Amartya Sen: [inaudible 00:04:46]
Ilan Stavans: Take the microphone.
Amartya Sen: ... I say, how many times to I have to tell you to?
Ilan Stavans: So, Amartya Sen, it's a real honor to have you here and a pleasure. Thank you for coming, I know it has been a big effort and the weather has not cooperated.
Ilan Stavans: Inequality has been a major concern of yours since your childhood, and that very inequality in your upbringing in India ended up defining how you perceive the potential for human development. You see the need to address those issues of inequality not only within a society, but within the larger community of nations, the so-called developed and the developing nations. And have been a prime force and promoter on the idea of thinking rationally, how to bring people that live in poverty to a level where they have those basic needs and they can be called free.
Ilan Stavans: So I want to start with a question of equality in a very large, ambitious way. Is inequality, Amartya, solvable? Can we imagine a world and make it a reality where the developed nations, those in control, in access, with access to power, will create the necessary context for those who do not have access to be lifted, the way it happened in China, the way it happened in Japan, but it hasn't happened in India and it hasn't happened in other parts, in South East Asia. Can we create the economic strategies in order to lift ... if not everybody, a large portion of that population that is described as poor, and what would those strategies need to be?
Amartya Sen: It's a very interesting question. Am I audible? Okay. You know, I think a world without inequality, in terms of the disvalue of inequality would be a very good world. And since it's a very important value, it's a world that's worth thinking about. On the other hand, avoidance of inequality is not the only value we have. We can think of many circumstances where we don't want that. Given, left on their own, women live longer than men. We don't want to organize a world in which women live the same amount as men. Such worlds do exist, but they're not called just worlds.
Amartya Sen: So it's one of the values and therefore while pursuing the really interesting topic statements that you want us to indulge in, you have to bear in mind there're other values to consider as well. And the way you could make women lives the same as men in terms of longevity is one where women have far less freedom than they should have given their natural capacity for withstanding disease and so on.
Amartya Sen: So that's the first one to me. Secondly, a world without inequality isn't all that easy. I mean, you point that out at rightly so, that in many ways Japan and China have succeeded in doing things that India has not, and you're absolutely right on that. And yet China and Japan are also full of inequalities of other kinds, of various kinds.
Amartya Sen: And so inequality has many dimensions. That's the main ... the second point I'm making, and therefore ... I mean, the Japanese are very good in terms of providing similar care, nutritional and health, for boys and girls in a way that India or Pakistan may not. On the other hand, in terms of occupying senior positions in companies or in the government, Japan does not have the same level of equality as even some of these countries, Pakistan or India, might have.
Amartya Sen: So we have to take into account the multidimensionality of inequality. The sad thing is that I think what we have to consider is to regard each of inequalities as being important and have to ask, why are they important? And to the extent we can find an answer to that, we are to see what we can do to reduce that inequality without overlooking the fact that there are other values with which we're also concerned.
Amartya Sen: That generates a model of human reasoning, including particularly social reasoning. That requires a much bigger adventure in our thought, and that is something which I would say we should pursue as a general effort to have to do with inequality.
Amartya Sen: But I think where your question becomes electric is that there are certain types of inequalities which are very strong in countries in the Middle East and South Asia, they're very strong. And yet there are subtle aspects, for example ... if you look at sex-specific abortion, which affects girls in many parts of the world in a way that it doesn't affect boys, and roughly, to give you some basic statistic, left to themselves between 94 and 96 girls are born per 100 boys. That's not inequality. That's biology. It varies. But if you look at the European ratio, it's between 94 and 96.
Amartya Sen: And the inequality of this kind is very strong in some parts of the world. In the Middle East, in North Africa. It's strong in India and Pakistan. Not so much in Bangladesh, oddly enough. In India it's about 93 girls per boys.
Amartya Sen: And despite the much greater level of equality that Chinese women have compared with men vis a vis Indian women vis-a-vis women, the Chinese ratio at birth is actually lower than 92. It was not long ago 86. It's gone up.
Amartya Sen: And oddly India falls into two parts. All of north ... every northern and western state, running from Punjab, Haryana, Kashmir, town to Gujarat and Maharashtra have a much lower ratio than the European ratio of 94 to say 96, whereas every state in east and south of India fall within the European band. The Chinese have a lower ratio because it has a similar ratio to north and west of India.
Amartya Sen: The oddity is, and this is a new thing I found which I never looked at it and I thought I would ... that even in countries which are very advanced in Asia, like Singapore and Hong Kong and Taiwan, the ratio is below the European ratio, and therefore the East Indian ratio, and below the Bangladesh ratio.
Amartya Sen: So there's a problem. There's an issue where culture and economics intermix. So it's a very complicated question. We don't think of Singapore and Hong Kong being unequal in this respect because women do so well there, as I was saying. But when it comes to boy preference, there is a lingering boy preference all over Asia with the exception of Japan that is psychic.
Amartya Sen:
So I think what we have to do ... you know, as I get older and older, I recently became 85 and that's a gigantic ratio. Not long ago I wondered how people could live at that kind of age. But now that I am there, I pontificate. And in the context of pontification, it seems to me that we have to give reasoning a much bigger span. That is, the multidimensionality is very important. We don't know whether the Chinese and the Singaporean and the Hong Kong and the Taiwanese ... girls, women, suffer in a way that we would not expect in other ways. And these have not been studied much. They need to be studied.
Amartya Sen:
So you know ... I have not led any kind of life other than academic. At the age of 23, I was appointed to a university teaching job and I held that tradition all my life, and I've never had a serious non-academic job. But one of the results of that is I'm continuously trying to invent new problems. And this is a new problem to offer and has not been discussed much, if I looked ... I think I know the general literature well. But it hasn't been, and we have to look at why it's the case. And then going further, why is it that in Japan, despite all the qualities that you get in education and science and so on, in politics and in business leadership there is this gap?
Amartya Sen:
So I think we have to look at this inequality issue at many different levels, and I'm glad you asked the question. What I'm saying is that it's a much bigger issue than ... and you were pointing out rightly to some tantalizingly nasty aspects of it. I'm saying that other than what is immediately, visibly nasty, there is nastiness of a kind that we have to look into, and it's important.
Ilan Stavans:
I will return to the topic of reason because it's a theme that runs through your work in how to approach challenges. But I want to move momentarily to that other topic that has been central and it is in the book that we have been discussing, Development As Freedom. Your argument being that one cannot think of somebody being capable of being free without the basic needs being satisfied. I mentioned some of those needs, healthcare, education, etc.
Ilan Stavans:
It seems on the premise as a very obvious statement, but the power of it is enormous. And I would like to ... you and I have talked a little bit about this. But I would like to explain briefly to the audience what do you understand by freedom? And if freedom is the same across cultures and across times. If different cultures understand what freedom is differently, what is valued in freedom, or is there a universal platonic view of freedom that you are proposing here, or that you are endorsing? And that the ways that each society takes in regards to it is secondary, so to speak.
Amartya Sen:
Yeah. Very exciting question. You see, I think the ... what we convey by freedom, of course, depends on the linguistic convention of that area in a way that, say, Antonio Gramsci or later Wittgenstein, not early Wittgenstein discussed. And yet there is a commonality in the notion of freedom which we have to respect, even as we take cognizance of the diversity of the different types of freedom coming into our story.
Amartya Sen:
Now, the basic idea that a person ... A, should be free or at liberty to do things that he or she wants to do, unless there's a very strong reason against it, as a basic idea of freedom, is a common one across the world. People might say, "I don't think freedom is such a good thing," as Mr. [Duterte 00:20:49] in Philippines often does. And the president of this country occasionally becomes close to saying, though he hasn't actually said it in that form.
Amartya Sen:
Yet, when you say, when Duterte said, "I don't think freedom is the right thing," or when [Lee Hwan-Yoon 00:21:14], with whom I had a series of arguments, says that it's a western values that emphasize freedom, and the eastern values don't, where I argue that he's mistaken in his reading. But he wasn't saying, "It isn't freedom. He was saying that it's not as valuable as westerners have made us think.
Amartya Sen:
And so in that context, we can use the idea of freedom, whether we like it or not, in big way as a concept of importance. And that seems to me to be fairly universal. Not the liking of it, not the loving of it, but the recognition that it's a big issue.
Amartya Sen:
But then when it comes to what are the important things to preserve, then, of course, it may depend from the minuscule aspects of culture, you know, where you are allowed to pray and whether the ... it's not minuscule. John Stuart Mill wrote a book about it called On Liberty. And similarly, what you had out to eat.
Amartya Sen:
And then it goes into more difficult territory once you allow others to eat, which has become such a big issue in India. Where there was never a particular problem around what you ate, but suddenly people have got much more worried about what others are eating rather than what they are themselves eating, and it's an incredible collapse of a value system.
Amartya Sen:
But for the moment, and this is not true of India as a whole, those who believe that have never been not a majority, they have never come close to being a majority. And yes, there are a lot people that take that view. So we have to not that the differences arise not only between regions and countries but within a region and within a country. Nothing was as clear over the last two or three days that two Americans, one possibly born in Hawaii and the other born in New York, as the world has presidentially experienced in America, have widely different views about what they would like to preserve. That doesn't mean that they're any different, they have different nations. They are the same.
Amartya Sen:
I think the main thing to recognize there is that our differences don't arrive only from where we come from. I mean, just to give a test, where actually I have to be very careful. I tried what an Amherst curry would look like over dinner, and the results of it are on my shirt now. So I can keep my tie above it.
Ilan Stavans: To cover it.
Amartya Sen: To cover it.
Amartya Sen: Where do you think this tie could be from?
Ilan Stavans: You mean where you bought it?
Amartya Sen:
Where was it made? And it has a symbolic value. But I don't think you would ever guess it's from a Muslim country, namely Bangladesh. It's a tie of Dhaka University. It's not green. It doesn't have a crescent moon. It's a red tie, which might make me look like a revolutionary. And you know, it's part of its culture too. As we knew in 1971. It played a big part, that part of the culture.
Amartya Sen:
I think the fact is that there are big variations. What is common is some idea that people A, should be able to do what they really think are important to them, and important in their view for the world, and B, should have what you told earlier, the basic means which make their exercise of their freedom feasible. Food, education, shelter, medicine, play a part in that.
Amartya Sen:
That is the commonality. Within that, there will be big differences. But that's not different from other ideas that we have. You know, the nature of kindness, as we understand it, varies. The nature of cruelty as we understand it varies. And so on.
Amartya Sen:
So I would say that when I talk about development as freedom, I'm trying to pursue an idea which has a globality, a global understanding, despite the fact that it can take many different forms.
Ilan Stavans:
Amartya, do we learn to be free? Is this the process and the product of an intellectual ... a reasonable development? Or is that freedom that you're talking about intrinsic to the very nature of who we are regardless of the axis of education and to the development of one's reason?
Amartya Sen:
I would say the comparison here, is what Chomsky, Noam Chomsky, says about our ability to generate language and grammar. That is, we have a capacity to understand, and that was, after all, the big difference between the early Wittgenstein of Tractatus, and the later Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations. And understanding ... in which, by the way, the Marxist thinker Gramsci played a very big part, mainly through the influence on [Piero Sraffa 00:28:04], who actually as it happened was one of my teachers. But in Trinity College, they were both fellows, Wittgenstein and Sraffa, and that thought was something that Sraffa won over Wittgenstein.
Amartya Sen:
But if we take Chomsky, which is probably the most articulated view of that, there is an ability for us to make grammar ourselves. If you say something which is awfully wrong grammatically, even without any creating we will, you know ... we will see that they ... for them ... yeah.
Amartya Sen:
And I think our ability to think grammatically then evolves. If you think about an Indian grammarian, fourth century BC, what was his contribution? He accepted the universality of grammar, but he said that people very often use it wrongly. And therefore, let me get these rules. He wrote 4,000 rules. There's a problem there, because how are these generated, or are these dictated by you?
Amartya Sen:
So at the moment I've given up teaching economics. I teach math and philosophy mostly, and this year I'm teaching with mathematician called Barry Mazur and an economist and mathematician Eric Maskin, I'm teaching a course called Axiomatic Reasoning, so I'm talking about Panini, Wittgenstein, Chomsky and Gramsci and so on.
Amartya Sen:
And the right answer to your question is you can ... three things. A, we have a sense of freedom which is intrinsic in the way our sense of grammar is. B, we could systematically apply reason to it and subject it to scrutiny. And C, many of the reasoning and rules that would appeal to us would turn out to be mistaken so that the rules offer them scrutiny. They need scrutiny of scrutiny. That's roughly my answer.
Ilan Stavans:
Okay. I want to move you to another freedom-related question before we go to the topic of reason and politics and globalism today. And this is something, Amartya, that you and I have talked today once, but I think this audience is going to be very interested in. I mentioned to you ... I would like for you to address the idea ... the potential idea of an individual choosing the opposite of freedom and making this an active choice.
Ilan Stavans:
So I told you during the podcast that I teach a course in a nearby jail, and I have become close to the inmates and have found out that some inmates, this is ... all of them are male, and many of them are from Springfield and other surrounding areas ... literally prefer to be in the jail, particularly in certain periods of the year, the winter, the spring. This is how they have told it to me. Because being outside, the inclement weather conditions, the violence on the street, the opioid epidemics and other drugs, being in the jail is preferable to being outside, and they also say that the benefits that they get in the jail are double or triple what they get outside. They get food, they get shelter, they get classes, and so on.
Ilan Stavans:
So here is a paradigm of a series of individuals who actually, one told me, would commit a petty crime sometimes coming to the winter in order to be able to be in jail for the next X amount of months and then go out. This is an active decision of limiting one's freedom in order to be able to benefit from that absence. So this is a choice that comes from reason in that it ultimately is a statement on what is happening on the streets.
Amartya Sen: Yeah. You know, we discussed this a bit earlier, so I have to be careful in not boring you with a similar answer.
Ilan Stavans: Oh, you don't have to worry about me. These are the people you have to entertain.
Amartya Sen:
[crosstalk 00:33:11] you know that to commit a sufficiently petty crime that sends you to prison between December and April, and then to come out as the daffodils come out, from jail ... requires pretty fine-tuning of crime and the judicial system. But let's imagine that you can.
Amartya Sen:
I strongly recommend for those who have not read it a collection of short stories by O. Henry called "Four Million", and four million is the number of New Yorkers at the time when he wrote it. And one of the stories is about a guy who is very depressed with the winter coming. He doesn't know of anywhere of earning an income. So he thinks, wouldn't it be better to be in prison? You know, think of the heat, warm rooms, breakfast ready in the morning ... and he tries to get himself arrested.
Amartya Sen:
And most of the story is the difficulty in his getting arrested. And he tries to misbehave in the street, running around obstructing cars and so on, and then one of the policemen who's about to arrest is told by another policeman saying, "These are Yalies celebrating their victory over Harvard in the game, and we have been told not to arrest them." So he doesn't get arrested. So this goes on and on. He is very frustrated. And then he sits in the park and he says, "What's wrong with me? Why can't I [inaudible 00:35:07] myself and start earning an income, look for a good job? Maybe I know jobs where ... but maybe if I try hard I might get it." And then he gets full of resolve, saying, "I am going to do that." At which moment a policeman puts a hand on his shoulder and says, "You are under arrest for loitering."
Amartya Sen:
So that's the story. And it's a sad story. It's a comment on society. It's a comment on the individual as well, and the comment has a similarity with yours.
Amartya Sen:
But [inaudible 00:35:51] what's common between your story and O Henry's is that they're not wanting to be locked up. They're looking for a warm room, a meal, a care in case you fall down and break your leg. And these are not imprisonment. These are the associated benefits that in the imprisonment system in this country happen to come with the imprisonment. Many countries, they don't, by the way.
Amartya Sen:
And so what these person are seeking is not wanting to bolted up. They're seeking a warm room and food and care. So I wouldn't draw from it that anyone is choosing unfreedom. If somebody said, "You can get a warm room, and you can get breakfast when you like, and a meal, and you can get a little bit of pocket money too, and you don't have to stay in the jail, you can go around," I bet he would choose that. Which indicates that it's not ... you shouldn't interpret it as someone preferring unfreedom to freedom. Someone prefers the freedom of having a warm room and food and a little income over the freedom of being able to roam around and go where you like.
Ilan Stavans:
I am struck by ... now, but throughout your work, you don't ... you use the opposite of freedom as "unfreedom". You don't talk about ... you don't use other words.
Amartya Sen: What?
Ilan Stavans: You don't use other words that would come faster to one's mind, so "imprisonment" or ... but you use "unfreedom". That's the opposite of freedom, in your mind?
Amartya Sen: Well, I think it would be difficult not to think of unfreedom as the opposite of freedom.
Ilan Stavans: And unfreedom is the absence of freedom.
Amartya Sen:
Yeah. I mean, many of these ideas we get by looking at the negation of it. It's a ... it's found factually Hegelian, what I'm saying, but it's not that Hegelian. The dialectics of it is that you say, "How do you know this guy had no freedom?" That question. Or you could say the other, "Why do you think that this person really has a lot of freedom?" Well, he can roam around. Doesn't have the unfreedom of being locked up. He can ... he actually manages to eat and have a reasonably warm room, comfortable room. Again, the opposite of not having them, which is unfreedom.
Amartya Sen:
There are many ideas which require engagement from both ends, but the engagement from the negative end is often much more articulated than from the positive end. And I would say freedom is one of those ideas. I mean, when I first started using it, people would say that there's no such word in English.
Ilan Stavans: I was going to say the folks of the OED would say, "We haven't registered it."
Amartya Sen: Well, the OED happen to have unfreedom.
Ilan Stavans: They do?
Amartya Sen: They do.
Ilan Stavans: Oh. Have to open it.
Amartya Sen: Because I'm not that original. [inaudible 00:39:52].
Ilan Stavans:
So Amartya, I want to ask you about globalism today. Do you think that we are, with the rise of populism and the emergence of fascist groups and fascism in countries like Poland and Hungary and Brazil, are we entering a period in which globalism is severely questioned and maybe even in retreat? Or is this an impasse that will pass?
Amartya Sen:
I think there have been ups and downs, certainly, you're right. But it's not the case that what we are witnessing now is a totally unprecedented phenomenon. When I first arrived in Trinity College in Cambridge as an undergraduate, I was struck when I went to the chapel to see how many Trinity men had fallen in the war. Their names were there on the side of the chapel, and so many of them that the entire chapel walls were taken up by their names. So when the Second World War happened, their names had to be put in the antechapel.
Amartya Sen:
I was absolutely shocked by the number of people who had died off one particular age group, a college of 700 students, and that many people in three and a half years ... it was amazing for me. And what were they fighting about? Britain versus Germany versus France. You know, very far from globalism. I don't think today, despite everything, no one would think that the French and the English are intrinsically ... or the French and the Germans are intrinsically hostile to each other.
Amartya Sen:
I think we have been in this kind of a situation again and again, and we have overcome them. And I think in the context of one of our debates, I quoted also an old Italian story to indicate that what may appear to be new may not be that new, and I might as well mention or repeat that story.