Sen bashing

…Sen deservers to get bashed a bit, because he did, after all, win this year´s Nobel. Even at his best, he can be at his worst. Consider one of the jew areas in which he said something important – his work on the history of famines. On that topic, 1 don´t for a moment question his passion or compassion, especially since he lived through the 1943 Bengal famine at the age of nine. But I do occasionally question his good sense.     Sen´s finding was that the starvation associated with these awful events has mainly been due to lack of access to food, rather than lack of its availability; the food, he says, was there all along, except the access was denied. That´s a pretty simple and stark distinction, but amazingly, Sen dresses it up with an absurd formal apparatus.

At the beginning of his 1981 journal article, "Ingredients of Famine Analysis" (one hopes he used that title ironically), we confront a graph with lots of lines and curves on it, In which the horizontal axis is labelled "Food" and the vertical axis "NonFood" and underneath it we read, "With a price ratio p, and a minimum food requirement OA, the starvation set Si is given by the region OAB. If the endowment vector is xi, the person is in a position to avoid starvation…." and on and on in that vein.