Re: Amartya Sen thesis challenged

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:

> NY Times, Mar. 1, 2003
> Does Democracy Avert Famine?
> By MICHAEL MASSING
>
> Few scholars have left more of a mark on the field of development 
> economics than Amartya Sen.
>
> The winner of the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, Mr. 
> Sen has changed the way economists think about such issues as 
> collective decision-making, welfare economics and measuring poverty. 
> He has pioneered the use of economic tools to highlight gender 
> inequality, and he helped the United Nations devise its Human 
> Development Index — today the most widely used measure of how well 
> nations meet basic social needs.

Most Nobels are echoes of the latest Western political ideology fad. 
Sen's theory is based on a fantasized definition of "democracy" - a 
romanticized image of Western democracy of which the US is a flawed 
reflection. Socialist governments also practice democracy, except it is 
not recognized as such by Western political scientists. Comparing India 
and China with Western standards is a meaningless excercise. The 
cultural gap between the two nations is so fundamental that it defies 
comparation. In the 1950s, China outpaced India in development 
achievement because China was planning according to socialist principles 
and India was planning according to market principles. Moreover, as I 
have pointed out many times, the famine in China in 1958 coinsided with 
the Great Leap Forward, not caused by it. It was caused by three 
consecutive years of bad harvest due to longterm climate patterns of 
severe draught, and made real by US embargo of food imports, despite the 
fact that both Australia and Canada were willing to extend unconditional 
credit to China for wheat. Famines are international political events, 
not domestic problems. The Bangal Famine of 1943 was more a result of 
British colonial rule and Sen clevelyr cloaked his attack on British 
imperialism as love of Democracy to win American support. The fact that 
his study was financed by the ILO also predeteermined the rhetorics of 
Sen's findings.

India is still considered by the West as more "democratic" than China, 
but no one is arguing that India's economy is healthier than China's 
today. Despite Chinese incursion into market socialism, it is the 
socialist part of the Chinese economy that keeps it humming along in the 
face of global market collapse. Most of China's economic and social ills 
today comes from dismantlement of socialist strucutres that the market 
cannot repalce or cure. Today, the socialist sectors of the Chinese 
economy are carrying the externalities that are required for the market 
sectors to thrive.

As for democracy, assuming US practice is the guiding standard, it 
appears to be producing regimes that promote war and destruction and 
that uses hunger as a terrorist threat..

Henry C.K. Liu




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