Book Review: S. Subramanian,Essays in Economics and Other Cheerful Themes—A Dismal Scientist’s Occasional Reflections on the World around Him

According to United Nations Development, India’s growth rate averages around 8 per cent annually in the previous five years (2010–2014). Despite that there are more poor people in India than in 26 African countries combined, a largest number of hungry people in the world are in India. India accounts for 36 per cent of the world’s adult illiterate population, 54 per cent of all severely and moderately underweight under-5 children live in India, 600 million defecate in the open, the highest in the world and 11 per cent seats in parliament held by women which is less than Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.

The book Essays in Economics and Other Cheerful Themes: A dismal Scientist’s Occasional Reflections on the World around Him is a contribution by author S. Subramanian to the society for the rights and well-being of the society. The book is divided into three sections. The first section of the book highlights three major aspects of development economics, namely, global deprivation and disparity, domestic deprivation and disparity and how state can meet its obligations towards its citizens by reducing poverty, inequality and discrimination. Reprisal without rectitude, moral catastrophes in polity and society has been substantiated. The second part of the book analytically explains the relationship between economics, philosophy and political science consisting of comparative headcount of poverty and significance of liberty, equality and justice. Headcount poverty comparisons and thinking through justice are the key bullet thoughts evoked. The third section of the book deals with less serious contemporary headaches and miscellaneous mistakes in Indian society, including cricket, institutions of higher learning, schooling and impenetrable postmodern prose.

The first chapter is the abstract of the essay ‘Aspects of Global Deprivation and Disparity: A Child’s Guide to Some Simple-minded Arithmetic’, published in The Hindu, on 8 and 9 February 2001. The author has used capability failure ratio (CFR) as a measure of deprivation. According to him, CFR is an average of the headcount ratios of deprivation in three dimensions of human achievement of knowledge (adult child literacy rate), child survival (under-5 mortality rate) and a decent income-related standard of living (income poverty ratio). The author has computed CFR’s components of 174 countries, which together constitutes the ‘world’. He has summarized through his research that a high rate of global deprivation rendered significantly worse by its highly unequal distribution across countries. He brings attention towards very high degree of correlation between colonialism and poor countries, the role of international trade in the division of global advantage and has stated, ‘one is compelled to the conclusion that while power will continue to work for the North, the rules have begun to work against the South’. Another important issue highlighted by the author is the debt burden of poor countries as a major hurdle on their development. He quotes, ‘debt and strife is an effective recipe for keeping knowledge and good health out of the reach of country’s citizens’. The author has suggested developing countries to look towards self and other similarly placed countries, in order to overcome its deprivations. He concludes by quoting, ‘I should like to submit that the means to realizing the promise of what Amartya Sen has called development as freedom does not reside in lynching missionaries and demolishing mosques.’

The second chapter explains the pertaining questions related to various aspects of international aid in the context of global poverty and inter-country inequality. The author has considered 2005 data on country-wise gross domestic product (GDP), population and aid receipt for 174 countries. The per capita GDP in 2005 for the set of 174 countries at current prices was at US$ 7,051, based on this the author has deemed a country to be poor if its per capita GDP is less than US$ 1,400. Each country has been described in terms of a pair of numbers, the first is its per capita GDP and the second is its population size. The author has measured poverty in terms of a family of poverty indices advanced by Foester, Greer and Thorbecke (1984), that is the so-called Pα family, where α is a parameter that assumes non-negative values and reflects degree of ‘aversion to poverty’, with higher values of α signifying greater aversion to poverty. While P₀ is the headcount ratio or proportion of the world’s population living in its poor countries (it violates monotonicity axiom as well as transfer axiom), P₁is the per capita income gap ratio, or the proportionate deviation of the average income of the poor from the poverty line, expressed in per person terms; the index P₂satisfies both monotonicity (other things being equal; decrease in any poor person’s income should increase poverty) and transfer axioms (other things remaining the same, any equalizing redistribution of income should reduce poverty). The author has computed the values of P₀, P_0.5, P₁ and P₂ as 0.44, 0.29, 0.21 and 0.12, respectively. The values of these indices for poor countries suggest that the extent of global poverty is very considerable, and hence there is a lot of poverty in the world. The total shortfall of income required in order to eradicate poverty, represented as aggregate global deficit (D), is obtained by summing up the deficits of all the poor countries. The amount of aid available is just 6 per cent of a proportion of aid required to eradicate global poverty, that is, the quantum of aid available, in relation to the need for it, is minimal. The author believes that from an impartial, arithmetical point of view, a relatively small sacrifice by a small number of rich countries could yield a disproportionately large benefit to a large number of poor countries.

The third chapter is a summary of an abbreviated version of an essay on ‘The status of the child in India’, presented as a keynote address at a workshop organized by UNICEF in Chennai in 2002. It highlights India’s track record in the matter of income poverty throughout post-independence period and depicts high inequality in the distribution of consumption expenditure (reflected as 0.3 or more Gini coefficient). The author concludes by quoting, ‘it is difficult to deny that the nature of progress has been a gradual transition from the terrible to the merely awful’. The status of child in India has been categorized under the heads: nutritional health, educational status of the child, infant and child mortality, gender discrimination in terms of sex selective and infanticide and foeticide, child labour and the global and domestic environment. The author believes that the present level of overall achievement is disappointing, in both absolute and relative senses. He concludes by stressing on the significance of urgent redistributive measures by the government to improve the status of the child particularly in the area of literacy, schools, crèches, immunization programmes and supplementary nutrition apart from legal and social reforms in the context of adoption, child abuse and child labour and women through protection from discrimination, in both domestic and work settings, and provision of enabling capabilities.

The author in the fourth chapter begins with the notion of ‘positive freedom’ quoted by Amartya Sen as the ‘capability to function’, in terms of ability with which human beings have to lead the ‘good life’, with guarantee of the right not be hungry; the right to a reasonably long and healthy life; the right to livelihood; the right to decent standard of living; the right to shelter and clothing; the right to knowledge; the right to mobility; the right not to be systematically disadvantaged by, and vulnerable to, Acts of God; and so on. On the other hand, the notion of negative freedom has been quoted by the author as ‘libertarianism’ in terms of freedom of conscience, of speech, of religious conviction, of political affiliation and of association as examples of libertarian human rights. The author has analyzed the extent to which India has fared with respect to securing any large measure of positive freedom for the bulk of its citizens. He has quoted Orissa as an evident example of periodic occurrence of starvation deaths, which is unacceptable in a time of self-sufficiency (in terms of the availability of food grains on a per capita basis) and of bursting public granaries. The author highlights two major issues to be considered to safeguard individual liberties: first, the prospect of securing the positive freedoms of the disadvantaged sections of the society and second, the positive freedom of advantaged sections of society be better secured. The author submits in the end of the chapter for deeper effort, harder and more principled than the easy satisfactions which are to be had from viewing glossy television advertisements in Technicolor for the sake of human rights.

The fifth chapter begins with different aspects of inclusive development, national integration, social integration and depth and coverage of social security provisioning for the deprived. The author has led immense importance to ‘inclusive development’ addressing domains of poverty, inequality and growth. The author has suggested that the government should commit itself to a target rate of growth of the quintile income (it measures the inequality of income distribution by calculating the ratio of total income received by the 20 per cent of the population with the highest income to the income received by the 20 per cent of the population with the lowest income) and that the economic survey should provide statistics on time series of the quintile income. This will serve as an incentive for the state to adopt some genuinely inclusive measures of governance. The author concludes that the quintile income does not have to be predicated on the (plainly unsustainable) judgement that it is the most appealing index of poverty available; a sufficient advertisement in its cause should be the proposition that it is a plausible and useful indicator of poverty.

The sixth chapter highlights the conflict between forcible seizure and moral integrity. The author begins with terrorist attack in New York on 11 September 2001 and a shared sense of humane fellow feeling that brought the world together. But US instead of the gracious acceptance of the widespread expression of support and solidarity to carry the rest of the world with it, in a spirit of mutuality, consultation and deferral it exhibited subjectivism, hubris and unilateral statement of intent by preparing for military strike against Afghanistan. The author wants to stress that anger and grief can and must be understood by all players in the globe and the passion of the wronged and injured need to be met with compassionate comprehension. He believes that the legitimacy of passion and anger is always, and only, asserted on the one side of the ledger, and never on the other. In the end, he urges the governments and the peoples of the ‘Western alliance’ to proceed with greater restraint, tolerance and patience than has hitherto been in evidence.

The author devotes seventh chapter to the assessment of ‘moral catastrophes and immoral reasoning’, by taking example of aftermath of the dreadful carnage in Gujarat and acknowledges those voices that have spoken, when we have not. He highlights the silence that informs ordinary conversation among friends and acquaintances; the silence of large chunks of the regional written media; the silence of influential men and women in public affairs; the silence of academic institutions which one might have expected to serve as ‘natural’ sources of principled and intellectual opposition to wrong doing. The author categorizes two grand traditions in moral reasoning: the consequentialist tradition (actions are judged according to their consequences) and the deontic tradition (actions are judged not according to their consequences but according to prior moral principles of obligation and onus). The author believes that there is a strong case in moral reasoning for differentiating between reason as causation and reason as justification. The author concludes by stressing on moral justice, otherwise the cost of resistance to moral justice is moral catastrophes which we and we alone have brought down on our heads.

The eighth chapter highlights the cause of the General Lok Sabha Elections (2004) as existence of a large enough constituency within the country that has been subjected to the felt experience of mass-income poverty, endemic hunger, starvation deaths, ill health, unemployment and the lack of access to water and energy. The author believes in any event, the limits to canny strategizing would be quickly exposed by the uncertain and unpredictable influences of ‘local conditions’, charismatic leadership and meteorological phenomena. Hence, the government needs to promote good governance and enlightened administration.

The ninth chapter examines the 77th, 81st, 82nd and 85th constitutional amendments on reservation for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the matter of promotion in government employment. The author highlights that the ‘Creamy Layer Principle’ (the principle that in any scheme of group-based reservation, the ‘creamy layer’ ought to be excluded from preferential treatment) heads out by many forward caste persons as an argument against providing reservation in education to the ‘creamy layer’ segments of the ‘backward castes’. The author’s keen interest is reflected in finding the right mechanism of compensatory discrimination to assist the cause of justice in the allocation of scarce educational opportunities among competing contenders for them. The author has proposed four schemes of compensatory discrimination: scheme 1 does not allow for any group-related preferential treatment; scheme 2 endorses preferential treatment in the event of caste disadvantage; scheme 3 does not allow for any caste-related preferential treatment; and scheme 4 allows preferential treatment on grounds of both caste and economic status. He believes that an elementary level of social maturity, combined with a sense of proportion, would dictate vastly more urgent deadlines for a cessation of caste atrocities than for a cessation of the phenomenon of reservation.

In the tenth chapter, the author critically analyzes the two measures of poverty: headcount ratio and aggregate headcount. The author highlights that the headcount ratio provides information about the probability of occurrence (likelihood principle) and aggregate headcount is based on the principle (continuity principle) that the poor population is the only relevant constituency for ascertaining the extent of poverty.

In the eleventh chapter, the author has tried to seek the contours of ‘justice’ through the perspective of Amartya Sen and John Rawls. He highlights that Amartya Sen’s (2009) book, The Idea of Justice, aims to present a responsible, coherent and deliberative account of the notion of justice and its constitutive parts, reflects both the ‘opportunity’ and the ‘process’ aspects of freedom. For Sen, free media and parliamentary democracy for the pursuit of justice is of paramount importance. Rawls’ (1971) book, Theory of Justice, deals with requirements of ‘domestic justice’. Rawls has been much concerned with a notion of justice as ‘fairness’, a manifestation of which he sees as residing in the outcome of a certain highly imaginative bargaining process aimed at realizing a just society and conducted in a fictive place of the mind he calls the ‘original position’.

The twelfth chapter is about equality and its perspective usage. The chapter begins with Derek Parfit’s essay on ‘Equality and Priority Ratio’ that suggests that egalitarianism is vulnerable to the ‘Leveling-Down Objection’ and the ‘Divided World Example’. His concern was people being equally well off, he believed that principle of equality is in itself bad if some people are worse than others. The author further differentiates between Pure Telic Egalitarianism that requires, given any two equi-dimensional distributions of well-being, the more equal distribution be judged to be the better one and Pluralist Telic Egalitarianism that requires, that given any two equi-dimensional distributions of well-being with the same sum total of well-being, the more equal distribution be judged to be the better one. He propagates that Leveling-Down Objection applies only to the Pure Telic Egalitarian. The author concludes with the statement that ‘Leveling-Down Objection’ and the ‘Divided World’ examples are not after all fatal worries for the ethnic egalitarianism.

The thirteenth chapter explores the feasibility of achieving liberty and equality at one and the same time. The author begins with the notion of a ‘good society’, as one which is governed by a number of prized social virtues. The prime virtue considered by him is deference to the values of personal liberty and interpersonal equity. The author highlights the ‘Weak Equity Axiom’ of Amartya Sen depicting the essential condition in distribution of income between two individuals, a larger share ought to go to the uniformly more disadvantaged person (such as, in the division of an income of given size between an able bodied and a physically challenged person, the assumption being that at every level of income, the latter individual is worse off than the former). The author ponders some thought provoking questions for readers as what could be possible escape routes from the equity–liberty dilemma and what could be the source of contradiction established in this very chapter.

The fourteenth chapter has been titled as ‘A Curmudgeon’s Complaints’; it comprises topics related to Indian cricket, Indian institutions of higher learning, teaching those young (school education) and destruction of good language (bad language). The author analytically explains the reasons responsible for India to win in India but not for Australia to win in Australia and vice versa. He highlights that Indian pitches are ‘mud tracks’— ‘treacherous’ and ‘two faced’. While Australian and English pitches are ‘hard’, ‘true’ and ‘sporting’. Further, the weather is hot and sweaty in subcontinent. The author has tried to cover various aspects of cricket; pitch quality, match fixing, bogus appealing, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI)’s misuse of power, commentators on TV and commercial ads after every over, money received by players as being brand ambassador of various products and so on. Further, the author has referred to educational and research institutions devoted to the cause of higher learning. The author highlights the drawbacks of higher education institutions in India as lack of commitment, slothfulness, back stabbing, implicit intra-institutional social contracts for muted or non-existent internal criticism, absence of planning and a cynical disregard for work schedules are absorbed in the afflatus produced by an extravagant self-image (which has the advantage of public endorsement) that sits cozily with an attitude of moral righteousness and intellectual arrogance. Even at elementary education level, the school has most rudimentary classrooms, desks, blackboards and chalk and teachers. The author believes that the recent move to rewrite textbooks in such a way as to promote national pride through orchestrated lying has geared to the system of certification in which predictable and identifiable castes and socio-economic groups are enabled to press home the advantages of the accident of birth, while others are simply left to their own devices. The author concludes the chapter by quoting that the chief offenders are those that write in a language that is nominally English but is in reality a language called postmodern. Chapters 15, 16 and 17 are about an advanced sociological analysis of Slum Dog Millionaire (Boyle, 2009), economist as equal to anything and economics in practice could be virtually anything economist cared to specify, dealing with economics is about raising the right question and finding a logical solution by substantiating it with facts and figures. Language and representation or, modestly, mathematical logical parody of economics and poverty has been deliberated by the author.

This book is of immense importance for students of economics, both at undergraduates and postgraduates who are still not very mature to reason and see relevance in favour of having alluring temptations of comfort and accommodation. The book provides an insight to the aspects of income and non-income deprivations and disparities on global landscape, the distribution of international aid, the implications of poverty and inequality on development, the extent of backward status of children in India, performance of Indian society and the Indian state for well-being of the citizens, a specific dimension of development as inclusiveness, significance of headcount poverty, an extended review of Amartya Sen’s epic work The Idea of Justice, distinction between prioritarianism and egalitarianism, as well as the trade-off between principles of equality and liberty.