Author: Alex M Thomas

A passionate student of economics!

Arun Bose: An Introduction to His Life and Work

This blog post introduces you to the economist Arun Bose (1919-2003) who made important contributions to Sraffian and Marxian literature. Bose was called a ‘Sraffian Marxist’ alongside Ronald Meek and Ian Steedman by Samir Amin in a 2015 article in the Monthly Review. Despite his substantial corpus of published writings, his work seems to have been largely forgotten within India. Therefore this essay provides an introduction to his life and work and ipso facto is a modest attempt at generating interest in Indian economic thought specifically (and more generally in the history of economic thought). In the past, blog posts which fall into this theme dealt with the economics of Krishna Bharadwaj and VKRV Rao. And what follows is a condensed version of Section II of my article ‘Arun Bose on Sraffa: Value Theory and Demand‘ published in Artha Vijnana as part of a 2018 special issue dedicated to the ‘Indian Reception of Piero Sraffa’s Economic Contributions’.”

Born in Calcutta, Bose had become interested in Marxian political economy by the end of high school. He completed his undergraduate studies (Tripos) at Cambridge University between 1937 and 1940. One of Bose’s recollections of Cambridge is the following: ‘During extra-curricular sessions, both Maurice Dobb and Piero Sraffa discussed economic theory and Marxian political economy, leaving an indelible impression on my mind’. Moreover, Bose was actively involved in student movements there and also joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. In the decade following this, Bose worked as a full-time activist in the Indian communist movement.’

Around 1957, Bose decided to resume his study of economic theory. Under the Commonwealth Universities Interchange scheme, he spent a year at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1960-1. Subsequently, he was asked to join the newly founded Kirori Mal College in Delhi at the behest of the economist B. N. Ganguli and the English professor Sarup Singh. B. N. Ganguli is the author of Indian Economic Thought: Nineteenth Century Perspectives (1977), one of the handful of books dedicated to Indian economic thought. In memoriam, the Economics Department at Kirori Mal has organised public lectures under the auspices of Arun Bose Memorial Lectures.’

Between 1963 and 1965, Bose closely engaged with Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960). Bose published a comment in Economic Weekly (now Economic & Political Weekly) in response to Krishna Bharadwaj’s review of Sraffa’s book entitled ‘Value through Exogenous Distribution’. Bose also published responses to the reviews of Sraffa’s book by Roy Harrod and David Collard respectively in the Economic Journal, one of the main international vehicles for the dissemination of economic ideas. And in 1965, he published an article on Sraffa’s book in the Economic Journal. And during this period, they corresponded; Bose sent Sraffa five letters to which he received responses to all but one (more details about the correspondence is available at the online archives of Trinity College).’

Bose’s next publication was after six years: an essay on Marx in the 1971 volume of the History of Political Economy; it continues to be an important journal devoted to the history of economic thought. Next year, he published another essay on Marx in Science & Society. After another brief hiatus from publication, he published a book in 1975 titled Marxian and Post-Marxian Political Economy; he gave a series of lectures at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Calcutta with the same title. Bose acknowledges Sukhamoy Chakravarty for reading the book draft and for familiarising him with modern linear economic theory (Chakravarty had also reviewed Sraffa’s book which had appeared in 1961 in Arthaniti, the journal of the Department of Economics, University of Calcutta). I reproduce an excerpt from the book’s preface where Bose describes his reason for being impressed with Sraffa’s work:

‘Piero Sraffa impressed me with his conviction that it was perfectly possible, though difficult, to develop a theory of political economy into an exact science, based on absolute precision of concept ‘ however much we may approximate in empirical work ‘ which would be wielded as effectively as a surgeon’s or a welder’s tools, to dissect or dismantle, and then reassemble the ‘unseen’ interconnections of the economic process, whose cognition is essential for revolutionary political action’ (p. 11; also reproduced in my Artha Vijnana article on p. 29).’

He went on to publish two follow-up books: Political Paradoxes and Puzzles (1977) and Marx on Exploitation and Inequality: An Essay in Marxian Analytical Economics (1980). While a visiting fellow at the Delhi School of Economics (DSE) during 1976-7, Bose delivered lectures on capital theory. (Today, in India, to the best of my knowledge, capital theory is a full course (albeit elective/optional) only at the University of Hyderabad; Bharadwaj had played an important role in designing their MA Economics curriculum along with Amiya Bagchi, Amit Bhaduri, and K. L. Krishna.) A year before his retirement from Kirori Mal College in 1985, Bose published a letter in the Economic & Political Weekly titled ‘Piero Sraffa’; this was in response to P. R. Brahmananda’s obituary of Sraffa in 1983, also in the form of a letter. Brahmananda had himself engaged with Sraffa’s book in a set of three articles in 1963 in the Indian Economic Journal; these were later reproduced in the first volume of the 4-volume Piero Sraffa: Critical Assessments edited by J. C. Wood (1995, Routledge).’

After his retirement, Bose employed his ‘Sraffian Marxist’ approach within a wider social scientific framework to explain India’s socioeconomic condition. In this period, he published the following: an article each in Economic & Political Weekly (1986) and International Review of Sociology Series I (1987); and two books in 1989 titled Theories of Development of Material and Human Resources and Education: Requiem or Rethinking’ and India’s Social Crisis: An Essay on Capitalism, Socialism, Individualism and Indian Civilization. In his Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani identifies India’s Social Crisis as an important contribution to ‘historical sociology’ (p. 218).’

To conclude, there are enough published works by Arun Bose for someone who is interested in writing a dissertation or thesis in the area of Indian economic thought. Moreover, his notes, manuscripts, and correspondence are available for purposes of research at Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML) although I personally found them to suffer from poor penmanship. It is extremely vital that we engage with the ideas of economists such as Arun Bose who provide an alternative way of understanding our economic surroundings.’

Economic Survey 2019-20 and the Missing Role of the Government

According to the Economic Survey 2020 (ES hereafter), wealth is created by the ‘invisible hand supported by the hand of trust’. This is another way of saying that economic prosperity can be achieved by free markets with the government playing the role of an enabler (primarily to enforce private property rights). The introductory paragraphs of the first chapter states the following: ‘During much of India’s economic dominance [in the past], the economy relied on the invisible hand of the market for wealth creation’; ‘the evidence across various sectors of the economy illustrates the enormous benefits that accrue from enabling the invisible hand of the market’; and that the ‘invisible hand needs to be strengthened by promoting pro-business policies’ (p. 1). In the chapter, there are quotes from old texts from the ‘Indian’ subcontinent such as Arthashastra and Thirukural to point out that wealth creation was strongly encouraged. Subsequently, as empirical evidence, they show India’s (historical) contribution to world GDP.

It is surprising to notice that our Chief Economic Advisor (CEA), Krishnamurthy Subramanian, the person responsible for the writing of the Economic Survey, did not object to the following mistake: ‘The ultimate measure of wealth in a country is the GDP of the country’ (p. 14). ‘While GDP or income is a flow concept (measured over a period of time), wealth is a stock concept (measured at a point in time); however, let us try to believe that the chief economic advisor meant income when he wrote wealth. Otherwise, it is an elementary mistake.’

The ES misunderstands Adam Smith’s political economy when it talks about ‘invisible hand’. It is stated that ‘wealth creation and economic development in several advanced economies has been guided by Adam Smith’s philosophy of the invisible hand’ and ‘During much of India’s economic dominance, the economy relied on the invisible hand of the market’ (p. 6). What is the meaning of invisible hand in Smith’ Smith used ‘invisible hand’ as a metaphor to indicate that there are unintended consequences to individual actions and it figures only once in his Wealth of Nations. However, it is true that this term has been appropriated subsequently to paint the image of Smith as a free market economist, which he unarguably was not. As a counter to the view of Smith as a free-market apologist, it is important to note that Smith believed that education should be provided by the government to offset the cognitive ill-effects from division of labour and that it should be affordable to the worker who earns the lowest wage (for more on this, see Thomas 2019).’

According to the dominant economic theory (popularly termed neoclassical but marginalist more accurately), given preferences, technology, and endowments, under conditions of perfect competition, equilibrium prices (of commodities as well as labour) are (Pareto) efficient. [Pareto efficiency means that no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.] Of course, mainstream economists recognise that an outcome might be efficient but it need not be fair. The ES reduces this formal idea to the following: ‘the market economy is based on the principles that optimal allocation of resources occurs when citizens are able to exercise free choice in the products or services they want’ (p. 6). Leaving aside the conceptual issues with the marginalist theory of value and distribution, how can the market economy in reality not just reproduce but also exacerbate the inequalities of wealth (or endowments), income, caste, and gender”

The ES appears to grossly misunderstand both the historical position and conceptual basis of Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. But was the market economy dominant during the time of Arthashastra as claimed by the ES’ Here are two excerpts from Thomas Trautmann’s 2012 book Arthashastra: The Science of Wealth (for my critical assessment, see Thomas 2016).’

‘As regards the quantity of rations to be issues to inmates in the king’s household: for upper-caste (Arya) males, the measure is one prastha of rice, one-fourth prastha curry (supa), salt one-sixteenth of the curry and butter or oil one-fourth of the curry. For lower castes, the measures are less. It is one sixth prastha of curry, and half the butter or oil. For women the measure is less by one quarter, and for children, it is less by one half. Thus ration units are proportionate to the status of the person and the body size.”(pp. 57-58)

 

‘In the case of commodities distant in place and time, the Overseer of Trade, expert in determining prices, shall fix the price after calculating the investment, the production of goods, duty, interest, rent and other expenses.’ (as quoted on p. 130)

The above two passages dispel the myth propagated in the ES that market forces had a ‘free’ reign in the past. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. There was a ‘division of labourers’, to use BR Ambedkar’s phrase, and food rations were provided on the basis of caste. Therefore, there existed no mobility of labour, and this is hardly surprising in a caste-based society. Moreover, prices were controlled because they believed in the concept of a ‘fair price’ which the market would not be able to set.’

ES also believes that the growth in incomes will trickle down to all: ‘Greater wealth creation in a market economy enhances welfare for all citizens’ (p. 11; emphasis added). ‘Wealth creation in the economy must ultimately enhance the livelihood of the common person by providing him/her greater purchasing power to buy goods and services’ (p. 14). How’ This happens in theory only if you make strong assumptions and neither is there strong empirical evidence to back this claim. On the same page, it is mentioned that the ‘freedom to choose is best expressed in an economy through the market where buyers and sellers come together and strike a bargain via a price mechanism’ and the reason is the following. ‘Where scarcity prevails and choice between one use of scarce resources [sic] another must be made, the market offers the best mechanism to resolve the choice among competing opportunities’ (p. 11). This is indeed the mainstream teaching of marginalist economics. It is true that marginalist economics views economics as a science of choice (under conditions of scarcity). However, what we require is a theory of production–available in the political economy of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and JM Keynes. In India, there is neither scarcity of labour nor of capital. Ipso facto there can be no scarcity of commodities. What we are faced with is surplus labour and capital; the former is manifested in high labour unemployment and the latter in high excess capacity. The macroeconomic problem is thus one of aggregate demand deficiency.’

The current economic survey applies a (marginalist) microeconomic analysis to our central macroeconomic problem–unemployment (this is not particular to this year; for another such attempt when Kaushik Basu was the CEA, see Thomas 2012). Thus, it argues ‘that government intervention hurts more than it helps in the efficient functioning of markets’ (p. 12). Within the marginalist paradigm, government intervention reduces ‘economic efficiency’ and therefore is discouraged. However, for the most important macroeconomic problem of unemployment, the government ought to play a key role in the economy. This is necessary because domestic private investment is volatile and foreign private investment even more so. It is extremely unjust for any government to transfer its core macroeconomic responsibility of full employment to the private sector.’

[This is a revised version of my talk delivered at a public discussion on the Union Budget on 16 February 2020 organised by Bengaluru Collective, Centre for Social Concern, Ashirvad, and St. Joseph’s College. The link to the video is:’https://www.youtube.com/watch’v=8VA6OmzDp6A]

 

Frank Ramsey and the Rate of Interest

I first came across Frank Ramsey in the preface to Piero Sraffa’s classic Production of Commodities by the Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory (1960). My recent interest in Ramsey is primarily motivated by the following news. Cheryl Misak, a philosopher based at the University of Toronto has recently completed a biography of Ramsey. This blog post provides an introduction to Ramsey’s life and his contribution to the growth theory literature. [It was reassuring to notice that I first blogged about History of Economic Thought (HET) explicitly more than 10 years ago.]

Ramsey was born in 1903. In the year 1920, he read around 45 books, which included Karl Marx’s Capital, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb’s The History of Trade Unionism, J. A. Hobson’s The Industrial System, J. S. MiIl, and Alfred Marshall’s Industry and Trade. At the age of 19, he was commissioned to review Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), a significant treatise in philosophy, for the journal Mind; the review was published in 1923. Subsequently, he was commissioned to translate Wittgenstein’s work into English. In Wittgenstein’s later work, Philosophical Investigations, there is an explicit acknowledgement of Ramsey. He was acknowledged for his critique/interventions of Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica in a new introduction by the authors. Sraffa, in his PCMC, had acknowledged Ramsey for mathematical help. In 1929-30, Ramsey met with J. M. Keynes, Sraffa, and Wittgenstein to discuss the theory of probability advanced by Keynes and Ramsey and also to discuss Freidrich Hayek’s theory of business cycles. Ramsey also had a close engagement with AC Pigou, a leading marginalist economist who was also the target of criticism in Keynes’s General Theory. Ramsey died in 1930.’

Under the patronage of Keynes, who was the editor of the’ Economic Journal, Ramsey published in it articles on the ‘theory of taxation’ (1927) and the ‘theory of saving’ (1928). In my 2019 article which critically evaluated the Nobel contributions of Paul Romer and Nordhaus, I had highlighted that Nordhaus employs a marginalist growth model drawing from Ramsey (without further comment). Ramsey’s question was the following: how much should a nation save today for future consumption tomorrow so as to maximise consumption across generations’ Nordhaus employs the optimal growth model with environmental protection as an important constraint. And, the rate of interest is seen as a price which equilibrates the society’s time preference. In other words, the rate of interest equilibrates the society’s preference for the future with that of the present. The policy implication when marginalist economists have a significant say in practical matters is as follows. Since the (actual) rate of interest captures the time preference of the society, this rate can be used to decide how much of current gross domestic product (GDP) should be devoted to environmental protection. In effect, not enough resources are being allocated to mitigate climate change and undertake environmental protection.’

Ramsey’s optimal growth theory also underlies Thomas Piketty’s position on economic growth. In his 2015 article in the American Economic Review, he writes that in the standard model ‘where each individual behaves as an infinitely lived family, the steady-state rate of return is well known to be given by the modified ‘golden rule’ r = ‘ + ‘ g (where ‘ is the rate of time preference and ‘ is the curvature of the utility function)’ (p. 2). The reciprocal of ‘ is the intertemporal elasticity of substitution which captures how much the representative family wishes to smoothen consumption over time. He uses this to point out that in general (marginalist) economic theory, we arrive at the r>g result–the focal argument in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century (2015; for a critical assessment see Thomas 2017). Furthermore, ‘in steady-state each family only needs to reinvest a fraction g/r of its capital income in order to ensure that its capital stock will grow at the same rate g as the size of the economy, and the family can then consume a fraction 1 ‘ g/r‘ (p. 3). To a marginalist (or neoclassical) economist, as Joseph Stiglitz wrote in an article in 1974, ‘interest rates are just intertemporal prices’ (p. 901).’

Therefore, for both Nordhaus and Piketty, interest rates are ‘intertemporal prices’ which allocate today’s income between today’s consumption and tomorrow’s consumption (today’s saving). As Ramsey (1928) writes, ‘The more we save the sooner we shall reach bliss, but the less enjoyment we shall have now, and we have to set the one against the other’ (p. 545). It is also interesting to note that their use of optimal growth models yields vastly different policy suggestions. While Nordhaus is conservative in his proposals for environmental protection, Piketty is progressive in his proposals to tax wealth.’

The rate of interest in Ramsey, as in Alfred Marshall, is a reward for waiting. Therefore, inequality in Ramsey necessarily arises from the heterogeneity of tastes or preferences; if a family is (relatively) more patient, it saves more than the (relatively) impatient one, and ends up owning all the capital stock (Attanasio 2015). How does this conception differ from the notions of interest rate found in Marx and Keynes’ For Marx, the rate of interest is the part of surplus value which is expropriated by the financial capitalist; the source of it is from the value added by labour. Keynes views the rate of interest as an expression of the preference for liquidity. To conclude, is the conception of the rate of interest found in Ramsey satisfactory for understanding a competitive economy’

REFERENCES

Attanasio, Orazio P.’ (2015), ‘Frank Ramsey’s Mathematical Theory of Saving’, The Economic Journal, 125 (March), pp. 269’294. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12229

Duarte, Pedro (2017), ‘Frank Ramsey’, In: Robert Cord (ed.) The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 2, pp. 649’671.

Monk, Ray (1990), Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, London: Vintage Books.’

Stiglitz, Joseph E. (1974), ‘The Cambridge-Cambridge Controversy in the Theory of Capital; A View from New Haven: A Review Article,’ Journal of Political Economy, vol. 82, no. 4, pp.’ 893‘903.

Further reading

Collard, David (2011), ‘Ramsey, saving and the generations’, Generations of Economists, London: Routledge.’

[Most of the contents of this post was informally discussed with my Economics colleagues at Azim Premji University on 19th February 2020.]

 

A Case for Pluralism in ‘Microeconomics’

[My return to blogging is motivated by the extremely warm response I’ve received in person – in the last 6 months – from several people who have been readers of this blog. I’m also happy to announce the publication of my co-edited book on the history of economic thought.]

The subject matter of microeconomics is enshrined in the economics curriculum at all levels – school, undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral. The central objective of microeconomic theory is to provide a solution for equilibrium price and quantity in both the commodity (say, apples or coconuts) and factor (wage and ‘capital’) markets. Indeed, questions of what is the source of value and what is the exchange value of two commodities have been posed much earlier. You can find answers in Kautilya, Aquinas, Petty, and Cantillon – all of them writing prior to Adam Smith’s foundational treatise on political economy.

 

Kautilya’s Arthashastra contains discussions of a fair price. Aquinas, drawing inspiration from Aristotle and Christianity, tries to arrive at the notion of a just price. One of the founders of political economy, William Petty, derives the distinction between necessary price and political price and possesses a rudimentary labour theory of value. Following Petty, Cantillon distinguishes between ‘intrinsic value’ and ‘market price’ based on a land-cum-labour theory of value. The contributions of Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and Sraffa to value theory follow this tradition of objectively determining value.

 

The dominant theory of value in contemporary economics is not the objective theories of value found in Ricardo, Marx, or Sraffa but the subjective theories of value whose pioneers are Jeremy Bentham, William Stanley Jevons (whose son taught at Allahabad University), Alfred Marshall, AC Pigou, and Paul Samuelson. The value theory (or microeconomic theory, as it is now called more fashionably) found in the textbooks of Hal Varian or Gregory Mankiw take the following as data when solving for equilibrium prices and quantity: (i) preferences, (ii) technology, and (iii) endowments. On the other hand, Piero Sraffa’s value theory, found in his Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960), takes the following as given when arriving at a solution for prices and one distributive variable: (i) size and composition of output, (ii) technology, (iii) the real wage or rate of profit.

 

How do you measure the data listed above’ While technology, endowments, and real wage can be measured in terms of the commodity-mix, the rate of profit is a pure number. However, how are preferences measured (or ordered)’ They are measured in a subjective manner. This is one of the core differences between the dominant marginalist theory of value and the Classical/Sraffian objective theory of value. Given this core difference, it is incorrect to treat the objective theory of value found in Ricardo or Marx as a precursor or rudimentary version of modern subjective theory of value. And therefore, it is important that students of economics learn about different value theories in microeconomics.

 

I shall end by drawing your attention to the practical implications of believing in the marginalist conception of the labour market vis-a-vis that of the classical economists (see an earlier post on wages). Under conditions of perfect competition, the equilibrium real wage is determined by the marginal product of labour. Any intervention, such as a minimum wage legislation or collective bargaining by the workers, results in imperfections and consequently leads to unemployment. However, in classical economics, real wage is exogenously determined though historical and social factors. If you believe in the marginalist conception, the logical policy recommendation is to eliminate any intervention/imperfection (such as minimum wage legislation or collective wage bargaining) whereas if you believe in the classical conception, you would treat collective wage bargaining and minimum legislation as legitimate ways of improving workers’ conditions.

 

This post argues that value theory matters for both contemporary politics and policy. And consequently, the teaching of microeconomics needs to become pluralistic. Moreover, as pointed out earlier, the politics of microeconomics ought to be made explicit. It is, as Keynes, said that we are the ‘usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”