Economical with economics

Why do latter-day economists write everything but economics in their autobiographies?

Indian economists started writing their autobiographies about 30 years ago. One important feature stands out: whereas until about 2001 they wrote about economics and policy in whatever way they saw it, practised it and moulded it, since then they have tended to avoid the subject as far as possible.
 
The result is that none of the Indian economists’ autobiographies published in the last 20 years really satisfies the reader. As it is, the universe of economists is small. Within that, the number of those who write autobiographies is microscopic and those who want to read about economists is infinitesimal. Does this nanonumber really want to know about the school and college the author went to, the plays he or she saw, the concerts they attended, their friends and colleagues and so on?

 
There was one book recently, for example, of nearly 450 pages by a bureaucrat who was at the centre of policy for 40 years. He wasn’t an economist but, then, who or what is an economist? He was very nice to everyone, but had little to say about economic policy. But he did spare the words for an in­ordinately long and acid-filled des­cription of Jairam Ram­esh — who, by the way, has now turned into a biog­ra­pher — and a (mere) two-sent­ence jab at P Chid­am­ba­ram who, he said, was obstinate.
 

The latest autobiographies, or memoirs if you want to sound genteel, are by Amartya Sen, his disciple Kaushik Basu and Shankar Acharya. All three disappoint the reader in varying degrees but on the same score. They disregard the reader.

 
Thus, of the 400 pages of text in Sen’s book, his academic life takes up just 140 pages. The chapter on economics takes up just 13 pages. Not just that. It comes only up to the mid-1970s. There’s no mention of anything after that, not even the Nobel he won in 1998. He, thus, almost entirely avoids any discussion of economics except in asides.
 
Likewise Acharya, who was involved in policy-making in the finance ministry for nearly two decades. You really don’t get much of that aspect of his professional life from his book. There’s some, of course, but not nearly enough.

 
In that respect Y V Reddy scores far better. His book is more thoughtful. He is, without question, what a highly respected journalist called the “most cerebral” of India’s policy economists.
 
Basu, meanwhile, has published what is more of a diary of his three years as chief economic adviser. But then, he doesn’t make any claim that it is an autobiography. Whenever he gets around to it, it must be hoped that he remembers to mention economics somewhere. After all, OUP published his collected works in three volumes some years ago.
 
A few months back Montek Singh Ahluwalia also published his autobiography. There was quite a lot of policy in it but the way he wrote it was like watching kids skimming stones over ponds. You need a very special skill to be able to do that.

 
The older bunch
 
The contrast with the older autobiographies is stark. They were not academic economists like Sen, Basu, Pranab Bardhan and so on but practitioners of policy just as Ahluwalia, Acha­rya etc have been. But they have written about their experiences in government and elsewhere far more candidly and analytically than the ones who have come later. There is a real sense of it all from their books because they have kept the professional strictly apart from the private. There’s none of “I had some delicately cooked lamb” or “we enjoyed a glass of exquisite Riesling”.
 

I G Patel, Sharad Marathe, M Narasimham and Ashok Desai are good examples of how to write for the reader rather than yourself. There was so much stuff in them about what the reader bought the books to read about.
 
Patel and Narasimham, the architect of our banking reform, wrote short little books. Patel called his Glimpses of Indian Economic Policy: An insider’s view and Narasimham called his Some Reminiscences. Even so, on policy these books are what they call “little gems”. The bang per buck spent is significant.
 
These older economists had strong views and, unlike their successors, did not hesitate to express them. Nor did they try and be protective of what they considered the government’s stupid economic policies.

 
Marathe, for example, was the first to point out to Morarji Desai that the Indian government was the only one in the world to tell its manufacturers “thou shall not produce”. He was referring to the limits imposed by industrial licensing.
 
Female economists
 
One question is if there are any female Indian economists, other than Padma Desai, Isher Ahluwalia and Devaki Jain, who have written their autobiographies. The answer appears to be no. Dharma Kumar, the economic historian, had started on one, I think, but passed away before it could be finished. She was an acerbic critic of economics, by the way.

 
The best known amongst the three mentioned above was Isher Ahluwalia. Sadly, she passed away last year. Her autobiography also has very little of economics despite her having obtained a PhD from MIT in the US.
 
Padma Desai belonged to an earlier generation and had a very low opinion of the Delhi School of Economics: boring classes in microeconomics and disinterested students. She left India in 1969. There’s barely any economics in her book, not even of the USSR on which she is a great authority.
 
Devaki Jain is a different kind of economist, or in some peoples’ opinion, not at all one. But her book is interesting enough because she was one of the first in India to start questioning government data about women. But she, like Sen, has just one chapter on it of 19 pages.

 
Chances are that in the coming years many more economists will write their autobiographies. It must be hoped that they will remember that there are two sides to a book: the writer and the reader.
 
Autobiographies should not be just for family and friends; they should contain a serious record of the times, whether of economic policy or economics generally.