Best of BS Opinion: Will the real Adam Smith please stand up?

Today's pieces cover wide ground, from Adam Smith to Bihari exceptionalism to the AI behemoth that threatens to swallow advertising whole, and the enduring vision of Ritwik Ghatak

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Hello, and welcome to the Best Of BS Opinion, our daily wrap of the opinion page.  

If Gordon Gekko was the apotheosis of unfettered capitalism, Bud Fox was perhaps his moral, albeit flawed, foil. The two are as good an analogy as any for the two sides of Adam Smith that economists have been struggling to reconcile: the moral philosopher of his early writings or the cold-hearted father of modern economics. Antara Haldar unboxes this debate as she considers Das Adam Smith Problem from both perspectives. In her reading, Smith has been thoroughly misunderstood, and that his work must be reexamined in the light of the moral and philosophical underpinnings that he provides, and that later economists have completely overlooked, or worse, disregarded. Resolving the Das Adam Smith Problem, she says, would finally close the rift between efficiency and empathy that is undermining human civilisation. 

 

The first phase of the keenly-contested Bihar Assembly elections are behind us, with a record-breaking turnout. Meanwhile, all eyes are on Tejashwi Yadav, the son of erstwhile chief ministers Lalu Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi. And that is what the NDA has latched on, as it reminds the populace that under the Yadav scion, things will go back to being as bad as they allegedly were under his father. Meanwhile, Tejashwi had made it clear he is a break from the past, writes Aditi Phadnis, even though he is being projected as the true inheritor of his father's legacy of social justice. And that is a challenge Tejashwi seems to have overcome. He has agreed to make his deputy the leader of the Nishad and Mallah community. What's more, he has successfully coalesced not just Yadavs and Muslims around him, but even Bhumihars, so-called upper castes. Only November 14 will show if he has made the right moves. 

 

Bihar is also unarguably the world's first republic, and its soil has thrown up political movements that have at regular intervals shaped India's history and politics. Unfortunately, writes Shekhar Gupta, the state has little to show for its many democratic interventions - from JP's revolutionary crusade against the Emergency or Karpoori Thakur's social justice stirrings - and remains at the bottom of most development indicators, raising the question of whether democracy has really been any good in the place it was birthed? While it was also where identity-driven politics put down early roots, the constant obsession with its politics is likely also the cause of the state's destruction relative to the rest of the country. 

 

Like many other industries, advertising has also gone through its fair share of churn. Companies that were once part of Madison Avenue lore have been bought, sold, merged, and sometimes just disappeared, as if they never existed. Nonetheless, there were always jobs aplenty. Not anymore, warns Sandeep Goyal, as he surveys both the ruins of fabled firms and the coming of the AI behemoth that threatens to swallow even more processes, functions, jobs, even film-making itself. Indian agencies are especially behind in recognising the threat, with most agencies barely having a functional AI strategy. Those who are already in the business must upskill and hold on to their jobs like their life depends on it. Which it does, because an AI-unleashed bloodbath may be coming. 

 

In many ways, Ritwik Ghatak probably remains one of India's most talented filmmakers who never quite got his due the way his contemporaries like Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen did. Pecuniary issues did not help his cause - he only made eight films before the lack of money dried up his art. Nonetheless, his limited output, which drew heavily from his life and times, established him as Indian cinema’s rebel auteur, writes Atanu Biswas. His Partition trilogy, particular, illustrates the consequences of that colonial geopolitical exercise.