Guest Column: A Student's Tribute

India Today
October 26, 1998

GUEST COLUMN
A Student's Tribute

Kaushik Basu

At a meeting in Italy some years ago, where cards were distributed with each speaker's biographical sketch, two words, after Amartya Sen's name had been whitened out. Some environmentally conscious secretary must have saved on the whitener, because one could easily see the words: Nobel Laureate. It was an embarrassing mistake, but prophetic. It also showed that Sen's winning the Nobel Prize had for so long been on the cards that many had begun believing that he had already got it.

Because I had done my Ph.D. with Amartya Sen and have worked on Senian (this should be permitted now) themes in economics, within moments of the Nobel news breaking, I began receiving calls from friends, acquaintances and journalists giving me various news snippets and asking me about Sen's work. I was sufficiently joyous with the news that I held forth. But I am not sure I made myself understood and the fault is not mine but Amartya Sen's. He is an exceptionally lucid writer and speaker. So much so that it is easy to be misguided into believing that one has understood him.

More than one journalist told me that the award shows a change of heart of the Nobel committee; it at last realised the folly of rewarding theoretical research and has recognised Sen's humaneness and concern for the poor. It is true that those qualities are more important than brainpower, but I do not think that the prize to Sen was for that. Sen would not have got the prize without his early theoretical work, which is as abstract, hard and technical as the works of the earlier Nobel laureates. In this sense, there is really no change in the Nobel committee's criterion for evaluation.

The work that the Nobel citation mentions most prominently, Sen began doing when he was a professor at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE). It was on the mathematics of voting theory. Kenneth Arrow, another Nobel laureate, had published a devastating theorem in the 1950s showing, logically, that all voting rules, such as the majority decision or two-thirds majority or status quo, must violate some elementary norms of democracy. This started a new sub-branch of economics, called Social Choice. Sen wrote a series of seminal papers in this field while at the DSE and also after his move to the London School of Economics in the early '70s. He combined abstract logic, economics and philosophy in a way that very few could.

Then he veered from this to related areas, such as the measurement of poverty and inequality, returning occasionally to his earliest work on growth and the choice of technology, which he had done as a student at Cambridge University. His book on famines was published in 1981. This spread his fame to well beyond the economics community. The work was important from a policy point of view, but was intellectually not as path-breaking as his more specialised work on choice theory and measurement.

The piecemeal reading of Sen's work has led to various misunderstandings. He has, for instance, been charged of being against economic reform and liberalisation in India. This is not true at all for he has been on record appreciating Manmohan Singh's effort as finance minister. Yet it is true that he has relentlessly campaigned that the Government must intervene more on behalf of the poor. To him the two positions were not incompatible and he campaigned more for the latter because he felt that there were fewer people doing so in today's world. And the campaigning has not been entirely futile -- it inspired the UNDP to bring out its annual Human Development Report and has been instrumental in effecting changes in the perspective of international organisations, such as the World Bank.

When I was a student at the London School of Economics, Sen was, by a wide margin the most riveting lecturer. His classes would be full, with students squatting on the floor and sitting on the window sill. The economist Sukhamoy Chakravarty used to joke that inviting Amartya Sen to give a lecture meant that one would have to keep a cinema hall ready. Two years ago, I invited Sen to speak at Cornell. The seminar room began filling up well before the lecture was to start. We moved to a large lecture hall but soon that became over-full and we were in a fluster. I called the Cornell administration and we were told that there was only one possible place for us to go to: the Cornell cinema. And that is indeed where he spoke.

Another story of Amartya's lecturing skill was told to me by an English economist. It seems that he once gave a special lecture at Oxford, for which the custom was to read out from a fully written text. And to the audience it seemed that Sen did just that for one full hour. Legend has it that what he actually read out of were plain white sheets, for he had not had the time to write the lecture and he did not wish to show disrespect towards an old custom. No doubt the story is exaggerated, but let me tell you one which I know is authentic and sums up Sen's wit and sense of fun.

To a Canadian telephone operator Sen kept trying to spell his surname, without success. Finally, exasperated, he said: "S for Somebody, E for Everybody and N for Nobody."

Kaushik Basu is the C. Marks Professor at the Department of Economics, Cornell University.

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