Nice profile in New Statesman of Amartya Sen and how Sen's ideas are reshaping liberal thought

[salvorhardin]

This is a fairly lengthy article (~1,800 words) so I'm just going to post a few short snippets here. The article talks a little bit about how Sen's ideas are becoming influential in the Labour Party in the UK. I wish the Democrats could start seeing how Sen's ideas relate to inequality and economics in the U.S. too. Then we might finally have a Democratic Party that is actually capable of doing things like getting meaningful healthcare reform.

“Responsible adults," Sen wrote, "must be in charge of their own well-being; it is for them to decide how to use their capabilities. But the capabilities that a person does actually have (and not merely theoretically enjoys) depend on the nature of social arrangements, which can be crucial for individual freedoms. And there the state and the society cannot escape res­ponsibility."

Redistribution of income and resources matters, on this view, but so does what people are able to do with those resources - their “capabilities", in other words, among which Sen lists ­literacy, nutrition and the "power to participate in the social life of the community". You can increase people's income without thereby enhancing their power or ability to choose for themselves the kinds of lives they aspire to lead.

This latter point is also a reminder of something that Purnell and other proponents of the capabilities approach on the centre-left sometimes forget: there may be more to inequality than disparities in income distribution, but this does not mean that people's ability to choose for themselves the lives they wish to lead is not ­drastically curtailed by their economic circumstances - by what they earn and what they own. If we are to take the story Sen tells about Kader Mia seriously, then the conclusion we ought to draw is not that we should forget about income inequality. It's rather that people want income and resources not for their own sake, but in order to do things with them.

Mainstream economists who claim to be upholding the legacy of Smith are committed to a view of economic behaviour which, if Sen is right, the author of The Wealth of Nations never held. "Rational economic man, in the narrow mainstream sense, is close to being a social ­moron," he says. "The inability to think about other people is not a proof of reason - it's the ­absence of reason! But the kind of self-satisfied, self-interest maximisation that Smith demolished in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, came back in the form of rational choice theory, and it's only now that we're getting away from it, though many of us have been sceptical of it for a very long time."

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Link here; and also a slightly sceptical blog post on New Labour's sudden quoting of Sen

http://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/2009/07/sen-interview-smith-income
(you may have to register with them - I can't remember)

And from the very good Liberal Conspiracy group blog (if you want to follow one blog for general liberal British thought and news, this is what I'd recommend):

Amartya Sen and his capabilities model is all the rage in cabinet, and ex-cabinet. Gordon Brown’s read all about it, Liam Byrne’s been quoting Sen in the Guardian, and now James Purnell’s been using him as the basis for his attempt to portray himself as a leading left thinker, ready to lead Labour and the left out of the electoral wilderness with his new best think-tank mate Jon Cruddas.

So what are we to make of the adoption of a piece of thinking which dates from the 1970s, and set out most famously in Sen’s seminal 1979 Tanner Lecture ‘Equality of What’? Like Stuart at Next Left, I’m not a little worried about how Sen’s being used and abused.

I’m not worried simply because New Labour has a patchy record, to say the least, on equalities and the distribution of of anything much, but because there is a real danger of Sen being deliberately misinterpreted and misused as a further means of cutting back on public services aimed at the poorer in our society.

The danger is, quite simply, that as the Sen-isms are rolled out, the bits about the need for people to be able take control of their own life will be highlighted, while the bits about the need for the state to take pro-active steps towards ensuring that everyone in society necessary functional ‘capabilities’, most often related to economic circumstance, will be quietly set to one side.
...
http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/07/23/is-james-purnell-using-sen

[salvorhardin]

2. Thanks for insertion of the link I forgot.

Doh!

And the recommendation on the Liberal Conspiracy blog. I'll add it to my feed reader.

So basically, the Labour Party is doing with Sen exactly what the New Statesman profile of Sen talks about doing with Adam Smith...? Cherry picking quotes that when read out of context can to be used to reaffirm their anti-liberal biases?

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Well, it's certainly worth keeping a critical eye on what 'New Labour' actually do with Sen

That blog piece was written by a Labour local councillor. There can be a lot of distance between a Labour activist at the local level, and some of those at or around Cabinet level - Purnell in particular should have a very close eye kept on him, since as a Cabinet minister, he attempted to introduce a series of 'reforms' that would have screwed people in need of state benefits in a number of ways, including things like using 'lie detectors' (claiming to analyse the stress of someone, over the phone) to determine whether benefit claimants were being honest or not. I think that was all eventually scrapped, but he gave the impression of wanting to find any excuse possible to pay less in benefits, without worrying if that would hurt people.

[salvorhardin]

4. Oh good grief!

Pseudo-scientific justifications of ideology.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. And just to muddy the waters, the makers of the software sue people who say it doesn't work

Purnell’s Lie Detector - What the Guardian didn’t say

For example, the Guardian references a paper by two Swedish linguistics professors, Anders Eriksson and Francisco Lacerda entitled “Charlatanry in forensic speech science: a problem to be taken seriously”, which was published, in 2007, in the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law. This is the same paper that triggered our own investigation. Eriksson and Lacerda’s analysis of the patent on which this technology is based, and their criticisms of its claims and methods, is of critical importance in understanding why the system is, basically, a hoax or, as they put it to the Guardian, why ‘the scientific provability of the Nemesysco code is akin to astrology’.

Unfortunately, the paper was withdrawn from on-line publication by the journal’s publisher, Equinox, after Nemesysco threatened to sue them for libel over the content of the paper – which is one of the complications we’ve faced in getting thing ready for publication, as the arguments in this paper are particular important to understand how and why the system doesn’t do what its developer’s claim.

According to the Guardian, the reason that paper was ‘pulled’ was because it contains contains ‘personal attacks’ on Nemesysco’s founder, Amir Liberman, and that’s the story that Liberman has telling anyone who’ll listen ever since his threat to sue the journal publishers became public knowledge.

That’s not, however, what the first letter that Liberman’s lawyers sent to Equinox actually says, in fact the first thing that this letter claims is defamatory is actually the claim that…

Our Clients’ technology does not work and cannot work and is therefore arbitrary and consequently worthless, contrary to our Clients’ claims with regard to it. This allegation is presented in various ways and pervades the Article.

http://www.ministryoftruth.me.uk/2009/03/13/purnells-lie-detector-some-things-the-guardian-didnt-mention/

The Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/12/voice-analysis-system-vra

Unity's (who also blogs in Liberal Conspiracy) technical article on it on the Minsitry of Truth blog: http://www.ministryoftruth.me.uk/2009/03/13/purnells-lie-detector-the-scientific-evidence/

And the inevitable result in a pilot? Genuine job seekers fail lie test

[HamdenRice]

6. Amartya Sen is the greatest economist of our time. Here are some of his accomplishments.

Many of his ideas which seem commonplace now were revolutionary when he introduced him, and yet most who people cite his ideas don't realize that they all came from the same liberal economist.

- Sen showed that famines are not the result of lack of food, but of lack of income to buy food that is almost always present during famine. For example, Ireland exported food to England during the potato famine, but the failure of the potato crop made Irish farmers too poor to buy the plentiful other kind of food in Ireland at the time. Famine is therefore preventable, and not the result of resource scarcity. This was the final nail in the coffin of Malthusianism.

- Sen used demographic data on male:female ratios from sub-Saharan Africa and China to show that China's male:female ratio was skewed toward more men. Multiplying that factor by the Chinese population, he argued that there were 50 million missing women in China, and a total of at least 100 million missing women in China, South Asia and North Africa. This wasn't because of infanticide as is often misreported; it is because of the thousands of daily assaults on women's well being, such as less food, less schooling and less expenditure of health as girls grow up. The entitlement of sub-Saharan African women to their own fields and crops seemed to explain why there were fewer missing women in sub-Saharan Africa. Sen's research has led to a world-wide focus on giving women direct access to crop fields and other assets.

- Sen invented the asset-entitlement approach to poverty reduction. In other words, giving poor people assets and entitlements were likely to reduce poverty. This has spurred an increase world wide interest in land reform. South Africa's land reform program is based significantly on Sen's theories.