Opinion Duel of the letterati

Pages have been written on Bhagwati versus Sen and there is not much more to add. It is an awkward truth,though,that the core of the argument between these two economic giants is really not about something that has one right answer. Economic growth (or increasing the size of the pie),and redistribution (making sure everyone gets some of the pie),are both essential objectives of government.

So is Bhagwati vs Sen really about some fundamental disagreement or do more prosaic concerns such as a heated political debate,newly released books and personal dislike explain most of what is going on? And if the latter,perhaps it would be better to pay less attention to what these great academics say in offhand interviews and op-eds and to pay more attention to what they write on at length.

Let’s go back a few months in time. In the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal,Paul Krugman and the Harvard economists,Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff,went hammer and tongs at each other. The battle echoed around the world after the discovery of errors in a paper by Reinhart and Rogoff suggesting that high debt is linked to low growth. As with our growth story right now,the debate in the media remained an acutely simplified version of what academics have actually written about and only served to remind us that blog posts and interviews are not the arena in which Nobel laureates and Harvard professors win their spurs. Again,therefore,it’s worth asking whether being a great academic automatically makes you a great pundit (assuming of course that such a creature exists).

And why stop here? Last year,once again accompanied by the release of a new book (Why Nations Fail,by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson),well-known economists went at each other. This time it was Jeffrey Sachs against the authors of Why Nations Fail. The question,as before,concerned the mysterious issue of economic growth,with Sachs arguing that a large part of what made poor countries poor comprised accidents of geography,disease prevalence and mineral resources. Meanwhile,Acemoglu and Robinson’s book focuses on one cause only — the nature of institutions and governing systems. They argue that this,and little else,accounts for why some nations fail. As with the examples earlier,the question is important but also complicated. And it’s unclear that the rest of us learned much from the public debate,because it was both simplified and shot through with antagonism.

For those not interested in economics,consider the battle last year between two great biologists — Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins — again coinciding with the publication of a popular science book (Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth),and again leading to hostile and therefore unenlightening arguments in the press. The debate this time was on a matter even more nuanced,namely,whether the characteristics of a group that encouraged group survival could drive evolution or whether,in fact,only individual survival probabilities mattered.

There are a host of other examples — Ramachandra Guha and Farrukh Dhondy’s debate on William Dalrymple a few years ago,for instance. The underlying questions on how to read and write Indian history were important,but the public tone between the protagonists was far from unbiased or academic.

Since even great academics are human beings with human biases,oversized egos and books to sell,it is a little hard to learn much from these clashes between titans in the popular press. Perhaps,therefore,it is even more important today that we look to journalists trained as scientists,economists and historians. This is a breed that,for science journalism at least,is slowly dying. Yet without real expertise in the fourth estate,we risk missing what matters about the complicated questions that underlie public debate,deafened as we are by the sound and fury.

The writer is a research fellow in sustainability science at the Kennedy School of Government,Harvard University

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