Sam Pawlett wrote:
Brad De Long wrote:
> Your fight is with Amartya Sen--not me.
>
> But my strong impression is that you have lost the argument already.
>
> Sen is not dumb, is careful, and rarely makes mistakes...
>
He uses the most amount of footnotes I've seen too. If I remember,
didn't Sen point out that India was actually exporting food during
its famines?
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I am not sure about India, but Ireland exported food throughout the
potatoe famine. So you see Louis, it really is the free market at work.
The Irish and the Indians didn't have sufficient income to make their
"preferences" (i.e. not starving) apparent in the market place, so they
did not receive any food. The market efficiently allocated it to those
with sufficient income. Now all that stuff about the colonialist military
setting up the landholding property rights which denied the colonists of
any access to income, THAT occurred prior to the current market period,
and thus is irrelevant to the current market analysis. If you want
to discuss that, you should be discussing political science or history,
but not economics. ;).
Summer's memo is neoclassical economics at its best, not its worst.
Doug Orr
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
