by Sylvia Nasar
The Soviet victory over Germany, Europe’s leading industrial power, in World War II had apparently convinced Robinson that Socialism was a shortcut to industrialization:
The grand moral of this thirty years of history is not so much for the western industrial countries where the standard of living is already high, as for the undeveloped nations. That communism is destined to supersede capitalism is in the nature of a dogma, but it is a proven fact that the Soviet system shows how the technical achievements of capitalism can be imitated (and in some cases surpassed) by those whom the first industrial revolution kept as hewers of wood and drawers of water.50
In 1951 Robinson wrote a brief introduction to a Marxist classic, The Accumulation of Capital by Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg was the German Communist leader who was murdered in 1919 and was one of the few first-rate minds among Marx’s disciples. Today her reputation rests more on her early criticism of the Bolshevik dictatorship than on her economic theory, but in 1951 Robinson was compelled by Luxemburg’s argument that the limits to growth—and the source of the inevitable breakdown—of the global market economy were to be found in the third world.
According to Luxemburg, shrinking investment opportunities at home drove entrepreneurs abroad in search of profits and led, inevitably, to rivalries. When these imperialists ran out of fresh territory to exploit—or ran into one another—capitalism had to break down, through either stagnation or war. Robinson acknowledged that Luxemburg’s analysis was incomplete in that it identified imperialism as the only means by which capitalism extended its flagging lease on life, omitting any consideration of technological change or rising real wages: “All the same, few would deny that the extension of capitalism into new territories was the mainspring of what an academic economist has called ‘the vast secular boom’ of the last two hundred years and many academic economists account for the uneasy condition of capitalism in the 20th century largely by ‘the closing of the frontier’ all over the world.” Nonetheless, she concluded, somewhat inaccurately, that Luxemburg’s book “shows more prescience than any orthodox contemporary could claim.”51
Robinson embarked on her own magnum opus on economic growth, for which she intended to borrow Luxemburg’s title.52 A hostile 1949 review of Roy Harrod’s classic on economic growth makes it clear what she wanted to accomplish.53 She castigated Harrod for ignoring conflicts of interest, history, politics, and especially “the distribution of income or measures to increase useful investment.”54 A 1952 article for the Economic Journal, written before she left for Moscow, offered a preview of her main argument: growth, she wrote, was the process of accumulating physical capital—roads, office buildings, dams, factories, machinery, and the like. Admittedly, Marx had erred in claiming that free market economies could not grow indefinitely. She would demonstrate that almost none would. “Perpetual steady accumulation is not inherently impossible,” she wrote, but “the conditions required by the model are unlikely to be found in reality.”55
Robinson’s first visit to China, in 1953, provided for her “the final proof that communism is not a stage beyond capitalism but a substitute for it.”56 She explained later, “Private enterprise has ceased to be the form of organization best suited to take advantage of modern technology.”57 The chief obstacle to growth in poor countries was not a lack of capital or entrepreneurship, she concluded, but interference by the West. North-south trade was a zero-sum game that produced losers as well as winners, and inevitably the poor countries wound up as the losers. She discounted the role of education and innovation. “Only when the advanced countries are satisfied that they need not disturb themselves will they tolerate, and so permit, the drastic social changes required to send the colonial and ex colonial and quasi colonial nations on a hopeful path,” adding somewhat irrelevantly that “peaceful coexistence is natural and logical.”
While Robinson wrote her book, Richard Kahn hosted what he and she called the “secret seminar.” It met every Tuesday during the Michaelmas and Easter terms in Kahn’s rooms at King’s College and served as a testing site for her work in progress. Visitors were invited to drop in but often found it hard to get airtime. Samuelson described a typical meeting as Robinson’s friend “Kaldor talking 75% of the time and Joan talking 75% of the time.”58
When The Accumulation of Capital was published in 1956, the book’s “heroic scale” and Robinson’s lofty stature guaranteed copious reviews. But although reviewers called the book “monumental” and “important,” reaction was muted. Some complained of “few new insights,” “no propositions [that] can be empirically tested,” “a verbal, graphical exposition” of “long familiar results in linear programming.”59 Others criticized her for not understanding the role of consumers, making logical errors, and ignoring recent research. (This was held to be a typically Cambridge, England, vice, with one reviewer pointing out that Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, written during World War II, contained not a single reference more recent than 1913.) Less charitably, Harry Johnson wrote that his former professor “has proved conclusively to her own satisfaction that Capitalism Cannot Possibly Work.”60 Samuelson compared Robinson’s theory to Lenin’s rule of three: electricity + Soviets = Communism.61 Abba Lerner called the book a “pearl,” not only for redirecting attention to “the causes of the wealth of nations” but for providing graduate students with a host of “errors and . . . ingenious confusions” on which to flex their muscles.62 Lawrence Klein, who shared Robinson’s political views, dismissed her insights as “ordinary sort of results usually derived in economic theory from some maximizing or minimizing principle.”63
Robert Solow, a Keynesian at MIT who had published a paper on economic growth that same year—one that would earn him a Nobel Prize in 1987—delivered the coup de grace: “I think there’s nothing Keynesian about Joanian economics . . . There’s nothing in The Accumulation of Capital . . . or any of those papers which strikes me as having a genuine root or inspiration in Keynes.”64
Solow had not only proposed an elegant theory but produced a stunning empirical result: Nine-tenths of the doubling in output per worker in the United States between 1909 and 1949 was due neither to the accumulation of physical capital nor to improvements in the health or education of the labor force, but rather to technological progress. The implication that an economic environment conducive to innovation mattered more than its stock of factories and machines flatly contradicted Robinson’s central premise, not to mention that of the widely imitated Soviet model. Solow, who dismissed Schumpeter, rather unfairly, as a pro-German anti-Semite and an intellectual phony, had supplied most compelling evidence that it was not what a nation had but what a nation did with what it had that determined long-run economic success or failure. This, of course, was pure Schumpeter.
• • •
Robert Solow and Kenneth Arrow spent the academic year 1963–64 visiting Cambridge, England, and heard Robinson describe her two months touring Chinese communes. Saying she wanted to counter “the malicious misrepresentation of China in the Western press,” she dismissed “the critics [who] were shedding crocodile tears over the ‘famine’ ” and claimed that China’s communes were “a method of organizing relief” during the three “bitter years” of flood and drought. Echoing Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s glowing reports during the 1932 Ukrainian famine, Robinson called the communes “a brilliant invention” and concluded that “the rationing system worked; the rations were tight, but they were always honored.”
We now know that an estimated 15 to 30 million peasants in Henan, Anhui, and Sichuan provinces died between 1958 and 1962—ten times the toll in the 1943 Bengal famine—and that forced collectivization, the disastrous Great Leap Forward, and the refusal of Mao Tse-tung’s regime to organize relief, not bad weather, were primarily to blame.
That democracy and well-being go hand in hand is now conventional wisdom. For a long time, it was not. Individual rights were thought, by many intellectuals influenced by the u
tilitarian tradition, to be a luxury that poor nations simply could not afford. Robinson considered democracy a bit of a fraud and politicians both pusillanimous and deceitful. “The notion of freedom is a slippery one,” she wrote during World War II, adding, without the slightest hint of irony, “It is only when there is no serious enemy within or without that full freedom of speech can safely be allowed.”65 She was inclined to dismiss democratic reforms as “premature attempts to pluck the low-lying fruit.” That blind spot goes a long way in explaining why Robinson, who visited China frequently in the 1950s and 1960s, “failed utterly to detect the biggest famine in modern history,” while others—including Bertrand Russell, Michael Foot, Harold Laski, and Harold Wilson, all of whom were vilified at one time or another as Communist sympathizers or even fellow travelers—saw what was happening and called for international relief.
To be sure, Joan Robinson was hardly the only eminent Western observer to be hoodwinked by Beijing’s denials. Lord Boyd Orr, head of the British delegation to the 1952 Moscow economics conference and one of the world’s leading experts on food, concluded Mao was ending the “traditional Chinese famine cycle.”66 In fact, the magnitude of the death toll wasn’t known outside China until after Mao’s death in 1976. But Robinson’s willingness to believe a totalitarian regime that forbade free movement, free speech, free press, and free elections was symptomatic of a mind-set—all too common among development economists fifty years ago—that ignored the crucial role of political rights.
Geoffrey Harcourt once remarked that Robinson was “always looking for the next Utopia.” Perhaps, but she was also looking for the next Great Leader and, of course, the next worshipful audience. She relished her celebrity, her junkets, the VIP treatment, and bully pulpits. She liked playing the fearless outsider speaking truth to power. Perhaps the Moscow bank account, friendships with Cold War spies, including Solomon Adler, Frank Coe, Donald Wheeler, and Oskar Lange, and the need for veiled allusions and careful elisions gave her a kick as well.
As time went by, Robinson became even more Olympian, imperious, and pessimistic. Her book Economic Philosophy, published in 1962, surveys economic ideas since 1700. In his review, George Stigler, Milton Friedman’s best friend at the University of Chicago, called Robinson “a superior logician” but accused her of ignoring facts:
There really isn’t a great deal to economics, considered as a logical structure based upon a few indisputable axioms about the world. If one cuts oneself off from two generations of immensely varied and instructive empirical research, and if one thinks economic history had no relevance to economic theory . . . then one is indeed left with a hollow discipline. A logician is a wondrous creature, but he cannot distinguish between the two simple errors: If A = B, and B = C, then (1) A = 1.01C and (2) A = 1065C. An economist can.67
Chapter XVIII
Tryst with Destiny: Sen in Calcutta and Cambridge
There haven’t been many folk songs written for capitalism, but there have been many composed for social justice.
It is mainly an attempt to see development as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. In this approach, expansion of freedom is viewed as both (1) the primary end and (2) the principal means of development.
—Amartya Sen1
Joan Robinson wound up her talk at the Delhi School of Economics clutching a copy of Mao’s “red book.” It was the late 1960s. Her topic was the dismal state of Western economics, but mostly she talked about China and the Cultural Revolution. The audience was in rapture. When the wild applause faded at last, a willowy young man asked a question. His tone implied the mildest and most polite skepticism. Robinson rebuffed him soundly but “with affection.”2 They were, after all, the best of enemies, former professor and favorite student. At Cambridge, she had cultivated students from the third world. One of the most gifted was Amartya Sen, but Sen’s interest in human rights and the immediate amelioration of poverty clashed with Robinson’s enthusiasm for the Soviet model of industrialization.
Amartya means “destined for immortality.” Born into a scholarly and cosmopolitan Hindu family, Amartya Sen grew up amid the horrors of the Bengal famine, communal violence, the collapse of British rule, and partition. As a brilliant student and campus agitator in Calcutta, he overcame a near-lethal bout of cancer, bested one hundred thousand other exam takers, and won admission to the college of Isaac Newton, G. H. Hardy, and the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, Trinity College in Cambridge. Since 1970, Sen has lived mostly in England and America, but his thoughts have never strayed far from India. Drawing on his own experiences, a lifelong study of the disenfranchised, and a deep knowledge of Eastern and Western philosophy, Sen has questioned every facet of contemporary economic thought. Challenging traditional assumptions about what is meant by social welfare and how to measure progress, he has helped restore “an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems.”3 He is a public intellectual, engaged by issues, from famines and premature female mortality, to multiculturalism and nuclear proliferation. His inspiring journey from impoverished Calcutta in newly independent India to the ivory towers of Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts—and back again—is a triumph of reason, empathy, and a very human determination to overcome incredible odds.
In January 2002, India’s Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party threw a three-day celebration for India’s far-flung diaspora in Delhi. In a gesture that revealed both how far he had traveled—and how close he had remained to his roots—Sen left that gathering to address an outdoor “hunger hearing” with several hundred peasants and laborers in a chilly dirt field on the far side of town.
One by one, members of the audience went up to the microphone. A scrawny fourteen-year-old from Delhi spoke about going hungry after she lost her dishwashing job. A dark-skinned man from Orissa described how three members of his family had died after a local drought the previous year. Fifty years after independence, a larger fraction of India’s population suffered from chronic malnutrition than in any other part of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa. Yet India’s government kept food prices high via agricultural price supports and had accumulated the biggest food stockpile in the world, a third of which was rotting in rat-infested government granaries.
When Sen stood up, shivering in his baggy cords and rumpled jacket, he spoke less about the “interest of consumers being sacrificed to farmers” and more about “profoundly lonely deaths.” Addressing an audience that seemed plainly awestruck, he conveyed sympathy and encouragement. “Without protests like these,” he said, “the deaths would be much more. If there had been something like this, the Bengal famine could have been prevented.” Their willingness to speak out, he told them approvingly, was “democracy in action.”
• • •
Sen is Bengali. Like saying that an American is a southerner, that has very specific connotations. Bengal is a river delta; fish is the mainstay of the Bengali diet; dhoti, chappals, and panjabi are the traditional garb. All Bengalis, Sen says, are great talkers, as he is. The worst thing about dying, Bengalis like to joke, is the thought that the people will keep talking and that you won’t be able to answer back.
The Bengali word for public intellectual is bhadralok, and Bengal has a long tradition, going back at least two centuries, of learned men with cosmopolitan outlooks who battled social evils such as untouchability and suttee. Sen is part of that tradition. His family is from the old part of Dhaka, an ancient river city 240 kilometers as the crow flies from Calcutta, now the capital of Muslim Bangladesh. In Jane Austen’s day, Dhaka was “a big, bustling place of first-rate importance,” famous the world over for its fine muslins (called bafta hawa, or “woven air”).4 Competition from Manchester brought decline. By 1900, Dhaka’s population had shrunk by two-thirds, and, according to a contemporary travel guide, “all round the present city are ruins of good houses, mosques, and temples, smothered in jungle.”5 Thirty-odd years later, when Sen was born, in 1933, Dhak
a had regained some of its former importance by becoming a regional administrative center for the British Raj.
Sen was born into that class of English-speaking academics and civil servants who helped run British India. He describes his father, Ashutosh, as “an adventurous man” who got a PhD in chemistry at London University and fell in love with an English Quaker. After returning home to an arranged marriage, he became head of the agricultural chemistry department at Dacca University. The Sens lived in a typical Dhaka house, fifty or sixty feet long, narrow in the front, “the middle being a courtyard open to the sky,” with plenty of room for servants and relatives.6
Sen began his education at an English missionary school in 1939. Two years later, as the Japanese advanced toward British India, he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Santiniketan, just north of Calcutta, “to keep me safe from the bombs.” Santiniketan has special connotations for Bengalis—indeed for all Indians—because of its association with Rabindranath Tagore, the poet. After winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, Tagore used his prize money to expand the Visva Bharati school in Santiniketan, where he tried to apply his ideas about education and his notions of merging Eastern spirituality with Western science. Gandhi visited Santiniketan in 1940, and for years India’s nationalist elite, including Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, sent their children to study there.
Sen’s maternal grandfather, Kshitimohan Sen, a distinguished Sanskrit scholar, was on the faculty of Visva Bharati. Sen attended classes in Tagore’s coeducational school under the eucalyptus trees. His free time was spent mostly with his grandfather. “Everyone found him formidable,” Sen recalled. “He woke at four. He knew all the stars. He talked with me about the connections between Greek and Sanskrit. I was the only one of his grandchildren who had a sense of academic vocation. I was going to be the one who carried the mantle.”
