I had taken a decision a while ago, to anchor most of my posts on socio-economic issues or my views on people, state of the planet, and various goings on – on my own wall on Facebook, or on my own blog, or as a chapter in my own books or booklets. I refrain from posting my views on someone else’s wall or intrude into someone else’s space.
Shyamantak Dutta tagged me on a long thread on Facebook, regarding what I might have said before about Amartya Sen’s grasp on economy.
It is interesting to note how much of a storm can be created over such a a trivial cup of tea – the Bank of Sweden prize on Economic Science that ended up wrongly being recognised as an authentic Nobel prize that Sen was awarded many years ago, presumably for contributing to “economic sciences” with his research work on Asian famines.
The long thread on Facebook is a good example of how the Bengali social media inhabitants can generate such a huge din with so little substance over a dead subject – a sign of the general degeneration of Bengali society. This extreme level of noise over an item of virtual zero relevance is a hall mark of Bengal. This includes people from Santiniketan, who get almost nothing of Tagore except blind following of meaningless symbolisms representing intellectual, cultural and social stagnation.
About Amartya Sen – until about the 1990s, I had acquired and read as many articles, essays and books authored by Amartya Sen as I could lay my hands on – spending considerable sums of my hard earned money. I would suspect that I might have read more of Sen than most folks reading Shyamantak’s post post and pontificating on it.
Many of those books are still on my shelf, collecting dust today as nobody else wishes to touch them. It took me over twenty years to rid myself of a blind adoration of Sen, and begin to question his contribution to the world of economics and same time – the very subject of economics itself. This issue – economics, appeared of increasing importance to me, with the backdrop of a world perhaps hurtling towards an socio-economic precipice sometime soon.
I was by then increasingly conscious that there was likely a fundamental problem with world economy and that the system being followed by western nations and being steamrolled across the rest of the planet, might be pushing the planet towards a major cataclysm that could result in an extinction of the living earth. Of course I was neither the first nor the last to come to this realisation.
Not being shy to approach experts, I had started writing to various economic experts including a few that got the same prize as Amartya Sen, but in more recent years and had written books raising questions on sustainability of the current economic system, primarily being spearheaded by the US and followed by everybody else – and the role of the World Bank, IMF, as well as later developments through the Doha meetings and the rest. I started getting some responses too.
Then came Amartya Sen’s cruel and vicious attack on Madhusree Mukherjee regarding her book on Churchill’s involvement in the Bengal famine of 1943. She projected views that did not tally with Sen’s own work done decades ago. Sen did not have the weight of data that Mukherjee had access to since a lot of classified data from the world war era had later been declassified and placed in public domain. Madhusree used such declassified information that Sen did not get to see.
I am not writing this in support of Madhusree because she was a friend. Although she had stayed at my home in Vancouver once, she unfriended and blocked me on Facebook due to my constant attack, on my own wall, on the liberal class of India, and my view that the so called liberals and left wings are, in India and in North America, primarily fraudsters masquerading as liberals. My attack upset Madhusree, who considers herself to be a. liberal, but falls for the same trap that equates criticising Modi is the righteous path for all liberals. She, a resident of Germany, was offended by my criticism of liberals on my own wall. So she blocked me, and informed me about it.
Thats OK. I remain convinced to my core, that left leaning and liberals of Indian extract, both in India and living abroad, are frauds. I am not the only person with this realisation. But many others do not wish to publicly announce their view. They do not like making enemies. Some wish to get help from others in one way or another. I do not on principle, want to take help from anybody. I do not care if folks disagree with my view. I shall not keep silent about my views on important issues that plagues the world. That is me. I am willing to lose friends like Madhusree Mukherjee, or anybody else reading this post, over my right to express my view todays socio-economics.
Criticising liberals does not come with pleasure. I myself have been identified as a liberal among liberals by many, mostly Americans. I am yet to fully understand what makes a liberal liberal. Vaguely, I guessed the liberals were supposed to be the beacon for the rest of mankind to follow – like a guiding light. If a nation’s liberals are gone, the nation is doomed. So I thought. It is because of this reason that I found it highly irritating that the world was running out of true liberals, being replaced by pseudo-liberals and fraudsters. In such a world, the only outcome would be social collapse, which was actually happening. I blame the false liberals for spoiling the party, much to my regret and chagrin.
Duke, Mita, Leena Chatterjee, Amartya Sen, Tan Lee, (Mr and Mrs Varghese ??), Tony Mitra
Back to Amartya Sen’s attack on Mukherjee’s book on Churchill and the Bengal famine – this showed that Amartya Sen can be petty, vicious and in my view, unacceptably mean minded and unacademic, when it comes to protecting what he considers to be his own turf.
Never mind the lives of several million Bengali peasants that died in the second world war through a man made famine. Sen’s study on Asian famines and the recognition he got from it, was perhaps more important to him than the real cause behind deaths of millions of Bengali peasants. Also, having made his bed with both USA and UK with regard to his earnings through tenures in academic institutions of the west, he appears most reluctant to criticise those nations. He would rather find an easier target – Narendra Modi, to pin the blame for the ills of the world on.
I did have a conversation with him more than ten years ago while having lunch with him in Vancouver, on invitation from Tan Lee da. He asked me to send him recordings of his sister, late Supurna Guha, who had spoken with me on record about her memory of Santiniketan. Amartya Sen despite being the elder brother, did not have such voice recordings or other memories of his then departed sister, and wished me to pass him what I had. I sent him what he wanted at his Harvard contact. This, to me, showed another side of Sen. Too much of a big shot, too little time to to be in touch with even his own sister.
I did ask him during the course of that lunch, about world economy. Was this practice of creating large sums of money out of thin air and without any backing (US dollar had been delinked from gold for three decades by then – and the dollar was well entrenched as the world’s reserve currency and the primary currency used in sale and purchase of oil across the world – while speculation was rife about an approaching Peak Oil). I asked if this limitless creation of money out of thin air as a lubricant for a GDP addicted economic policy was not a prescription for an eventual collapse. Also what, scientifically or mathematically speaking, was the value of such instantly created virtual money ?
Sen grudgingly agreed, in a kind of shifty way, that my suspicion might be correct. Money no longer had any intrinsic base value. Continued creation of limitless money out of thin air ensured that eventually, financial collapse was a mathematical certainty. But he added that I need not worry too much since that collapse may not happen in my own lifetime. I found his entire response to be unacademic, unscientific, unsure, and most unsatisfactory.
Systemic collapse of the economy dove tails with simultaneous collapse of multiple systems. Many other scientists have been predicting it. Some calculate that this 21st is the last century when the world and human civilisation, followed a business as usual model for a while. Before this century comes to an end, all hell is very likely to break loose. Some predict a collapse of the human population, down to less than a percent of the current level to survive the end of this century. Many believe, myself included, that the only people to survive will be those, like the aborigines of the Andamans, or the Kalahari desert, that have no use for money.
Clearly, economists have a lot to explain, apart from environmentalists, ecologists and politicians. Some scientists are doing their bit already. Main stream western media, which no longer represents either free speech or journalism, and have become a copy of the old soviet style arm of propaganda, refuse to touch negative news such as possible collapse of the system in the next generation or two. Nobody likes a defeatist story that does not give hope, we are told. As a result, the public is being kept drugged, and unaware of the impending doom. That the living planet is facing am immediate doom right now, is accepted in scientific and academic world. The planet is facing its sixth mass extinction phase. The previous one, the fifth, happened sixty five million years ago, which put an end to the dinosaurs. That happened because of an extra terrestrial event – the earth was struck by an asteroid massive enough to cause irreversible and permanent alternation of the planets flora and fauna.
This time, the cause of the ongoing mass extinction is not extra terrestrial. This one is wholly and solely man made. Man has made is impossible for 99 percent of the rest of the living creatures, to survive. That man himself may not survive if 99 percent of the rest cannot, has not filtered down into the psyche of the so called intelligent creature called man – the singularly most toxic species to ever evolve out of the primordial soup.
And the bulk of the blooming economists, Amartya Sen included, has missed the bus on the real reason – that the primary economic theories, from the days of the rise of the Calvinists – are all bunkum. Those might have been viable for a planet of infinite mass and infinite resources. Unfortunately, no such planet exists.
Actually, Rabindranath Tagore, never claiming to be an expert in economics, did a much better job of identifying the root cause of an impending planetary doom where the world will be unlivable for all creatures including man. He identified the basic pillars of western civilisation based on manufactured public opinion through advertising and doctored media, reckless consumerism and war mongering for profit, to be the root causes for this super-destruction. Understandably, few western economist of philosophers were willing to bell their own cat. Western educated Indian born economists and wannabe philosophers such as Sen are the worst collaborators.They don’t have a clue.
Response on my questions on fundamental economic sustainability did come back from other economic stalwarts including those that also got the Swedish prize same as Sen, but more recently. They had, unlike Sen, studied the topic of global economy and creation of phoney money. They shared my view that creating money without a fall back value was same as counterfeiting. Only thing is – if we do it, its illegal. But Governments do it and allow some banks and financial institutions to do it – recklessly, but legally. Worse, nobody really had an accurate tally of how much of such money was floating around. Asking experts can result is a bewildering array of answers. Anywhere between twenty trillion to two hundred trillion dollars might be out there, and no one has a clue to the exact figure, or how much more is being pumped in every day. No government has a clue, including the US government, the main promoter and perpetrator of the current system.
These economic stalwarts that did respond to my questions, were by and large a lot more honest, direct, detailed and without beating around the bush. Some of them would write books about it, while others did not.
I took me some more time to come to the conclusion that Amartya Sen did not know much about economics. He was busy creating distance from the subject and trying to fashion himself as a philosopher that likes to comment on social justice, and in particular, criticise Narendra Modi. Yes, Modi was instrumental in getting him out of the newly formed Nalanda University in India. It is uncertain if Sen carries a grudge because of that. But having seen Sen’s reaction to Madhusree Mukherjee, I would suspect the reason Sen dislikes Modi is more personal, than political. Either way, Sen knows little about either Modi, or economic sustainability, or much else, in my own personal view. He is not even an honest leftist.
I see him as a fraud, unqualified to speak on economic trends. I started considering him to be an irrelevant economist, a second rate one, that can give no answer to todays or tomorrow’s problems.
He even had the audacity to call me a “reactionary” during that lunch in Vancouver. Not being familiar with communist vocabulary, I did not really know what exactly a “reactionary” was, and had to ask a lot of left wing Bengali intellectuals of the time to explain its meaning and relevance to me. Eventually I concluded that nobody really knew what being a reactionary implied, and how such as person was supposed to think or behave. The term was used as a a generic insult or an abuse targeting anybody the leftists did not like.
I have come to the conclusion years ago, that economics was not a science at all. Addressing the subject as “Economic science” was an oxymoron. Economics had more to do with speculation and voodoo, than any hard science.
I also find Sen to be not just a second rate economist, but also a third rate political or socio-economic analyst. I would have had a lot more respect for him if he decided to turn his focus on his adopted country of residence, USA, and analysed what the US was doing to the planet. The US civilisation is based on extreme and unsustainable exploitation of the rest of the world, permanently harming both human and natural resources globally and ushering in a planet wide ecocide or climatic collapse. Sen, if he wanted to be a socio-political analyst and a philosopher, should have focussed on the US’s behaviour and the survival prospects of mankind, instead of being sanctimonious and picking on Modi.
But Sen would not touch the American Pandora’s box. Firstly I suspect him to be incapable of analysing it. Secondly, his bread is buttered on the US side. Damned if he will bite the hand that feeds him, opportunist that he is.
People like Sen are the small cogs that are used to keep the western destructive socio-economic wheel lubricated and turning. His left wing cover is an illusion, another example of a fraudster’s bag of tricks.
And yes, he got his prize because the Rothschild family pushed for it. If you guys want to know more – study what the Rothschilds do across the planet. It would be a good education.
No self respecting leftist should touch a Rothschild with a ten foot pole. Cheers.