A WIDE CANVAS
LEADERSHIP AND IDEAS
What do our leaders know? Do they update their knowledge? What are the sources of such updating?
John Kenneth Galbraith, that fine economist who was the US Ambassador to India during the Kennedy years once related an incident. He was once visiting President Kennedy in his office and noticed a book he had read lying on his desk. Kennedy mentioned that it dealt with the state of Burma then. Galbraith was in India, so near Burma but had not known about the book! He took it from the President to read, to update his knowledge of the region. Imagine the President of the US reading a book on Burma amidst all his other important work! This is how real leaders remain leaders, and grow in knowledge.
J.K.Galbraith around 1940.
In the absence of such growth, leaders remain captives of old ideas and formulae, trapped in a mental past. As Lord Keynes, perhaps the greatest economist of the last century said:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually slaves of some defunct economist.
Madmen in authority,who hear voices in the air are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
I am sure the power of vested interest is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.
Lord Keynes in 1933.
It is good for a leader to be a man of ideas, or at least to be receptive to new ones. But there are ideas, and ideas. Our PM Modi is moved by the idea of "development". But how does he propose to achieve it? "Make in India", he says. And for this he is inviting the capitalists of the world to come, set shop or factory in India. He is even prepared to acquire good farm lands for the purpose.
PM launches 'Make in India' global initiative.
"By Narendra Modi [CC BY SA-2.0 (http:://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0] via Wikimedia Commons"
Now. The idea of development is not so novel. This was what Nehru was repeating over 60 years ago, when we were in school and college. This is an old cliche which means nothing, in practice- except perhaps more paper schemes, more bureaucracy, more expenditure, more taxes, higher inflation, more corruption, and greater all round misery for the common man. The industries selected for the 'Make in India' initiative are all highly polluting and it remains to be seen whether Indian bureaucracy can enforce strict norms, to ensure that our land and environment are not further degraded- a task in which they have failed so far.
Nehru sought to achieve it through Soviet-model planning and socialistic pattern, through a mixed (up) economy which ended in disaster in 1991, two years after USSR itself collapsed! And Modi is trying to do it through crony capitalism ( All capitalism today is crony capitalism, like all socialism is bureaucratic and political control). Unless he can be clear as to what contents he puts into the idea of 'development' it is just empty slogan. Who knows. People unfairly accuse his party of being Hindu fundamentalist, so he might be revealing himself as a development fundamentalist! Or growth maniac, as Nehru was planning maniac! But all fundamentalisms are unbalanced reactions to a hostile environment. And do not work.
After all, Russian Communist fundamentalism was not defeated by Western capitalist fundamentalism, or by NATO, or weapons. It collapsed due to its won unworkability and innate illogicality. And subsequently, it has not emerged as a market economy, either. And western capitalist fundamentalism was saved in the 30s by the prescriptions of Keynes- ie by timely and intelligent modification. But later it too led to problems of 'stagflation'. But it was more due to over dosage and wrong usage ( ie application for inappropriate problems) , rather than due to the defect of the medicine itself. No economic solution is a panacea for all ills; problems arise when politicians and their paid economic stooges make a fetish of it. It is very much like what we hear today in the medical profession: indiscriminate use of antibiotics has made many strains of bacteria drug-resistant: hardly a defect of the antibiotics themselves!
The point is: the kind of 'development' model Modi has in mind also does not work well. Here too the words of Keynes are apt:
The decadent international but individualistic capitalism in the hands of which we found ourselves after the war is not a success.It is not intelligent.It is not beautiful.It is not just. It is not virtuous. And it does not deliver the goods. In short we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.
This is the problem we face. Our experience with socialistic pattern was painful , full of self-inflicted suffering and frustration. We certainly do not want to go back to the permit-quota-licence-inspector Raj. But did it ever end? It is very much alive. Our FM lives by it. All our politicians are so used to it. And then, we have today international corporate capitalism, not individual capitalism. And the measures that Modi sarkar proposes will make the international gangs loot India. His team is already playing ball with promoters of GM crops- not scientists, but corporates who employ the scientists to do their bidding! (while there is great agitation in all developed countries against GM crops). Development as an idea is good. It is our understanding of it, the shape we give it, and the road to it that are strewn with problems and difficulties. From the frying pan, we should not jump into the fire.
The basic economic problem is simple. It is our fixed ideas, and commitment to certain positions which prevent a solution. The problem is that all our political parties live on dead dogmas. Nehru was from Cambridge. Man Mohan Singh is from Cambridge. Amartya Sen is from Cambridge. (These latter two were students of Joan Robinson who was an admirer of the Lenin-Stalin-Mao dispensation and was blind to its faults and atrocities.)They can only look at the world through socialist glasses, which are outdated.
The alternative is not the type of MNC capitalism that is practised in the US. It is not Free Market enterprise. Today, the whole world is converted into a market , controlled by the big MNCs., moved by speculation, huge financial flows and lack of national or international control.The US survives on debt; it survives on military-industrial complex; it survives on the capitalist-politician nexus. It survives on unrestrained, mad, senseless consumption, generating enormous waste and pollution and environmental damage. They cut welfare and foster the corporates who have transferred manufacture and employment outside the country for the sake of their profit. So, it is corporate bottom line that drives their economy- for the time being. And when they have a problem, they can externalise it. This model can hardly work in other countries. Every one will not have an Iraq to invade, if there is a domestic economic problem.
India has the resources; it has the market; it has the trained workforce; it has or can make the technology which we need. And we have the requisite skill and manpower which is enriching the whole world. Then why does it not work here? Why can we not make what we need here, ourselves? Because it is not allowed to work here! Leaders like Man Mohan Singh (if ever he was one) and Modi and others of all political hues do not allow it to work! Political colonialism is replaced by corporate colonialism!
A leader should know what to do. His team should know how to do it. The bureaucracy should be cut to size and made to work, and made accountable for what
it fails to do. It is 10 months now since Modi took over. What has he to show for it- substantial, not symbolic? It was J.K.Galbraith who said:
it fails to do. It is 10 months now since Modi took over. What has he to show for it- substantial, not symbolic? It was J.K.Galbraith who said:
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This and not much else is the essence of leadership.
Churchill in England during the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt in the US during the depression readily come to mind as leaders of this type. Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore was such a leader. Though Nehru is eulogised, he only increased our anxiety: Kashmir problem, linguistic states, China problem, growing statism, economic failure- he increased our anxiety on all fronts. A leader has to put the bureaucracy to work. Modi had enormous good will. And he generated some hope. Time is running out, and hope is turning into vapour.
NOTE:
1.
Our govt still measures growth or development by GDP. This is pure bullshit. GDP just indicates the money income generated in an economy in a year, and does not measure welfare. Nor does it show how the national stock has been affected. Simon Kuznets, who proposed the measure of national income (but not in the form of GDP which developed later) in 1934 to the US Congress very clearly said:
The valuable capacity of the human mind to simplify a complex situation in a compact characterisation becomes dangerous when not controlled in terms of definitely stated criteria. With quantitative measurements especially, the definiteness of the results suggests, often misleadingly,of a precision and simplicity in the outlines of the object measured. MEASUREMENTS OF NATIONAL INCOME ARE SUBJECT TO THIS TYPE OF ILLUSION AND RESULTING ABUSE, especially since they deal with matters that are at the centre of conflict of opposing social groups where the effectiveness of an argument is often contingent upon oversimplification.
All these qualifications upon estimates of national income as an index of productivity are just as important when income measurements are interpreted from the point of view of economic welfare. But in the latter case additional difficulties will be suggested to anyone who wants to penetrate below the surface of total figures and market values. Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income.THE WELFARE OF A NATION CAN, THEREFORE, SCARCELY BE INFERRED FROM A MEASUREMENT OF NATIONAL INCOME AS DEFINED ABOVE.
Simon Kuznets (1901-1985) Author of the concept of National Income and its measurement. Nobel Laureate, 1971.
www.nobelprize.org.
Just see how cautious Kuznets is in proposing this measure, and how candid in telling us that this does not measure welfare! Great people do not make tall claims. It is the tin-horn economists who have made GDP a sacred cow, and use it as an unchallenged measure of welfare. In subsequent years, mainstream economists concentrated increasingly on GDP,(Quantitative measurement) and neglected welfare (qualitative aspects). For instance if a city should be bombed, or be subject to an epidemic, the resulting increase in economic activity would add to GDP! How nice!
2.
French President Sarkozy appointed a Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress in 2008, consisting of 25 eminent social scientists, including 5 Nobel Laureate economists. In their report, the Commission dealt with the inadequacies of the concept of GDP and said "GDP fetishism" should be given up. It highlighted some fundamental issues, two of which are very relevant to us right now. The GDP does not reckon how our capital is used up, in creating income. Second, it does not take into account the effect on future generations of our present development policies. For instance, if our mineral deposits in Orissa and Jarkhand are used up now, with generous help from MNCs under 'Make in India', it will surely boost our incomes now, but be disastrous for future generations, whose choice will be restricted or taken away. This is an issue of social, political and economic ethics. I wonder whether our politicians or economists think about such deeper issues at all!
By European People's Party[CC BY-SA 2.0]
creativecommons via Wikimedia commons.
The report of the Sarkozy Commission is presented in a book with a very revealing title: Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add UP.
But long before that, on 18 March, 1968, Robert F.Kennedy, who was running for Democratic party nomination for American President said in a speech:
Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year: but that Gross National Product- if we judge the United States of America by that- that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm, and counts nuclear warheads and armoured cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programmes which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriage, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
This was said almost 50 years ago not by an economist but by a politician who had had a liberal education! Economists are still out of their breath when it comes to welfare! It is such ideas which make for true leaders. We can get economists by truck loads, and politicians enough to fill all the seas of the world. To find a true leader will be a miracle.
At the Democratic party convention in 1964, Robert Kennedy recited these lines from Shakespeare in memory of his slain brother, President John Kennedy:
When [he]# shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Romeo and Juliet,3.2.21-25
# In the original, it is 'I' in some versions.
This is very poignant, for Robert Kennedy was himself assassinated on 5 June 1968, and became a little star!
Robert Kennedy speaking at a rally, 1963
By Warren k.Leffler.
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