A creative mind on social issues

Suppose that there was a ritual in the world whereby in each city the mayor tosses a coin 20 times at the start of each millennium.... Let us suppose in Washington a researcher wanted to see if there was reason to believe that there was a particular bias in coin tosses in Washington and he discovered that in fact all the 20 tosses had yielded heads.

He would be tempted to publish a paper entitled, 'Heads Bias in Washington', and may have speculated if having too many senators or too many lobbyists caused this.... It is indeed very surprising to get 20 heads in a row.... Given that this ritual is followed in thousands and thousands of cities, the probability is very high that a sequence of 20 heads will occur somewhere. So the fact that this has occurred somewhere is of no interest whatsoever."

That's Kaushik Basu for you, giving an example of how one can be led astray in the interpretation of probabilities. Without disrespect to any of his illustrious predecessors in the post of Chief Economic Advisor to the Finance Ministry that he now occupies, I think Kaushik is different because he is a theoretical economist with a Ph.D. thesis on revealed preference of government. There are those who will describe him as a development economist. Still others will have read his popular columns, a pastime not every self-respecting economist dabbles in. He straddles several spaces, including creating board games, writing plays and hand-painting saris.

This volume, the fourth in a series, has a sub-title that states "Inter-Disciplinary Transgressions" and mentions political economy, moral philosophy and economic sociology. There is a fair bit of law in the essays, too. (Law figured conspicuously in Volumes I and III.) The 18 essays are divided into four parts — methodological foundations; culture, custom, and consuetude; moral, philosophy and ethics; and economic theory in society and polity.

A few are co-authored and the last essay is a longish review of Stiglitz's "Globalization and Its Discontents". These are collected papers, so they are not new and have been reprinted as they were originally published. Therefore, there is some repetition across the essays. Kaushik writes well, like his mentor Amartya Sen. However, there is one technique where he has out-done the mentor: of picking up an ordinary example, using that as an illustration, and then building an elegant theoretical model.

The essays cover methodology, the nature of causality, social norms, group identity and so on. Despite game theory, mathematics and modelling, there is plenty for the so-called laity. Kaushik writes: "John Bon Jovi has a wellknown song that goes, 'It's been raining since you left me.' The popular Bengali singer, Anjan Dutta, on the other hand, has a song that says, 'The clouds bring no rain, when you are not around.'...It is meant to be understood that John Bon Jovi is referring to the gloom and depression associated with rain.... A person brought up in India knows that rain is associated with beauty and romance, and its absence denotes gloom and bereavement."

This then takes off into a discussion on social norms and cooperative behaviour. Out of the four volumes that are now available, this is the one that will be of most interest to the non-economist, with some competition from Volume I. One should not look at it as a compilation of an economist's output. It is more a compilation of a fertile and creative mind thinking about social problems.