India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 01 :: Jan. 02 - 15, 1999

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EXCELLENCE

A meeting point in Calcutta

PARVATHI MENON

AT a civic reception given in his honour by the Government of West Bengal, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation and the Howrah Municipal Corporation at the Netaji Indoor Stadium in Calcutta on December 27, Amartya Sen announced that he would use a part of his prize money to set up a charitable trust. It will be called the 'Pratichi Trust', after his house in Santiniketan, and it will focus on education and health care, "which have been among my major concerns over the years". The activity of the Trust will be confined, to begin with, to India and Bangladesh. "In view of the enormity of the problems faced, a Trust of this kind can make only a little difference, but I must try to do what I can," he said.

The West Bengal Government used the function in honour of the Nobel Prize winner to make a public pledge to universalise primary education in the State by the year 2002. Finance Minister Asim Dasgupta announced that the project would cost the State Rs. 1,000 crores. He said that this project was also intended to bring down the infant mortality rate in West Bengal to 30 per 1,000. Dasgupta also announced the establishment of a research institute that would focus on issues of Sen's concern, such as land reform, primary education and health care.

The invited audience of almost 10,000 at the evening function listened in rapt attention as Sen gave a 30-minute prepared speech in which he traversed diverse terrain: from a tribute to the pluralist traditions of Calcutta to an explanation to a lay audience of social choice theory and its practical implications.

SUSHANTA PATRONOBISH
Amartya Sen with West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu at the State reception accorded to him in Calcutta on December 27.

The facade of the Calcutta Town Hall formed the backdrop to the dais. Present on the dais along with Sen and West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu were West Bengal Governor A.R. Kidwai, Calcutta Mayor Prashanta Chatterjee, Howrah Mayor Swadesh Chakrabarti, Speaker of the Legislative Assembly Hashim Abdul Halim, Asim Dasgupta, Home Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya, and Chief Secretary Manish Gupta.

In his speech, Jyoti Basu paid tribute to Sen's work and its social welfare dimension. "I am also for true democratic freedom," the Chief Minister said. "But democracy can also be used incorrectly, unless there is, at the same time, a strong emphasis on equal access to productive assets and spread of the right kind of education which raises the consciousness of the people." He said that there was a "meeting point" between Sen's "concepts of capabilities, extension of education and freedom" and the Left Front Government's "perception of land reforms, education and social awareness."

IN his speech Sen returned to a theme that has been central to many of the lectures he gave on this trip. This is the view that Indian culture is absorptive and non-isolationist, one that "militates against a culturally separatist view". He paid special tribute to the spirit of Calcutta for its many-sidedness and openness to new influences. He said:

The name of the city is often identified with poverty. And we all know that there is truth in that image. And yet, it is also a city of astounding vitality, and also of great intellectual ingenuity, artistic imagination, and political liveliness. And above all, it is an extrordinary place of tolerance and creativity, which effortlessly combines its native civilisation with the culture and understanding that each migrant brings to this great city. ... No city can claim to be more absorptive, more broad-minded and more in tune with Rabindranath Tagore's non-isolationist view of cultural excellence than this city - our Calcutta.

The main part of Sen's talk was, however, on his work on social choice. The Royal Swedish Academy of Science referred to "welfare economics" as the general field of Sen's contributions for which he won the award. The Academy identified three areas within it - social choice, distribution and poverty. Sen said that the theory of social choice "provides the linkage between inequality, poverty and welfare economics, and that certainly has been the connecting theme in my work."

Sen characterised the subject matter of social choice theory in the following way:

Any society consists of many individuals, who can have quite divergent interests and dissimilar preferences. How can it be possible to arrive at judgments of "social welfare" (the welfare of the whole society seen together), given the diversity of interests and preferences within the society? And what about other aggregated ideas, reflected in such statements as "the society prefers this to that," or "the society should choose this over that"? We all know that even a small committee consisting of more than one person can arrive at inconsistent and even incoherent decisions. It has, for example, been suggested that "a camel is a horse designed by a committee". Given the problems of committee decisions, any decision about the aggregate "social welfare", or about "social preference" for a large society, must be monstrously difficult.

This is the challenge that the subject of social choice theory faces, and it addresses the discipline of systematically arriving at social decisions on the basis of the disparate interests and preferences of different members of the society, who come from different classes, distinct communities, dissimilar economic and social backgrounds, divergent cultural and religious beliefs and so on.

Using the theory of social choice, Sen has tried address a varied range of questions.

When would majority rule be consistent? How can we accommodate rights and liberties of persons while taking adequate note of their well-being and misery? How can we judge how a society as a whole is doing? How do we measure poverty or inequality, taking note of the interests of the diverse people that make up the society - the rich and the poor, the well-off and the destitute, the powerful and the powerless?

The field of social choice theory came into its own in late 18th century France and was influenced by the intellectual ideas of the Enlightenment. Sen spoke specifically of the revival by Kenneth Arrow of interest in social choice theory in the 20th century in a book entitled Social Choice and Individual Values, published in 1951. Arrow, Sen says, was "very concerned with the difficulties of group decisions and the inconsistencies to which it may lead." He developed a theory of social choice which he presented with an "impossibility theorem". "Arrow's 'impossibility theorem', " Sen said, "aroused immediate and intense interest (and generated a massive literature in response, including many other impossibility results), and it led to the diagnosis of a deep vulnerability in the subject that overshadowed Arrow's immensely important constructive programme of developing a systematic social choice theory that could actually work."

Resolving the difficulties of social choice through "technical scrutiny and hard work" brings forth results that are "encouraging and positive", Sen said.

The field of social choice theory looks quite different now, with plenty of possibilities of being constructive and positive in doing socially relevant measurement as well as systematically examining and scrutinising aggregative judgments about social welfare, poverty and inequality, and about the rights and liberties, and asymmetries of power and opportunities. Indeed, instead of the old question, "Is it possible to have socially rational decisions based on the interests and preferences of the members of the society?" the new question that has to be addressed is "Which of the various ways of making socially rational decisions best serve our values of equity and justice?" The choice is no longer just something or nothing, but between many different ways of evaluation among which we can choose by invoking foundational notions such as justice or fairness. Even the apparently technical subject of choosing a suitable measure of poverty for a nation or a state can be seen in terms of the competing values which can be reflected in different ways by distinct statistical measure. It is this linking of knowledge with practice that is perhaps the most encouraging implication of the recent works in welfare economics and social choice theory, including the evaluation of inequality and poverty.

In conclusion, Sen acknowledged the "great many economists, social scientists and mathematicians" who contributed to refining the theory of social choice, and said that though he had been "singled out for the recent award" it was "as much a joint achievement as anything that could have happened".