When Amartya Sen won the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics, I congratulated an Indian-born co-worker on his compatriot’s achievement. He snorted dismissively and made it clear he did not consider Sen’s recent scholarly work to be economics.
Many other academic economists would share this view. When Sen worked in an abstract area of microeconomics called “social-choice theory,” they might argue, he was doing economics. But now, when he writes histories of famines or discusses the connections between development and freedom, they argue, he has crossed the frontier into some other discipline. This is philosophy, perhaps, or sociology or history, but certainly not economics.
Amartya Sen spoke Tuesday to a standing-room-only crowd at Hamline University when he delivered this year’s Alkire International Business and Economics Lecture. His subject was the links between poverty and violence. People who wanted simple answers did not get any. Despite what some other academics assert, Sen sees no direct causal link between poverty and individual people choosing to commit violent acts.
The al-Qaida squads that hijacked four airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, were made up of men who were relatively well educated and high-income. As a child, Sen saw people die of hunger in front of sweet shops during the terrible famine in Bengal in 1943. No food-shop windows were broken and crime rates remained extremely low despite hundreds of thousands dying of diseases exacerbated by terrible malnutrition.
Nor does Sen accept the “clash of civilizations” argument first made by Samuel Huntington 12 years ago. Huntington saw a future dominated by battles between different cultures rather than between different political or economic ideologies. The immediate example of such a clash is between Islam and the Christian West of Europe, the U.S. and other English-speaking countries.
Sen argues that conflicts such as the perceived one between Islam and the West are more complex and nuanced than that. People’s identities are multi-dimensional. I am a U.S. citizen, a demo-crat, a republican, a Democrat, Christian, male, baby boomer, Caucasian, youngest child, bald, teacher, welder, overweight, retired Army major, father, Minnesotan, traveler, depressive and of Dutch ethnic stock. Sen might ask, Can any of these identities trump all others in every situation?
Cultural- or ethno-centrism does make things worse, Sen said. To assume that democracy, individual freedom and other liberal values are solely products of “Western civilization” or that all scientific and technological progress originated in Europe is to ignore all of the contributions of “the East.” Islam was long more religiously tolerant than Christianity, and, until just a few hundred years ago, the science and mathematics of the Middle East and Asia were ahead of Europe’s.
Ignoring this history and denying the fact that the ex-colonized and the ex-colonizers have very different perceptions of history drives wedges between cultures. These wedges exacerbate political violence.
In his lecture, Sen did not argue that there are no relationships between poverty and political or criminal violence. Rather, the links are complex. There are connections that go both ways. Reducing poverty may reduce violence, but will not eliminate it.
Sen’s lecture was masterful, but was it economics? I think it was, but my position might lose a straw vote among other economists. True, he did not use the jargon or mathematics of most modern economics. Nor is the topic he addressed a common one in the discipline.
The focus of economics is, however, slowly broadening again after a century of narrowing. Two centuries ago, David Ricardo pioneered a theoretical approach based on the question, “What would a rational person do in this situation, and what would be the outcome for society of many people acting rationally?” Such deductive theorizing has dominated economic scholarship ever since, but it may have hit its high-water mark.
Young economists working with behavioral psychologists and doing experimental research are building a new microeconomics no longer crippled by the assumption that rationality dominates all human decision-making. Change within the discipline will come slowly, for, as John Maynard Keynes observed, few people change their fundamental beliefs after age 30. It will be a long time before the thousands of economists formed in the old orthodoxy pass from the scene.
This century will end, however, with a much broader discipline of economics than it began with, and economics will return to its earlier integration with other disciplines from philosophy and history to the other social sciences. While many contemporary economists would exclude most of Amartya Sen’s recent work from their discipline, 50 years from now, the verdict is likely to be very different.
© 2005 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.