November 22, 2024

4 thoughts on “Amartya Sen Speaks at Cornell

  1. I thought the lecture was excellent–he was hilarious and very intelligent. I disagreed with him on some things like health care and pollution, but more about his assumptions than his recommendations given his assumptions. e.g. if the social cost of pollution is high, then we SHOULD tax polluters. And he was right that it requires collaboration between modern countries, with penalties for those who don’t comply. All this was spot on given that pollution has high social costs . I would argue that pollution is not (in general) as big a social cost as people say. Given that assumption, you get a different answer.

    This is on a complete tangent, but I read “The Use of Knowledge in Society” recently by Hayek, which was an excellent paper, and it somewhat relates to this. One of his points is that we know how to find the efficient outcomes given all circumstances . But we don’t know all the circumstance at any given time, and can’t; therefore the problem of economics is learning these circumstances, or finding a way to efficiently allocate resources without anyone explicitly knowing all of them. He goes on to argue in favor of the price system and against central market planning, which is unrelated to Sen’s lecture.

    Overall excellent lecture. Thought-provoking and insightful. I liked that he argued for eschewing dogma and “names.” Really hope everyone else was as lucky as I was to attend!

    What did you think Dennis?

  2. Like I said earlier, I thought it was good, but I’m skeptical about the usefulness of this “abandon ideology and take the pragmatic route” approach. I did like his points, though, about examining individual institutions and not just thinking in terms of whether or not “socialism” or “capitalism” would be best for us at the moment.

  3. I suspect that all of the people who have died from cancer due to the environmental toxins released by polluters would disagree with you on the notion that the social costs to pollution aren’t very high.

  4. OK Mr. Nagowski, you caught me. “I would argue that pollution is not (in general) as big a social cost as people say.” Oh, radical me! You must realize you’re precisely an example of what I’m talking about. I for one appreciate your keen sense of wit and satire.

    The point of the post was not to debate the seriousness of pollution. Next time, rather than having the knee jerk reaction “He said pollution not big deal, so he bad!”, try to consider what the person is actually saying. I heard Sen argue in favor of things I disagree with, but I still came away impressed with him. It wasn’t “He said universal health care good. He bad!”. So grow up.

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