Bridging the 'Harvard-hard work' gap

Book review of 'Sense and Solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone'

Sense and Solidarity

Jholawala Economics for Everyone

Jean Dreze

Permanent Black

343 pages; Rs 585

Solidarity to your fellow beings is the best, or the most sensible, public policy. That, in a nut shell, is the central message of Jean Dreze’s latest book. But this summum bonum of the book, it would appear, is neither easily reached by many – and regardless of how obvious this might sound – nor are its implications accepted widely. In that sense, the end result of this book is quite like the author’s personality. Mr Dreze, who is not only the chief architect (as well as the frontline critic) of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act, is a soft-spoken, agreeable person, but engaging him in a serious debate on matters of economic and social policy has typically led to two broad reactions. One set of people, mostly economists (and some in the media who have such delusions), tend to detest him. It is another matter that despite openly disparaging Mr Dreze’s ideas and policy suggestions, they can never seem to ignore him. The other set includes people who are completely in awe of his brilliance and simplicity. It is hard to figure out, who would benefit more from reading this book. 

To be sure, it is not exactly a book of fresh writings by the author. For the most part, it is a collection of his already published articles and essays over the past two decades across different themes that he has been associated with — such as hunger, poverty, health care, education, and employment etc. He has, of course, carefully curated them and placed them in neat little chapters for the benefit of a reader who has not followed his ruminations over the years. But he admits considering scrapping the book after he “read somewhere that publishing a collection of one’s op-eds as a book was ‘the ultimate vanity’”. Thankfully, he didn’t because readers would have been deprived of his brilliant articulation of what he trying to achieve (in the book’s introduction) and the critical need for public-spiritedness in the country’s development discourse (in the last essay of the book).

Mr Dreze’s detractors have long argued, albeit sotto voce, that he has lost his way as a formal economist and his transformation into an “activist” has meant that his research cannot be seen to be unbiased. For his part, Mr Dreze came to a stark realisation around the time he started working with the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) and the Akal Sangharsh Samiti, organisations campaigning to establish the rights of the drought-affected people in Rajasthan in 2000. Writing in a rather famous paper titled “On research and action”, in the Economic and Political Weekly (2002), Mr Dreze shared his humbling experience. “My association with this campaign was an eye-opening experience in many ways. … After 15 years of research on hunger and famines, one is perhaps entitled to feel like an ‘expert’ of sorts on these matters…but when I tried to explain to them [the villagers] the main insights of this work, they were not exactly impressed.” This was in the immediate glow of his longtime collaborator, Amartya Sen, winning the Nobel Prize in 1998. Mr Dreze realised: “In seminar halls in Delhi, or for that matter in London or Harvard, one hears all kinds of weird ideas that would never pass muster in an Indian village”.

Since then he has been treading a different course, which involves collecting first-hand experience about the Indian people and questioning many of the “superstitions” in formal economics. For instance, the assumption that every individual essentially acts in self-interest. But as Mr Dreze argues in the last essay, this is just not true. Readers will enjoy the humorous disdain with which he swats one of the fundamental premises of economics. “It is difficult to imagine what a totally selfish person might look like (perhaps hard-core egoists don’t have babies, so they are not around anymore)”. But on a more serious note he posits that people do act for other reasons — public-spiritedness being one of them; and he defines it as “a reasoned habit of consideration for the public interest”. It is important to note the phrase “reasoned habit” which distinguishes public-spiritedness among humans from the well-established patterns of co-operative behaviour among animals. Examples of public-spiritedness? Being punctual for meeting is one. But a more telling example is exercising one’s vote in a democracy — an easily “forgotten” act on which rests the entire edifice of electoral democracy. “Each voter knows that his or her vote will not make a difference… yet a large proportion… of people do vote… even… in difficult circumstances…”

In the introduction, Mr Dreze explains why he continues to mix “research” with “action” and why it is a better fit for India’s fledgeling democracy. In short, because more often than not, the so-called “evidence”-based policy misses out as its architects do not have an understanding of the ground realities. In that sense, this book would make a great reading for Prime Minister Narendra Modi — his distinction between Harvard and “hard work” finds resonance in the jholawala’s approach to economics.