Letters: Let's talk economics

The vicious personal assaults on me (Getting the facts right; Letters, September 4) by Mr Ram of the Hindu and three more of Mr Amartya Sen's friends - was their case so flawed and flimsy that it took four to take me on? - as being "offensive and abusive" against Mr Sen and as indulging in "personal attacks" against him need a brief response.

The Bhagwati-Panagariya book, titled India's Tryst with Destiny, was published in India by HarperCollins to great interviews in print media and on TV in December last year. Then, the US edition which generalises the lessons from India, was published to acclaim in early April by PublicAffairs under the title Why Growth Matters.

We, therefore, trumped Mr Sen's book with Mr Dreze since the latter appeared only later. This probably was galling, as the arguments and empirical evidence in our book on the success of our 1991 reforms in accelerating growth and therewith reducing poverty for all underprivileged groups on the average, were compelling. Indeed, the economist Surjit Bhalla, who does not mince words, has destroyed the contrary assertions in the Sen-Dreze book in a scathing review.

The scholarly result should have been a proper debate on the economic arguments and evidence. Instead we were faced by an effort to attack us personally in the media and refusal by Mr Sen to debate me face to face.

This was accompanied by snide attacks saying that I was "personal" when the charge fitted Mr Sen instead. I recommend that the readers of this excellent newspaper look at the NDTV Panel debate where Mr Sen was so upset with my co-author Panagariya that he attacked him with condescension as knowing little about India because he lived in New York, forgetting that Mr Sen lived in Cambridge, as Panagariya reminded him. Mr Dreze, on the same programme, produced animal toys and said that Panagariya was the unicorn! The descent into personal attacks is the forte of Mr Sen, not mine. You hit below the belt when you have no arguments on your side.

Let Mr Sen return to the economics that divides us strongly, instead of getting his friends to pretend that there is no difference between us (as if there was no difference between Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman), while also looking the other way as his cronies act like pit bulls trying to take a bite out of me.

Jagdish Bhagwati, Columbia University, New York
 

Further correspondence on this subject is closed - Editor

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