Recalling his brilliant lectures: Prabhat Patnaik

I am delighted that the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Professor Amartya Sen, that even the Nobel committee has finally recognised Professor Sen's stature as an economist and his seminal contributions to the subject. The Nobel prize would not add much to that stature; on the contrary, it is the award to Professor Sen that would add to the stature of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

The stature of the economics prize has suffered greatly in recent years. The committee's preference for formalism over substance, its lack of concern with the role of economics as a social science, its patently right-wing ideological predilections (which excluded even the Keynesians) and its complete ignoring of economists outside of the United States and Western Europe, have been well known for quite some time. But some of its recent choices, even from the stable of conservative American economists preoccupied with techniques, have been truly amazing. Its credibility has taken a particularly severe knock with the failure of the financial firm Long Term Capital Management, in which two Nobel laureates - awarded the prize in 1997 specifically for their supposed ability to predict the behaviour of security prices - were deeply involved. In this context, the belated award to Professor Sen, whose contributions have been intellectually far more significant, and far more concerned with changing society in a humane direction, would restore to an extent the credibility of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

N. SRINIVASAN

There is of course a danger that while the award to Professor Sen would confer in the eyes of many a legitimacy on the Nobel Committee and its conception of economics, the committee itself would continue along its old ways: a further 20-odd years would pass, as has been the case since the award to Arthur Lewis, before another outstanding development economist is recognised. If this happens, and if during these 20 years several more inconsequential conservative Anglo-Saxon economists are awarded Nobel Prizes, giving the impression to the world at large that what these gentlemen do is real economics and that worthwhile research is concentrated only in their tiny corner of the globe and absent elsewhere, then that would be a great pity. But the award to Professor Sen, which would also involve, however slightly, someone like him in the making of future choices for the prize, simultaneously helps to make the system more truly open. And to the extent that it gives wider currency to the ideas of Professor Sen, that is to be welcomed.

As a student of Professor Sen, from whose brilliant lectures at the Delhi School of Economics I learnt much of my economics (indeed in my life since then I have never come across a better lecturer than Professor Sen), I rejoice at his getting the award and share this joy with innumerable other Indians.

But while our nation, starved of achievements at the international level, savours Professor Sen's award, I hope that it would pay more attention to the substance of what he has been arguing for all these years, namely for a society where hunger, illiteracy, and lack of basic health and education, are banished though public action, and where democracy is strengthened and the canker of communalism is overcome.

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