than himself, but that is not what Maurice Dobb says of Amartya Sen. Keynes called his pupils Hawtrey and Robertson his “grandfathers” because he had felt himself learning monetary economics from them. Dobb said in 1959 Amartya Sen’s “ideas have in some respects developed along parallel lines to my own”; so might Ted Schultz and I, who are not Sen’s teachers or pupils!, say the same! — except it has happened without Professor Sen’s proper academic acknowledgment!

Just as Lenin had no respect for private property but decided to take it purportedly on behalf of the proletariat, so Amartya Sen, admirer of “Leninist political philosophy”, takes for himself Ted Schultz’s or my intellectual property without proper academic acknowledgement — plagiarism purportedly on behalf of the proletariat perhaps!

To continue, Professor Sen says he spent the four years of his Prize Fellowship (1956-1960?) “to learn some serious philosophy”, after returning to Cambridge from Jadavpur which was in “Spring 1958” according to page 335 or in 1957 according to page 346; perhaps it was both and he had become a jet-setter or rather a frequent flyer on the Super Constellations of the time. (He had left for Jadavpur in “the summer of 1956”). Back at Cambridge, he attends “lectures on mathematical logic and recursive function theory”, and says he “hung around in philosophy seminars and discussions”. Also he “approached C D Broad, a fine philosopher at Trinity” for philosophical advice and tutoring. He does not apparently attend the lectures of the two Professors of Philosophy at Cambridge at the time, John Wisdom and Richard Braithwaite; in fact, he told me in 2006 that his interaction with John Wisdom amounted to Wisdom (a keen horse-lover) trying to get him to ride horses which he did not do. Braithwaite was a leading philosopher of science; I, driven by my Science S levels, attended an excellent seminar run by Mary Hesse that Braithwaite attended too decades later; Amartya Sen says he did Physics not the Arts at Santiniketan school yet apparently gives Braithwaite’s lectures a miss at Cambridge during his claimed philosophy education!

Mary Hesse, incidentally, said she remembered Braithwaite saying to the Cambridge Senate the only original PhD in philosophy was that by Wittgenstein… And “Wittgenstein’s later repudiation of the Tractatus doctrine did not diminish Braithwaite’s regard”.

Professor Sen has newly claimed in 2021 that he as of 1953 “knew a fair amount… about Russell, Whitehead, Moore and Wittgenstein”, and he decided as of 1956/57 “to learn some serious philosophy” (“plunge into”?). Whitehead and Wittgenstein were dead, Russell may have been absent but Moore was receiving visitors for tea and philosophical talk until his final hospitalization! Broad was Moore’s successor and his editor, as well as being Amartya Sen’s philosophical guide according to Professor Sen himself; why did Broad not take him to tea with Moore? Perhaps because as a matter of fact rather than fantasy, contrary to his present claim in 2021, Professor Sen was not familiar with Moore’s or anyone else’s philosophy in the 1950s (except the Marxists) — as he said to me in 2006, “you know my philosophy was not an important thing at the time”! A narrative about Amartya Sen’s engagement with world philosophy via Sraffa or CD Broad in the late 1950s, early 1960s, while being busy too with Dobb’s Marxism, just does not cohere together plausibly… It is internally inconsistent, and reeks of self-contradiction and fabrication….

In 2013, Professor Sen allowed one Harvard alumnus to flatteringly describe him as having been all along really a “neoclassical economist” who also happens to be “the greatest living scholar of the original philosopher of the free market, Adam Smith”! 
Now as recently as June 3 2021, Professor Sen has permitted Christina Pazzanese of the Harvard Gazette to create further #FakeNews/disinformation about him, eg

— Tagore was “an associate of” Amartya’s maternal grandfather Kshitimohan Sen (not his employer?)!
— that Amartya Sen “(comes) from a long line of Hindu intellectuals and teachers”, “Teaching was in his blood”…

— that Amartya Sen “left a prestigious teaching job in India to return to Cambridge to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy”; “I was always interested in philosophy. I had studied on my own a certain amount of philosophy…. including philosophy of mathematics. I fully enjoyed doing them. But when the college suddenly said, “Now, for four years, you can do what you like. We’ll give you a salary,” I said, “This is a really good chance to do some philosophy systematically,” which I did”. Contrary to this Fake News and apparent delusion and self-deception in 2021, Amartya told me categorically in 2006 in response to my questions:

ROY: …The philosophers Renford Bambrough and John Wisdom would have been with you at Cambridge….
SEN: Wisdom I knew better; he was at my College; but you know my philosophy was not an important thing at the time. Among the philosophers there, it was C. D. Broad with whom I chatted more. But Wisdom I knew, and he mainly tried to encourage me to ride horses with him, which I didn’t.
ROY: You went to Cambridge in …
SEN: I went to Cambridge in 1953.
ROY: So Wittgenstein had just died…
SEN: Wittgenstein had died.
ROY: Only just in 1952 (sic; in fact he died in 1951.
SEN: But I knew a lot about the conversations between Wittgenstein and Sraffa because Sraffa was alive; I did a paper on that by the way.
ROY: Well that’s what I was going to ask, there is no trace of your work on Wittgenstein and the Wittgensteinians.
SEN: I don’t know why. My paper was published in the Journal of Economic Literature a couple of years ago. Now mind you it’s not a conclusion, just an interpretation, what was the role of Gramsci in the works of Sraffa and Wittgenstein, what is it that Sraffa actually did in intermediating between them.
ROY: In your book Identity and Violence, I was curious to find you call yourself a “dabbler” in Philosophy yet at the same time you are an eminent Professor of Philosophy at Harvard for decades. The question that arose was, were you being modest, and if so, truly or falsely?
SEN (laughs): I think if you make a statement which you suspect might have been made out of modesty and then I said it was because of modesty I think I would have eliminated the motivation for the statement as you identify it. I am not going to answer the question as to what I think.
ROY: But surely you are not a “dabbler” in Philosophy?
SEN: I am interested in Philosophy is what I meant, and whether I am a dabbler or whether I’ve succeeded in making some contribution is for others to judge. But not for me to judge.
ROY: Okay.
SEN: As for me, the right description is that I am a dabbler in Philosophy. But then that diagnostic is… mine, and I won’t go to war with others if someone disputes that. But it’s not for me to dispute it.
ROY: Would you, for example in reference to our discussion about Wittgenstein, say that you have contributed to Philosophy in and of itself regardless of Economics?
SEN: Most of my work on Philosophy has got nothing to do with Economics. It is primarily on Ethics, to some extent on Epistemology. And these are not “economic” subjects. I have never written on the “Philosophy of Economics” at all.
ROY: How about Ontology? I mean the question “What there is” would be…..
SEN: I am less concerned with Ontology or with Metaphysics than some people are. I respect the subject but I have not been involved.
ROY: You have not been involved?
SEN: Well, I have read a lot but I haven’t worked on it. I have worked on Ethics and Political Philosophy and I have worked on Epistemology and I have worked a little bit on Mathematical Logic. Those are the three main areas in which I have worked.
ROY: Why I say that is because, if the three main philosophical questions are summarised as “What is there?” (or “Who am I?”), “What is true?”, “What should I do?”, then the question “Who am I?” is very much a part of your concern with identity and a universal question generally, while “Is this true?” is relevant to Epistemology and “What should I do?” is obviously Ethics. Morton White summarised philosophy in those three questions. It seems to me you have in this book had to look at…
SEN: At all three of them.
ROY: Well, some Ontology at least….

Amartya has been just as he said in his 2006 book and talking with me, a “dabbler“ in academic philosophy, and perhaps his association with John Rawls was enough to make him Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, it hardly matters. And yes he has, decades after Sraffa’s death, tried to put a Marxist spin on the later Wittgenstein by suggesting it was all really in the Italian Communist Gramsci, friend of Sraffa… But he has not been a backer of “individual liberty and freedom” as he claims…! There seems to be no significant evidence of any such through his apparent defence in the 1980s of Communist China’s forced one-child policy to his ignoring the fact one young man named Khemka was tossed into jail for being rude to the Communist Government of Bengal the same day he was feted by that Government for his 1998 Nobel! We will return to the Sraffa issue immediately after the next.

10. Wittgenstein & Economic Theory IV: Exactly what Subroto Roy, Renford Bambrough, John Wisdom (and Wittgenstein) have already done… for the kind information of Amartya Sen & Team Amartya

Just so absolutely no future confusion arises, and Professor Sen or Team Amartya suddenly do not think now that they remember his mental state in 1953 to have also contained all this that follows too, it may be best to outline what I’ve said (since 2017 or a bit earlier) that I and Bambrough and Wisdom have done, applying the later work of Wittgenstein.

Several lines descended from Wittgenstein through his several disciples, including Max Black whom I visited and talked extensively with at Cornell throughout the Fall of 1983, and whom I was privileged to count as a friend, an experience I have yet to write of. “But there is one disciple who stands apart from the rest; the work of Professor Wisdom is truly Wittgensteinian, yet at the same time original and independent…Wisdom carries Wittgenstein’s work further than he himself did, and faces its consequences more explicitly… Wisdom’s approach is much less esoteric than Wittgenstein’s, and his conclusions are perhaps easier to come to grips with.  We see in Wisdom something like a new application of Wittgenstein’s ideas; we recognize the same forms there, yet cast, as it were, in a new medium…” said David Pole in his 1958 book The later philosophy of Wittgenstein.

Wisdom in his obituary notice of Wittgenstein said if he was asked to say in one sentence what was the biggest contribution of Wittgenstein he would say it was asking the question “Can you play chess without the Queen?”  Wisdom’s disciple Bambrough in turn said if he was asked to say in one sentence what was the biggest contribution of Wisdom he would say it was Wisdom replying to such a question about Wittgenstein as he had done.  

I said in my 2004 public lecture at the University of Buckingham: “If I was asked to answer in one sentence what has been the combined contribution to human thought of Wittgenstein, Wisdom and Bambrough, indeed of modern British philosophy as a whole, I would say it has been the proof that there are no unanswerable questions, that there is no question to which there is not a right answer.  By “common reasoning” I shall mean merely to refer to the structure of any conversation well-enough described by F R Leavis’s operators in literary criticism: “This is so, isn’t it?, Yes, but….”.  My “yes” to your “This is so, isn’t it?” indicates agreement with what you have said while my “but…” tells you I believe there may be something more to the matter, some further logical relation to be found, some further fact to be investigated or experiment carried out, some further reflection necessary and possible upon already known and agreed upon facts. It amounts to a new “This is so, isn’t it?” to which you may respond with your own, “Yes, but…”; and our argument would continue.  Another set of operators is: “You might as well say…”; “Exactly so”; “But this is different…” This was how Wisdom encapsulated the “case-by-case” method of argument that he pioneered and practiced. It requires intimate description of particular cases and marking of similarities and differences between them, yielding a powerful indefinitely productive method of objective reasoning, distinct from and logically prior to the usual methods of deduction and induction that exhaust the range of positivism.  We are able to see how common reasoning may proceed in practice in subtle fields like law, psychology, politics, ethics, aesthetics and theology, just as objectively as it does in natural science and mathematics. Wittgenstein had spoken of our “craving for generality” and our “contemptuous attitude towards the particular case”. Wisdom formalized the epistemological priority of particular over general saying: “Examples are the final food of thought. Principles and laws may serve us well. They can help us to bring to bear on what is now in question what is not now in question. They help us to connect one thing with another and another and another. But at the bar of reason, always the final appeal is to cases.” And “Argument must be heard”.  In all conflicts – whether within a given science, between different sciences, between sciences and religion, within a given religion, between different religions, between sciences and arts, within the arts, between religion and the arts, between quarreling nations, quarreling neighbours or quarreling spouses, whether in real relationships of actual life or hypothetical relationships of literature and drama – an approach of this kind tells us there is something further that may be said, some improvement that can be carried out, some further scope for investigation or experiment allowing discovery of new facts, some further reflection necessary or possible upon known facts. There are no conflicts that are necessarily irresoluble. Where the suicide-bombers and their powerful adversaries invite us to share their hasty and erroneous assumption that religious, political or economic cultures are becoming irreconcilable and doomed to be fights unto death, we may give to them instead John Wisdom’s “Argument must be heard….”

Bambrough, applying Wisdom applying Wittgenstein, and integrating all this with his deep classical scholarship and knowledge of Aristotle and Plato in particular, showed how objectivity and reasoning are possible in politics, in ethics, in theology, in aesthetics, in literature, as much or as little as in science or mathematics.  Bambrough’s  path-breaking works of general epistemology and ontology are four humble papers in  Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

“Universals and Family Resemblances”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4544648“ 
Unanswerable Questions” https://www.jstor.org/stable/4106729?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

“Objectivity and Objects”

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4544817?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
“Thought, Word and Deed”
https://academic.oup.com/aristoteliansupp/article-abstract/54/1/105/1779886?redirectedFrom=PDF

I, applying all of this from Bambrough to the economic theory of Marshall, Keynes, Hicks, Hayek, Hahn, Friedman, Arrow and others showed in 1989 the same for economic policy and normative economics.  

Economic reasoning is a species of reasoning in general… It is marked by its subject matter (finding work, handling income savings consumption investment etc), and by its practical constraints…it cannot be indefinitely open like reasoning in science or history or literature.. Reasoning with “practical constraints” means too “Reasoning with action demanded”… Ie “Practical Reasoning”…Not merely “theoretical” or “academic” or “mental”… If an action must result, it will be a possible or feasible one of several…

Economic reasoning is a species of reasoning in general… It is marked by its subject matter (finding work, handling income savings consumption investment etc), and by its practical constraints…it cannot be indefinitely open like reasoning in science or history or literature.. https://t.co/oJjVzgsVN8

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) October 9, 2021

Reasoning with "practical constraints" means too "Reasoning with action demanded"… Ie "Practical Reasoning"…Not merely "theoretical" or "academic" or "mental"… If an action must result, it will be a possible or feasible one of several…

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) October 9, 2021

I have since then tentatively applied similar methods of reasoning to diplomacy, politics, psychology, religion, literature, and presently explore  physics.

What Wisdom did was far more astonishing, showing, among many other things, how the confluence of Freud and Wittgenstein could be found to help us comprehend all that seems so irrational: hopes & fears, dreams & the unconscious, psychoses & neuroses, everything said or done has an explanation, usually when there has been an adequate description.   Modes of reasoning are manifold, well beyond the deduction and statistical inference known to the positivist.  Then besides, there’s reflection about known facts too.  Really if you can make reasonable sense of dreams and the unconscious, of  the psychotic and the neurotic, as Wisdom did, the differences between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, between the West and Islam, between Einstein and Quantum Mechanics too become amenable…

11. Wittgenstein & Economic Theory V: Implications of my work for Economic Theory & Policy: Sidney Alexander, Karl Georg Zinn, TW Schultz and other assessments

Professor Sen has made much of his memory of purported discussions with Sraffa about Sraffa’s conversations with or memories of Wittgenstein, at least a decade after the Sraffa Wittgenstein conversations had ended, and about which Sraffa was said to have himself little memory. If Sraffa affected Wittgenstein with his Neapolitan gesture on a train as deeply as has been said by many, Sraffa probably did not remember or care very much and had many other things on his mind… Yes Wittgenstein’s famous preface lauded Sraffa’s contribution to his thinking, but as is known Philosophical Investigations was collated and published only in 1953, two years after his death, and it is mostly anticipated in his pre-World War II lectures — first in 1930-1933, recorded in copious notes taken by GE Moore, and now published, then in 1933-1937 in the student-notes known as The Blue and Brown Books and other recollections, eg that of John Wisdom in his Mind obituary notice in 1951. Professor Sen makes out as if the vast change in Wittgenstein’s thinking between his first published book and his second posthumously published book turned on the specific interaction with Sraffa, and the evidence for that is given by the great man himself in the Preface. Not so. Doubtless Sraffa and Wittgenstein were friends, and as the Ray Monk biography of the latter shows, Wittgenstein was deeply concerned about his nationality status and visa status after Hitler took Austria, and had relied on the advice and help of his friend. There was a quite natural gratitude in Wittgenstein for his friend’s advice, which may have also been on his mind in respect of the mention in the Preface. Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian military in World War I and was an artillery-spotter; at Cambridge in the late 1930s, he and Sraffa may have both become, legally, “enemy aliens”!

Professor Sen’s implicit suggestion that he had a special vantage point at Trinity College thanks to his friendship with Sraffa (let aside his pre-knowledge as an undergraduate at Presidency even before he met Sraffa), to comprehend (the recently deceased) Wittgenstein’s work (then in the hands of his Literary Executors especially GEM Anscombe), does not hold water. Indeed how to see Wittgenstein’s later work itself may be helped by seeing a slight analogy there is between the later Tolstoy and later Wittgenstein.

FR Leavis reported in his masterly assessment of Anna Karenina, “The later Tolstoy…refused to see anything impressive in Anna Karenina. “What difficulty is there”, he said, “in writing how an officer fell in love with a married woman? There is no difficulty in it, and, above all, there is no good in it…” Analogously, there is some considerable evidence Wittgenstein did not like his own Tractatus very much even before he returned to Cambridge in 1929 (where it was submitted as and became his doctoral thesis, more than eight years after its first publication) and years before he started to give his Blue and Brown Book lectures in the 1930s which two decades later became his posthumous Philosophical Investigations. An author, especially an author of a work of genius, may see shortcomings in his/her own work which others, whether admirers or critics, have missed.

The evidence for this is Wittgenstein’s apparent disdain for the so-called Vienna Circle of scientists and philosophers who had taken most keenly to Tractatus as soon as it was published in 1921 and who apparently longed to acquire him as a leader. Wittgenstein kept them waiting for long, for five years!, and when he did meet them he apparently refused to discuss philosophy with them and instead read from the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore!

Amartya Sen, being a Tagore specialist and having been named as a baby by Tagore himself a few years later, would have known this story if he knew Wittgenstein’s work or the work of Wittgenstein scholars; but he didn’t, because he doesn’t. No post-lunch conversation with Sraffa among the hundreds such apparently went:

“Sraffa: You know LW told me once he snubbed the Vienna Circle reading Tagore, the poet from your India, rather than discussing philosophy as they had wished…

Sen: That’s interesting. I was told by my mother that Tagore himself named me “Amartya” as a baby!”

And with this arrival at the Vienna Circle of exactly a century ago we also get to the point where the implications for Economic Theory start to become apparent of the work I applied in my 1989 Philosophy of Economics, i.e. the work of the later Wittgenstein, John Wisdom, Renford Bambrough. Namely, the Vienna Circle positivism which penetrated and since then dominated all of Economic Theory is firmly if quietly put to final rest...

I have myself arrived at a view that exactly three or four statements of the later Wittgenstein are necessary and sufficient for us in 2021 to grasp the core of his point of view in ontology, epistemology, ethics, ie his point of view in philosophy:
(1) & (2) … his deploring the “craving for generality” and our “contemptuous attitude towards the particular case”;
(3)… his 1944 statement to Malcolm: “What is the use of studying philosophy if all that does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?”
(4) his statement to John Wisdom when Wisdom said his talk with another philosopher had not gone well:
“Perhaps you made the mistake of denying something that he asserted”… and “Say what you like”…

No, Wittgenstein is not asking we not deny 2+2=5…
Significance? Not that truth is absent or consistency is not a value but that truth in any subtle complex discussion of diplomacy, statecraft, science, mathematics or family psychology emerges thru dialogue, or, better, dialectic… “Without contraries is no progression” (Blake).
My view is developed via those of John Wisdom and Renford Bambrough. I am, as an economist, economizing…🙂 “Keeping with my purpose of addressing extant problems in economic theory while using philosophy as discreetly as possibly”…

Sidney Alexander of MIT, teacher of Solow and contemporary of Samuelson, came to a similar point of view within Economic Theory years earlier not via the later Wittgenstein but via Dewey, pupil of Peirce, who also may have affected Wittgenstein via Ramsey. “Following Renford Bambrough … (Dr Roy) arrives at a position equivalent to that of the American pragmatists, especially Dewey, who insist that the problematic situation provides the starting point for the analysis of a problem even though there are no ultimate starting points. The methodological implication is the support of inquiry as fundamental, avoiding both scepticism and dogmatism” said Alexander in 1985…. He and I were pirate ships sinking permanently the positivist Armada in Economics, especially that in so-called “social choice theory” beloved of Amartya Sen. Hahn, and I think Arrow too through him, knew I was right.

12. Amartya Sen’s excellent article of 1962 in the Hahn volume that he himself seems unaware of: I suggest he withdraw from publication the Team Amartya product, and he and I write an accurate biography for him instead

Yesterday 16 December 2021 the Hahn-Brechling 1965 volume of a 1962 conference in France on Theory of Interest Rates came into my ownership. I had bought it because of the vital critique by Hahn of Patinkin contained in it, which was the subject of my 17 November 1976 Hahn seminar talk on the foundations of monetary theory. I found unexpectedly in it an excellent article too by Amartya Sen, which he seems never to have referred to again himself. It makes me think he should order the withdrawal of the document he let Team Amartya produce about him, and instead he and I should sit for a week and write up an accurate intellectual biography of his.

"For this meeting I'm happy to search now for any insight to be found in his work…." https://t.co/LvqxcavxdO

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) December 15, 2021

In fact here's my recommendation to Amartya @Harvard Prof @AmartyaSen_Econ #AmartyaSen: withdraw the volume created by #TeamAmartya which has been so open to my harsh criticism https://t.co/lCk1P0f46M => I&he should write together a concise accurate intellectual biography for him https://t.co/NSQP2tTjFW

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) December 16, 2021

to be continued…

I am not a journalist but came to be invited by the Editor of The Statesman, Ravindra Kumar, to be Contributing Editor between October 2005 and June 2008. Besides many signed op-ed articles and analyses that have been re-published elsewhere here, I also contributed to the team efforts of the paper’s daily editorial stance. Some of these have now been digitized by my new assistant librarians, and offer Glimpses of Indian Politics (& World Events) during that time, besides in some cases having a continued relevance…

More to come… 2006, 2007, 2008….

16 December 2020

The empirical issue is simple… or at least it is simple to state… Was there 0 illegality in the average 8% difference in vote growth between @JoeBiden & @realDonaldTrump? If so Mr Biden won fair and square. But if some of the difference in growth was bad it could have altered swing State outcomes…

13 December 2020 Yesterday I did an elementary analysis of the American Presidential voting data across 50 States and the District of Columbia, contrasting 2020 with 2016. It turns out to be obvious that both sides saw massive growth from 2016. On average the recorded Democrat vote grew by some 8% more than the growth of the Trump vote. The explanations may be innocent or not or more likely some mixture of both. Innocent explanations of large vote growths on both sides are eg demographic changes (more first time 18yr old voters voting than before); more canvassing of the elderly, the infirm, the very poor; better campaigning; etc. And there could be known and/or unknown illegalities as well.

Note the Arizona and Georgia difference in growth between Democrats and Mr Trump is much larger than the average, Michigan’s difference in growth is about average, and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin is each about half the average difference in growth.

And look just a bit to see how vastly the Trump vote grew and exceeded the Democratic vote growth, not just in Florida, but in eg California Hawaii New York Illinois and DC too…

Utah had the most massive growth on both sides…

My analysis is simple, clear, and made relevant by the pompous and needless reference to quadrillions and Z-tests in the Texas vs Pennsylvania #TexasLawsuit in the US Supreme Court!

Caveat: some young person do check my spreadsheets for errors… Disclosure: Both @realDonaldTrump and @SenSanders praised a trade-policy talk of mine at a conference back in Sep 1983 Washington…

More to come…

Critique of Monetary Ideas of Manmohan & Modi:  the Roy Model explaining to Bimal Jalan, Nirmala Sitharaman, RBI etc what it is they are doing

 

 

Drafts 4 August 2019, 7 August 2019, 27 August 2019, 28 August, 30 August, 31 August, 1 September 2019

 

 

 

by Subroto Roy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1 The Original Scheme/(Scam?)

 

 

 

2 Manmohan’s Faulty Macro

 

 

 

3 #RajantoNDTV

 

 

 

4 Mr Modi Goes to Washington

 

 

 

5 Rajiv, Ray, Milton & Myself

 

 

 

6 Mr Modi’s #5trillioneconomy dictat

 

 

 

7 Brunner Meltzer’s Balance Sheet

 

 

 

8 NO “SURPLUS”!

 

 

 

9 India’s Balance of Payments

 

 

 

10 India’s Monetary Base

 

 

 

11 #RBIMirage!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(See also My 13 Sep 2019 Advice to PM Modi’s Adviser: Let PM address each State Legislature, get all India Govt Accounting & Public Decision Making to have integrity…)  

 

 

 

(1) Chapter 1 The Original Scheme/(Scam?) 4 Aug 2019 

 

 

 

A dozen years ago in April 2007 I denounced the original Sonia Manmohan Chidambaram Montek etc idea, which Modi Jaitley Shah Gurumurthy Sitharaman etc have now taken over with their Bimal Jalan “panel” idea, about purloining foreign exchange reserves for the Government. (“A scam in the making” Sunday Statesman April 1 2007 front page comment, “Swindling India”) 

The Reserve Bank of India @RBI like any central bank is charged with managing a country’s “foreign exchange reserves”; fx reserves are *not* what they sound like: they are a residual in a country’s balance of payments and are *not* akin to tax revenues, hence are *not* open to be purloined by a Government to spend.  

 

India’s fx reserves were sought to be “borrowed” by the Manmohan Chidambaram Montek regime back then, and I harshly objected.  The same is being attempted now by Modi Jaitley Shah Gurumurthy Sitharaman. 

 

Then it was ostensibly for  “infrastructure”, now ostensibly for “small business” subsidies, “poverty alleviation”, “recapitalising PSBs”; I denounced it as lobbyist-driven humbug then, and do so now too. 

 

 

 

 

 

One of Manmohan’s acolytes has in recent days told PTI “in the past too, governments had contemplated a similar plan but dropped it as the negatives far outweighed the positives”.   

Yes… they dropped it thanks to my gali… 

 

I said in 2007 (“A scam in the making” Sunday Statesman April 1 2007 front page comment, “Swindling India”)

“A gigantic financial scheme is in the making. Will it come to be seen in future years as having been in fact a scam – indeed India’s scam of the 21st Century for which India’s unknowing masses will be made to pay for many generations? The scheme is mind-boggling in size as well as its sheer audacity. Bofors, Quattrochi etc amount to peanuts in comparison. 

No less a personage than the Finance Minister of India, P Chidambaram, has openly praised the potential of this financial scheme. And he has done so in no less an open and transparent place than his latest Budget Speech to Parliament last February.

It is a scheme openly advocated and currently being developed by our Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s closest acolytes, Planning Commission head Mr Montek Singh Ahluwalia and HDFC head Mr Deepak Parekh, in collaboration with Reserve Bank Governor Dr YV Reddy and the Finance Ministry’s top bureaucrats. The PM himself has come close to endorsing it explicitly. And this PM is not an elected member of the Lok Sabha but holds office and acts as the executive agent of the UPA Chairperson and Lok Sabha Member from Rae Bareilly, Sonia Gandhi.

I hasten to add nobody in the BJP has objected to this financial scheme — in fact had the BJP been in power today instead of Congress, they would have been likely even more agreeable to the scheme given their close proximity to business lobbies and organized capital. As for the Communists, none of their JNU economics professors is technically competent enough to comprehend or recognize what is going on.

The scheme involves private companies “borrowing” India’s foreign exchange reserves from the Reserve Bank of India, allegedly for purpose of “infrastructure” creation — in collaboration with the American bank Citigroup, the American financial business, Blackstone Group, and possibly the American giant, GE Capital too. Mr Chidambaram took the unprecedented step of naming Mr Deepak Parekh as well as Citigroup and Blackstone in the text of his Budget Speech.

To begin to comprehend the nature of this scheme, we need to recall an earlier case.

Foreign exchange reserves of countries typically include foreign currency holdings as well as gold stocks. One of the biggest Wall Street scams of the 1980s-1990s involved private companies borrowing not countries’ foreign currency reserves but their gold reserves.

In that scam, it was not the Reserve Bank of India that was cheated but the Central Banks of Poland, Malaysia, Portugal and Yugoslavia. The New York financial company involved was a subsidiary of the Drexel Burnham Lambert Group. The Drexel parent went bankrupt on February 13 1990 and its subsidiary followed on May 9 1990.

A report on June 4 1990 by Leah J. Nathans (now Leah Nathans Spiro) in New York’s highly respected Business Week magazine said: “Central banks, those pillars of monetary virtue, lost $219 million ($21.9 crore) to an obscure commodities subsidiary called Drexel Burnham Lambert Trading Corporation”. The sum was small by American standards but it was “a big, big number” for the countries involved at the time.

What had these national central banks done? They had been lured into becoming greedy. They had been sitting on stocks of gold as part of their national reserves which they felt “just collect dust”. So they yielded to the temptation offered by the Drexel subsidiary of leasing the gold to private parties.

In Ms. Nathans’ words, “By leasing gold, a central bank earns a modest interest rate, ranging from less than 0.5% to 2.5%. Typically, the central bank consigns the gold to a dealer – say, for 90 days. The dealer can then lend the gold to a customer, at a higher interest rate. It may be a speculator, who hopes to repay the borrowed gold when the price falls, or a gold mine that wants to repay the broker with gold produced later.”

But the Drexel parent and subsidiary went bankrupt through bad financial decisions. Drexel’s Michael Milken went to jail. The Central Banks of Poland, Malaysia, Portugal and Yugoslavia were left empty-handed – and had to sue as creditors in New York’s courts trying desperately to get back the gold they had been lured into parting with. It would be unwise to take bets on how much of their gold they ever got back.

All the present PM’s men — Messrs Chidambaram, Ahluwalia, Parekh, Reddy et al in collaboration with one or two American financial companies – now have a scheme that will use not the RBI’s gold but its foreign currency reserves.

Mr Ahluwalia and Mr Parekh have made the outlandish claim that “India needs US$320 billion” (US 32,000 crore) by way of “investment for physical infrastructure” during the so-called “Eleventh Five-Year Plan”. (How many so-called “Five Year Plans” is India going to have incidentally? We had our “First Plan” when Manmohan Singh was a student at Punjab University. Stalin, who invented the “Five Year Plan”, died during that time, and even his old USSR has ceased to exist, let alone its “Five Year Plans”.)

That vast amount of “investment for physical infrastructure” is what Mr Ahluwalia says he knows India needs for his purported “9% growth rate” to be achieved. Where are the macroeconomic models and time-series data sets from him or his friends to back such assertions? There are none. None of the PM’s men, no one in the Finance Ministry or RBI or Planning Commission, nor any of their JNU economics professor friends or anyone else in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata etc have any such models or data with which to back such assertions. Nor do the World Bank etc. It is all sheer humbug – all a lie. It is part of the mendacity and self-delusion that our capital city has been floating upon.

In any event, the RBI reportedly has “opposed the idea of deploying forex reserves for infrastructure development on the grounds that it will create monetary expansion”. But Mr Chidambaram’s Finance Ministry owns the RBI, and the Ministry has said “the RBI’s concerns had been taken care of, as the investments would be deployed only through a structured mechanism”. (Business Standard 23 March 2007, p. 3)

What is a “structured mechanism”? Mr Chidambaram, mentioning Citigroup and Blackstone Group specifically, said in his Budget Speech that Mr Deepak Parekh has “suggested the establishment of two wholly-owned overseas subsidiaries of India Infrastructure Finance Company Ltd with the following objectives: (i) to borrow funds from the RBI and lend to Indian companies implementing infrastructure projects in India, or to co-finance their External Commercial Borrowings for such projects, solely for capital expenditure outside India; and (ii) to borrow funds from the RBI, invest such funds in highly rated collateral securities, and provide ‘credit wrap’ insurance to infrastructure projects in India for raising resources in international markets. The loans by RBI to these two subsidiary companies will be guaranteed by the Government of India and the RBI will be assured of a return higher than the average rate of return on its incremental investment.”

You do not understand? Well, no one is supposed to. The most exquisite thievery occurs after all not in darkness but in broad daylight with everyone watching but no one able to see or comprehend anything. So let us return to elementary first principles.

What are foreign exchange reserves and why do countries hold them? It is quite simply answered. Consider the USA and Canada, each with its own dollar. Canadians want to purchase American goods and services, give gifts and make loans to American residents, and make investments in the USA. Americans want to do the same in Canada. Each has to use the domestic money of the other when it does so. If an American wishes to lend money to a Canadian or to purchase something from him, he receives Canadian dollar notes from the Canadian Government to make his Canadian transactions, handing over his American dollar notes instead. The American dollar notes he hands over become part of Canada’s foreign exchange reserves, held by its Central Bank. Roughly speaking, a country’s foreign exchange reserves are the residual foreign currency assets its central bank holds after all these transactions are carried out on both sides of the border.

In the US-Canada case, neither Government prevents its citizens from exchanging domestic money for foreign money. In India, our rupee has been inconvertible since about 1940. The average Indian cannot freely exchange his/her rupee-denominated assets for foreign exchange denominated ones even if he/she wished to. There has been some import-liberalisation in recent years but only someone with the political access of Mr Tata or Mr Birla can purchase foreign assets and foreign companies using their Indian money – because the rupee is inconvertible, any bad financial decisions they make in using their foreign assets will be implicitly paid for by the Indian public.

Now a country’s central bank, such as our Reserve Bank, is the custodian of its foreign exchange reserves. India’s reserves are supposed to have reached $195.96 Billion ($19,596 Crore) as of March 16 2007. Keep in mind we do not know why they have risen: they can rise merely because foreigners (including NRIs) have lent us more of their money, not because foreigners have bought more of our goods and services. In fact Business Standard yesterday 31 March 2007 said on its front page “external commercial borrowing” was “a major source of accretion” of India’s reserves.

Also keep in mind that the Reserve Bank has the duty to manage these foreign-denominated assets against which it has already issued Indian rupees. It might receive a small conservative income from the cash-management aspect of this but it may not risk them or place them in any jeopardy!

Yet the whole idea behind the Chidambaram-Ahluwalia-Parekh-Reddy scheme under discussion by the Sonia-Manmohan Government is that the RBI will “lend” some of the billions of Americans dollars in its custody to overseas subsidiaries of Indian companies – say, for example, to the Tatas who have now bought foreign “capital assets” of some US$ 12 Billion ($1200 Crore) from Corus without having anything near that kind of foreign income.

Such favoured Indian companies might then use these “borrowed” funds as collateral for other borrowings. In exchange, they will go about undertaking purported “infrastructure” projects in India. So much for the “structured mechanisms” being touted by Messrs Chidambaram, Ahluwalia, Parekh et al.

Before India’s public understands it, the schemers will shout (as they have done with the SEZ Act) that Parliament has passed it. The BJP will applaud with envy. The Communists might uncomprehendingly complain a little, and then be bought off with a sop or two that they do understand, like a little pro-China rhetoric or being let off lightly on Nandigram.

Now international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of International Settlements officially exist to advise central banks to stay along the straight and narrow and to avoid all such mischief. Here is what the IMF explicitly warned about such schemes in its Guidelines for Foreign Exchange Reserve Management dated September 20 2001:

“Liquidity risk. The pledging of reserves as collateral with foreign financial institutions as support for loans to either domestic entities, or foreign subsidiaries of the reserve management entity, has rendered reserves illiquid until the loans have been repaid. Liquidity risks have also arisen from the direct lending of reserves to such institutions when shocks to the domestic economy led to the borrowers’ inability to repay their liabilities, and impairment of the liquidity of the reserve assets.

Credit risk. Losses have arisen from the investment of reserves in high-yielding assets that were made without due regard to the credit risk associated with the issuer of the asset. Lending of reserves to domestic banks, and overseas subsidiaries of reserve management entities, has also exposed reserve management entities to credit risk.”

Dostoevsky believed man could have evil intent. Socrates was more generous and said man does not do wrong knowingly. It is not impossible our Indian schemers have innocent intent and do not even realize how close they are to becoming scamsters, or are already in the grip of scamsters. But at least we are now forewarned: India faces a clear risk of being swindled of its foreign exchange reserves. Prevention is better than cure.”

 

(2) Chapter 2 Manmohan’s Faulty Macroeconomics: 

Two years later in June 2009,  with Manmohan Singh back as PM, I had to tell him his macroeconomic logic was faulty, gravely so:

12 June 2009 The Hon’ble Dr Manmohan Singh, MP, Rajya Sabha Prime Minister of India

Respected Pradhan Mantriji:

In September 1993 at the residence of the Indian Ambassador to Washington, I had the privilege of being introduced to you by our Ambassador the Hon’ble Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Bar-at-Law. Ambassador Ray was kind enough to introduce me saying the 1991 “Congress manifesto had been written on (my laptop) computer” – a reference to my work as adviser on economic and other policy to the late Rajiv Gandhi in his last months. I presented you a book Foundations of India’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s created and edited by myself and WE James at the University of Hawaii since 1986 — the unpublished manuscript of that book had reached Rajivji by my hand when he and I first met on September 18 1990. Tragically, my pleadings in subsequent months to those around him that he seemed to my layman’s eyes vulnerable to the assassin went unheeded.

 When you and I met in 1993, we had both forgotten another meeting twenty years earlier in Paris. My father had been a long-time friend of the late Brahma Kaul, ICS, and the late MG Kaul, ICS, who knew you in your early days in the Government of India. In the late summer of 1973, you had acceded to my father’s request to advise me about economics before I embarked for the London School of Economics as a freshman undergraduate. You visited our then-home in Paris for about 40 minutes despite your busy schedule as part of an Indian delegation to the Aid-India Consortium. We ended up having a tense debate about the merits (as you saw them) and demerits (as I saw them) of the Soviet influence on Indian economic “planning”. You had not expected such controversy from a lad of 18 but you were kindly disposed and offered when departing to write a letter of introduction to Amartya Sen, then teaching at the LSE, which you later sent me and which I was delighted to carry to Professor Sen.

 I may add my father, back in 1973 in Paris, had predicted to me that you would become Prime Minister of India one day, and he, now in his 90s, is joined by myself in sending our warm congratulations at the start of your second term in that high office.

The controversy though that you and I had entered that Paris day in 1973 about scientific economics as applied to India, must be renewed afresh!

This is because of your categorical statement on June 9 2009 to the new 15th Lok Sabha:

“I am convinced, since our savings rate is as high as 35%, given the collective will, if all of us work together, we can achieve a growth-rate of 8%-9%, even if the world economy does not do well.” (Statement of Dr Manmohan Singh to the Lok Sabha, June 9 2009)

I am afraid there may be multiple reasons why such a statement is gravely and incorrigibly in error within scientific economics. From your high office as Prime Minister in a second term, faced perhaps with no significant opposition from either within or without your party, it is possible the effects of such an error may spell macroeconomic catastrophe for India.

As it happens, the British Labour Party politician Dr Meghnad Desai made an analogous statement to yours about India when he claimed in 2006 that China

“now has 10.4% growth on a 44 % savings rate… ”

Indeed the idea that China and India have had extremely high economic growth-rates based on purportedly astronomical savings rates has become a commonplace in recent years, repeated endlessly in international and domestic policy circles though perhaps without adequate basis.

1. Germany & Japan

What, at the outset, is supposed to be measured when we speak of “growth”? Indian businessmen and their media friends seem to think “growth” refers to something like nominal earnings before tax for the organised corporate sector, or any unspecified number that can be sold to visiting foreigners to induce them to park their funds in India: “You will get a 10% return if you invest in India” to which the visitor says “Oh that must mean India has 10% growth going on”. Of such nonsense are expensive international conferences in Davos and Delhi often made.

You will doubtless agree the economist at least must define economic growth properly and with care — what is referred to must be annual growth of per capita inflation-adjusted Gross Domestic Product. (Per capita National Income or Net National Product would be even better if available).

West Germany and Japan had the highest annual per capita real GDP growth-rates in the world economy starting from devastated post-World War II initial conditions. What were their measured rates?

West Germany: 6.6% in 1950-1960, falling to 3.5% by 1960-1970 falling to 2.4% by 1970-1978.

Japan: 6.8 % in 1952-1960 rising to 9.4% in 1960-1970 falling to 3.8 % in 1970-1978.

Thus in recent decades only Japan measured a spike in the 1960s of more than 9% annual growth of real per capita GDP. Now India and China are said to be achieving 8%-10 % and more year after year routinely!

 Perhaps we are observing an incredible phenomenon of world economic history. Or perhaps it is just something incredible, something false and misleading, like a mirage in the desert.

 You may agree that processes of measurement of real income in India both at federal and provincial levels, still remain well short of the world standards described by the UN’s System of National Accounts 1993. The actuality of our real GDP growth may be better than what is being measured or it may be worse than what is being measured – from the point of view of public decision-making we at present simply do not know which it is, and to overly rely on such numbers in national decisions may be unwise. In any event, India’s population is growing at near 2% so even if your Government’s measured number of 8% or 9% is taken at face-value, we have to subtract 2% population growth to get per capita figures.

2. Growth of the aam admi’s consumption-basket

The late Professor Milton Friedman had been an invited adviser in 1955 to the Government of India during the Second Five Year Plan’s formulation. The Government of India suppressed what he had to say and I had to publish it 34 years later in May 1989 during the 1986-1992 perestroika-for-India project that I led at the University of Hawaii in the United States. His November 1955 Memorandum to the Government of India is a chapter in the book Foundations of India’s Political Economy: Towards an Agenda for the 1990s that I and WE James created.

At the 1989 project-conference itself, Professor Friedman made the following astute observation about all GNP, GDP etc growth-numbers that speaks for itself:

“I don’t believe the term GNP ought to be used unless it is supplemented by a different statistic: the rate of growth of the average consumption basket consumed by the ordinary individual in the country. I think GNP rates of growth can give very misleading information. For example, you have rapid rates of growth of GNP in the Soviet Union with a declining standard of life for the people. Because GNP includes monuments and includes also other things. I’m not saying that that is the case with India; I’m just saying I would like to see the two figures together.”

You may perhaps agree upon reflection that not only may our national income growth measurements be less robust than we want, it may be better to be measuring something else instead, or as well, as a measure of the economic welfare of India’s people, namely, “the rate of growth of the average consumption basket consumed by the ordinary individual in the country”, i.e., the rate of growth of the average consumption basket consumed by the aam admi.

It would be excellent indeed if you were to instruct your Government’s economists and other spokesmen to do so this as it may be something more reliable as an indicator of our economic realities than all the waffle generated by crude aggregate growth-rates. 

3. Logic of your model

Thirdly, the logic needs to be spelled out of the economic model that underlies such statements as yours or Meghnad Desai’s that seek to operationally relate savings rates to aggregate growth rates in India or China. This seems not to have been done publicly in living memory by the Planning Commission or other Government economists. I have had to refer, therefore, to pages 251-253 of my own Cambridge doctoral thesis under Professor Frank Hahn thirty years ago, titled “On liberty and economic growth: preface to a philosophy for India”, where the logic of such models as yours was spelled out briefly as follows:

 Let

 Kt be capital stock

 Yt be national output

 It be the level of real investment

 St be the level of real savings

 By definition

 It = K t+1 – Kt

 By assumption

 Kt = k Yt 0 < k < 1

 St = sYt 0 < s <1

 In equilibrium ex ante investment equals ex ante savings

 It = St

 Hence in equilibrium

 sYt = K t+1 – Kt

 Or

 s/k = g

where g is defined to be the rate of growth (Y t+1-Yt)/Yt  .

 The left hand side then defines the “warranted rate of growth” which must maintain the famous “knife-edge” with the right hand side “natural rate of growth”.

 Your June 9 2009 Lok Sabha statement that a 35% rate of savings in India may lead to an 8%-9% rate of economic growth in India, or Meghnad Desai’s statement that a 44% rate of savings in China led to a 10.4% growth there, can only be made meaningful in the context of a logical economic model like the one I have given above.

 [In the open-economy version of the model, let Mt be imports, Et be exports, Ft net capital inflows.

 Assume

 Mt = aIt + bYt 0 < a, b < 1

 Et = E for all t

 Balance of payments is

 Bt = Mt – Et – Ft

 In equilibrium It = St + Bt

 Or

 Ft = (s+b) Yt – (1-a) It – E is a kind of “warranted” level of net capital inflow.]

 You may perhaps agree upon reflection that building the entire macroeconomic policy of the Government of India merely upon a piece of economic logic as simplistic as the

 s/k = g

 equation above, may spell an unacceptable risk to the future economic well-being of our vast population. An alternative procedural direction for macroeconomic policy, with more obviously positive and profound consequences, may have been that which I sought to persuade Rajiv Gandhi about with some success in 1990-1991. Namely, to systematically seek to improve towards normalcy the budgets, financial positions and decision-making capacities of the Union and all state and local governments as well as all public institutions, organisations, entities, and projects in general, with the aim of making our domestic money a genuine hard currency of the world again after seven decades, so that any ordinary resident of India may hold and trade precious metals and foreign exchange at his/her local bank just like all those glamorous privileged NRIs have been permitted to do. Such an alternative path has been described in “The Indian Revolution”, “Against Quackery”, “The Dream Team: A Critique”, “India’s Macroeconomics”, “Indian Inflation”, etc.

4. Gross exaggeration of real savings rate by misreading deposit multiplication

 Specifically, I am afraid you may have been misled into thinking India’s real savings rate, s, is as high as 35% just as Meghnad Desai may have misled himself into thinking China’s real savings rate is as high as 44%.

 Neither of you may have wanted to make such a claim if you had referred to the fact that over the last 25 years, the average savings rate across all OECD countries has been less than 10%. Economic theory always finds claims of discontinuous behaviour to be questionable. If the average OECD citizen has been trying to save 10% of disposable income at best, it appears prima facie odd that India’s PM claims a savings rate as high as 35% for India or a British politician has claimed a savings rate as high as 44% for China. Something may be wrong in the measurement of the allegedly astronomical savings rates of India and China. The late Professor Nicholas Kaldor himself, after all, suggested it was rich people who saved and poor people who did not for the simple reason the former had something left over to save which the latter did not!

 And indeed something is wrong in the measurements. What has happened, I believe, is that there has been a misreading of the vast nominal expansion of bank deposits via deposit-multiplication in the Indian banking system, an expansion that has been caused by explosive deficit finance over the last four or five decades. That vast nominal expansion of bank-deposits has been misread as indicating growth of real savings behaviour instead. I have written and spoken about and shown this quite extensively in the last half dozen years since I first discovered it in the case of India. E.g., in a lecture titled “Can India become an economic superpower or will there be a monetary meltdown?” at Cardiff University’s Institute of Applied Macroeconomics and at London’s Institute of Economic Affairs in April 2005, as well as in May 2005 at a monetary economics seminar invited at the RBI by Dr Narendra Jadav. The same may be true of China though I have looked at it much less.

 How I described this phenomenon in a 2007 article in The Statesman is this:

 “Savings is indeed normally measured by adding financial and non-financial savings. Financial savings include bank-deposits. But India is not a normal country in this. Nor is China. Both have seen massive exponential growth of bank-deposits in the last few decades. Does this mean Indians and Chinese are saving phenomenally high fractions of their incomes by assiduously putting money away into their shaky nationalized banks? Sadly, it does not. What has happened is government deficit-financing has grown explosively in both countries over decades. In a “fractional reserve” banking system (i.e. a system where your bank does not keep the money you deposited there but lends out almost all of it immediately), government expenditure causes bank-lending, and bank-lending causes bank-deposits to expand. Yes there has been massive expansion of bank-deposits in India but it is a nominal paper phenomenon and does not signify superhuman savings behaviour. Indians keep their assets mostly in metals, land, property, cattle, etc., and as cash, not as bank deposits.”

 An article of mine in 2008 in Business Standard put it like this:

 “India has followed in peacetime over six decades what the US and Britain followed during war. Our vast growth of bank deposits in recent decades has been mostly a paper (or nominal) phenomenon caused by unlimited deficit finance in a fractional reserve banking system. Policy makers have widely misinterpreted it as indicating a real phenomenon of incredibly high savings behaviour. In an inflationary environment, people save their wealth less as paper deposits than as real assets like land, cattle, buildings, machinery, food stocks, jewellery etc.”

 If you asked me “What then is India’s real savings rate?” I have little answer to give except to say I know what it is not – it is not what the Government of India says it is. It is certainly unlikely to be anywhere near the 35% you stated it to be in your June 9 2009 Lok Sabha statement. If the OECD’s real savings rate has been something like 10% out of disposable income, I might accept India’s is, say, 15% at a maximum when properly measured – far from the 35% being claimed. What I believe may have been mismeasured by you and Meghnad Desai and many others as indicating high real savings is actually the nominal or paper expansion of bank-deposits in a fractional reserve banking system induced by runaway government deficit-spending in both India and China over the last several decades.

5. Technological progress and the mainsprings of real economic growth

 So much for the g and s variables in the s/k = g equation in your economic model. But the assumed constant k is a big problem too!

 During the 1989 perestroika-for-India project-conference, Professor Friedman referred to his 1955 experience in India and said this about the assumption of a constant k:

 “I think there was an enormously important point… That was the almost universal acceptance at that time of the view that there was a sort of technologically fixed capital output ratio. That if you wanted to develop, you just had to figure out how much capital you needed, used as a statistical technological capital output ratio, and by God the next day you could immediately tell what output you were going to achieve. That was a large part of the motivation behind some of the measures that were taken then.”

 The crucial problem of the sort of growth-model from which your formulation relating savings to growth arises is that, with a constant k, you have necessarily neglected the real source of economic growth, which is technological progress!

 I said in the 2007 article referred to above:

 “Economic growth in India as elsewhere arises not because of what politicians and bureaucrats do in capital cities, but because of spontaneous technological progress, improved productivity and learning-by-doing on part of the general population. Technological progress is a very general notion, and applies to any and every production activity or commercial transaction that now can be accomplished more easily or using fewer inputs than before.”

 

In “Growth and Government Delusion” published in The Statesman last year, I described the growth process more fully like this:

 “The mainsprings of real growth in the wealth of the individual, and so of the nation, are greater practical learning, increases in capital resources and improvements in technology. Deeper skills and improved dexterity cause output produced with fewer inputs than before, i.e. greater productivity. Adam Smith said there is “invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many”. Consider a real life example. A fresh engineering graduate knows dynamometers are needed in testing and performance-certification of diesel engines. He strips open a meter, finds out how it works, asks engine manufacturers what design improvements they want to see, whether they will buy from him if he can make the improvement. He finds out prices and properties of machine tools needed and wages paid currently to skilled labour, calculates expected revenues and costs, and finally tries to persuade a bank of his production plans, promising to repay loans from his returns. Overcoming restrictions of religion or caste, the secular agent is spurred by expectation of future gains to approach various others with offers of contract, and so organize their efforts into one. If all his offers ~ to creditors, labour, suppliers ~ are accepted he is, for the moment, in business. He may not be for long ~ but if he succeeds his actions will have caused an improvement in design of dynamometers and a reduction in the cost of diesel engines, as well as an increase in the economy’s produced means of production (its capital stock) and in the value of contracts made. His creditors are more confident of his ability to repay, his buyers of his product quality, he himself knows more of his workers’ skills, etc. If these people enter a second and then a third and fourth set of contracts, the increase in mutual trust in coming to agreement will quickly decline in relation to the increased output of capital goods. The first source of increasing returns to scale in production, and hence the mainspring of real economic growth, arises from the successful completion of exchange. Transforming inputs into outputs necessarily takes time, and it is for that time the innovator or entrepreneur or “capitalist” or “adventurer” must persuade his creditors to trust him, whether bankers who have lent him capital or workers who have lent him labour. The essence of the enterprise (or “firm”) he tries to get underway consists of no more than the set of contracts he has entered into with the various others, his position being unique because he is the only one to know who all the others happen to be at the same time. In terms introduced by Professor Frank Hahn, the entrepreneur transforms himself from being “anonymous” to being “named” in the eyes of others, while also finding out qualities attaching to the names of those encountered in commerce. Profits earned are partly a measure of the entrepreneur’s success in this simultaneous process of discovery and advertisement. Another potential entrepreneur, fresh from engineering college, may soon pursue the pioneer’s success and start displacing his product in the market ~ eventually chasers become pioneers and then get chased themselves, and a process of dynamic competition would be underway. As it unfolds, anonymous and obscure graduates from engineering colleges become by dint of their efforts and a little luck, named and reputable firms and perhaps founders of industrial families. Multiply this simple story many times, with a few million different entrepreneurs and hundreds of thousands of different goods and services, and we shall be witnessing India’s actual Industrial Revolution, not the fake promise of it from self-seeking politicians and bureaucrats.”

 Technological progress in a myriad of ways and discovery of new resources are important factors contributing to India’s growth today. But while India’s “real” economy does well, the “nominal” paper-money economy controlled by Government does not. Continuous deficit financing for half a century has led to exponential growth of public debt and broad money, and, as noted, the vast growth of nominal bank-deposits has been misinterpreted as indicating unusually high real savings behaviour when it in fact may just signal vast amounts of government debt being held by our nationalised banks. These bank assets may be liquid domestically but are illiquid internationally since our government debt is not held by domestic households as voluntary savings nor has it been a liquid asset held worldwide in foreign portfolios.

 What politicians of all parties, especially your own and the BJP and CPI-M since they are the three largest, have been presiding over is exponential growth of our paper money supply, which has even reached 22% per annum. Parliament and the Government should be taking honest responsibility for this because it may certainly portend double-digit inflation (i.e., decline in the value of paper-money) perhaps as high as 14%-15% per annum, something that is certain to affect the aam admi’s economic welfare adversely.

6. Selling Government assets to Big Business is a bad idea in a potentially hyperinflationary economy

 Respected PradhanMantriji, the record would show that I, and really I alone, 25 years ago, may have been the first among Indian economists to advocate  the privatisation of the public sector. (Viz, “Silver Jubilee of Pricing, Planning and Politics: A Study of Economic Distortions in India”.) In spite of this, I have to say clearly now that in present circumstances of a potentially hyperinflationary economy created by your Government and its predecessors, I believe your Government’s present plans to sell Government assets may be an exceptionally unwise and imprudent idea. The reasoning is very simple from within monetary economics.

 Government every year has produced paper rupees and bank deposits in practically unlimited amounts to pay for its practically unlimited deficit financing, and it has behaved thus over decades. Such has been the nature of the macroeconomic process that all Indian political parties have been part of, whether they are aware of it or not.

 Indian Big Business has an acute sense of this long-term nominal/paper expansion of India’s economy, and acts towards converting wherever possible its own hoards of paper rupees and rupee-denominated assets into more valuable portfolios for itself of real or durable assets, most conspicuously including hard-currency denominated assets, farm-land and urban real-estate, and, now, the physical assets of the Indian public sector. Such a path of trying to transform local domestic paper assets – produced unlimitedly by Government monetary and fiscal policy and naturally destined to depreciate — into real durable assets, is a privately rational course of action to follow in an inflationary economy. It is not rocket-science to realise the long-term path of rupee-denominated assets is downwards in comparison to the hard-currencies of the world – just compare our money supply growth and inflation rates with those of the rest of the world.

 The Statesman of November 16 2006 had a lead editorial titled Government’s land-fraud: Cheating peasants in a hyperinflation-prone economy which said:

 “There is something fundamentally dishonourable about the way the Centre, the state of West Bengal and other state governments are treating the issue of expropriating peasants, farm-workers, petty shop-keepers etc of their small plots of land in the interests of promoters, industrialists and other businessmen. Singur may be but one example of a phenomenon being seen all over the country: Hyderabad, Karnataka, Kerala, Haryana, everywhere. So-called “Special Economic Zones” will merely exacerbate the problem many times over. India and its governments do not belong only to business and industrial lobbies, and what is good for private industrialists may or may not be good for India’s people as a whole. Economic development does not necessarily come to be defined by a few factories or high-rise housing complexes being built here or there on land that has been taken over by the Government, paying paper-money compensation to existing stakeholders, and then resold to promoters or industrialists backed by powerful political interest-groups on a promise that a few thousand new jobs will be created. One fundamental problem has to do with inadequate systems of land-description and definition, implementation and recording of property rights. An equally fundamental problem has to do with fair valuation of land owned by peasants etc. in terms of an inconvertible paper-money. Every serious economist knows that “land” is defined as that specific factor of production and real asset whose supply is fixed and does not increase in response to its price. Every serious economist also knows that paper-money is that nominal asset whose price can be made to catastrophically decline by a massive increase in its supply, i.e. by Government printing more of the paper it holds a monopoly to print. For Government to compensate people with paper-money it prints itself by valuing their land on the basis of an average of the price of the last few years, is for Government to cheat them of the fair present-value of the land. That present-value of land must be calculated in the way the present-value of any asset comes to be calculated, namely, by summing the likely discounted cash-flows of future values. And those future values should account for the likelihood of a massive future inflation causing decline in the value of paper-money in view of the fact we in India have a domestic public debt of some Rs. 30 trillion (Rs. 30 lakh crore) and counting, and money supply growth rates averaging 16-17% per annum. In fact, a responsible Government would, given the inconvertible nature of the rupee, have used foreign exchange or gold as the unit of account in calculating future-values of the land. India’s peasants are probably being cheated by their Government of real assets whose value is expected to rise, receiving nominal paper assets in compensation whose value is expected to fall.”

 Shortly afterwards the Hon’ble MP for Kolkata Dakshin, Km Mamata Banerjee, started her protest fast, riveting the nation’s attention in the winter of 2006-2007. What goes for government buying land on behalf of its businessman friends also goes, mutatis mutandis, for the public sector’s real assets being bought up by the private sector using domestic paper money in a potentially hyperinflationary economy. If your new Government wishes to see real assets of the public sector being sold for paper money, let it seek to value these assets not in inconvertible rupees that Government itself has been producing in unlimited quantities but perhaps in forex or gold-units instead!

 In the 2004-2005 volume Margaret Thatcher’s Revolution: How it Happened and What it Meant, edited by myself and Professor John Clarke, there is a chapter by Professor Patrick Minford on Margaret Thatcher’s fiscal and monetary policy (macroeconomics) that was placed ahead of the chapter by Professor Martin Ricketts on Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation (microeconomics). India’s fiscal and monetary or macroeconomic problems are far worse today than Britain’s were when Margaret Thatcher came to power. We need to get our macroeconomic problems sorted before we attempt the  microeconomic privatisation of public assets.

It is wonderful that your young party colleague, the Hon’ble MP from Amethi, Shri Rahul Gandhi, has declined to join the present Government and instead wishes to reflect further on the “common man” and “common woman” about whom I had described his late father talking to me on September 18 1990. Certainly the aam admi is not someone to be found among India’s lobbyists of organised Big Business or organised Big Labour who have tended to control government agendas from the big cities.

A partial list of my plentiful criticism may be found here… https://independentindian.com/2013/11/23/coverage-of-my-delhi-talk-on-3-dec-2012/ &nbsp;

also

https://independentindian.com/thoughts-words-deeds-my-work-1973-2010/rajiv-gandhi-and-the-origins-of-indias-1991-economic-reform/did-jagdish-bhagwati-originate-pioneer-intellectually-father-indias-1991-economic-reform-did-manmohan-singh-or-did-i-through-my-e/

 

 

 

 

 

(3) Chapter 3  #RajantoNDTV

 

 

 

 

 

Now coming to current times, I remain appalled by the large errors and extremely low quality of economic thought that has emerged from RBI and Gov’t economists and pretenders in Delhi and Mumbai in recent years.  

As a general rule, I do not critique people younger than myself.  Raghuram Rajan (who I think reviewed my 1984 work when he was still doing electrical engineering at IIT Delhi) fell in that category, and I was gentle and encouraging when he first became RBI Governor.  Even later when his waffle  became especially tedious I merely poked fun at it. Then in December 2018 he gave a much hyped NDTV interview where he made cardinal errors one does not expect from a former RBI Governor or IMF Chief Economist!  He had to be taken to task for revealing essentially an ignorance of what foreign exchange reserves in fact are by the IMF’s own definition and acknowledged as such worldwide!

Well @PrannoyRoyNDTV what your chum @raghuramrajan #RajantoNDTV says at 41:43 in his purported explanation of @RBI reserves, assets, liabilities, exchange- rates seems, or is, sophomoric humbug.. But of course Prannoy nods his head & says “Correct” (link: https://www.ndtv.com/video/exclusive/ndtv-special-ndtv-24×7/majoritarianism-divides-raghuram-rajan-tells-prannoy-roy-501586) ndtv.com/video/exclusiv…

https://twitter.com/subyroy/status/1074683846312914944?s=20

 it is utterly appalling that a former Chief Economist of the IMF, also a former @RBI head, seems unfamiliar w the IMF’s own standard definitions of the balance of payments & forex reserves… #RajanToNDTV

  https://twitter.com/subyroy/status/1074689091189362688?s=20

how to see a Central Bank is as a *gateway* for fx denom transactions… its fx balance sheet is like the book-keeping of the gatekeeper: a domestic resident may purchase a foreign good/service (=fx outflow) or a foreign resident may purchase a domestic good/service (=fx inflow)

plus there are *loans* & gifts too… a foreign loan or repayment or gift to a domestic resident (=fx inflow), a domestic loan or repayment or gift abroad (=fx outflow).. fx reserves are the *residual* of what’s left on both current and capital accounts taken together! #tellRajan

“fx reserves are the *residual* of what’s left on both current & capital accounts taken together!” #tellRajan

What does Rajan say at 41:43 @PrannoyRoyNDTV @nidhi

 #RajanToNDTV ? He says @RBI  has “assets” in fx, liabilities in INR… No Dumbo 🐘 RBI has a balance sheet in either!

RBI has a balance sheet in either USD or INR! 

Better to have it in USD so neither Manmohan nor Modi start to lust after it… #tellRajan

suppose an Indian techie in Calif *lends* his uncle USD 50,000 to start a factory in Coimbatore… fx reserves ⬆️; next year Uncle repays the loan, fx reserves ⬇️… @RBI  s sole function is to convert USD to INR & back! Balance sheet in either!

when Calif sends USD50k as a loan to Coimbatore @rbi  fx reserves⬆; when it’s returned ⬇.Initially RBI incurs a *liability* in USD, acquires an *asset* in INR (money to Uncle), both extinguished/reversed when Coimbatore Uncle repays the California techie #tellRajan #RajanToNDTV

a friend is puzzled so I am happy to clarify: Nephew sends a USD loan, he has an asset; @RBI  is fx gatekeeper; RBI has a liab w Nephew and an asset in INR paid to Uncle; India’s fx reserves ⬆️; when Uncle repays INR to RBI, RBI repays USD to Nephew; India’s fx reserves ⬇️…

Suppose Calif Nephew forgives the debt, ie transforms loan to Coimbatore Uncle into a gift instead.. India’s fx reserves stay ⬆️.

@RBI  holds that amount in USD against which it has issued INR. A different family may have a gift the other way of the same amount, fx reserves ⬇️…

Now has come the appalling idea represented by the so-called Jalan “panel” (it pretends to be of experts but has none, just bureaucrats and a Big Business honcho). 

https://twitter.com/subyroy/status/1078160271519019010?s=20

https://twitter.com/subyroy/status/1078220501531553795?s=20

https://twitter.com/subyroy/status/1120555067311099904?s=20

I’ve said it for months and say it again: what the #Jalan “panel” is doing, under pressure from @PMOIndia   – following the Manmohan Montek @PChidambaram_IN  model of 2007 – is profoundly misguided… https://twitter.com/subyroy/status/1152433290097221633?s=20

 

 

 

(4)  Chapter 4  Mr Modi Goes to Washington Oct 1984

 

 

 

 

As for Mr Narendra Modi, in October 1984 in Washington DC at SAIS Hopkins, I was invited to give a Deendayal Upadhyaya lecture and did so.  From India Mr Narendra Modi led a group of Young Leaders of the RSS for that conference and I recall well him being introduced to me before the talk.  I have written about that experience  https://twitter.com/subyroy/status/1105722176399908865?s=20 &nbsp;

 

 

 

(5) Chapter 5 Rajiv, SS Ray, Milton Friedman & Myself

 

 

 

Six years later, thanks to Siddhartha Shankar Ray, I and Rajiv Gandhi sparked what became known as the 1991 economic reform.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(6)  Chapter 6 Mr Modi’s USD 5 trillion Economy dictat

 

 

 

 

Mr Modi’s dictat now to somehow get India to some magical “5trilliondollar” economy has seemed to me silly and groundless. 

It is similar to Manmohan’s idea of “400 skyscrapers” (or was it 4000?). 

Such grandiose notions have behind them some kind of idea of the Government of India somehow getting their hands on “3trillionRupees” worth of foreign exchange reserves, of which the RBI is custodian, and then spending their way on unknown and probably totally wasteful expenditure (eg paying for foreign weapons India does not need but on which payments have come due, as had happened in the 1990/91 bop crisis, Amaresh Bagchi told me in 1992).

 

 

(7)  Chapter 7   Brunner & Meltzer’s Balance Sheet

 What is the best interpretation that can be put to the Modi idea?  That was the question I have asked myself, and the problem started to be cracked when I came across Karl Brunner & Allan Meltzer’s Table 9.1 in the Benjamin Friedman & Frank Hahn (eds) Handbook of Monetary Economics Vol 1…

It still takes several steps to apply to India! And I realised Dilliwallas/Bombaywallas will still fail to see the connections or get the logic under their belts.  So I have had to explain it all myself … Hence the Roy Model of what RBI & GoI are (unknowingly) up to… 

The Brunner Meltzer balance sheet Table 9.1 is where RBI & GoI have to start to comprehend what they are themselves trying to do using the #Jalan “panel”and all those trillions… starting by constructing from there… 

https://twitter.com/subyroy/status/1154698950340825088?s=20

https://twitter.com/subyroy/status/1154730921087516672?s=20

Start with what Brunner Meltzer call “Real Capital” held by the Public, K… Without loss of generality let’s include Human Capital too along with Real Capital as K, so Output or National Income or GDP is

Y = f (K)  f’>0 which means as K⬆️ Y⬆️…

Now what is it Messrs Modi Shah Gurumurthy etc want to do?  They want to go from today’s Y 2019 to some larger future Y 2024 where the latter is valued at “USD5trillion” 

Ie Y has to grow by 🔼 Y…

How can Y2019 grow by 🔼 Y to Y2024?

Plainly given Y=f(K) f’>0 only by K growing adequately too,

Ie by some 🔼 K…

So what it is Messrs Modi Shah Gurumurthy etc want to see is growth of Real & Human Capital  K….

OK. Fair enough. 

Returning to Brunner Meltzer as the basis of explaining to the Bimal Jalan “panel” what it is they are (unknowingly) up to… 

 

It will be seen a P multiplies the K… that is “Price” giving nominal values… 

Let’s change that to r for real return on our combination Real & Human Capital…

Now Brunner Meltzer have the Public on one hand, the Central Bank & Government on the other…

the Central Bank has, let’s call it “gold”, Au, as an asset, against which it issues Base Money B… 

I am going to say the Central Bank is owned by the Public… so the Au is also owned by the Public…

In an economy without imports exports or other fx flows, the Public as a whole has no Liabilities…

its Assets here are then rK (the nominal value of all Real and Human Capital) + Au = W its total Wealth or Equity,  

Ie, the Public’s Wealth is  W = rK + Au

Brunner Meltzer also have S for securities or Public Debt issued by the Government to pay for its expenditures… at a rate of return v…

Hence their Table 9.1. has vS held by the Public (usually by Banks) as an Asset against which Government has Liabilities vS…

Ignore that too, so… we have only W=rK+Au…

We’ve reached the end of Stage 1… time to leave Brunner Meltzer ‘s Table 9.1 behind…

For now we have W=rK + Au and the #ModiSarkar2 PMOIndia’s  wish to somehow get K to increase by 🔼 K (or rK to increase by r🔼K in nominal terms) to get to Mr Modi’s magical #USD5trillion economy.

The idea — in fact the perpetual temptation — motivating the #Jalan panel under Mr Modi et al now as it did Manmohan Montek Chidambaram  is to somehow use Au to cause 🔼K…

This idea, this perpetual temptation, to somehow use Au to cause 🔼K that is motivating #Jalan panel  now as it did Manmohan et al earlier may well be fallacious…

tho let’s assume for now it’s not…

Return to W = rK + Au which is the Public’s Wealth..

W = rK + Au showing no liabilities for the Public as a whole is so if there are no foreign exchange flows in either direction. 

But obviously there are such flows in fact…

fx inflows from exports and inward remittances and interest received,

fx outflows due to imports and outward remittances and interest paid…

that’s the Current Account.

If fx inflows > fx outflows on the Current Account (and there is no Capital Account) then

W = rK + Au  may show 🔼Au > 0

while

if fx inflows < fx outflows on the Current Acc 🔼Au < 0… 

let us suppose the latter prevails (as it does in India), call it the CAD or Current Account Deficit. 

the CAD has to be matched or “financed by” net positive fx inflows on the Capital Account,

eg by Indian loans abroad (assets tho implying fx outflows)

being lower than

loans to India from abroad (fx inflows tho implying liabilities)… |

Net Capital Inflows  have to match or exceed CAD

If Net Capital Inflows > CAD in absolute size, the fx “reserves” held by the RBI  will be rising, and vice versa…

Now can you see why I have denounced the whole #Jalan panel idea including the “it belongs to the Govt” fallacy of Dr @IlaPatnaik  as well…? 

 

 

(8)  Chapter 8  THERE IS NO EXCESS, NO “WINDFALL”, NO “SURPLUS”!  IT’S AN ILLUSION, A MIRAGE! 27.8.2019

 

 

 

 

“How is that RBI has Excess/Surplus Funds while Other Banks struggle?” @prao_d

“Ques arises, From where RBI get this income?” @idesibanda

My answer: there is no excess, it is an illusion, a mirage… to repeat THERE IS NO EXCESS, IT IS AN ILLUSION, A MIRAGE!

Start with merchandise trade of India… over decades and decades….

post Independence, India’s traditional surplus of merchandise trade is gone… more merchandise imports than merchandise exports… (balance of trade….)

Government merchandise imports as a percentage of total 1949-1989 (a lot maybe military)… (and the negligible Government merchandise exports as a percentage of total)…

India weapons imports by origin… in constant 1970 USD millions

“Recent” India Balance of Merchandise Trade 1986:2003 …. NB still no sign of any “surplus” fx arising sua sponte in @RBI  from merchandise trade! (and it likely gets worse 2003 to 2019…)

Yes the (little) good news has been a +ve trade balance in “Services” (ie “invisibles”)… labour migration to the Gulf from the late 1970s helped… (tho I expect now elite Indian tourism abroad may have wiped that out… Hey those celebrity weddings abroad cost fx!)

what is the BoP “Current Account”? mostly Balance of Merchandise Trade + on Services… India has a *Deficit* CAD, and it’s systematic, even endemic.. So still no sign of any RBI “surplus” fx!

So where is this @RBI  fx “surplus” arising from? IT’S **BORROWED**! Capiche?! #thinkPonzi

What did I say at the start?  I said:

“The RBI like any central bank is charged with managing a country’s “foreign exchange reserves”; fx reserves are *not* what they sound like: they are a residual in a country’s balance of payments and are *not* akin to tax revenues, hence are *not* open to be purloined by a Government to spend.”

Manmohan, Montek, Chidambaram et al tried… and got a earful from me in 2007… Now a dozen years later Sitharaman, Gurumurthy, Shaktikanta Das, Rajiv Kumar, Amit Shah, and the PM too deserve the same for their attempt to transfer to GoI mostly borrowed fx…

 

(9) Chapter 9 India’s Balance of Payments 28.8.2019

 

 

 

India’s Balance of Payments (by the Kindleberger definition):

B =Manufactured (Exports-Imports)

+ Services (Exports-Imports) 

+ Private Transfers (remittances)

+ Public Transfers (aid) 

+ Net Publicly guaranteed loans (New Disbursements – Amortization of Existing Loans)

+ Private Direct Foreign Investment 

+ Net Short Term Capital Flow

Now where e = Errors and Omissions

B + e =

– delta R (Change of Reserves, -ve = increase in level)

+ delta F (Change in Net Liabilities with the IMF)

 

So for example in 1986 USD mn:
B = 337,

delta R =  -548

delta F =  -264

– delta R +  delta F = 284;

so e = -53

Ie 337 – 53 = 284 = -(-548) – 264 = 284

#TellRajan

[I wrote “Mfg (Exports-Imports)” a little hastily… meaning Manufactured goods trade… Traditionally it is “Merchandise exports and imports”… including “raw materials”, agriculture, and “manufactured goods”… But come to think of it, my error seems fine… mining and agriculture are also manufacturing in the theory of production…]

In September 2014 I first said Nirmala Sitharaman should head to the Finance Ministry.  

Sep 3, 2014 Memo to @PMOIndia: Sir, given @arunjaitley’s ailments, perhaps he himself wd recommend e.g. @rammadhavbjp as DefMin, @nsitharaman as FinMin

… On 31.5. 2019 I cheered her appointment. Now she has it… Well done @PMOIndia #ModiCabinet #ModiSarkar2

Today 27.8.2019 I can see she’s tried hard to comprehend the dimensions of the job, then either given up or stopped learning believing she knows the questions let aside answers…

Finance Minister @nsitharaman w #RBIReserves #RBILooted is now well & truly out of her depth. It is sad. It is not for want of good intent & effort on her part.  She has denounced as “outlandish” criticisms eg by myself (I don’t know any other) of the integrity, autonomy, competence of @RBI.

 

(10) Chapter 10 RBI’s Monetary Base 28.8.2019 

 

 

 

Looking at the original @RBI  history (Vol 1 is excellent, the remaining Vols, not so much)… I see there is a monetary interpretation to  what Nirmala Sitharaman, Shaktikanta Das, S Gurumurthy, Bimal Jalan et al have been up to…. **Go after “High Powered Money” or the “Monetary Base” (“A” in Issue Dept)**! 

What is “A” in the Issue Department (in those old original @RBI  balance sheets when the accounting had integrity)? “A” is Gold and Foreign Exchange Securities… That is the same as Au in the Brunner Meltzer table earlier

https://twitter.com/subyroy/status/1155395639926149120?s=20

Note @RBI original balance sheets separated “A” from “B” in the Issue Department…

Ie Gold + Foreign Exchange Securities separate from

🇮🇳 Rupee holdings & GoI Securities….

Let me guess!  @RBI has since amalgamated convertible (high powered) “A” with “INR”?!? 

So domestic lobbies whether under Manmohan or Modi have wanted to get their hands on the result ?!?

“The BJP will applaud with envy” I said in 2007 about the scheme Sonia Manmohan Montek Chidambaram had in mind: https://independentindian.com/2007/04/02/swindling-india/…

But they “dropped it” after my harsh criticism. 

Now @nsitharaman @dasshaktikanta  have their hands on not merely the Money Supply but the Monetary Base itself! “High Powered Money” in the American terminology! 

(Neither knows enough to know it…Nor does the #BimalJalan “panel” with or without Rakesh Mohan.)

I said 16.12.16 during #ModiJaitleyChaos #Demonetization  

“The risk created needlessly by #QuackEconomics is of a massive contraction followed by massive overshooting”. 

First cause contraction, now ruination of the Monetary Base ie High Powered Money!  

First you cause Contraction then you cause Inflation…

India’s macroeconomics, India’s monetary and fiscal and balance of payments policy, is effectively out of control… as of late August 2019… 

I said on 16 May 2014 : “What does concern me is the vacuum of commonsense as well as expert reasoning around (Mr Modi) although that around Sonia-Manmohan was as bad as well as being more pretentious.”

 

 

11) Chapter 11 Explaining the Govt’s Mirage 30.8.2019

 

 

 

 

As of 29 August, it was a mystery to me by what sleight of hand and when did RBI start conflating Base Money and borrowed foreign capital…? Manmohan and friends had wanted to merely “borrow” @rbi fx reserves, then backed off, PM Modi wants to take them and spend them too, so that’s worse! 

24 hours later I think it’s solved! 

What creates the illusion… the mirage… that @RBI has a “surplus”/”excess” that, according to Bimal Jalan, can be and is going to be and has started to be transferred to GoI for @PMOIndia to spend?

Every mirage has to be explained!…

 

I’ve shown that no such “surplus” has arisen in foreign exchange from India’s’ Current Account… It hasn’t come from net export earnings and remittances being positive overall

Twitter 17 September 2019

Rutherford said no scientific discovery was worth anything unless it could be explained simply (eg to a barmaid)… my explanation of what’s wrong with #5trillioneconomy #rbireserves #RBI #rbiMirage

 

More to come…

Now y'dy the Hon'ble Finance Minister seems to have de facto yielded tho of course without admitting it…@nsitharaman @FinMinIndia @DasShaktikanta …. the reference to the 1934 @RBI Act is at best irrelevant… the only RBI "surplus" seen in indep🇮🇳 is a mirage! #RBIMirage pic.twitter.com/kO1T7M08jU

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) November 19, 2019

"neither Manmohan nor Modi caused the new economic freedom of India… I did…" 😇🙂😇 …

I doubt they or their acolytes or chamchas can ever catch up… https://t.co/2mlWolnWAq pic.twitter.com/zrj6puHeuc

— Dr Subroto Roy (@subyroy) November 12, 2019

Physics & Reasoning

(An Ongoing Tract)

by

Subroto Roy DRAFT 01.12.2017

0.  Since Philosophy of Economics (Routledge 1989) I have tentatively applied similar methods of reasoning to diplomacy, politics, psychology, religion, literature; now an exploration into physics.

Chapter 1 “This is where we got to”

Chapter 2   Telescopes & Oxygen

Chapter 3 Facts, Hypotheses, and Guesses

 

 

Chapter 1 “This is where we got to”

1.1. The purpose of physics has been, and remains, twofold: improve the self knowledge of our species, & enhance and affirm life by technology. In the last 200 years physics and other sciences have been massively, spectacularly, successful at doing both.
1.2. Quantum Mechanics or other seemingly complex baffling aspects of physics today are ultimately theories of reasonable human belief & action; what it is we *ought to* or *may* believe given the current state of evidence; the significance of physical theories has to do with their applications to technology, what they do for us…
1.3. Other species of flora & fauna each have their own comprehension of Nature for purposes of survival, growth & reproduction; none yet is as articulate or systematic as homo sapiens. We teach our Science at our schools and universities too. Some other hominid or other future intelligence may find us extinct in their archaeology and wish to comprehend our Science for their purposes.
1.4. Science is a human creation, for our purposes. And the purpose ultimately is not one of using mathematics to paint landscapes of an imaginary eternal platonist Heaven “somewhere”, “out there”. The purpose of physics is practical: enhance and affirm life. Both Einstein and his Quantum Mechanics critics may have tried to be platonist landscape painters, an impossibility.
1.5. Our state of knowledge at a given time is the answer to the question: What is it most reasonable to believe on the basis of current evidence about light mass energy time motion space particles fields..? An efficient attitude to physics may be one of creating, as it were, a time capsule every day for a future intelligence which finds us extinct the next day, ie tomorrow. We say to them: “This is where we got to”.
1.6. Notice that to tell a future intelligence “This is where we got to” isn’t to say “We wrote equations depicting physical reality really *really* seems to look like this to us” (the platonist’s mistake). The purpose of any science is to improve the self-knowledge of homo sapiens (the creators of all known science) and enhance and affirm life on earth through technology. The purpose isn’t to try to paint mathematical landscapes in an invisible eternal platonist Heaven.
1.7. When we can reasonably imagine a world before human beings existed it’s reasonable to imagine a world where we are extinct too. We have received this world with the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors about it, in books photos art etc; we may be required to do the same for the future.
1.8. When we are extinct we may or may not be discovered in the archaeology of a future intelligence who may be other hominids or something else. My proposal is physics be done with a daily attitude of informing such a future intelligence “This is where we got to”…
1.9. “This is where we got to” is a dynamic state…changing every day with our changing knowledge of light mass energy space time particles fields etc.
1.10. “This is where we got to” includes our certain knowledge from Aristarchus, Copernicus and others that our little solar system is heliocentric…
1.11. “This is where we got to” includes our experience of geometry, of Earth’s curvature when we “can see ships vanish behind the horizon’s edge” tho’ we “cannot put our heads out of the universe to see its curvature” (Freudenthal).
1.12. We are as confident about the solar system being heliocentric and the surface of the Earth being curved as GE Moore was when he declared he knew he had one hand and another, saying he was certain the Earth had existed for long before he was born and would continue afterwards, that he had always been on or never far from the surface of the Earth, etc.
1.13. “This is where we got to” includes our multitudes of current or inherited puzzles, dead ends, controversies…it’s a complex living open discussion…
1.14. That “This is where we got to” is a correct normative goal for physics may even be capable of proof.
1.15. If we can reasonably imagine a world spinning on its axis before homo sapiens evolved, we can do the same of when homo sapiens is extinct…Ask: What is the status of arithmetic geometry or chemistry, let aside music or literature, in those worlds without humans?
1.16. Do truths of arithmetic geometry or chemistry, eg carbon’s atomic weight is 12, remain whether or not there are or will be or have been humans…?
1.17. A human creation like Da Vinci’s Cartoon still has meaning after Da Vinci or other humans are gone, but had none before he created it…
1.18. Even the atomic weight of carbon being 12 is not a permanent truth independent of whether there are humans… it’s just a human discovery of a fact…
1.19. Suppose homo sapiens had become extinct before Copernicus, while still believing in the Ptolomaic geocentric solar system….a new intelligence discovering us in its archaeology may have said, Oh look homo sapiens believed in Ptolemy…they didn’t know any better….
1.20. Similarly a future intelligence discovering us as we are today in its archaeology may yet say, Oh look homo sapiens believed carbon’s atomic weight to be 12…Oh look they believed in Planck’s constant, Einstein’s equations, Heisenberg’s electron…
1.21. Carbon’s atomic weight being 12, Planck’s constant, Einstein’s equations, Heisenberg’s electron share something with Ptolomaic astronomy. Namely, these represent the state of human knowledge at a given time, the present, just as Ptolemy’s geocentric solar system did once until it was superceded…
1.22. The best we can leave behind are human creations and discoveries… it is the state of our own human knowledge, not eternal truths independent of our having ever existed… not paintings of landscapes in an eternal Heaven. A new intelligence discovering us might say looking at Da Vinci’s Cartoon, Isn’t that nice?, or at Einstein.. Those were clever insights…
1.23. A new intelligence discovering us may not have accomplished as much as homo sapiens did, just that they are living and we were not…better a live dog than a dead lion, DH Lawrence quoted somewhere…
1.24. Bambrough publicly asked Russell in 1948 if it made a difference if humans as a species perished before their time. If we are destined to be extinct in x years does it matter if we perish by y<x ? Russell dodged the question. I’ve said yes it does matter because we don’t produce the Da Vinci, Einstein work we may have done between y and x. My answer is yes it does matter if humankind perishes at y < x as the good (or net good) we would have produced between y and x never gets created. A future intelligence would find less about us in their archaeology if we perished before our time.

Chapter 2   Telescopes & Oxygen

2.1.   Homo sapiens has been very resourceful & ingenious to create as much Science as we have done despite our completely trivial physical size and significance in the solar system.

2.2.  Human lifespans have grown with intelligence & civilization to three or four score years, yet summing all human life from ancient times to the present  amounts to near zero duration & mass in the life of the Earth or solar system.

2.3.  Despite our momentary lives on Earth and complete lack of physical consequence beyond Earth, humankind has managed to comprehend much in recent times about the vast solar system and beyond.

2.4. Eg the Sun is 8 light minutes distant from us with a central temperature of some 20 million degrees, a giant star billions of light years distant may have a temperature of a thousand million degrees.  Uranus is 160, Neptune 250, Pluto 327 light minutes distant from us.  Alpha Centauri the nearest star to our Sun is  4.35 light years distant, a mere 25.7 thousand billion miles…Etc.

2.5.  The magnitudes are unimaginable (or mindboggling) compared to our infinitesimal human experience.  Time in billions of years, distance in billions of trillions of miles, temperatures in billions of degrees.   In the 1960s, the Palomar telescope was receiving light that had left its source a billion years ago.. a billion light years distant…

2.6.  By way of actions beyond Earth, the best humankind can do is get to our own moon & back, send probes that take human lifetimes to Mars or Venus or even Jupiter & Saturn, send out radio signals beyond that, peer as best we can from a space station or with the Hubble and other telescopes.

2.7.  Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune are so large cold and distant from the Sun their atmospheres have hydrogen and helium which hasn’t been allowed to escape.  Mercury is so little and close to the Sun it has no atmosphere at all.

2.8.  Venus despite its nice name has an atmosphere high in methane & ammonia:  no vacationing there for humans, or Mars…both have abominably high surface pressures  (Correction via Tim Cavanaugh) Venus has abominably high, Mars has abominably low surface pressure! Venus & Mars have nitrogen and carbon dioxide.  But only our Earth has precious oxygen in our atmosphere…

2.9. Free molecules of oxygen exist only in the atmosphere of Earth…  Our special atmosphere keeps us alive — perhaps *only* us alive in the Universe.

2.10.  “The world is mainly a vast leaf-colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass, and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests. This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon the leaves. By leaves we live.” So noted Patrick Geddes (1854-1932),  polymath and friend, admirer,  biographer of  JC Bose (1858-1937) inventor of radio and pioneer of plant physiology.

2.11.  Oxygen from plant photosynthesis is the source of life on Earth. Thence TW Schultz quoted the Mayers: “Few scientists think of agriculture as the chief, or the model science. Many indeed do not consider it a science at all. Yet it was the first science – Mother of all science; it remains the science which makes human life possible”.  Farming before physics.  Photosynthesis before farming.  “By leaves we live”.  No human life without food or free oxygen molecules in the atmosphere.

2.12.  Eugen Glueckauf “The Composition of Atmospheric Air” in Compendium of Meteorology TF Malone (ed) 1951 reported the composition of Earth’s lower atmosphere as Nitrogen 78.084, Oxygen 20.946, Argon 0.934, Carbon dioxide  0.033 adding to 99.997% plus trace gases…  An increase from 0.033 was predicted at 2-3% per decade of CO2 due to the “rapid burning of the Earth’s reserves of organic fossil fuels…though the data are not entirely conclusive”, noting “there is considerable local variation of CO2 due to localized sources and sinks”…

2.13.  In “Atmospheric Composition” in Fundamentals of Physical Geography, 2nd Edn 2006 we’re told by M. Pidwirny the composition is Nitrogen 78.08 Oxygen 20.95 Argon 0.93 Carbon dioxide 0.036.  Presumably meteorological data exist on the composition of the atmosphere measured every year at many points of the Earth.

2.14.  DH Lawrence claimed “the novel is a greater invention than someone’s telescope”… a curious enigmatic statement.  Anna Karenina a greater invention than the Hubble telescope, or even Galileo’s?  Phooey…!?

2.15.  But there’s this paradox too: since the time of Faraday, humankind has made astounding technological & economic progress due to applications of physics: electric power, internal combustion engines, electronics, satellites, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, etc.  Still we are completely impotent outside Earth’s atmosphere and orbit!

2.16.  Both paradoxes may have the same solution.  Physics is so brilliant on and about life at home on Earth and so powerless beyond Earth because physics itself depends on life, food, leaves, on precious oxygen.  Lawrence is saying human life is more important to us than what happens on Alpha Centauri or Saturn.

2.17  We think there has to be other intelligent life in the Universe because we know it to be unimaginably vast. But it is not impossible we are alone.  As far as we know, we are alone.  Everything has been in subtle equilibria for photosynthesis and life here to have arisen…Yes there’s the genius of James Lovelock too giving us the “Gaia hypothesis”.

2.18  If we are alone (as is my surmise) the responsibility to preserve our knowledge for when we are extinct is vast…Little sweet Mother Earth ruled over by the hominid homo sapiens may be the centre of not just this small solar system but the Universe itself.

Chapter 3 Facts, Hypotheses, and Guesses

3.1.  A scientific fact is something for which the evidence is overwhelming, to deny which would be naive or foolish or unreasonable.

3.2.  Two central facts of physics established over the centuries are the heliocentric solar system & the spherical Earth (its curved surface).

3.3.  Other scientific facts we certainly know today include that we inhale oxygen needed for our metabolism and exhale carbon dioxide as a waste, that oxygen enters & carbon dioxide exits through the lungs, that both are transported everywhere in our mammalian bodies by the blood pumped by the  heart, and so on.

3.4. It is best to keep quite small the number of such illustrations of certain scientific knowledge for reason of Rutherford’s Common Man: “An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid”.  What the barmaid and Rutherford share is rationality, reasonableness, comprehension, language.  Perhaps pubs in college towns should supply bartenders to witness doctoral viva voces in science and everything else…

3.5. Chapter 6 of my 1989  Philosophy of Economics is titled “Expertise & Democracy”.  It doesn’t say the Common Man should judge quality but that the road for the Common Man to do so should be open.  The road to judge whether an advance has been made, a contribution to knowledge, new facts established, should be open to everyone including Rutherford’s barmaid.

3.6. Many people have not thought about the flatness or curvature of Earth’s surface, nor know about their own respiration & metabolism.  (The easiest way to improve a nation’s health incidentally, may be by greater general understanding of the science of respiration, metabolism  etc.) Many people especially in India & China endorse a geocentric solar system today when they act as they do believing in astrology’s horoscopes. (Astrology could be only a trivial pastime, or at least we have to hope so as believers may include those purporting to science!)  Russell cynically said “Many people would sooner die than think, in fact they do”.

3.7.  Other facts can be deduced or conjectured from central facts like heliocentrism.  Eddington noted we are transported by the Earth & Sun: the Earth as our vehicle we travel at 20 miles per second around the Sun which in turn carries us at 12 miles a second through the galactic system, which carries us at 250 miles a second amid the spiral nebulae…

3.8.  Eddington’s 1927 Gifford lectures *The Nature of Physical Reality* had a laudable if unsuccessful aim of expressing in words Electromagnetism, Relativity, Entropy, Gravitation, Quantum Theory, all the new physics!  A member of the audience asked about relativity “You must find the journey between Cambridge & Edinburgh tiring.  I can understand the fatigue if you travel to Edinburgh but why are you tired if Edinburgh travels to you?”.  Physics isn’t without its humour.  Eddington had to reply, “If motion could tire, we ought to be dead tired” referring to our carriage by the Earth, Sun, galaxies.

3.9.  Beyond relatively few central facts, physics has uncountable multitudes of “surmised facts” consisting of hypotheses & conjectures,  guesses & speculations.

3.10.  Boundaries between facts and hypotheses or between hypotheses and guesses need not be hard and fast or dogmatically precise…  We can always ask in a given case, is this a known accepted fact or a surmise or just an informed guess, what is the situation?  Earth’s curved surface or the heliocentric solar system are established facts; Eddington’s calculations of  speeds at which we travel thru galaxies are less so.

3.11.  Between hypotheses and guesses the boundaries may be imprecise again but with a broad difference: With guesses there is no known empirical or even conceptual test available or possible, with hypotheses some test giving a yes/no answer may be possible.

3.12  At least 1/3 of all stars is a “double” or two stars together with no planets, reports Eddington from the important research of his colleague JH Jeans.  Jeans concluded double star formation to be typical,  formation of a solar system to be “a freak”.   Jeans’s theory of our solar system’s formation is that a thousand million years ago another star passed not far from what became the planet Neptune, this star passing by caused “big protruberances” of the Sun, big enough for the formation of the planets by eruption from the Sun.

3.13.  JH Jeans’s description of how another star once passed by our Sun causing it to disgorge the planets of the solar system is a guess or speculation which can’t be empirically tested.

3.14.   Yet Jeans’s guess is reasonable & comprehensible, following as it does a line of reasoning from less uncertain facts. As such it is more plausible than if we instead guessed the planets emerged because the Sun sneezed like a human.

3.15.  Jeans and Eddington concluded the chances of planets arising from any star are remote.  Compound that with the chances of water, photosynthesis, oxygen, life arising,  and the likelihood of a Da Vinci elsewhere in the Universe becomes remoter still.  Humankind may be alone (is my surmise)!

3.16.  A contemporary view from Helen Klus is “There may be millions of other planets in our galaxy that contain life”.  If so Jeans and Eddington were wrong, and I too to believe them.

3.17.  Popper proposed we try to falsify our guesses and findings to come to know what is scientific truth at a given time, that we adopt a critical attitude to our own and others’ scientific claims.  Everything we think we know we seek to re-examine critically if we are to progress with and advance our knowledge.

3.18.  Jeans conjectures a star passed by causing the Sun to disgorge planets a 1000 million years ago?  Popper says look at the reasoning and facts again.

3.19.   A youngster is sceptical seeing a ship disappear over the horizon.  Good.   Bring him/her back the next day & the next, to see more ships doing the same… But how do we know the ships aren’t just falling off the edge? the child asks… Excellent question… Let’s take a helicopter, chase after it.  Or imagine we do so notionally if we can’t afford one.  “We haven’t got the money, so we’ll have to think” (Rutherford).  Ok, says the child, I accept the Earth’s surface seems curved in this region, but how can we tell it is so everywhere? To Jules Verne!

3.20.  The vast bulk of physical facts may be surmises midway between guesses/speculations on one hand, and known central facts on the other. This bulk of surmised facts I describe as hypotheses/conjectures open to hypothesis testing: offering yes/no results to empirical or even just conceptual experiments…

3.21.  Heisenberg’s  “thought experiment” led to his declaring we can know the location or velocity of a particle as precisely as we want but not both together at the same time… Heisenberg’s superb *Principles* is the exemplary doctoral thesis of the star pupil of Sommerfeld… You describe one two three four extant empirical experiments that you say everyone finds puzzling, inadequately explained, anomalous…You provide your criticism of the existing theory or theories used in these experiments, then propose a theory to replace them…Then you discuss possible criticisms and extensions of the theory you’ve newly offered. Then apply it to reexamining the original empirical experiments.  Finally you place in an appendix the “Mathematical Apparatus” you’ve used, mathematics in its place as the servant not master of physics.

3.22.  Heisenberg admits with utmost honesty after all his new theory that most of the empirical experiments remain explicable classically!

[GEMoore:  “You aren’t denying the electron exists, you’re saying we can’t tell where it is.”

Heisenberg: “Exactly so! (Well, almost!)”.]

3.23   Eddington suggested a “thought experiment” of an empty vessel with a sliding door halfway: in the left half is air; the closed right half is a vacuum; opening the sliding door causes the air molecules to diffuse thru the vessel, hitting each other & the walls randomly, never again congregating back to the initial left side.  Eddington used it to show increasing entropy, “the running down of the Universe”, a “loss” in the initial “organization” of the molecules..

3.24.  Complicated experiments on a hard subject were those of Clauser, and later Aspect, seeking to test Bell’s theorem in the contest between Einstein and the Quantum Mechanics of the “Copenhagen School”.   The latter “won”, for the time being at least.  But Popper’s scientific method would require them and everyone else to think again!  Try to refute your own findings!  Was Bell’s theory adequate?  Were the Clauser and Aspect experiments adequate?

3.25.   John Wisdom gave a deliberately easy empirical experiment with a yes/no answer: a room seems empty, nothing to see feel hear smell taste in it.  A declares “It’s empty”, B declares “It’s not”, throws a lighted match in it, there’s an explosion. “Gas” says B….

3.26.   Empirical questions should be nice enough to provide us a binary choice of answers: Yes/No; True/False; or, if we like, probability ≈ 1 probability ≈ 0.  Until a binary choice is available the question is not purely empirical but still theoretical.  John Wisdom was keen to argue that even *after* all facts, all empirical results, are in, there may still not be a conclusion until we have  *reflected* about all that’s before us.

3.27  Other than probability ≈ 1, probability ≈ 0, the only probability number   of interest is the halfway point 0.5, which is, as it were a point of “Ignorance” or “Indifference”, an *unstable* point which must move either towards 1 or towards 0, ie towards certain knowledge in one direction or other.

3.28.  I suggest physics define

probability ≈ 1 as our *rational degree of belief* in the heliocentric solar system,

probability ≈ 0 as its contrary….

Or we can normalize with probability ≈ 0 as the Earth being flat, probability ≈ 1 its contrary.

3.29.  JH Jeans’ surmised description of the formation of the solar system (of how another star once passed by our Sun causing it to disgorge the planets) is a guess we may place at probability = 0.5.

3.30.  My proposal is, in other words, that we calibrate our rational degrees of belief by certainty eg heliocentrism prob ≈ 1, by JH Jeans’s Guess prob =0.5, and a lower limit of certainty again prob ≈ 0 eg the Earth being flat.

3.31. Certain knowledge  prob ≈ 1 is not “absolute knowledge” prob = 1.  Our slogan remains “This is where we got to”.  It is not *logically* impossible Copernicus & everyone got it wrong… Before Copernicus, Ptolemy was certain knowledge.  What can be certain knowledge in one era may be expected to change as evidence advances with time.

3.32.  Calibrating with certainty prob ≈ 1, a Guess prob=0.5, a lower limit of certainty again prob≈0, every other case must be compared and contrasted to these three in turn.  Moving  from a Guess at probability 0.5 positively towards certain knowledge prob ≈ 1 or negatively towards certain knowledge prob ≈ 0 is the process of hypothesis testing given improving evidence.  Our confidence in our belief increases away from 0.5 towards 1, or decreases away from 0.5 towards 0… call it positive, negative confidence respectively.

3.33.  A person applies for a job, he’s at 0.5, doesn’t know if he will get it…As evidence improves his confidence moves  positively towards 1 or negatively towards 0.  The initial Ignorance point 0.5 is unstable: it’s as if the 0.5 point belongs to Leibniz and movement in directions positive to 1 or negative to 0 both belong to Bayes.

3.34.  We may have the rudiments of the probability theory that eluded Keynes Ramsey de Finetti  Good etc…who may have at different stages in different ways confused objective and subjective.  (In turn, Quantum Mechanics theorists, not having time to investigate probability themselves, may have confused themselves with the dogmas of probability theorists!)

3.35.  Ramsey said we bet all the time in life: we go to the railway station betting the train will depart…or we would have stayed home… In my terms we go to the railway station betting the train will depart because we place the probability above our JH Jeans Guess of 0.5, below the probability of heliocentrism ≈ 1

3.36.  Two commuters place a probability 0.9 each day of the train departing; one day A doesn’t turn up, B does & finds the train doesn’t run. B asks A the next day, she says yes my son told me the train wasn’t going to run because there’d been a mishap down the line so I stayed home.  A’s assessment of the evidence had changed due to the new information hence her rational degree of belief, her probability, changed too… In Bayesian terms, A’s “prior probability” 0.9 the train would run crashed to a “posterior probability” ≈ 0 based on her son’s information.

3.37  From the Ignorance point 0.5 we act in one direction as prob -> 1, we act in the opposite direction as prob -> 0.   Our confidence in our belief increases away from 0.5 towards 1, or away from 0.5 towards 0… positive or negative confidence.

Alternatively, the 0.5 point is a point of Ignorance, 1 and 0 are the points of Rational Belief and Rational Disbelief respectively….

Alternatively, probability  1 is  T in “truth tables”, probability 0 is F…. 0.5 is, say, I for Ignorance or Indifference, an unstable point, moving with learning towards either T or F.

Rational Belief______Ignorance_______Rational Disbelief
Probability ≈  1                =  0.5                        ≈ 0
True T                           Ignorance I                False F

We rationally believe in heliocentrism, rationally disbelieve the Earth is flat, & we guess JH Jeans’ theory of planet formation is correct.  Once we have three such points, every other case of belief/disbelief that arises for anyone may be compared & contrasted with each of these

 

3.38  The 0.5 Guess point is the unstable one of “insufficient evidence”; moving in either direction increases evidence with hypothesis testing.  Moving  from a Guess at prob 0.5 positively towards certain knowledge prob ≈ 1 or negatively towards certain knowledge prob ≈ 0 is the process of hypothesis testing given improving evidence.   “It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence…” said Clifford.  (Clifford, dead at 33 in 1879, the same year Einstein is born, anticipated Einstein on gravitation by a generation, and Einstein knew it in his Berne years.)

3.39  Games of chance like rolling dice or choosing a card from a shuffled pack are artificial human contrivances to simulate states of ignorance.

In my terms, a 6-sided fair die before it is rolled would be represented by a six element vector (0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5); its possible outcomes are the rows of a 6×6 identity or unit matrix (1,0,0,0,0,0), (0,1,0,0,0,0), (0,0,1,0,0,0), (0,0,0,1,0,0), (0,0,0,0,1,0), (0,0,0,0,0,1).

With 52 cards, obviously if we know the initial order & how precisely it is shuffled (say in slow motion by a machine) we know the new order.  Our ignorance is deliberately contrived in a pack of cards to create randomness & chance for amusement; it may be a mistake to think nature is like that.

In a randomly shuffled pack, what is the top card is in my terms a 52 dimensional vector of (0.5) s, 52 possible results by a 52 dimensional identity or unit matrix.

The 0.5 would still represent the halfway between 1 and 0 in each case but otherwise = 1/6 is an ex ante “probability” in case of the die, 1/52 in case of the cards.

3.40  Einstein saying (if he did) of Quantum Mechanics “God does not roll dice” may have just meant to say: “Don’t confuse our contrived games of chance for our real ignorance of Nature…!”.   Max Born, Heisenberg and others may have tossed in prevalent probability ideas/dogmas without having the time to think them all through…

[Very rough

01.12.2017 : https://www.facebook.com/notes/subroto-roy/my-terrestrial-physics-vs-astrophysics-dichotomy-is-better-than-classical-vs-mod/10154880186491126/]

 

 

Modi & Monetary Theory: Economic Consequences of the Prime Minister of India (2016)

by

Subroto Roy*

 

see also 2019 https://independentindian.com/2019/08/04/critique-of-monetary-ideas-of-manmohan-modi-the-roy-model-explaining-to-bimal-jalan-nirmala-sitharaman-rbi-etc-what-it-is-they-are-doing-draft-4-august-2019/

Mr Modi was doing well enough until his catastrophic statement of 8 November 2016 trying to nullify the value of masses of people’s holdings of 500 and 1000 rupee currency notes.

 

On foreign policy he had flown around important capitals with substantive results.  On economic policy he had ended the ossified process misnamed “planning” and was seeking to bring better rationality to budgeting e.g. by finally integrating the railway budget.  India seemed the envy of the world economy.

 

What needed to be done next was remove the RBI and nationalised banks from the Finance Ministry’s control completely, into a new Ministry of Money & Banking.  Finance (with Accounts and Planning) then would be tasked to get the budgets right  for both Union *and* the States, for not just railways but the military too.  The Finance Ministry’s full-time year long occupation, not yielding to lobby groups, not allowing anyone get close to them, would be just getting all of India’s Budgets right, for the first time ever.  Money & Banking would run the nationalised banks on commercial lines (being ready to battle their fat cat unions), while the RBI continued with its supervisory, money creating, and balance of payments management roles.  The aim would be to bring a semblance of integrity to India’s currency at home and abroad, for the first time ever.

 

Instead Mr Modi got into his head there was something bad called “black money”, and that he could remove it by peremptorily declaring the bulk of India’s paper money to be null and void within days or weeks.

 

Now money is a most peculiar institution. Paper money is intrinsically worthless in and of itself yet all of India’s people (street children onwards)  need to hold it temporarily to expedite their individual transactions of buying and selling real goods and services.  Money acts too as a repository of value over time and a unit of account or measure of economic value.  Money supply consists of hand to hand currency and till-money in the banks (including  ATMs),  and bank deposits of customers.  (“High powered money” or “base money” consists of currency and bank reserves.)

 

Cash and credit transactions differ obviously in that cash is now, credit is later. Cash needs trust only against inflation devaluing its purchasing power while it is held. Credit needs that too, and in addition has to assess the credit-risk of the debtor for the debt to be encashed.  Hence cash is completely liquid and economizes on trust, credit much less so.

 

When you accept my cheque you accept my bank’s credit, superior to my own; and banks differ in their  credit-worthiness. As for debit cards, e-wallets or other “plastic money”, there is no relevant difference with cheques except digital signatures being required not handwritten ones.

 

The crucial task of money, whether hand to hand currency or bank deposits, is to expedite real transactions.  Money is held only temporarily in place of real goods satisfying human needs: shelter, food, clothing.  The labourer accepts Rs 500 as wages believing he/she can dispose of the piece of paper in exchange for rent or food.  The real transactions are labour, shelter, food — the paper money (or bank deposit) merely intervenes temporarily to *allow* these trades to happen.

 

Money’s paradox is it has no value in itself yet is held universally by all in  belief it can be exchanged.  Why people believe in that universally is because they believe everyone believes the same. Hence the two great divisions of Economics into Theory of Value and Theory of Money, “micro” and “macro”:  what explains the relative values (prices) of things, and why is money – which is not a thing like any other thing – desired to be held at all by people and in what amount.

 

Hence money represents people’s incomes and, if current consumption needs are met, their savings for future consumption.  Cash or deposits may be held as a store of purchasing power for future consumption, or used to purchase an asset like cattle or gold or land for the same purpose. The cash/deposit ratio, and generally the ratio of money to other assets, has to be voluntary, chosen by people depending on individual circumstances of convenience, wealth, and especially confidence in the banks and financial system.  Liquidity,  a concept introduced  first by JM Keynes himself in *A Treatise on Money*, defined as something being “more certainly realizable at short notice without loss”, applies to all assets, land and human capital too.  “You’ll always find work here”, an employer says to a worker; she immediately realizes her skills are liquid, can always be converted to cash income and hence to food.

 

Mr Modi on 8 November 2016 suddenly declared the bulk of India’s people’s holdings of hand to hand currency would soon be worthless paper, though it could be exchanged purportedly for bank deposits or new currency.   It is a measure of how obedient India’s people are that they immediately accepted this, at least initially, and started standing in endless often futile queues.

 

 

But money’s peculiar nature means its value is ultimately determined by people assessing its liquidity.  If India’s people wish to continue to use their Old 500 or 1000 notes with confidence in trade and employment, Mr Modi cannot stop them.  Government and other banks may be ordered by Mr Modi not to accept them but the “Old Money” can continue to have value as a hand to hand currency as long as it is accepted by masses of people,  either the full face value or a discounted value.

 

Old Money would become effectively a *private* money, not a fiat government money but a parallel currency to the New Money that Mr Modi and his bankers issue, and there would be an implicit exchange rate defined between Old and New Money.  Who is to say that four Old 500 notes will not have a higher market price than one New 2000 note?  Some evidence has appeared that retail markets where the Old Money is accepted have been doing normal business while others accepting only New Money have been hit badly.

 

Mr Modi’s sudden nominal shock damaged the normal functions of money and inevitably led to real shocks in trade, transport, employment and hence incomes.  People’s money holdings represent mass nominal incomes and savings, and an arbitrary cutting of these overnight must cut mass consumption, possibly cause mass hunger.  There is a medium term risk a massive contraction will lead to a policy overcorrection, and further erosion in confidence in the currency. Government should try to comprehend the macroeconomic path it has put itself on.

 

As to the ostensible purpose, India’s masses can see as well as anyone that forcing people to reduce their cash/deposit ratios and then rationing severely their ability to withdraw their own money, is an ill-concealed attempt to help government banks which over decades have been run into the ground financially by political malfeasance. Confidence in the organized banking system cannot be imposed forcibly.  Making banks mere instruments of a tyrannical tax collecting state is a sure way of getting the public to lose further confidence in them, and indeed in the currency they use.

 

Government like everyone else has two sides to its budget, Revenue and Expenditure. Mr Modi has unleashed a tyranny on individual citizens to raise revenue, while allowing expenditure,  deficits, government accounting and audits to remain a mess.  Instead of attacking government corruption on behalf of India’s masses, he has attacked the masses’ meagre incomes and savings transferring them towards the government class.

 

 

The way forward is a Government-Opposition Accord: crackdown on tax evasion, crime, counterfeit currency and terrorism, while allowing Old Money and New Money to continue as parallel currencies for as long as may be needed by the public.

————————-

*Subroto Roy was an adviser to Rajiv Gandhi in 1990-91.

Fixing Washington: On Improving Institutional Design in the United States

by
Subroto Roy*

17 November 2016

President Trump has a unique chance to redesign the institutional framework of the United States Government for the better. His decisive victory is accompanied by a prospect of an amicable House and Senate that will approve a productive redesign, as has been always wished for in American history but only very spasmodically accomplished.

Original departments of the US Government were State and Treasury (both 1789), Defense (1949 from Army or War, 1789, Navy 1798, Air Force 1947); then Interior (1849), Agriculture (1862), Justice (1870), Commerce (1903), Labor (1913), Health Education Welfare (1953).

The Postmaster General remains the second highest paid public official after the President, an anachronism arising from the Post Office being older than the Republic though it was reorganised after 1971 into what would be called elsewhere in the world a “public sector enterprise”.

The vast presidential staff of the Executive Office including the Office of Management and Budget and the Council of Economic Advisers grew out of the results of the 1939 Brownlow committee.  President Obama’s Cabinet had the Vice President, State, Treasury, Defense, Justice, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security.   Other Cabinet rank officers President Trump would inherit from President Obama are the White House Chief of Staff, Environment Protection head, Management & Budget head, Trade Representative, UN Ambassador, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman, and Small Business Administration head.

Now as a general rule, managing a process of public financial or other decision-making requires a coincidence of the people who have the best information with the people who have the authority to act. Decision-makers need to have relevant, reliable and timely information made available to them, and then they need to be considered accountable for the decisions made on that basis.

A few dozen PhD theses may argue how American decision-making at the highest levels in recent decades has at critical times become confused and counterproductive. A major reason may be because the span of control of the President of the United States has been rendered unmanageable, besides departmental overlaps, wastages, redundancies, failures of information reaching the right decision maker at the right time, and so on. That is only on the Government side, not to mention the President’s political functions with the Legislative side and as head of his party supporting its candidates during elections, besides innumerable other functions interacting with the citizenry.

My proposal in a nutshell is that President Trump have four, just four, principal or senior Cabinet officers, while dispersing downwards the bulk of what has accumulated since 1939 as the Executive Office.
The four principal Cabinet Officers would be for
— Foreign Affairs (Secretary of State)
— Home Affairs (an important new portfolio)
— Economy or Economic Affairs (Treasury Secretary though enhanced much in scope from Wall Street towards Main Street)

— National Security (Secretary of Defense, including all intelligence).

The Vice President and these four Cabinet officers would be the Principal Cabinet of the President, as well as the basis of the National Security Council and Office of Emergency Management, adding persons as they wished in different contingencies.

A larger Presidential Cabinet or Executive Council with other Cabinet officers would be dispersed like this:

President, Vice President
Foreign Affairs (Secretary of State)
— Foreign Service
— Foreign Commerce (Trade)
— UN Ambassador
Home Affairs (Secretary of Home Affairs)
— Attorney General/Justice Department (FBI)
— Interior
— Federalism (Union-State Relations)
— Housing & Urban Development
— Environment
Economic Affairs (Treasury Secretary)
— Banking (Federal Reserve)
— Budgets & Accounting
— Agriculture
— Domestic Commerce
— Energy
— Transportation
— Education, Science & Technology, Small Business
— Labor
— Health & Human Services
National Security (Secretary of Defense)
— Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard
— DIA, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security
— Veterans

This larger Cabinet or Executive Council could meet in whole or part as necessary.

My second proposal, in a nutshell, is that the new portfolio of Federalism falling under the Secretary of Home Affairs would see each of the 50 States being represented in the National Capital on the Executive side of government, besides their Legislative representation in Congress.

Washington DC by day is a town of foreign embassies and innumerable domestic lobbyists. It is a bewildering place not only for ordinary people from the 50 States who may be visiting as tourists but for their legislative representatives as well.

My suggestion since May 2016 has been that the United States create 50 new quasi-embassies in the Capital, one for each State, call them for sake of argument a Commission, so there would be a US-AZ Commission, a US-MN Commission, a US-TN Commission etc.   Existing bodies representing the State Government in the Capital would be amalgamated into these. Each would be headed by, say, a Commissioner appointed by the Secretary for Home Affairs and a Deputy Commissioner appointed by the State Governor and resident in Washington.

The constant conversation of those two appointees would represent the daily traffic along the Information/Decisions/Resource Transfers Highway between the Federal and the specific State Government. In a federal structure, information would usually travel upwards from the State Government to the Federal Government, Decisions and Resources traveling the other way after detours in the Congress.

The aim of these quasi-embassies would be to expedite traffic along these Information/Decisions/Resources Highways between the Federal Government and the 50 State Governments. Some matters would be common across States within the Federal ambit, while others would be territorially diverse and tailor-made for a given State.  A State’s legislators representing it in the House and Senate in Washington would be naturally deeply involved in seeing to the Commission for the State in the Capital working expeditiously.  The Secretary of Home Affairs would provide a single easy window for the State Government’s concerns to access the Cabinet. Existing State Government bodies in the Capital could be amalgamated into these, for example promoting tourism to the States, or providing services for people from the States visiting the Capital.

The balance of power in Washington, which has become skewed badly in favor of military and foreign policy, would find some ballast in favor of domestic policy as well thanks to these 50 new quasi-embassies of the States. The widespread disaffection towards the Federal Government and Washington of many ordinary people in the far-flung States may thus come to be reduced, besides traffic along the Information/Decisions/Resources Highways between Washington and the States flowing more easily.

In a great old and deep democracy like the United States, the locus of policy decision-making must be Congress and the State legislatures. Academics, civil servants, journalists, special interest groups, this or that business or industrial lobbyist or management consultant can all have their say — but consensus on the direction and nature of policy, if it is to be genuine, has to ultimately emerge out of the legislative process on the basis of reasonable, well-informed discussion and debate, given full relevant timely information. The proper source of policy decisions and initiatives is the President and his/her Cabinet, as well as Congress itself and the State Governments and local bodies — not this or that lobby or interest-group which may be vocal or powerful enough to be heard at a given time in Washington or some State capital.

My proposal outlined above will help the USA in its public decision-making in the 21st Century.

Dedication: this work is dedicated to the memory of Willis Coburn Armstrong  and Louise Schaffner Armstrong.

*Subroto Roy, PhD (Cantab.), BScEcon (London) is author of *Philosophy of Economics*, 1989, and the co-creator of *Foundations of India’s Political Economy* MS 1989, 1992, *Foundations of Pakistan’s Political Economy* 1993, *Margaret Thatcher’s Revolution* 2005, and other works. Between August 1992 and January 1994 he was a Washington consultant. In 1983 at a Cato Institute talk in Washington, https://independentindian.com/2009/03/19/risk-aversion-explains-resistance-to-freer-trade-as-well-as-protectionism-during-a-recession/ the future President Elect Donald J Trump praised the talk, introduced himself briefly, and possibly said “Remember the name”!

 

Postscript 22 December 2016, from Twitter