Amartya Sen is the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in economics and has for decades been a sane, patient and sapient voice in applying academic ideas to the real world – which is a trait from which more economists could benefit and which can also be seen in the recent winner Paul Krugman. His various books have argued for the need for peace and democracy as a means of ending not just misery but poverty and starvation, while his understanding of the multivalent complexity of human society has let him argue for tolerance and understanding in place of the violence and confrontation that now characterise “political discourse” in so many places.

Read the full review here.

Nylig var jeg så heldig å få være med på en studietur til Oxford i regi av Civita. I tillegg til leksjoner og diskusjoner med professorer fra universitetet, eksklusivt for vår gruppe på 10 studenter, fikk vi med oss et foredrag med Amartya Sen.

Amartya Sen er en slags filosofenes rockestjerne, noe vi fikk merke da vi måtte stå i en ufattelig lang kø for å slippe inn til hans Public Speech, og rigget oss til på en benk oppunder taket i det store Sheldon Theatre som rommer omkring 1000 personer. Heldigvis slapp vi å sitte på gulvet, slik de siste 50-100 personene inn døra måtte.

Dessverre er det nok slik at en del personer, også populære og berømte nobelprisvinnere i økonomi, er bedre til å skrive enn til å tale til en stor forsamling. Det var til tider vanskelig å oppfatte hva den høyt aktede inderen hadde å meddele. Men uansett var det en opplevelse, og ekstra morsomt var det å få tak i en signert utgave av hans siste bok dagen etter.

Amartya Sen er brennende opptatt av å få bukt med verdens fattigdom og urettferdighet. Hans innfallsvinkel er at i stedet for å forsøke å bli enige om hvordan det perfekte, rettferdige samfunnet ser ut, kan vi begynne med å luke ut det som er åpenbare urettferdigheter. Et eksempel han gjerne bruker er at man ikke trenger å være enig om hva som er et ideelt, fritt og rettferdig samfunn for å være enig i at et samfunn uten slaveri er mer rettferdig enn et samfunn med. Så er spørsmålet om disse innlysende eksemplene kan overføres til mer kompliserte forhold.

Jeg gleder meg til å lese boka, og lover en rapport i etterkant. I mellomtiden går det an å lese hva The Independent eller The Guardian mener om den. (Jeg skulle også gjerne linket til omtalen i The Economist, men den er ikke lenger tilgjengelig uten abonnement).

E’ ormai “naturale” nella nostra società produrre, consumare, avere ritmi frenetici anche se studi dimostrano che questo non è ciò che conduce al benessere.
Il Presidente francese Sarkozy in primis ha affidato ai Nobel Amartya Sen e Joseph Stiglitz il compito di riformare gli indici che misurano la ricchezza di un paese, aggiungendo un’infinità di variabili al semplice reddito.
Il Pil di un paese è sempre stato lo strumento che fotografava il benessere dello stesso ma oggi sembra che questo non sia più cosi reale. Sempre più si parla di B.I.L. (Benessere Interno Lordo) che prende in considerazione parametri nuovi.
Il concetto è molto semplice: inutile guadagnare di più degli altri se la qualità della vita (minacciata dal rischio dell’ammalarsi a causa dell’inquinamento o dalla perdita di tempo trascorso nel traffico quotidiano o dal non avere più spazi vitali o utili all’uomo allinterno del nostro territorio) peggiora.
Ricalcolando in questa maniera il benessere in italia la provincia di Forli e Cesena compresa anche Rimini passa ai primi posti mentre Milano (prima per il PIL) slitta in una posizione centrale.

Nel nostro piccolo nel pensare alla nostra casa abbiamo pensato al benessere che questa deve produrre, non solo in termini della fortuna di poterci permettere una nuova casa singola in campagna ma in merito agli spazi, ai materiali, all’orientamento cardinale e soprattutto per i nostri figli in qualcosa che non vada ad inquinare sempre più il loro futuro.
Sicuramente una casa con intonaci in calce, vernici traspiranti e naturali, infissi in legno naturale, cappotto riciclabile ed ecologico, zero emissione di CO2, con un ampia produzione di energia elettrica e acqua sanitaria e ulilizzando imprese e impiantisti locali ci avviciniamo sicuramente all’obbiettivo desiderato.

«Molti dei conflitti e delle atrocità del mondo sono tenuti in piedi dall’illusione di un’identità univoca e senza possibilità di scelta. L’arte di costruire l’odio assume la forma dell’invocazione del potere magico di una determinata identità, spacciata per dominante, che soffoca le altre affiliazioni e può arrivare anche, in una forma adeguatamente bellicosa, a sopraffare qualsiasi simpatia umana o naturale benevolenza di cui possiamo normalmente essere dotati. Il risultato può essere una violenza elementare, artigianale, oppure una violenza e un terrorismo globali, sofisticati.»
(Amartya Sen, Identità e violenza, prefazione)

Condivido profondamente questo passaggio (il professor Sen, appena l’ho messo al corrente, ha potuto finalmente rilassarsi). Ho sempre vissuto con un certo disagio l’idea di appartenenza a un gruppo definito di individui e forse è questa sensazione che mi ha sempre fatto vedere con “sospetto” le manifestazioni di massa: politiche, religiose e sportive. Con molta probabilità, questa mia tendenza mi ha anche impedito di fare esperienze potenzialmente interessanti, come il sesso con più partner contemporaneamente, ma di questo preferisco non parlarne in un altro momento.
Naturalmente l’identità che contraddistingue un gruppo più o meno grande di persone non è portatrice solo di valenze negative, come ben viene specificato in altre parti del libro; pur potendo ricondurre frequentemente le radici della violenza a questioni di “esclusività”, non si può negare che l’identità sia uno stimolo positivo per un gran numero di persone. Purtroppo, dico io, esiste un gruppo – dai contorni non definibili ma dall’identità peculiare – che è trasversale a tutte le altre categorie: le teste di cazzo. Non so se nel libro viene affrontato questo aspetto in tali termini (non ho ancora finito di leggerlo) ma, nel caso, ve lo farò sapere.

More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing

 On going through this Amartya Sen’s brilliant article, it is dismaying to see how Women on every count are short changed.  The man to woman birth ratios are pathetically hitting south due to various factor’s like lack of medical care at neo and post natal  times, women deprived of gainful  education and employment and sheer Ignorance of men and Governments at Rule. Given exact conditions, women tend to survive and outlive Men but still this total apathy towards women is simply galling. Sen estimates that if these injustices (Stupidities to me) were not there, more than 100 million women would be Born and simply outshone men. What a shame.  Way to go forward will be simply to concentrate on gender biases actively, consciously from Individual to Institutional level and make sure  more great girls and Women are nourished and brought to mainstream. Check out the original piece at  http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/gender/Sen100M.html

Amartya Sen

(source)

This dilemma – part of this series – comes from Amartya Sen. Three children, Anne, Bob and Carla, are arguing who should receive a flute. The arguments they give for getting the flute are not selfish, partial or arbitrary, but based on different theories of justice. Of course, since they are children, they don’t have a well-developed sense of the theories of justice they each adopt and use as a justification for getting the flute, but it turns out that the three of them present a crude version of three of the most common philosophical theories of justice.

• Anne claims that she should get the flute because she’s the only one of the three children who know how to play it (which is correct). It would, in her view, be unjust to deny the flute to the only one who can make proper use of it.
• Bob claims that the flute should be his because he’s poor and doesn’t have anything to play with (which is correct). He could possibly even learn how to play it given the opportunity. It would be unjust to deprive him of this opportunity and to leave him destitute compared to the other children.
• Carla claims the the flute should be hers because she spent a lot of time making it (which is correct). Taking the flute away from her would be unjust.

All three points of view – or theories of justice if you want – sound persuasive, although some will sound more persuasive to some than to others. In fact, if you’re a utilitarian, you’ll be more persuaded by Anne. If you’re a liberal egalitarian, Bob will have your ear. And if you’re a libertarian, Carla will be the obvious choice. A utilitarian will argue that giving the flute to Anne will produce the highest aggregate utility (or happiness or whatever). After all, it’s better to play the flute than just play “with it”, or simply make it. Even the negative utility for Bob and Carla – i.e. not having the flute – would perhaps not outweigh the positive utility for Anne. And even Bob and Carla can get some utility from the fact that Anne has the flute: they may enjoy her playing it.

Libertarians would strongly support the property rights of Carla, rights which for them override utility considerations. Liberal egalitarians would point to the fact that Anne’s ability to play the flute – the reason for utilitarians to give her the flute – is perhaps the result of a privileged social position, as it the fact that Carla was able to make the flute – the reason libertarians put forward for giving her the flute. Giving the flute to Bob would equalize society, and that is what justice is about for them, not property rights or utility.

Standard note: Use the comment section in order to elaborate on your answer. As usual in this series, we don’t pronounce ourselves on our favorite answer. This series is about what the readers think. However, nothing in the statistics on the answers you give makes it possible to conclude anything about “public opinion”. The usual disclaimer about the quality of internet polls where participants can self-select is applicable. Read more. Also, the polls in this blog series will remain open indefinitely in order to allow accidental readers of this blog, or readers finding their way here through a search engine, to participate.

More on justice. More on Amartya Sen. And you can still vote on our previous moral dilemmas here.

The emergence of new supra-national movements with respect to higher education and research continue apace.  From the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), through to international consortia of universities, through to bits of universities embedded in others within distant territories (e.g., Georgia Tech’s unit within the National University of Singapore), the higher education landscape is in the process of being reconfigured and globalized. Yet, is it really that novel in an historical sense?

Today’s call at the East Asian Summit for the revival of Nalanda University (see below) draws upon development outcomes in higher education that took place well before the establishment of medieval universities like Oxford, Bologna, or Lund. As Sashi Tahroor notes:

Founded in 427 A.D. by Buddhist monks at the time of Kumaragupta I (415-455 A.D.), Nalanda was an extraordinary centre of learning for seven centuries. The name probably comes from a combination of nalam (lotus, the symbol of knowledge) and da, meaning “to give”, so Nalanda means “Giver of Knowledge”. And that is exactly what the university did, attracting prize students from all over India, as well as from China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Persia, Sri Lanka, Tibet and Turkey. At its peak, Nalanda played host to more than 10,000 students — not just Buddhists, but of various religious traditions — and its education, provided in its heyday by 2,000 world-renowned professors, was completely free.

The establishment of new types of universities in like Nalanda University, Øresund University, or the recently opened Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana (UNILA), remind us that there is an emerging desire for novel spaces of knowledge production that think and act beyond the nation.  A related question, then, is how effective will these new configurations be, and can supporting stakeholders (including nation-states) really act beyond the nation?

Kris Olds

Three things
 
One) A quick trivia on the Winner of the Noble Prize (Economics Category): Elinor Ostrom (1 of 2 winners, the other being Oliver Williamson)
 
The Nobel is for Economic Sciences, but Ostrom is a professor in Political Science.
B.A. (Honors) Political Science UCLA 1954,
M.A. Pol Sci UCLA 1962,
Ph.D. Pol Sci, UCLA 1965.
Economists all around seem happy she argued convincingly (to some) on the concepts of Institutional Economics (google this term guys!) but is the Prize for Economics or is it an award for the outstanding contributions in the field of economics?
Two) Anyway, to help out those who want to rebut Ostrom’s work (as those who support it are plenty in the cybersphere), here’s my suggestion:
 
That Ostrom argues that people create their (often local) institutional arrangements to deal with the common pool of resources. It is empirically based (mainly) on case studies, but by and large quite relevant when discussing how to develop mechanisms and rules to create new economic infrastructures.
 
However:
 
What several cases here show is that technological innovation can entirely break institutional arrangements around common pool resources that have functioned over hundreds of years.
 
To prove this argument, use these examples:
 
1) Of the strong improvements in fishing where modernization of trawlers and boats allowed fishermen to go further away from their base and therefore dismantled historical regimes over where to fish. Coupled to this, other fishermen can observe their behaviour and outclass each other.
 
2) Of the strong improvements in agriculture where farmers tend to multiply their harvest by innovative and effective farming methods (remember the Japanese taught us Malayans how to plant rice twice a year during WW2?) and this breaks down the historical regimes over what to plant and when? Again, other farmers observe and again try to outclass each other in pursuit of competition.
 
Local administration of common pool resources can be torn down via other means and not just technological innovation. The thing is, if we want to argue which method is the best until the moon freezes over, instead of working with one method in the most effective manner, then we’ll never solve world hunger.
 
 
Three) That is why Dhaka born-Indian fellow Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen won the Prize because he analysed HOW TO solve world problems via his work “Welfare economics: solving famine, human development theory, poverty, gender inequality” using various methods available at present instead of developing a new method to work with.
 
There’s two ways to solving a problem: use existing methods (as proposed by Sen), or establish a new pecking order (as propagated by Ostrom). In fact, the economics category winners tend to contradict themselves through their work more often than in other categories.
 
A Nobel recipient once said on the rostrum that ‘he is delighted to win the award and that he is humbled by the recognition’. However, he pointed out that Economics is the only category in the Nobel Prize that you can win by discussing the exact opposite (and therefore contradict) previous winners. Clearly, economics is not for the faint hearted.

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The eye doesn’t see what the mind doesn’t know

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Revisited: “How do you value quality of life?” 

            I needed to re-edit this post to expand and clarify my project. French President Sarkozy assembled a committee of Nobel Prize economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen to ponder on new indicators for measuring economic performance and social progress. This honorable committee submitted its report on September 13, 2009. The conclusion of the report concerning social progress target the well being of the citizens such as life expectancy, affordable health care, affordable dwelling, worthy education system that focus on individual reflection instead of data and fact memorization since the individual will be called upon to act on his decision, alternatives to organize our life around activities that we love; having satisfying jobs that we value; the possibility of expressing our opinions in public politics and social meetings; enjoying wholesome environment, clean water and purer breathable air; and feeling secure in the neighborhood.  All this social indicators are more valuable to measure how a State has been progressing than relying solely on GNP or how many cars a family own or the number of household equipments.

            In this post I will ask binary questions of (Yes or No) for voting on laws and amendments in three categories of quality of life: personal, community, and State levels.

            On the State level let us consider that the tax breaks exempt people earning less than $10,000 of taxes.  If the State decided to exempt people earning less than $15,000 would you vote for that new tax break knowing that investing money on the previous tax break are targeted to preserving natural reserves, distributing electricity 24 hours per day at the original rate, establishing affordable State health care for all, paying higher rates for teachers for continuing education to encourage individual reflection, increasing rates for nurses with higher quality of services, investing in clean alternative sources of energy, or salvaging beach resorts and better accommodating camping grounds and reclaiming greener locations for the public? How would you vote?

            Thus, each time you vote yes for the new tax breaks would mean that you don’t care that much about the alternative investment in quality of life.  For example, a sample question would be: Would you vote to exempt people earning less than $15,000 in taxes if the tax generated from the current tax break is allocated to preserving natural reserves?

            Let us consider that the government decided to raise taxes on new homes and larger apartments in order to invest on other values of quality of life such reclaiming greener spaces, saving the forest, tending to trekking routes, outdoor camping grounds, constructing public facilities for communities meeting, art galleries, continuing education classes, high quality services establishments for the elderly, and kids intramural sports facilities? How would you vote?  A sample question would be: would you vote for raising taxes on new houses if the generated budget is targeted to reclaiming greener spaces?

            Let us ponder on this line of thought; the government decided to raise taxes on frequent flyers, families with more than two cars, gas guzzling vehicles, and stock traders in order to invest on enforcing laws on gender discrimination, equal employment laws, health and safety in the work place, child abuse, unbiased election laws, equitable laws for minorities; wider range for freedom of expression, and rehabilitating prison systems. How would you vote?        The sample question would be: would you be agreeable to raising taxes on gas guzzling cars if the generated money is earmarked to cover the expense of more law enforcing agents and judges on gender discrimination?

            On the community level, suppose that if people postponed purchasing their first cars for a year and the saved money covers the expenses of inoculating all babies in the community then how would you vote?  Suppose people are asked to postpone buying a new car instead of their older one for a year, then how would you vote?  Suppose of inoculating babies the community decided for pay for free complete blood tests for citizens over 45 of years? Suppose that the community can perform free bypass surgery for the badly needed patients, or free urine dialysis?

            What if you can postpone for a year replacing your washing machine to cover the expenses of investing in playgrounds for kids, or clean water, or new sewer system, or public transport system, or upgrading a hospital, or modernizing schools with updated communication and audio visual systems? How would you vote?

            On the personal level, suppose your family is over three kids and they attend private schools. If you are to send them to public schools, in safe neighborhoods, then would you invest the saved money on a new bathroom, building an extra large room for the kids to assemble and play, arranging the garden as an attractive playground for the kids, taking additional vacations, working part-time so that you may monitor the teaching of your kids after school, subscribing your kids in various clubs and extra-curricular activities, or going out more frequently to movie theaters, musical event, and plays?

            The premises are clear: for the same financial saving you have choices of improving the quality of life of the many in return of lavisher personal comfort or “standard of living”.  These questionnaires permit you to value the kinds of quality of life you believe in; they are easy to administer and the responses can be statistically analyzed using statistical packages specialized for binary responses.  How your community value quality of life? How your nation value quality of life?  What do you think about this research project?

Note: Joseph Stiglitz is not welcomed in the Obama Administration because he harshly criticized the President’s economic adviser Larry Summers in The New York Times; Stiglitz said: “the plan for financial and economic stability is too modest to be effective. The pumping of money in banks is practically free gifts offered to Wall Street: only investors and creditors to these banks are benefiting but not the tax payers.”  Stiglitz is the chief of the line of economists who attack the concept that free markets have the capability to stabilize imbalances efficiently.  His mathematical models have demonstrated that transactions in free markets are biased toward those who are specialized in finance and have the necessary data to fool clients; “globalization has created a fresh pool of investors to exploit their ignorance”.

            As far as I recall Amartya Sen demonstrated that micro-improvement to the economical and social progress of the common people is far more effective than mega projects that displace people and environment to please the grotesque ego of bureaucrats.

Full interview here.

“I am a friend of the Left and my politics has been on the Left, but sometimes it’s difficult to recognise what is Left, what is Right. I am in favour of fighting today’s battles rather than yesterday’s battles. I think this gut anti-Americanism—don’t make it the headline (laughs)—is a problem. It is a minor problem, but one of the reasons why the Left cannot liberate itself from the Cold War. It made sense at some stage to oppose America for various reasons. But I think gut anti-Americanism is certainly pulling the Left back now.”

Of course, that’s the Indian left.  It seems that if you think deeply enough, you think through a lot of party ideas.  Yet, those ideas run deep in your own mind and childhood, and maybe you never stop really stop wrestling with them.

If you’re more familiar with Sen’s work, feel free to comment.

Also On This Site: Certainly the work he and Martha Nussbaum did is to better the quality of life in India, and create more economic opportunity there, but is there also global left-leaning international platform being built too…are these the best ideas to understand the range of American political and philosophical traditions?:  Amartya Sen In The New York Review Of Books: Capitalism Beyond The Crisis

Can you maintain the virtues of religion without the church…?:  From The City Journal: Roger Scruton On “Forgiveness And Irony”…Are we going soft and “European”… do we need to protect our religious idealism enshrined in the Constitution….with the social sciences?…Charles Murray Lecture At AEI: The Happiness Of People

How do you value quality of life? (October 20, 2009)

            French President Sarkozy assembled a committee of Nobel Prize economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen to ponder on new indicators for measuring economic performance and social progress. This honorable committee submitted its report on September 13, 2009. The conclusion of the report concerning social progress target the well being of the citizens such as life expectancy, affordable health care, affordable dwelling, worthy education system that focus on individual reflection instead of data and fact memorization since the individual will be called upon to act on his decision, alternatives to organize our life around activities that we love; having satisfying jobs that we value; the possibility of expressing our opinions in public politics and social meetings; enjoying wholesome environment, clean water and purer breathable air; and feeling secure in the neighborhood.  All this social indicators are more valuable to measure how a State has been progressing than relying solely on GNP or how many cars a family own or the number of household equipments.

            Joseph Stiglitz is not welcomed in the Obama Administration because he harshly criticized the President economic adviser Larry Summers in The New York Times;  Stiglitz said: “the plan for financial and economic stability is too modest to be effective. The pumping of money in banks is practically free gifts offered to Wall Street: only investors and creditors to these banks are benefiting but not the tax payers.”  Stiglitz is the chief of the line of economists who attack the concept that free markets have the capability to stabilize imbalances efficiently.  His mathematical models have demonstrated that transactions in free markets are biased toward those who are specialized in finance and have the necessary data to fool clients; “globalization has created a fresh pool of investors to exploit their ignorance”.

            In this post I will ask binary questions of (Yes or No) for voting on laws and amendments in three categories of quality of life: personal, community, and State levels. For example, on the community level, suppose that if people postpone purchasing their first cars for a year and the saved money covers the expenses of inoculating all babies in the community then how would you vote?  Suppose people are asked to postpone buying a new car instead of their older one for a year, then how would you vote?  Suppose of inoculating babies the community decided for pay for free complete blood tests for citizens over 45 of years? Suppose that the community can perform free bypass surgery for the badly needed patients, or free urine dialysis?

            What if you can postpone for a year replacing your washing machine to cover the expenses of investing in playgrounds for kids, or clean water, or new sewer system, or public transport system, or upgrading a hospital, or modernizing schools with updated communication and audio visual systems? How would you vote?

            On the State level, suppose the tax breaks exempt people earning less than $10,000 of taxes.  If the State decided to exempt people earning less than $20,000 would you vote for that new tax break knowing that investing money on the previous tax break are targeted to preserving natural reserves, distributing electricity 24 hours per day at the original rate, establishing affordable State health care for all, paying higher rates for teachers for continuing education to encourage individual reflection, increasing rates for nurses with higher quality of services, investing in clean alternative sources of energy, or salvaging beach resorts and better accommodating camping grounds and reclaiming greener locations for the public? How would you vote?

            On the personal level, suppose your family is over three kids and they attend private schools. If you are to send them to public schools, in safe neighborhoods, then would you invest the saved money on a new bathroom, building an extra large room for the kids to assemble and play, arranging the garden as an attractive playground for the kids, taking additional vacations, working part-time so that you may monitor the teaching of your kids after school, subscribing your kids in various clubs and extra-curricular activities, or going out more frequently to movie theaters, musical event, and plays?

            The premises are clear: for the same financial saving you have choices of improving the quality of life of the many in return of lavisher personal comfort.  These questionnaires permit you to value the kinds of quality of life you believe in; they are easy to administer and the responses can be statistically analyzed using statistical packages specialized for binary responses.  How your community value quality of life? How your nation value quality of life?  What do you think about this research project?

It sounds interesting. Because India won its 7th Nobel Prize on Wednesday, 7th Of October 2009. Yes! Indian born Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a senior scientist at the MRC Laborartory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, England, has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry along with two others, the Nobel Committee announced on 7th October 2009.

The two other scientists, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with V Ramakrishnan are Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E Yonath (Israel). They all are working with MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge.

Born in 1952 in Chidambaram, Tailnadu, Ramakrishnan shared the Nobel Prize with Thomas E Steitz (US) and Ada E Yonath (Israel) for their “studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”.

Ramakrishnan earned his B.Sc. in Physics (1971) from Baroda University and his Ph.D. in Physics (1976) from Ohio University.

He moved into biology at the University of California, San Diego, where he took a year of classes, then conducted research with Dr Mauricio Montal, a membrane biochemist.

Let us remember the Great Sons of India who made Indians feel proud by winning the Nobel Prize which is the most respected award the world over.

Here is the list of Those Indians who won this prestigious award and let us salute them…

1) Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)

Nobel Prize for Literature (1913). Tagore was born and lived in Calcutta for most of his life. He was one of modern India’s greatest poets and the composer of independent India’s national anthem. In 1901 he founded his school, the Santiniketan, at Bolpur as a protest against the existing bad system of education.

The school was a great success and gave birth to Viswabharati. He was awarded the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature for his work “Gitanjali”; for the English version, published in 1912. The noble citation stated that it was “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.” In 1915, he was knighted by the British King George V. Tagore renounced his knighthood in 1919 following the Amritsar massacre or nearly 400 Indian demonstrators.

2) Sir C.V. Raman (Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman) (1888 – 1970). Nobel Prize for Physics (1930). C V Raman was born on 7th Nov. 1888 in Thiruvanaikkaval, in the Trichy district of Tamil Nadu. He finished school by the age of eleven and by then he had already read the popular lectures of Tyndall, Faraday and Helmoltz.

He acquired his BA degree from the Presidency College, Madras, where he carried out original research in the college laboratory, publishing the results in the philosophical magazine. Then went to Calcutta and while he was there, he made enormous contributions to vibration, sound, musical instruments, ultrasonic, diffraction, photo electricity, colloidal particles, X-ray diffraction, magnetron, dielectrics, and the celebrated “RAMAN” effect which fetched him the Noble Prize in 1930.

He was the first Asian scientist to win the Nobel Prize. The Raman Effect occurs when a ray of incident light excites a molecule in the sample, which subsequently scatters the light. While most of this scattered light is of the same wavelength as the incident light, state (i.e. getting the molecule to vibrate). The Raman Effect is useful in the study of molecular energy levels, structure development, and multi component qualitative analysis.

3) Dr. Hargobind Khorana Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology (1968)Dr. Hargobind Khorana was born on 9th January 1922 at Raipur, Punjab (now in Pakistan). Dr. Khorana was responsible for producing the first man-made gene in his laboratory in the early seventies. This historic invention won him the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1968 sharing it with Marshall Nuremberg and Robert Holley for interpreting the genetic code and analyzing its function in protein synthesis.

They all independently made contributions to the understanding of the genetic code and how it works in the cell. They established that this mother of all codes, the biological language common to all living organisms, is spelled out in three-letter words: each set of three nucleotides codes for a specific amino acid.

4) Dr. Subramaniam Chandrasekar

Nobel Prize for physics (1983) Subramaniam Chandrashekhar was born on October 19, 1910 in Lahore, India (later part of Pakistan). He attended Presidency College from 1925 to 1930, following in the footsteps of his famous uncle, Sir C. V. Raman.

His work spanned over the understanding of the rotation of planets, stars, white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies. He won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for his theoretical work on stars and their evolution.

5) Mother Teresa (1910 – 1997) Nobel Prize for peace (1979)Born in 1910, Skoplje, Yugoslavia (then Turkey) and originally named Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, Mother Teresa dedicated her life to helping the poor, the sick, and the dying around the world, particularly those in India, working through the Missionaries Of Charity in Calcutta. The Society of Missionaries has spread all over the world, including the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries.

Missionaries of Charity provide effective help to the poorest of the poor in a number of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and they undertake relief work in the wake of natural catastrophes such as floods, epidemics, and famine, and for refugees. The order also has houses in North America, Europe and Australia, where they take care of the shut-ins, alcoholics, homeless, and AIDS sufferers. Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997.

6) Dr. Amartya Sen Nobel Prize for Economics (1998)Amartya Sen (born 1933) was the first Indian to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, awarded to him in 1998 for his work on welfare economics. He has made several key contributions to research in this field, such as to the axiomatic theory of social choice; the definitions of welfare and poverty indexes; and the empirical studies of famine.

All are linked by his interest in distributional issues and particularly in those most impoverished. Whereas Kenneth Arrow’s “impossibility theorem” suggested that it was not possible to aggregate individual choices into a satisfactory choice for society as a whole, Sen showed that societies could find ways to alleviate such a poor outcome.

And the Seventh Man who won the Nobel Prize is Venkatraman Ramakrishnan.

There are few others connected to India also won the prestigious Nobel Prize.

They are:

1) Ronald Ross. Born in Almora, India, in 1857 Ronald Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on malaria.

He received many honours in addition to the Nobel Prize, and was given Honorary Membership of learned societies of most countries of Europe, and of many other continents. He got an honorary M.D. degree in Stockholm in 1910 at the centenary celebration of the Caroline Institute. Whilst his vivacity and single-minded search for truth caused friction with some people, he enjoyed a vast circle of friends in Europe, Asia and America who respected him for his personality as well as for his genius.

2) Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). Rudyard Kipling, born in Mumbai, 1865 (then Bombay in British India), was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907. He remains the youngest-ever recipient and the first English-language writer to receive the Prize. British writer, Kipling wrote novels, poems and short stories — mostly set in India and Burma (now known as Myanmar).

3) Abdus Salam.

Abdus Salam (1926-1996), born in undivided Punjab and a citizen of Pakistan, and shared a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979, with Steven Weinberg, for his work on electroweak unification, one of the important puzzles of modern theoretical physics. He was a visionary and an advocate of science in the third world. He founded the International Center for Theoretical Physics, in Trieste, Italy, which has nurtured world class physicists through workshops, fellowships and conferences.

4) V.S. Naipaul (1932- ) A British writer, V.S. Naipaul (Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul) was born in 1932 in a family of north Indian descent living in Chaguanas, close to Port of Spain, on Trinidad. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. In awarding him the Prize, the Swedish Academy praised his work “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” The Nobel Committee added: “Naipaul is a modern philosopher, carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.”

The Committee also noted Naipaul’s affinity with the Polish-born British author of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad: “Naipaul is Conrad’s heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have forgotten, the history of the vanquished.”

5)14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama (Born on 6 July 1935 at Taktser, Amdo, northeastern Tibet).Former Head of state of Tibet and active leader of Tibetan Resistance towards PRC. Escaped to India when the PRC took over Tibet. Although legally a citizen of Tibet and hence indirectly China, he is head of Tibetan Government in Exile which is stationed in India. He got Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for efforts for Tibetan Freedom through Non-Violence and Spreading Global Peace through Buddhism. Also during Prize Distribution, Head of Prize Committee commented that the prize was a part of tribute to memory of Mahatma Gandhi. Tenzin travels widely, in an effort to promote peaceful ideals.

Um grande livro, uma grande personalidade. Amartya Sen ajudou o mundo a criar novos conceitos de desenvolvimento.

Michael Sandel has his Harvard University course on Justice  online. It has recording of the lectures, reading lists, and discussion material. (It comes on with a loud audio soundtrack)

Good article about the course – including how he came to teach it and about his critics.

Good line in article – “Campus legend has it that Sandel provided the physical inspiration for Mr. Burns, the villainous nuclear-plant owner on The Simpsons, for which many Harvard graduates have written.”

Amartya Sen, the Noble prize winner in economics, has a similar book out and here is an article about it.

Suppose three children—Anne, Bob, and Carla—quarrel over a flute. Anne says it’s hers because she’s the only one who knows how to play it. Bob counters that he’s the poorest and has no toys, so the flute would at least give him something to play with. Carla reminds Anne and Bob that she built the darn thing, and no sooner did she finish it than the other two started trying to take it away.

When Rawls declared justice “the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought,” and began his painstaking probe of the conditions of just institutions, he re-established a modern tradition dating back to Hobbes: using social-contract theory to articulate ideal forms of social justice, sometimes in quasi-syllogistic form. But there was also a longstanding, skeptical, antisystematic tradition in justice theory. One of the suspenseful aspects of Sen’s book is how its author, personally close to Rawls (who died in 2002) but more expansive and historical in regard to justice, walks a difficult line between the analytic foundationalism Rawls and Nozick practiced and the sensitivity to real-world justice in people’s lives that Sen and Martha Nussbaum argue for and describe as the “capabilities” conception of justice.

Solomon wrote in A Passion for Justice that justice is “a complex set of passions to be cultivated, not an abstract set of principles to be formulated. … Justice begins with compassion and caring, not principles or opinions, but it also involves, right from the start, such ‘negative’ emotions as envy, jealousy, indignation, anger, and resentment, a keen sense of having been personally cheated or neglected, and the desire to get even.” In time, suggested Solomon, “the sense of justice emerges as a generalization and, eventually, a rationalization of a personal sense of injustice.”

Update - Jewish Texts for Social Justice from American Jewish World Service. Let me know what you find in the various categories. Is it all pragmatic? Is there any overall theory? I see that Levinas, Heschel, Soloveitchik are used interchangeably in small snippets.

1. You, along with Amartya Sen, argue that negative rights should not be a side-constraint on action, as Nozick would argue. Rather, they should be viewed as moral goals that compete with other moral goals. My question is, do you think there are any moral side constraints? If so, what are they, and why these? In an example we discussed way back when, why not take healthy people’s kidneys (leaving them one healthy one) and give the taken kidneys to people who need them to survive? (For that matter, why not kill a a few people and save fifty people each from their transplanted tissues?)

2. Isn’t your whole moral code basically Christian altruism (in which you believed at one point) only without the God, Heaven, and Hell to back it up? Basically, an adaptation that doesn’t at all fit in with the secular world, for which you’re trying to invent new underpinnings?

3. You like quipping “If you don’t like taxation, just leave the US!” even though I’ve refuted that (and even though the US is one of the most economically free countries in the world.) However, you still haven’t said why you haven’t moved to a country with the kind of welfare system you want. They do exist, and according to you, paying for those services benefits everyone. Thus, your assertion that “you might do that if you get seriously ill” (paraphrase) doesn’t really go with your claim that everyone benefits.

4. You’ve gone from saying that capabilities are another type of freedom, just like negative freedom, and should therefore be given the same respect, to saying that negative rights are moral goals to be weighed against other possible moral goals. Then you said that you’re consenting to whatever the government does by being in the country, so you’re not really being stolen from (in the example of taxation.) Then you said that everyone benefits from paying for government providing education/health care/welfare, so it’s not really a violation of rights, you’re actually benefiting everyone! Point is, these arguments have nothing to do with each other (one could legitimately believe any one of them without the believing the others), but you’ve used them all to justify violating freedoms by establishing a welfare state. Isn’t that a bit suspicious? Don’t you think that maybe you just have an emotional preference for that welfare state that exists outside of and prior to rational arguments?

5. Read The Portrait of a Lady.

Michael Specter, a New Yorker science writer, has written a new book accusing Americans of being stupid about science. It’s not that I don’t agree with him. I just have one quibble.

I have to caution: I haven’t actually read the book. But I have heard him on several radio shows promoting it. He is especially hard in these interviews on those who believe organic or “natural” diets is the only safe way to eat. I couldn’t agree more. While I do prefer organic foods myself, Americans are unhealthy because they don’t eat vegetables at all, pesticides or no. And believing the natural world is somehow better for you than the mechanical and technological world in which we’ve cocooned ourselves ignores most of human history. It’s a relatively new thing that we’re living past 30 or 40, and it’s not just because we were hunted by predators. The world is dangerous for us, and there’s really no concrete divide between the natural world and the manufactured one. Though we can never prove for certain that the chemical BPA doesn’t cause cancer, we already know about viruses and natural plants like tobacco that definitely do. You’ll do yourself a lot more harm by never getting a vaccine for, say, HPV than you will help yourself by drinking out of a Sigg.

In these interviews, Specter goes off on folks who protest genetically modified foods, but I think he mischaracterizes their objections and the benefits. First, he says those who object protest what these foods might do to harm humans. While there are some out there who fear that without evidence, there are bigger objections to those who are uncertain about what the introduction of new genetic material might do to ecological health. That’s a pretty rational fear when one considers what introducing chemical fertilizers and pesticides did to the environment; the truth is we usually don’t know how the food chain could react, and how pests could adjust.

Second, he argues that these genetically modified foods could benefit the many hungry people on our planet by making more food more available. He needs to go back and read Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998 for showing that most of the world’s famines have to do with distribution of wealth, not actual food shortages. That’s still true now; there’s probably plenty of food on the earth, there are just some of us who eat too much of it, which was part of what the organic and locavore food arguments try to address. Genetically modified foods are not going to be used to feed hungry people, they’re going to be used to increased profits.

Specter could address these things in his book, but in interviews he’s not mentioned them, and so he’s underselling his argument.

Human Statue of Liberty

(source, click to enlarge)

Libertarians traditionally adopt a negative kind of freedom, and, more precisely, limited negative freedom: they believe that individuals should be free from interference by the government. They seldom accept that individuals can be coerced by private and social constructs, such as tradition, the family, gender roles, cultural racism etc. Here’s a rather long but exceptionally well-written quote that makes this point:

I am disturbed by an inverse form of state worship I encounter among my fellow [libertarian] skeptics of government power. This is the belief that the only liberty worth caring about is liberty reclaimed from the state; that social pathologies such as patriarchy and nationalism are not the proper concerns of the individualist; that the fight for freedom stops where the reach of government ends. … [L]ibertarians for whom individualism is important cannot avoid discussions of culture, conformism, and social structure. Not every threat to liberty is backed by a government gun. … [W]hen a libertarian claims that his philosophy has no cultural content — has nothing to say, for instance, about society’s acceptance of gays and lesbians — he is engaging in a kind of cultural politics that welcomes the paternalism of the mob while balking at that of the state. …

To take a very basic example, at mid-century 5.5 percent of Americans entering medical school happened to have female bodies. This number may well have reflected women’s limited interest in pursuing medicine as a career. But that level of interest also reflected a particular view of women in positions of authority, a certain range of social spaces that girls could imagine themselves inhabiting. Norms that positioned women as wives and mothers obviously functioned as constraints on identity formation. None of this has much to do with limited government, but it has everything to do with individuals struggling to assert themselves against a collective. …

Libertarians will agree that laws requiring racial segregation and prohibiting victimless, though controversial, sexual practices are contrary to their creed. But if the constraints on freedom of association suddenly become social rather than bureaucratic [or legal] — if the neighborhood decides it does not want black residents, or the extended family decides it cannot tolerate gay sons — we do not experience a net expansion of freedom. Kerry Howley (source)

Kerry Howley

(source)

In other words, libertarians are stuck in the first part of the following equation:

Liberty = Freedom From the State + Freedom From Social Pressure + Equality of Opportunity

But there is also a tendency to go no further than the second part. Many accept that society can restrict the freedom of individuals, but don’t grant the same powers to inequality of opportunity. As I stated in two previous posts (here and here), it makes sense to view freedom more positively as the possession of resources and capabilities that are necessary to make a really free choice between alternatives and opportunities. The freedom of those without certain resources and capabilities (such as education, health and a basic income) is futile because they can’t exercise their freedom, not because they are actively interfered with by the state or by their social environment, but because they can’t choose between opportunities. Someone who’s left alone by her government, and who isn’t pressured by her family, tradition or society, may still lack freedom because she doesn’t have a basic income or education necessary to make choices and realize these choices. Amartya Sen has pioneered this view. Hence the importance of helping people to develop their capabilities, e.g. anti-poverty programs, investments in education and healthcare etc. Of course, it’s precisely such programs that often horrify libertarians…

Amartya Sen, photo by Stephanie Mitchell

(source)

We can now take the equation depicting the components of liberty, and plot this against the main political ideologies:

components of freedom

This is of course a gross simplification, but if you wanted to explain human political ideology to Martians, that’s probably how you could start:

• Libertarians focus on freedom against the state; freedom against social pressure isn’t very interesting or at least not a priority; equalizing opportunities, resources and capabilities is harmful because it empowers the state and violates property rights.
• Conservatives agree with libertarians on the first and last part of the equation, but preserve the right to use social pressure to impose their – often Christian – ideology (e.g. same-sex marriage), sometimes even with the help of the state (in which case the freedom from the state isn’t important anymore).
• Liberals think all three parts of the equation are important but sometimes struggle to find the right balance. So-called “big spending liberals” may accept a large state apparatus.
• Socialists focus on the last two parts, often at the expense of the first. State intervention is believed to be highly beneficial, without substantial risks to individual freedom.

Read other posts in this series.