On Manmohanomics

These are actually two responses from my friend Pramod to my post on Ineffective leadership.  He has left them as reader's comments.  I am not sure how many people read comments so I thought I will put them here so that what he has to say is available for others to read as well.

The following are words of Pramod:

The arguments of Dr. Yum Yum Singh that (a) coalition politics necessitates corruption; and (b) that in order to avoid frequent elections, a certain level of corrupt practices by coalition partners has to be entertained are clearly indicative of a warped mind - the same mind that can with great equanimity claim that it is okay to allow grain to rot in public godowns and not distribute it to the hungry and the malnourished, because the market will not allow it. Maybe Karl Polanyi was right when he suggested that supercharged capitalism will necessarily take the economy far beyond social constraints. The question  is whether, because of the double movement, the economy will be brought back to an even keel peacefully or violently. An apocryphal story: apparently President Roosevelt (Theodore), after a particularly trying meeting with economists, turned in exasperation to his Secretary of State and asked him if he could find some one handed economists. Apparently, the poor economists who had met him at the turn of the previous century, were humble enough to acknowledge that their prescriptions and prognoses were fraught with uncertainty. Economists of late twentieth century seem to be another breed altogether - arrogant, and animated more by ideological fervour  than by any moral compunctions about their own epistemic short-comings. Oh how I wish we could go back to the era of two handed economists - they'd be infinitely better  than the one handed market fundamentalists who are ruling the roost. We are even more unfortunate that one such amoral economist heads our government.

The problem may also lie in the very brand of economics that Dr. Singh seems to have subscribed to and that may make it difficult for him to understand the difference between accepting the levels of corruption as fait accompli, and having to function within those levels as against taking a determined moral stand against such corruption. Much of modern economics, taking its cue from Milton Friedman's push to cast it  purely as a positive science, contains a strong kernel of determinism/cynicism - that human nature is essentially greedy, if not downright evil. Consequently modern economics would argue that there is no point in trying to change human nature, and any attempts to changing it would be futile and even counter-productive in terms of overall welfare (without reference to distribution issues, and negative impact on certain segments). Its prescription is that a policy maker should only attempt to make the state function as a "night watchman" with respect to law and order, and the market can then weave its way through to were it will. The tautological aspect of their argument lies in the logic that whatever end point is achieved is, by definition, the best that could have been achieved. So for a person like Dr. Singh, the notion of taking a principled stand, on the basis of some positive morality, against corruption would appear to be an unnecessary luxury, and maybe even a hindrance, to solutions that markets will eventually find. I am not surprised that he would take the stand of a victim, at the hands of the press and the opposition, and also of circumstances. A profession that is capable of building elaborate models of description and prescription on the assumption of ceteris paribus is most likely to also be incapable of producing leaders with great moral convictions. By training, Dr. Singh is incapable of a moral vision.