The Conspiracy is Capitalism's Reviews > Development as Freedom

Let me rank those who research "Development Economics":

1st Tier: Critical (geo)political economists, i.e. seriously consider global historical context/power relations, social costs (not just "economic growth") and alternatives: ex. Utsa Patnaik, Prabhat Patnaik, Michael Hudson, Radhika Desai, Amiya Kumar Bagchi (who had me fooled by writing some essays on Sen, but Bagchi's father did supervise Sen...)

2nd Tier: Heterodox political economists, i.e. seriously consider other schools of economic thought, not just (Global North) Neoclassical ("Mainstream Economics"): ex. Ha-Joon Chang

3rd Tier: Reformist economists with good writing styles: ex. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Partha Dasgupta

4th Tier: Reformist economists with mediocre writing styles: ex. Sen

5th Tier: Reactionary economists: economists Sen cites

...Everything beneath the top tier has a strong bias towards "capitalism"/(economic) "liberalism". Let's unpack these big labels and how they affect Sen:

The Bad:

1) Classical liberal contradictions:
--A revealing way to cut through the noise and reveal the essence of "capitalism" and "liberalism" is to unpack the contradictions of "Classical economics" godfather Adam Smith's legacy:

Liberalism’s fatal hypocrisy [...] was to rejoice in the virtuous Jills and Jacks, the neighbourhood butchers, bakers and brewers [1], so as to defend the vile East India Companies, the Facebooks and the Amazons, which know no neighbours, have no partners, respect no moral sentiments [2] and stop at nothing to destroy their competitors. By replacing partnerships with anonymous shareholders [3], we created Leviathans that end up undermining and defying all the values that liberals [...] claim to cherish.
-Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present, emphases added

[1] Smith's celebrated quote from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations on self-interest producing social good: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
...This gets lumped together with the "Invisible Hand" quote: "By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, [the merchant] intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."
[2] Smith's conveniently-forgotten book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, sets out how society requires many more moral values than just self-interest; of course vulgar economists erase the fact that Smith was a moral philosopher!
[3] The stock market is a key capitalist market. Markets for goods (real commodities, i.e. Smith's butches/bakers/brewers) have long existed before capitalism. Capitalism innovated peculiar markets: labour/land/money, which feature "fictitious commodities" (humans/nature/purchasing power are not "produced" like real commodities just for buying/selling on markets): Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

2) Classical liberal biases:
--Even worse for "Development economics" is the Classical liberal paradigm is built on convenient thought-experiments by ivory-tower thinkers in colonizer/Global North nations ("Classical economics" was based in Britain, i.e. Adam Smith/David Ricardo). This becomes a disaster for the colonized/Global South seeking alternatives from "Development economics"!
--Take the "free trade" myth: Smith, with a certain national loyalty to the British Empire, recommended to its settler colonies like the United States to keep exporting raw materials (theorized as "comparative advantage") rather than pursue long-term development planning for industrialization (do-as-we-say, not-as-we-do).
...The US eventually rejected this (America's Protectionist Takeoff 1815-1914), climbed the productivity ladder, then once on top repeated the myth to those below, i.e. "kicking away the ladder": Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

3) Neoclassical liberal delusions:
--Even worse, modern mainstream economics ("Neoclassical") has further vulgarized "Classical" economics; in retaliation to Marx pushing Classical concepts (classes, social change/crises, "labour theory of value" focusing on the cost of production and recognizing economic rent) to their breaking point, Neoclassical threw all this out to instead focus taking micro grains of sand (individual utility-maximizing consumer) to build elaborate sand castles (supply/demand equilibrium).
--While Sen considers some historical context when analyzing Smith, he fails to do so for the other "economists"; in particular, Friedrich A. Hayek, whose rhetoric alone can hide the reactionary force behind his arguments (The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump).

4) The missing tidal waves of Geopolitical economy:
--Mainstream economics' sand castles may be defenseless to the tidal waves of reality on many levels, but there's always more sand (more money) to keep rebuilding the myths.
--Meanwhile, in the real world, you had non-capitalist centers of market production in India and China, where Europe sustained trade by the gold/silver loot from pillaging the Americas. Europe did not achieve market dominance through some "free market" competition; they had to smash Indian and Chinese markets into colonial wastelands, to the point where colonial India was selling opium to China, for the profit of British business (Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World) and building "modern mass poverty" (Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present).
--The colonizers had more competitive violence, which was perfected through divide-and-rule strategies (bringing the worst out of peoples) and economic abstractions (see: Debt: The First 5,000 Years).
--There are obvious warning signs with Sen, starting with the "Nobel" (actually Swedish bank) Prize in Economics. Peak liberalism. Taking geopolitical economy, abstracting away the "geo" (global) and "political" (i.e. power relations/struggles/alternatives/qualitative values), and forcing it into a (dismal) "science" ("economics")...of course your prize winners are intellectual giants at naturalizing the status quo!
--Sen toils through the grains of sand to consider vapid notions of "capability", where even the low-hanging fruits were picked in a tedious manner.
--To revive geopolitical economy:
1) Accessible overview: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
2) Accessible history: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
3) Intro to theory: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
4) Dive into theory:
-Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy
-Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
5) Dive into history:
-The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World
-Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital

The Good:

--Elsewhere (co-authored Hunger and Public Action), Sen does leave vague abstractions to critically consider the real world, in particular comparing post-revolution Communist China vs. post-independence liberal India. Perhaps thanks to his Global South context, Sen shows that he did not let his liberal ideology completely cloud his findings on the benefits of Communist social support/decolonization, and he helps put Global South famine deaths in perspective (both massive agrarian transitions after colonial famines: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World):

1) China’s dramatic rise in life expectancy occurred prior to its 1979 market liberalization’s economic growth:

In fact, it seems fairly clear that the Chinese growth rate was not radically higher than that of India before the economic reforms of 1979, by which time the tremendous surge ahead in health and longevity had already taken place. In the pre-reform period, agricultural expansion in particular was sluggish in China, as it was in India, and the dramatic reduction in hunger and undernourishment and expansion of life expectancy in China were not ushered in by any spectacular rise in rural incomes or of food availability per head. […]

This is indeed the crucial point. The Chinese level of average opulence judged in terms of GNP per head, or total consumption per capita, or food consumption per person, did not radically increase during the period in which China managed to take a gigantic step forward in matters of life and death, moving from a life expectancy at birth in the low 40s (like the poorest countries today) to one in the high 60s (getting within hitting distance of Europe and North America). [p.208]

2) China’s focus on social support (i.e. social needs, i.e. socialist policies):

As far as support-led security is concerned, the Chinese efforts have been quite spectacular. The network of health services introduced in post-revolutionary China in a radical departure from the past—involving cooperative medical systems, commune clinics, barefoot doctors, and widespread public health measures—has been remarkably extensive. The contrast with India in this respect is striking enough. It is not only that China has more than twice as many doctors and nearly three times as many nurses per unit of population as India has. But also these and other medical resources are distributed more evenly across the country (even between urban and rural areas), with greater popular access to them than India has been able to organize.

Similar contrasts hold in the distribution of food through public channels and rationing systems, which have had an extensive coverage in China (except in periods of economic and political chaos, as during the famine of 1958-61, on which more presently). In India public distribution of food to the people, when it exists, is confined to the urban sector (except in a few areas such as the state of Kerala where the rural population also benefits from it, on which, too, more presently). Food distribution is, in fact, a part of a far-reaching programme of social security that distinguishes China from India. The impact of these programmes on protecting and promoting entitlements to food and basic necessities, including medical care, is reflected in the relatively low mortality and morbidity rates in China. [p.209]

3) Despite China’s Great Famine, how do life-expectancies compare?

Finally, it is important to note that despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, the extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former. Comparing India's death rate of 12 per thousand with China's of 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to the Indian population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of 1958-61. India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame. [p.214-215]

...Note: furthermore, Utsa Patnaik (whom I ranked in the 1st Tier) disputes the famine death methodologies used for China (Great Leap Forward) famine cited by the liberal authors, which I unpack in reviewing Hunger and Public Action.