The worlds top

thinkers
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014
Introduction
W
hat constitutes a world thinker? Rodins
image is unhelpful; it suggests someone
observing from the wings of the world stage
even in extravagantly interesting times.
Those who topped Prospects World Thinkers
2014 poll are all public intellectuals, with influence, dedicated to
trying to devise answers to the most challenging questions in the
world today. Nearly 7,000 votes were cast in the online poll which
canvassed opinion from all corners of the globe.
This e-book aims to allow you to delver deeper inside the
minds of the 10 thinkers from our original long list of 50 who
attracted the most votes. Running a poll like this is not a science,
of course, and one should be wary of drawing conclusions from
the data. Nevertheless, the presence in the top 10 of five think-
ersAmartya Sen, Raghuram Rajan, Arundhati Roy, Mao Yushi
and Kaushik Basuwhose work focuses in different ways on the
challenges of development is surely significant. The struggles
of India to share its newly acquired wealth as widely as possi-
ble, and the future of Chinas distinctive combination of polit-
ical authoritarianism and breakneck economic expansion are
issues that should concern those of us who live in the developed
2
worldas well as the billions who are experiencing the growing
pains of development at first hand. In his essay, Sen asks why we
tolerate poverty and identifies bad reasoning rather than human
nature as the root cause. While Mao Yushi anatomises the bru-
tal legacy of the former Chinese Communist Party leader, Mao
Zedong in a provocative article which caused considerable con-
troversy in China.
The after-effects of the financial crisis on what used to be
called the first world is present in the writing of two of the
thinkers included here: Pope Francis, who has regularly criti-
cised the capitalist system, and Ha-Joon Chang, the Cambridge
economist who chastises his colleagues for their obsession with
mathematical models and has tried instead to revive the older
tradition of political economy.
Away from economics and politics, we are delighted to
include an essay from Mary Beards new collection, Confronting
the Classics, and an insightful profile of the Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Peter Higgs.
We hope you enjoy this thought-provoking collection that cel-
ebrates the success of this years poll and highlights the role of
the public intellectual in shaping global debate.
 1
AMARTYA SEN
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014
Why do we tolerate poverty?
amartya sen
F
or a person born in India, persistent encounters with
poverty are inescapable. By the time I was nine, I had
come to see poverty as a fact of life, even though I had
not yet fully grasped how appallingly nasty extreme
poverty could be. It was in my 10th year that the Ben-
gal famine of 1943 eruptedfour years before the end of the
Rajand the streets were suddenly full of dying people. Along
with that came the inhumanity to which the famished destitute
tends to descend.
I came from a middle-class, academic family; we were
stretched but not endangered. I was allowed to give a small
amount of rice to anyone who came to our door, but felt very sad
that we could not give more. Seeing the starving men and women
quarrelling with each other for their own share was as demeaning
as it was disturbing. I remember an occasion when I was able to
give a banana to an extremely emaciated woman with a severely
skinny child on her lap. After peeling the banana, she instinc-
tively put it into her own mouth, and then immediately pulled it
out, and burst into a piercing cry, bathing her emaciated face in
tears, as she gave the banana to her child. She looked at me, con-
fused and lost, and said, We are no longer human beingsour
instincts are now worse than those of animals.
If poverty is intolerable, it is not just because serious depriva-
tion makes our lives precarious and dreadful, but also because
extreme poverty can rob us of the normal human feelings that
we tend to have. Given the nastiness of extreme deprivation, and
the wealth of the world, there is some difficulty in explaining how
poverty is an accepted predicament of so many people across
the world. While the incidence of poverty varies from country
to country, there is no country that is free from it: the question
of why we tolerate the intolerable has relevance for every coun-
try in the world.
Blaming the victim is as common today as it was in the days
when very mild attempts at poverty relief, such as the English
Poor Laws, had their staunch opponents. It is not, however,
easy to see how the army of the unemployed and the destitute
can readily reverse their own predicament, without extensive
social and economic change. But what about people who are not
severely deprived? How do so many reasonably secure people
come to terms with the gruesome suffering around them? There
is something here that surely demands an explanation.
We can consider three possible explanations that might have
some plausibility. There is, first of all, the hypothesis of igno-
rancethe possibility that we do not really know with adequate
clarity what poverty is like and how prevalent it is around us. In
this line of explanation, we tolerate the terrible states of affairs
4
unknowinglyat least without adequate understanding.
A second line of explanation focuses not on ignorance, but on
a possible belief that poverty cannot, in fact, be removed or sub-
stantially reducedno matter how hard we try. Along with this
line of reasoning there can be some diagnosis of what is seen as
realism about the impossibility of curingor even substantially
reducingpoverty. The so-called realists often spend a lot of time
on this issuenot in trying to remedy poverty (a hopeless task, in
their view), but in criticising those whom the self-identified real-
ists see as hopelessly romantic, who attempt to do what can-
not be done, and in the process (the realists argue) often make
the world actually worse.
A third line of explanation takes the very different route of
postulating that human beings are basically self-centered crea-
tures who do not worry about others. Going further, some argue
that there is, in fact, no compelling reason why others should
have any moral obligation to help remove deprivation unless they
are themselves responsible for the condition of the deprived.
In discussing the arguments involved, I shall use the exam-
ple of India, focusing particularly on the slow removal of pov-
erty and deprivation in that rapidly growing economy. India
provides a good illustration of a country with much poverty
but also a numerically large middle class whose tolerance of
poverty is a big factor behind the amazingly slow progress in
reducing poverty levels.
I begin with the explanation of tolerance through igno-
rance. Indias poverty is no secretindeed very few social facts
have been as much discussed as poverty in India. That was not
always the case: the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith,
included India in general and Bengal in particular as being
among the richest countries in the world. He even attempted to
give, in The Wealth of Nations, an explanation of the prosperity of
this part of the world by invoking its abundant use of trade and
exchange (partly connected with its well-developed river naviga-
tion, in addition to sea trade), and referred to its exportation of
a great variety of manufactures (paying particular attention to
its flourishing textile industry).
India may well have been a relatively rich country in Smiths
time. Some recent empirical studies, for example by Prasannan
Parthasarathi (Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global
Economic Divergence 1600-1850), tend to confirm that view. How-
ever, there can be little doubt that the proportion of the poor
in India grew quite steadily during the period of British rule.
Indeed, during those centuries, when much of the rest of the
world, particularly the west, was rapidly progressing, GDP in
India seemed to move hardly at all. During the last half century
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 AMARTYA SEN
of British rule, when there was some expansion, Indias GDP per
capita grew at the amazingly low rate of 0.01 per cent per year.
As Angus Deaton, a leading econometrician and development
economist, has argued in his recently published and authori-
tative book, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of
Inequality: It is possible that the deprivation in childhood of
Indians born around midcentury [at the time the Raj ended, in
1947] was as severe as that of any large group in history, all the
way back to the Neolithic revolution and the hunter-gatherers
that preceded them.
Things have moved on since then (as Deaton has noted),
and Indias income today, even after correcting for inflation, is
about five times what it was per head when India became inde-
pendent. However, its income level is still very low in absolute
terms. Furthermore, there are huge numbers of people among
the Indian population who not only have very low income,
but whose opportunities for healthcare, education and social
security are dreadfully inadequate.
Yet the Indian middle class, with comparatively comfort-
able lives, is quite large, consisting of 200m (according to some
criteria, perhaps even 300m) relatively well-off people. They
may not be very rich by western standards, but do all right
in terms of modern facilities as well as traditional comforts.
One result of having such a largeand dynamicmiddle class
is that their dominance has had a huge impact over the pri-
orities and coverage of the Indian media, both print media
and broadcast channels. This may have made Indian news-
papers, television and radio remarkably lively, but one con-
sequence of the glitzy focus is the crowding out of the ugly
facts about Indias extensive poverty from media coverage and
public reasoning.
As it happens, India has taken a huge stride forward in terms
of the availability of information through its remarkably exten-
sive Right to Information Act, giving anyone access to a huge
variety of information involving public affairs, if and when any
such data are formally requested. But this has not brought the
unusual severity of the deprivation of Indias vast army of the
poor into the political consciousness of the vocal and influential
public. Having knowledge is not merely a matter of unrestricted
availability of information when sought.
Income data do, of course, bring out how poor most Indi-
ans still are, but to add to the complication in informational
reach, the poverty of most Indians relates also to meagre and
bad healthcare, limited and low-quality schooling, and other defi-
ciencies of public services in a way that is far more intense than
in many other developing countriesfrom China and Brazil to
Thailand and Indonesia. An exclusive concentration on private
incomes misses the role of public services in education, health-
care, social facilities and environmental support, which can
make a big difference in protecting people from deprivation and
expanding their freedoms.
Elementary facilities such as a decent school, an accessible
hospital, a toilet at home or two square meals a day are miss-
ing for a huge proportion of the Indian population in a way they
are not in, say, China or Thailand. Yet there is very little general
understanding of how out of line India is in international terms
in having such meagre public facilities for poverty removal, even
compared with other poor countries (as the empirical analy-
sis presented in the book I wrote last year with Jean Drze, An
Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions, shows).
If India is out of line compared with other countries in its
5
neglect of the persistently deprived, it is worth recalling that it is
also out of line with the rest of the world in having a longstand-
ing and pernicious caste system. It is hard to think that these two
phenomena are not connected, particularly since a huge propor-
tion of the disadvantaged families in contemporary India come
from low castes. Yet the temptation to find an adequate expla-
nation of the persistence of disadvantage solely in terms of the
history of the caste system would be an error. For one thing, there
are other disadvantaged social groups, such as poorer Muslims,
and much more severely, the tribal groups. But no less impor-
tantly, the Indian state that has done most for sharing the benefits
of schooling and health care for all is Kerala, which had an unusu-
ally strong form of caste systemperhaps the strongest in India
with the severest practice of untouchability. The socially radical
movement that began transforming Kerala in the 19th century
originated as an anti upper-caste initiative, with a particular focus
on providing the benefits of education to the lower castes. Even
the powerful Communist Party, which won the state elections
in 1957 and proceeded to try to complete the social transforma-
tions initiated in the previous century, was largely an off-shoot of
that anti upper-caste movement. Something similar happened in
the state of Tamil Nadu, with its history of strong caste barriers
and anti upper-caste movements, and its relative success in the
achievement of schooling and healthcare today. It is interesting
that the states with the strongest forms of caste division have led
the country in egalitarian sharing of education and health.
S
o the impact of the traditional caste system on inequal-
ity in modern India is, to a great extent, contin-
gent on the nature of the political developments in
different parts of India. More sociological research
is needed into these regional variations, but for India as a
whole the barriers of the caste system have made it harder to
turn the predicament of the disadvantaged into a focus of
public reasoning in general, and of the mainstream national
media in particular. The silence of the Indian media on the
subject has been deafening, and that has played a gigantic role
in keeping the population grossly uninformed and oddly com-
placent about the extreme nature of social inequality in India.
I turn now to the second line of explanation: belief in the
unremediability of poverty. Many people take the existence
and high incidence of poverty as a fact about which little can be
done. However, the hypothesis of inescapability is very difficult
to defend on empirical grounds, since major reductions in pov-
erty have been accomplished across the worldfrom Europe and
the USA to east Asia and Latin Americathrough determined
human efforts (Angus Deatons book provides a good under-
standing of how the great escape has been achieved).
A weaker version of this scepticism takes the form of argu-
ing in favour of single-minded concentration on high economic
growth, without having to do anything directly about poverty
reduction. Underlying this attitude is the increasingly popular
belief that rapid income growth, even without anything else, is
the quickest and most effective way of cutting down the inci-
dence of poverty and deprivation. How sound is this rather com-
fortable view that absolves society from doing things directly for
the poor?
It is correct to argue that an important part of any seri-
ous and large-scale programme of poverty removal must
include the cultivation and sustaining of economic growth. It
is also right to expect that some improvements in the lives of
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 AMARTYA SEN
the disadvantaged would tend to occur almost invariably with
economic growth, as employment and entrepreneurial oppor-
tunities expand, particularly for those who are not prevented
from seizing these opportunities by ill health, lack of school-
ing, social barriers or other disadvantages. However, pub-
lic support for the underprivileged is extremely important
in helping them to overcome disadvantage and in ensuring
that the fruits of economic growth are shared widely. With-
out it, a great many lives will continue to be tormented by hun-
ger, poverty, illness and other deprivations, despite spurts in
aggregate economic growth, from which the neglected groups
could, in many circumstances, get very little help. This has
indeed been happening spectacularly over the recent past in
India, with its falling behindin many cases much further
behinda number of developing countries in terms of living
conditions, even as it has overtaken them in economic growth.
A
n important understanding that has emerged quite
powerfully from studies of international experi-
ences is the recognition that the constructive use of
public resources generated by economic growth to
enhance human capabilities contributes not only to the qual-
ity of life but also to higher productivity, and further economic
growth. In fact, the so-called Asian experience, beginning with
Japan in the late 19th century, then South Korea, Taiwan, Sin-
gapore and eventually all of China, has been based on exploit-
ing the relationship between economic expansion and growth
on the one hand, and human advancement through education,
healthcare, better nutrition, and other determinants of human
capability on the other. This is a two-way relationship, of which
relatively little use has been made by India, thereby ensuring not
only that the country has fallen behind in terms of quality of life
and living standards, but also making its long-run growth more
fragile and less widely shared than it would have otherwise been.
There is some tragic irony here. Insights about the intimate
connections between health, education and productivity were
not at all absent from the visions of the pioneers of economic
and industrial development in India, such as Jamsetji Tata. As
Tatas biographer, FR Harris, describes his conception of indus-
trialisation, from the time of driving in the first stake, the Iron
and Steel Company assumes the function of a municipality
focusing on free healthcare, decent schooling, provision of safe
water and basic sanitation for all, among Tatas other indus-
trial and social initiatives. A clear understanding of the com-
plementarity between production and productivity, on the one
hand, and human well-being and capability-formation, on the
other, was also powerfully articulated in the famous report of
the Bhore Committee on health policy that nationalist leaders
commissioned for the future independent India, as the Raj was
coming to an end in 1946: If it were possible to evaluate the
loss, which this country annually suffers through the avoidable
waste of valuable human material and the lowering of human
efficiency through malnutrition and preventable morbidity, we
feel that the result would be so startling that the whole country
would be aroused and would not rest until a radical change had
been brought about. Alas, the country has not been aroused
by the continued neglect of health and education and other pub-
lic services; on the contrary, this neglect and its far-reaching
consequences have received little attention in public discussions
over more than six decades of the functioning of independent
and democratic India.
6
The media coverage of how much the government spends on
enhancing the lives of the Indian poor has been extraordinarily
distorted. Reading the constant repetition in the press of critcism
of the government for its fiscal irresponsibility in introducing
some minimal employment guarantees in rural areas and some
food subsidies for the poor, one would not guess how much larger
is the amount spent by the same government on subsidising the
good lives of the relatively prosperous classes. In terms of the lat-
est available figures, India spends at least 1 per cent of GDP sub-
sidising electricity for those who have power connections (nearly
400m people do not have any), 0.66 per cent of GDP on fertiliser
subsidy that mainly benefits the rich farmers and 0.97 per cent of
GDP on providing subsidised diesel, cooking gas and other petro-
leum products for those who have equipment for their use (not
excluding luxury sedans driven by the very rich). These items
together, even ignoring other forms of subsidy for the rich, come
to a total of 2.63 per cent of GDP.
Compared with that, the government spent 0.85 per
cent of GDP in providing food subsidy and 0.29 per cent
on employment supplementation, totalling 1.14 per cent of
GDP. Indeed, even if we add to those pro-poor spending pro-
grammes the entire governmental expenditure on health-
care of all types to all the people of India (1.2 per cent of
GDP), we get a grand total of 2.34 per cent of GDP, which is
still less than what the government directly spends in subsi-
dies that mainly benefit the relatively rich. If the thundering of
the media denouncing the subsidies for the poor on grounds of
fiscal soundness is fed by the priorities of Indias stratified
society, so is the comparative silence on the much larger sum
spent by the government directly in the interests of the dominant
groups of relatively prosperous Indians.
India has missed out pretty comprehensively on many of the
lessons of the Asian economic development that has rapidly
enhanced human well-being and capability as a part of pursu-
ing fast economic growth in much of east Asia. While the inef-
ficiency and inequity of an over-extended license Raj that
plagued India needed to be removed (as India has been doing,
and there is a strong case for speeding up that still incomplete
process), it is also extremely important for the government to
do those positive things that it should be able to bring about,
including much faster expansion of public education and pub-
lic health care. Indeed, those few states in Indiain particular
Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradeshthat provided com-
paratively more schooling and healthcare for all, have over the
decades climbed, from lowly positions, to be near the top of the
comparative table of per-capita GDP in India. There is perhaps
nothing as important for durable and shared economic growth
as the enhancement of an educated and healthy labour force.
Even in comparative terms today, Chinas experience shows
that devoting much more public revenue than India does to the
education, healthcare and nutrition of the people is compatible
withand can indeed be very helpful forhigh and sustained
economic growth. Comparing Indias miserable overall alloca-
tion of 1.2 per cent of GDP to government expenditure on health
with Chinas much higher figure of 2.7 per cent, one is struck
by two things: the poor appreciation of the demands of public
health in India; and the failure of many champions of economic
growth to grasp the precise requirements for fast and sustained
economic expansion.
How has China been able to do something that India has
failed to do? It seems plausible to argue that given the nature
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 AMARTYA SEN
of the political systems of the two countries, the vulnerabilities
from which they respectively suffer are radically different. With
Indias open and multi-party democratic system, deprivations
that are easy to see and politicise get immediate attention in gov-
ernance through a process that is by no means guaranteed in
China. The kind of famine that China had when the disastrous
Great Leap Forward killed around 30m peoplewith no criti-
cism in any of the newspaperscould not have occurred in dem-
ocratic India. Similarly, the sudden and unopposed abolition
of the entitlement to health insurance that all citizens of China
hadalbeit at a rather low levelbefore the economic reforms
of 1979 illustrates a kind of reversal of established political guar-
antees that would be hard to carry out in India. However, India
has different handicaps. Since its democratic system operates
on the basis of a general public understanding of the problems
faced by the country, when the problems are harder to focus on
and very inadequately discussed in the media, they may get lit-
tle political attention.
In China, by contrast, when the leaders of the political
system determine that something must be done, this can happen
with breathtaking rapidity, without any need to bring it about
through a democratic process of public reasoning shared by the
citizenry. The healthcare setback in 1979, led by the new political
convictions of the countrys leaders, was reversed sharply from
2004 onwards, when Chinas leadership changed its mindin this
case in favour of very supportive policies. By 2012, China had got
back to a near-universal coverage of healthcare and at a much
higher level of entitlements. A reassessment by the leadership
alone of what China urgently needed was enough to bring about
a radical change in the lives of all people.
The two systems have very different vulnerabilities. While
democratic India has never been in danger of going the way of
North Korea today, or of Cambodia, or for that matter of China
yesterday, Indias ability to march ahead in healthcare like
China has always been dependent on the slow process of bring-
ing about a shared public understanding of its ailments. And
this is where the practice of democracy in India has badly failed,
with its foggy media coverage and inadequate discussion of the
countrys health predicament contributing to persistent depri-
vations. Basic liberties and civic freedoms, including democratic
rights, may be much more vulnerable in China than in India, yet
India can learn much from what can be seen as the intelligent
welfarism of contemporary Chinese policies, without wanting to
go over to its more authoritarian system. (In the absence of dem-
ocratic guarantees, the Chinese system carries with it the kind
of riskssocial as well as individualto which all authoritarian
states are exposed.)
I am singling out India for illustration, but of course the fail-
ure to recognise the complementarity between economic growth
and human capability expansion applies to many other coun-
tries as well. It can be argued, for example, that an odd dis-
connect between public action and economic expansion has
plagued the recent attempts in Europe at overcoming the con-
tinents on-going economic and financial crisis through largely
indiscriminate austerity, without taking adequate account
of the far-reaching social and economic consequences of with-
drawal of public services and employment-supporting policies.
I move now to the third line of proposed explanation of the
tolerance of severe poverty. The claim that human beings are
incapable of sympathy for others is an often-repeated gen-
eralisation about mankind. Oddly enough, this epistemi-
7
cally unsupported and ethically befuddling point of view
is sometimes attributed to Adam Smith, based on a misread-
ing of a couple of paragraphs in one of his books dealing with
a different subject (why bakers, butchers, brewers and all of us
want trade and can benefit from it), and ignoring the rest of
his writings.
Smiths Theory of Moral Sentiments opens, in fact, with the
following sentence: How selfish soever man may be supposed,
there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest
him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness neces-
sary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the plea-
sure of seeing it. Smiths analysis is further developed as the
book proceeds, and he makes particular use of the thought-
experiment of the impartial spectator as a device for the rea-
soned self-scrutiny, of which, he thought, human beings are
perfectly capable. There is actually a close link between Smiths
discussion of the nature and reach of moral sentiments and the
gradual emergence of political demands across the world, over
the last two centuries, for social safety nets, human rights and
even for the establishment of a so-called welfare state.
T
hese connections apply as much to India as they do
to Europe and America and the rest of the world. For
example, the rapid elimination of famines that followed
Indian independence and the establishment of a func-
tioning democracy turn on the capability of people to relate to
each other. The share of famine victims in the total population
is always very smallit is typically not more than 5 per cent of
the people, and hardly ever exceeds 10 per cent. So the power of
voting in a majoritarian democracy would not be able to explain
how a democracy could serve as a deterrent to famines, if other
people really lacked sympathy or concern for the famine vic-
tims. Public discussion about the agony and misery of the famine
victims, along with an understanding of the complete prevent-
ability of famines, makes their elimination a policy priority for
a majority of the people and thus irresistible in a majoritarian
democracy. The use of the media in a functioning democracy
is critically important for broadening the political reach of peo-
ples moral reasoning.
To conclude, it is hard to believe that the quiet tolerance of
poverty and deprivation really arises from some basic inability
of people to sympathise with each other. We get more help from
the hypothesis of ignorancenot arising from the unavailability
of empirical information, but from established barriers against
paying attention to information about socially distanced peo-
ple. In the case of India, it is almost certainly linked to hard-
ened social stratifications of caste, class and gender and to the
biases that these barriers impose on the coverage of the other-
wise vibrant Indian media. The nature of that media, however,
is not an immutable social fact, and a clear recognition of the
need for change can itself be an important step towards reme-
dying the limited nature of the coverage. The fact that the expe-
rience of the worldfrom Europe to east Asiashows a positive
connection between economic expansion, on the one hand, and
public efforts to enhance human capability, on the other, has to
be much more widely discussed and far better appreciated.
If it seems possible that the tolerance of the intolerable
arises ultimately from fallacious reasoning, rather than from
the unsympathetic nature of human beings, that recognition
must surely provide some ground for relief. It also generates the
understanding that there is work to be done.
 2
RAGHURAM RAJAN
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014
Exporting to growth
raghuram rajan
I
grew up in different parts of the world because my
father was an Indian diplomat. My first real memo-
ries of India are from my early teens, in the mid-1970s,
when he returned to work in Delhi. It was not an easy
time. We were not poor, but my parents had to bring up
four children on my fathers government salary. More problem-
atic, there was very little to buy, especially for children who had
grown used to the plentiful choices in European supermarkets.
Every evening, one of us children trudged around the local mar-
kets looking for bread. The government was trying to limit the
production of unnecessary consumer goods, of which bread
was deemed one. Moreover, because the government also reg-
ulated the official sale price for bread, the little that was pro-
duced was diverted to favoured clients and sold at black-market
prices. So we went around the empty stores, trying to ingrati-
ate ourselves with the shopkeepers in the hope that one would
sell us half a loaf of bread from his hidden stockat twice the
fixed price. I remember the joy we felt when a friends brother
bought a shop in the market. My new connections ensured our
bread supply, allowing us to stop haunting the market.
We were not so lucky in our quest for a car. High import
duties made foreign cars unaffordable. The government allowed
only three domestic firms to produce cars, and only in limited
quantities, for cars were deemed unnecessary as well. The only
Indian-made car that could accommodate our large family was
the Ambassadora local version of the 1954 Oxford Morris, vir-
tually unchanged from the original. But the waiting list for an
Ambassador, which in most other countries would be deemed
an antique, was years. So my father settled for a scooter that he
rode to work. Because public transport was unreliable, family
outings were rare.
The government wanted to limit consumption and encour-
age savings, and households did save a lot. But there were also
unintended consequences. Because goods were in short supply
and prices were fixed at ludicrously low levels, little was avail-
able in the open market. Black markets flourished: everything
could be obtained if you had cash or connections. Few jobs were
created: the production of more cars would have meant more
demand for restaurants and cinemas and thus more jobs not
only for auto workers but also for waiters and ticket clerks. I
thought there might be some grand design I did not under-
stand, but the governments policy clearly was not working,
because India was still poor. I was determined to learn more,
so I became interested in economics. This book is another unin-
tended consequence of the governments policies.
Thirty-five years later, it is relatively easy to describe the typ-
9
ical path that successful countries have followed in the search
for growth. It has emphasized both substantial government
intervention in the early stageswhich is why I broadly refer
to it as relationship or managed capitalismand a focus on
exports. Although easy to describe, it is much harder to imple-
ment. At key junctures, the government has to take steps that
go against its natural inclinations; the India of my youth muffed
the game plan. Perhaps this is one reason why only a handful
of countries have grown rapidly out of poverty in recent years.
The export-led managed-growth strategy, when imple-
mented well, has been the primary path out of poverty in the
postwar era. In the early days of this strategy, the exporters
were small enough to allow the rest of the world to boost its
spending and absorb the exports easily. Unfortunately, even
as exporters like Germany and Japan have become large and
rich, the habits and institutions they acquired while growing
have left them unable to generate strong, sustainable domestic
demand and become more balanced in their growth.
The surpluses they put out into the global goods markets have
circled the world, looking for those who have the creditworthi-
ness to buy the goods, and tempting countries, companies, and
households around the world into spending. In the 1990s, devel-
oping countries ran the trade deficits necessary to absorb these
goods: the next chapter shows how many of them suffered deep
financial crises and forswore further deficits and borrowing. Even
as developing countries dropped the hot potato of foreign-debt-
financed spending in the late 1990s, the United States, as well as
European countries such as Greece, Spain, and the United King-
dom, picked it up. First, though, I want to describe the export-led
managed growth strategy and why it worked.
The Elusive Search for Growth
Few people realize that many of todays wealthy nations are rich
today because they grew steadily for a long time, not because
they grew particularly fast. Between 1820 and 1870, the per cap-
ita incomes of Australia and the United States, the fast-growing
emerging markets of their time (I refer to them as early devel-
opers), grew annually at 1.8 percent and 1.3 percent, respec-
tively. By contrast, late developers like Chile, South Korea, and
Taiwan, which joined the ranks of wealthier nations only in
recent decades, grew at multiples of these rates over a shorter
period. Japan was not quite a poor country in 1950 (though in
1950 its per capita income was lower than Mexicos). However,
between 1950 and 1973, Japanese per capita income grew at
a rate of around 8 percent a year. These late developers have
set the aspirational level for todays developing countries, but
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 RAGURAM RAJAN
theirs is a very different path from that of the early developers
especially with respect to the speed of their growth.
How did the late developers grow so fast? In the entire his-
tory of humankind, no country had grown as fast as Japan did
between 1950 and 1973. But since then, South Korea, Malaysia,
Taiwan, and China have approached and even exceeded this
rate of growth. To understand these developments, we have to
understand why countries are poor in the first place and how
they attempt to climb out of poverty.
Is More Capital the Key to Growth?
A difference obvious to anyone who travels from a rich country
to a poor country is the varying levels of physical capital. In rich
countries, vast airports accommodating big planes, enormous
factories packed with high-tech machinery, huge combines in
well-irrigated fields, and households with appliances and gadg-
ets for every imaginable use suggest to us that far more phys-
ical capital is in use than in poor countries. Physical capital
increases income because it makes everyone more productive.
A single construction worker with a backhoe can shift far more
mud than several workers with shovels and wheelbarrows.
If, however, the only difference between the rich and the poor
countries is physical capital, the obvious question, posed by the
University of Chicago Nobel laureate Robert Lucas in a semi-
nal paper in 1990, is, why does more money not flow from rich
countries to poor countries so as to enable the poor countries
to buy the physical capital they need? After all, poor countries
would gain enormously from a little more capital investment:
in some parts of Africa, it is easier to get to a city a few hun-
dred miles away by taking a flight to London or Paris and tak-
ing another flight back to the African destination than to try to
go there directly. Commerce would be vastly increased in Africa
if good roads were built between cities, whereas an additional
road would not make an iota of difference in already over-con-
nected Japan. Indeed, Lucas calculated that a dollars worth
of physical capital in India would produce 58 times the returns
10
available in the United States. Global financial markets, he
argued, could not be so blind as to ignore these enormous dif-
ferences in returns, even taking into account the greater risk of
investing in India.
Perhaps, Lucas concluded, the explanation is that the
returns in poor countries are lower than suggested by these sim-
ple calculations because these countries lack other factors nec-
essary to produce returns: perhaps education or, more broadly,
human capital. It may seem that an Egyptian farmer, using the
ox and plow that his ancestors used five thousand years ago,
could increase his efficiency enormously by using a tractor. By
comparison, it would seem likely that a farmer in Iowa who
already owns an array of agricultural machinery would improve
his yield only marginally by buying an additional tractor. But
the Egyptian farmer is likely to be far less educated than the
farmer in Iowa and to know less about the kinds of fertilizers
and pesticides that are needed or when they should be applied
to maximize crop yields. As a result, the additional income the
Egyptian farmer could generate with a single tractor might be
far less than what the Iowa farmer could generate by buying
one more machine to add to the many he already has.
However, even accounting for differences in human capi-
tal between rich and poor countries, Lucas surmised that cap-
ital should still be far more productive in the latter. Moreover,
evidence suggests that the enormous investments in educa-
tion around the world in recent years have not made a great
difference to growth. Something else seems to be missing in
poor countries that keeps machines and educated people from
maximizing productivity and the countries from growing rich
something that dollops of foreign aid cannot readily supply.
Excerpted from Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten
the World Economy by Raghuram G. Rajan. 2010 by Prince-
ton University Press. Also published in India by Collins Busi-
ness, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers India. Reprinted by
permission.
 3
ARUNDHATI ROY
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014
Capitalism: A Ghost Story
arundhati roy
I
s it a house or a home? A temple to the new India or a
warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on
Altamount Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet
menace, things have not been the same. Here we are,
the friend who took me there said. Pay your respects to
our new Ruler.
Antilla belongs to Indias richest man, Mukesh Ambani. Id
read about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-
seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ball-
rooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and
s servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawna
soaring, twenty-seven-story-high wall of grass attached to a vast
metal grid. The grass was dry in patches; bits had fallen off in
neat rectangles. Clearly, Trickledown hadnt worked.
But Gush-Up certainly has. Thats why in a nation of 1.2 bil-
lion, Indias one hundred richest people own assets equivalent
to one-fourth of the GDP.
The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at
least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis
dont live in Antilla.
No one knows for sure. People still whisper about ghosts and
bad luck, Vastu and feng shui. Maybe its all Karl Marxs fault.
(All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, has conjured up such
gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the
sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the neth-
erworld whom he has called up by his spells.
In India the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post
International Monetary Fund (IMF) reforms middle class true for businessmento be able to sell what they dont have
the marketlive side by side with spirits of the nether- world,
the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains, and
denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers
who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have
been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And
who survive on less than twenty Indian rupees a day.
Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion. He holds
a majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited
(RIL), a company with a market capitalization of $47 billion
and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil,
natural gas, polyester fiber, Special Economic Zones, fresh food
retail, high schools, life sciences research, and stem cell stor-
age services. RIL recently bought 95 percent shares in Infotel,
a TV consortium that controls twenty-seven TV news and enter-
tainment channels, including CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC,
IBN Lokmat, and ETV in almost every regional language. Info-
tel owns the only nation-wide license for 4G broadband, a high-
speed information pipeline which, if the technology works,
12
could be the future of information exchange. Mr Ambani also
owns a cricket team.
RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India. Some
of the others are the Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys,
Essar, and the other Reliance, Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani
Group (ADAG), owned by Mukeshs brother Anil. Their race
for growth has spilled across Europe, Central Asia, Africa,
and Latin America. Their nets are cast wide; they are visible
and invisible, overground as well as underground. The Tatas,
for example, run more than one hundred companies in eighty
countries. They are one of Indias oldest and largest private-sec-
tor power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel plants,
telephone, and cable TV and broadband networks, and run
whole townships. They manufacture cars and trucks and own
the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea,
a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, a major brand of
iodized salt, and the cosmetics giant Lakme. Their advertising
tagline could easily be You Cant Live Without Us.
According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you
have, the more you can have.
The era of the Privatization of Everything has made the
Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. How-
ever, as with any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main
exports is its minerals. Indias new megacorporations, Tatas,
Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite, are those that have managed
to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing
money extracted from deep in-side the earth. Its a dream come
to buy.
T
he other major source of corporate wealth comes from
their land banks. All over the world, weak, corrupt
local governments have helped Wall Street brokers,
agribusiness corporations, and Chinese billionaires to
amass huge tracts of land. (Of course this entails commandeer-
ing water too.) In India the land of millions of people is being
acquired and handed over to private corporations for public
interestfor Special Economic Zones (SEZs), infrastructure
projects, dams, highways, car manufacture, chemical hubs, and
Formula One racing. (The sanctity of private property never
applies to the poor.) As always, local people are promised that
their displacement from their land and the expropriation of
everything they ever had is actually part of employment gen-
eration. But by now we know that the connection between GDP
growth and jobs is a myth. After twenty years of growth, 60
percent of Indias workforce is self-employed, and 90 percent of
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 ARUNDHATI ROY
Indias labour force works in the unorganized sector.
P
ost-Independence, right up to the 1980s, peo-
ples movements, ranging from the Naxalites to
Jayaprakash Narayans Sampoorna Kranti, were fight-
ing for land reforms, for the redistribution of land
from feudal landlords to landless peasants. Today any talk of
redistribution of land or wealth would be considered not just
undemocratic but lunatic. Even the most militant movements
have been reduced to a fight to hold on to what little land peo-
ple still have. The millions of landless people, the majority of
them Dalits and Adivasis, driven from their villages, living in
13
slums and shanty colonies in small towns and megacities, do
not figure even in the radical discourse.
As Gush-Up concentrates wealth onto the tip of a shining pin
on which our billionaires pirouette, tidal waves of money crash
through the institutions of democracythe courts, the parlia-
mentas well as the media, seriously compromising their abil-
ity to function in the ways they are meant to. The noisier the
carnival around elections, the less sure we are that democracy
really exists.
Chapter 1 of Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Haymarket Books, 2014)
 4
MAO YUSHI
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014
Return Mao Zedong to
Human Form
mao yushi
M
ao Zedong was once a god. Today, however,
with the uncovering of more and more doc-
uments and information, he has gradually
been returned to the form of a flesh and blood
human being. Still, some still view him as a
god, and view any critical discussion of him as blasphemous. To
say that he made mistakes is still viewed as impermissible. To
these people, we will never be able to analyse Chairman Mao,
never directly face his legacy, and never question his spirit.
They will never see the Mao Zedong who was unable to control
his drooling, the Mao Zedong who was unable to speak clearly,
the Mao Zedong who required the assistance of others to get
into his car, and the Mao Zedong who was consistently bedrid-
den owing to his thin and weak legs. Fortunately, owing to the
publication of new materials, the average person is able to form
a new impression of Chairman Mao. He was a mere mortal, and
although his intellect was formidable, he struggled with the
same limitations we all do. He was unable to break free from
the natural constraints of existence, and the superstition that
now surrounds him is gradually disappearing.
The Cultural Revolution was his creation, a reaction to the
three-year famine that gripped China. Thirty million Chinese
starved during this period, a number that surpasses any pre-
vious period in human history, whether in peace or at war. As
this was a time of peace for China, there is no way to place
the blame for this event on anyone else. Who was responsible?
Without a doubt it was Mao Zedong. Without any reason what-
soever, he opposed the criticism of his policies by Peng Dehuai
for fear that Peng would usurp his authority. Even though his
leftist policies had created disaster, he continued to push for-
ward. He refused to allow the truth to be spoken, initiated the
reality-defying Great Leap Forward with its backyard steel
production, its Peoples Communes, and its Three Flags cam-
paign. The result was famine. In order to evade responsibil-
ity for this destruction, he launched the Cultural Revolution.
For his criticisms of Maos policies during the Great Leap For-
ward, Liu Shaoqi was arrested and later died in captivity. Mao
attempted to destroy all political opponents, expand his polit-
ical power, and after his death, pass his political legacy on to
his most trusted partner, his wife Jiang Qing. In his eyes, the
people were just a pile of meat, mere tools to be used employed
for the shouting of revolutionary slogans. He became a slave to
his lust for power, and consequently he went mad. He paid the
ultimate price for this lust for power, and as a result, his power
was weakened.
His method for acquiring power was class struggle. The orig-
15
inal meaning of class struggle was the capitalist class against
the proletariat. For Mao Zedong, however, class struggle had
nothing to do with capitalists and the proletariat, as the term
capitalist was used to describe anyone who Mao detested, many
of whom had little or no property. In the end, this unprincipled
struggle destroyed Mao himself. Beginning in the 1950s, Mao
became infatuated with class struggle. The campaign against
Hu Feng, the Anti-Rightist Movement, the opposing rightism
movement, the Four Cleanups Movement, the Cultural Revo-
lution; all of these involved class struggle. He eliminated Peng
Dehuai, He Long, Chen Yi, Liu Bocheng, and Tao Zhu. He used
Lin Biao to attack Liu Shaoqi, and later turned on Lin Biao
himself. Even Zhao Enlai wasnt safe from Mao. This left only a
few relatives and isolated individuals such as Jiang Qing, Mao
Yuanxin, Wang Hairong, and a few servants, Zhang Yufeng
being one. If Mao had not held such a firm belief in the power
of class struggle, peace would have prevailed, unity would have
been achieved, and he would not have died a lonely and isolated
individual. Yet even though he was responsible for three years
of famine, he was still the leading figure behind the founding
of the Peoples Republic of China, and is still respected by most
Chinese. But it is clear that Mao was destroyed by the same
class struggle that he unleashed. After the death of Lin Biao,
Mao Zedong repeatedly instructed his wife Jiang Qing on the
necessity of unity, having seen her uncanny ability to destroy
any and everyone. She was, after all, Maos dog. Whomever he
instructed her to bite, she bit. Until the very end, Mao was a
firm adherent to the theory and practice of class struggle.
Maos use of class struggle resulted in the deaths of an
untold number of Chinese, and for this he showed not the
slightest inkling of remorse. Every political campaign resulted
in some committing suicide, especially during the Cultural Rev-
olution, during which many of Chineses most famous public
figures faced death by their own hands. Many of these were
even Maos friends. Mao, of course, was aware of these events,
but never evinced sympathy for their plight. Of the 30 million
who perished during the three-year famine, most where citizens
who helped build the nation, but for Mao, there was no sor-
row over their death. Even those as close to him as Sun Weishi
and ShangguanYunzhu were compelled to take their own lives.
Again, no tears were shed by Mao. Whats more, it has recently
been disclosed that Mao sexually assaulted an untold number
of women. When Mao sat on his alter, no one dared speak of his
more beastly instincts, but after his descent from that position,
the truth has been laid bare. His cold-bloodedness is now a mat-
ter of public record, and the depths to which he was capable of
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 MAO YUSHI
travelling to have left many in shock. Many say that Maos wis-
dom was unsurpassable, but it is perhaps more accurate to say
that few can attain his level of callousness. He was a man with-
out even the slightest amount of humanity.
From the details that have recently been made public, we
now know that through class struggle, Mao made even those
within the Communist Party fear for their lives. Everything
came to revolve around one word: power. The unification of the
country and the public interest were placed in the background,
and the leaders of China spent their days contemplating how
something could provide an advantage, especially how the
power of Mao Zedong might be affected. No one dared offend
Mao, and the entire affairs of the country become the personal
affairs of Mao Zedong. While only a few at the time understood
what was happening to the nation, today this history is slowly
becoming clear. How did the propaganda posters of NieYuanzi
become Cultural Revolution propaganda posters? How did a
few university rebels come to be exploited? Why was Wang Li
attacked in Wuhan? And later at the Tiananmen Mass Assem-
bly to Support the Central Cultural Revolution Group, who was
516fenzi. And why was it that specific number, 516? Where did
the campaign to oppose Li Biao, Confucius, and Zhou Enlai
come from? All of this was unintelligible to outsiders, yet it was
all the result of Maos strategy to eliminate his political oppo-
nents. He was firm in his convictions, yet he deliberately spoke
obliquely. Many of the most important actions taken during
the Cultural Revolution required his assent, yet he was always
unclear in his wishes, and required others to guess his inten-
tions. Because his real plans would have been opposed had
they been understood by the masses, his mood was always one
of opaqueness. Under his confused command, Chinas econ-
omy and politics were brought to the edge of collapsesome-
thing that should not be a surprise to anyone. Most thought the
Cultural Revolution had been started to snuff out the proper-
tied class and bring final victory to the masses, yet today Maos
great swindle has been exposed for the fraud that it was.
D
uring the last few years of Maos life, his body had
lost its former vitality but his mind remained active.
He knew he was in the winter of his life, and so the
question arose of to whom power should be given
upon his death. In his heart, the only worthy candidate was
Jiang Qing. And yet she would never be accepted by the major-
ity, and so he was forced to enlist the aid of Hua Guofeng. He
once said to Hua, With you in power, my heart will rest easy.
And yet he went on, With any problem, consult Jiang Qing.
In the final year before his death, Maos plans for Chinas polit-
ical future were made known. Communist Party Chief: Jiang
Qing. Premier: Hua Guofeng. Head of the National Peoples
Congress: Wang Hongwen or Mao Yuanxin. Head of the Mil-
itary Commission: Chen Xilian. He later amended this plan
to have Mao Yuanxin serve as the Party head. In short, Mao
was unwilling to look outside of his immediate political fam-
ily. Based on the moral and intellectual abilities of Jiang Qing
and Mao Yuanxin, on what right did they deserve to act as the
leader of China? During the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing
proved herself to be the consummate shrew without the slight-
est foresight or knowledge. After the destruction of the Gang
of Four, she was convicted of being a counter-revolutionary and
sentenced to a differed death sentence, which I believe was emi-
nently fair. Mao Zedong, it appears, wanted to turn over polit-
16
ical power to a counter-revolutionary. In his mind, the only
consideration was how to keep political power in the family. It
had nothing to do with class struggle.
After the death of Lin Biao in 1971, the entire country
breathed a collective sigh of relief, for they thought that it was
Lins nefarious deeds that brought about the Cultural Revolu-
tion. Now that he is gone, they thought, the madness of the Cul-
tural Revolution will cease. Those who had opposed Lin Biao
and opposed the Cultural Revolution were liberated (save for
those who had already been put to death.) Yet Mao Zedong
developed a serious illness, owing in part to the news of Lin
Biaos misfortunes. His health never recovered. The mood of
the Chinese people and the mood of Mao Zedong were the
exact opposite. While the Chinese were overjoyed by the news
of Lin Biaos demise, Mao Zedong became depressed. After the
second rehabilitation of Deng Xiaoping in 1975, his first move
was to fix the countrys dilapidated railway system, returning it
to its normal, functioning state. He then moved on the various
factions that existed in the government, eliminating mutually
opposed sentiments, liberating those cadres who had been flat-
tened, and arresting the bad eggs. It was only thus that the gov-
ernment began to operate in a normal manner, and the effects
of which were obvious. Government targets gradually began
to rise, and the people of China felt that with Deng Xiaoping
back in government, China was making a turn for the better
and China had a chance of returning to normal. Yet what Mao
Zedong wanted and the interests of the people were two entirely
separate things. The only consideration for him was whether or
not his power could be preserved and how to ensure Jiang Qing
was the next leader of the country. The few times Deng Xiaop-
ing had come into open conflict with Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong
moved against Deng. This was the 1976 campaign to criti-
cize Deng Xiaoping, and once again he fell from grace. Mao
Zedong had degenerated from a statesman into a public enemy
of the Chinese people owing to his infatuation with power. In
the end, not even a minimum of reason remained in his mind.
The lust for power completely destroyed Mao Zedong,
including the entirety of his critical reasoning. He saw the polit-
ical affairs of China as his own personal affairs. Although he
knew Jiang Qing was unpopular with the masses, and he said
that great bloodshed will occur in 3-5 years. Yet he couldnt
alter this situation. He had already gone mad, mad because of
class struggle. Handing over power to Jiang Qing was the opti-
mal solution to Mao. He longed to see Zhou Enlai buried in
the earth because he never believed Zhou would pledge loyalty
to Jiang Qing. His ideal had been for Zhou to aid Jiang Qing
in the wielding of power, but Zhou was incapable of cooperat-
ing with her, for she lacked the stuff of politicians. Apparently
of all the countless heroes in the Communist Party who had
helped build the country, none were able to best Jiang Qing.
Mao Zedongs fatuousness when combined with his extreme
intelligence turned China from country into a non-country. As
he went about destroying the country, his ability reached its
peak, and none of his countrymen could match 1/100th of his.
As more and more materials are being declassified, the
details of the farce that was the Cultural Revolution are becom-
ing clear. Mao Zedong was extraordinary; able to annihilate one
hero after another. In this, Mao and Stalin were different. Sta-
lin strove to eliminate other factions and political parties, and
murder was his end goal. Mao, however, wanted to humiliate
and cause suffering for his opponents. First, he would isolate
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 MAO YUSHI
them so that none one would dare sympathize with their plight.
They became public enemies. Next, their most basic human
rights would be stripped away so that their humiliation could
be enjoyed by all. Anyone could attack them, call them gar-
bage, with even hospitals refusing to treat them. Lastly, they
would reach a point where death seemed better than life, and
suicide became the only means of liberation. And even as they
were ending their own life, they were forced to cry Long Live
Chairman Mao. Failure to do so would bring tragedy to their
families.
When the two are compared, Stalin killed more than Mao.
Before the Liberation, the purge of counter-revolutionaries in
Jinggang Mountain saw the death of more than 100,000 peo-
ple. As to who is responsible for this act, I cannot say for sure.
Yet the suppression of counter-revolutionary elements after the
Liberation resulted in the murder of 700,000 individuals. This
was Mao Zedongs doing. The purging of class elements dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution, the 3-anti and 5-anti campaigns;
these resulted in mass deaths. The specific number of those
murdered has never been made public, but it is estimated that
roughly 2 million perished. Aside from this, there were no
instances of the large-scale use of firing squads. The 30 million
who starved to death were not directly murdered; they were
killed. Those who committed suicide and those who died in bat-
tle were not directly killed by Mao Zedong either. Stalin, on the
other hand, directly oversaw the murder of millions. But Sta-
lin defended his country during WWII, resisting the Nazis and
helping to win the war. No one can deny this. By contrast, aside
from the two years that the army of the CCP several times drove
off the Japanese, Mao was never engaged in any battle after
1939. The majority of the CCPs efforts were spent in expanding
the area under their control and building the strength of their
army. At a moment when the very fate of the Chinese people
was at stake, Mao was busy with his abacus, preparing for the
CCPs takeover of the country. And in the end he succeeded in
this. Yet his success did not bring fortune to the Chinese peo-
ple. On the contrary, the Chinese people were plunged into 30
years of misery. Roughly 50 million Chinese died for political
reasons, a number that exceeds the casualties during WWII.
The conclusion of WWII brought peace to the world, with Ger-
many and Japan becoming rich and prosperous democracies.
Among the countries that saw victory at the end of WWII, it
was only China who entered the morass of class struggle, cre-
ating losses not before seen in history.
What Mao gave to China was suffering, followed by death.
Not only did he exhaust the means at his disposal to cause
pain, he also mobilized the entire country to fight against
itself; to mutually create suffering. Even lesser known figures
were made to suffer before death, individuals such as Zhang
Zhixin, Yu Luoke, Lin Zhao, and Wang Peiying. Mao Zedong
even destroyed some of the worlds most wonderful treasures.
For thousands of years, China had accumulated culture, ide-
als, morality, and art. All of this Mao rejected. Those paintings,
drawings, and sculptures that could be moved were burned.
Those buildings that couldnt be moved were toppled. Movie
stars had their heads shaven and were subject to humiliation by
the masses. Intellectuals were beaten, one-by-one, even forcing
some to commit suicide. Religious leaders were incarcerated or
killed. Maos goal was to see the entire world suffer in his hon-
our. If the suffering of each person could be added together,
Maos goal was to maximise this total. And by means of the Cul-
17
tural Revolution, he reached his goal. The maximisation of suf-
fering was the essence of the Cultural Revolution. This is what
the peoples saviour offered them as a gift.
Mao Zedong not only created suffering for China, he
exported his theory to the rest of the world so that all could
share in his cruelty. He encouraged armed revolution in South
East Asia, which resulted in death. Armed rebellion broke out
in Malaysia, India, Thailand, the Philippines, Burma, Indone-
sia, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. After more than 30 years since his
death, we are still dealing with his legacy. The Maoist rebels in
India have more than 200 hundred million supporters, yet after
more than 30 years, the problem of poverty there has seen no
improvement. Armed struggle in that country kills more than
1,000 each year. There is little that the Indian central govern-
ment can do. The cruellest example of Maos legacy is Cambo-
dia. Chairman Maos great student, Pol Pot, learned from Mao
how to murder, and stands as recent historys most ruthless
killer. This is Maos most unrivaled gift. And this series of events
explains something important. His philosophy is a deception,
and thus we see why so many have been fooled by it. Even today
some use the Mao Zedong Brand to legitimize their actions. But
in the end, is his theory correct or not? The theory is quite sim-
ple: to improve the lives of the people, one must develop pro-
duction. But how can this be achieved with aggression? All of
those who follow the philosophy of Mao Zedong are perhaps
fighting with happy hearts, but they will never cast off poverty.
There is no exception to this.
M
ao Zedong was an anti-intellectualist. He never
attended university, and thus held a jealousy
towards the institution borne out of his sense of
inferiority. As an assistant to the Peking University
librarian and co-founder of the Communist Party of China Li
Dazhao, Mao received a cold shoulder from the universitys aca-
demics. The experience was extremely upsetting, and for the
rest of his life, Mao sought out opportunities to exact revenge
against intellectuals, who he considered his greatest enemies.
After seizing power, they were made fools of, and were forced to
abuse and insult themselves. They were made to call out their
errors in public, known as taking off ones pants. He required
all intellectuals to expose their deepest and darkest secrets to
all in an attempt to expose their hypocrisy. In the end, they lost
all face and were treated as the stinky old ninth, the lowest of
societys anti-revolutionary categories. Yet even then, Mao was
not satisfied, and he created an even more absurd theory: more
knowledge meant more reactionary tendencies. He said the
lowliest are the smartest; the noblest are the most stupid. He
also said We must still have universities, but they should be
science and technology universities. But we must scale back our
educational institutions and have revolutionary education, with
proletarian politics dominating. And finally, he said Young
intellectuals must go to the countryside and spend a lifetime
working for revolution.
In the years following his launch of the Cultural Revolution,
the number of universities students shrank from 600,000 to
40,000. His promotion of anti-intellectualism set Chinese soci-
ety back several hundred years. But his greatest crime was to
annihilate Chinas outstanding intellectuals, including those in
the intellectual elite who had a chance of winning a Nobel Prize
for science. For several decades, China had no great scientific
achievements as a result of Maos destruction of the elite.
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 MAO YUSHI
But the above crimes pale in comparison to the world war
that Mao wanted to launch. In 1955 he said A world war is
nothing to fear. WWI gave us the socialist Soviet Union, while
WWII split the world into socialist and non-socialists camps.
If there is WWIII, we can finally realise the Great Unity. A
WWIII should come early, should come big, and should be
nuclear. In such a conflict, China might lose 400 million peo-
ple, but if we sacrifice of our population and in return see
the realisation of the Great Unity, this is a worthwhile sacrifice.
If 400 million die and we only have 200 million remaining, it
will only take a few years before we return to 600 million. (The
above quote comes from Zhan Dongyuans 9/9/2011 article in
the Epoch Times).
Yet Mao Zedong was naive. He never expected that in the
end, he would become a hermit, without even one true compa-
triot by his side. All that was left was a pack of rogues; with the
only people he trusted being the disgraced Gang of Four. Eve-
ryone would brag that Mao stood tall and saw far, but in real-
ity Mao Zedong could barely see past his own nose. When he
launched the Cultural Revolution, he could not have foreseen
18
that it would end in his isolation. His earliest and closest com-
rades had all become outcasts. His mind was clear till the end,
but he was still alone, hopeless, with no prospects, and without
any friends to comfort him as he approached death. He could
not have predicted that this once glorious life would end in such
a manner. And as he faced death, he did so without the slight-
est sense of responsibility or regret for what he had done. After
Maos death, Hua Guofeng and Ye Jianying seized the Gang of
Four, with Chinas Supreme Court sentencing them to death.
Yet the leader of the Gang of Four can still be glimpsed hang-
ing above the Gate of Heavenly Peace and his picture printed
on the money we use everyday. In China, this comedic sitcom
still hasnt come to a close. But Mao was a man, not a god, and
in the end, he has vacated his throne. And only when we strip
away the mythology and superstition that once surrounded him
can he finally be judged.
An abridged version of this article appeared in the Wall Street Jour-
nal under the title Judging Mao as Man on 6th July 2011. The
translation is by Jude Blanchette.
 5
POPE FRANCIS
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 20

Demolishing the idols

pope francis

The Logic of Power and Violence by our own interests, and this attitude persists. We have per-
Isnt the world we want a world of harmony and peace, in our- fected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we
selves, in our relations with others, in families, in cities, in and have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves. As if it were nor-
between nations? And does not true freedom mean choosing ways mal, we continue to sow destruction, pain, death! Violence and
in this world that lead to the good of all and are guided by love? war lead only to death, they speak of death! Violence and war
But then we wonder: is this the world in which we are liv- are the language of death!
ing? Creation retains its beauty which fills us with awe and it
remains a good work. But there is also violence, division, disa- The Cult of the God of Money
greement, war. This occurs when human beings, the summit It is no longer the person who commands, but money, money,
of creation, stop contemplating beauty and goodness, and with- cash commands. And God our Father gave us the task of pro-
draw into their own selfishness. tecting the earthnot for money, but for ourselves: for men
When we think only of ourselves, of our own and women. We have this task! Nevertheless men
interests and place ourselves in the centre, when and women are sacrificed to the idols of profit and
we permit ourselves to be captivated by the idols consumption: it is the culture of waste. If a com-
of dominion and power, when we put ourselves in puter breaks it is a tragedy, but poverty, the needs
Gods place, then all relationships are broken and and dramas of so many people end up being con-
everything is ruined; then the door opens to vio- sidered normal. If on a winters night, here on the
lence, indifference and conflict. This is precisely Via Ottaviano for examplesomeone dies, that
what the passage in the book of Genesis seeks to is not news. If there are children in so many parts
teach us in the story of the Fall: the man enters of the world who have nothing to eat, that is not
into conflict with himself, he realises that he is news, it seems normal. It cannot be so! And yet
naked and he hides himself because he is afraid these things enter into normality: that some home-
(cf. Gen. 3:10), he is afraid of Gods glance; he less people should freeze to death on the street
accuses the woman, she who is flesh of his flesh this doesnt make news. On the contrary, when
(cf. v. 12); he breaks harmony with creation, he the stock market drops ten points in some cities,
begins to raise his hand against his brother to kill Extracted from The
it constitutes a tragedy. Someone who dies is not
him. Can we say that from harmony he passes to Church of Mercy
news, but lowering income by ten points is a trag-
disharmony? No, there is no such thing as dis- edy! In this way people are thrown aside as if they
harmony; there is either harmony or we fall into chaos, where were trash.
there is violence, argument, conflict, fear ... This culture of waste tends to become a common men-
It is exactly in this chaos that God asks the mans conscience, tality that infects everyone. Human life, the person, is no longer
Where is Abel your brother? and Cain responds: I do not seen as a primary value to be respected and safeguarded, espe-
know; am I my brothers keeper? (Gen. 4:9). We too are asked cially if that person is poor or disabled, if they are not yet useful
this question; it would be good for us to ask ourselves as well: like the unborn child or are no longer of any uselike the
am I really my brothers keeper? Yes, you are your brothers elderly person. This culture of waste has also made us insen-
keeper! To be human means to care for one another! But when sitive to wasting and throwing out excess foodstuffs, which is
harmony is broken, a metamorphosis occurs: the brother who especially condemnable when, in every part of the world, unfor-
is to be cared for and loved becomes an adversary to fight, to tunately, many individuals and families suffer hunger and mal-
kill. What violence occurs at that moment, how many conflicts, nutrition. There was a time when our grandparents were very
how many wars have marked our history! We need only look at careful not to throw away any leftover food. Consumerism has
the suffering of so many brothers and sisters. This is not a ques- induced us to be accustomed to excess and to the daily waste
tion of coincidence, but the truth: we bring about the rebirth of food, whose value, which goes far beyond mere financial
of Cain in every act of violence and in every war. All of us! And parameters, we are no longer able to judge correctly. Let us
even today we continue this history of conflict between peo- remember well, however, that whenever food is thrown out it is
ple, even today we raise our hands against our brother or sister. as if it were stolen from the table of the poor, from the hungry!
Even today, we let ourselves be guided by idols, by selfishness, I ask everyone to reflect on the problem of the loss and waste
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 POPE FRANCIS
of food, to identify ways and approaches which, by seriously
dealing with this problem, convey solidarity and sharing with
the underprivileged.
The Leprosy of Careerism
But what does having inner freedom mean? First of all it means
being free from personal projects, being free from personal pro-
jects. Free from some of the tangible ways in which, perhaps,
you may once have conceived of living your priesthood; from
the possibility of planning your future; from the prospect of
staying for any length of time in a place of your own pas-
toral action. It means, in a certain way, making yourself free
also with regard to the culture and mindset from which you
come. This is not in order to forget it or even less to deny it, but
rather to open yourselves in the charity of understanding dif-
ferent cultures and meeting people who belong to worlds far
distant from your own. Above all it means being alert to ensure
you keep free of the ambitions or personal aims that can cause
the Church great harm. You must be careful not to make either
your own fulfilment or the recognition you might receive both
inside and outside the ecclesial community a constant prior-
ity. Rather, your priority should be the loftier good of the Gos-
pel cause and the accomplishment of the mission that will be
entrusted to you. And I think this being free from ambitions
or personal goals is important, it is important. Careerism is a
form of leprosy, a leprosy. No careerism, please. For this rea-
son you must be prepared to integrate all your own views of
the Churchhowever legitimate they may beand every per-
sonal idea or opinion into the horizon of Peters gaze. You must
integrate them into his specific mission at the service of the
communion and unity of Christs flock, of his pastoral char-
ity that embraces the whole world and wishes to be present,
partly through the action of the papal representations, espe-
cially in those all too often forsaken places where the needs of
the Church and of humanity are greater.
Undressing the Spirit of the World
During my visit to Assisi for St Franciss day the newspa-
pers and media have been stirring up fantasies. The Pope is
going to strip the Church, there! What will he strip from the
Church? He is going to strip bishops and cardinals of their
vestments; then he will divest himself. This is, indeed, a good
occasion to invite the Church to divest herself. But we are all
the Church! All of us! Beginning with the newly baptised, we
are all Church, and we must all follow the path of Jesus, who
21
himself took the road of renunciation. He became a servant,
one who serves; he chose to be humiliated even to the cross.
And if we want to be Christians, there is no other way. But cant
we make Christianity a little more human they say with-
out the cross, without Jesus, without renunciation? In this way
we would become like Christians in a pastry shop, saying: what
beautiful cakes, what beautiful sweets! Truly beautiful, but
not really Christians! Someone could ask: Of what must the
Church divest herself? Today she must strip herself of a very
grave danger, which threatens every person in the Church, eve-
ryone: the danger of worldliness. The Christian cannot coexist
with the spirit of the world, with the worldliness that leads us to
vanity, to arrogance, to pride. And this is an idol, it is not God.
It is an idol! And idolatry is the gravest of sins!
When the media speaks about the Church, they believe the
Church is made up of priests, sisters, bishops, cardinals and
the Pope. But we are all the Church, as I said. And we all must
strip ourselves of this worldliness: the spirit opposing the spirit
of the Beatitudes, the spirit opposing the spirit of Jesus. World-
liness hurts us. It is so very sad to find a worldly Christian, sure
according to him or herof that security that the faith gives
and of the security that the world provides. You cannot be on
both sides. The Churchall of usmust strip herself of the
worldliness that leads to vanity, to pride, that is idolatry.
Jesus himself told us: You cannot serve two masters: either
you serve God or you serve mammon (cf. Matt. 6:24). In mam-
mon itself there is this worldly spirit; money, vanity, pride, that
path ... we cannot take it ... it is sad to erase with one hand what
we write with the other. The Gospel is the Gospel! God is one!
And Jesus made himself a servant for our sake and the spirit
of the world has nothing to do with this. Today I am here with
you. Many of you have been stripped by this callous world that
offers no work, no help. To this world it doesnt matter that
there are children dying of hunger; it doesnt matter if many
families have nothing to eat, do not have the dignity of bring-
ing bread home; it doesnt matter that many people are forced
to flee slavery, hunger, and flee in search of freedom. With how
much pain, how often dont we see that they meet death, as
in Lampedusa: today is a day of tears! The spirit of the world
causes these things. It is unthinkable that a Christiana true
Christianbe it a priest, a sister, a bishop, a cardinal or a Pope,
would want to go down this path of worldliness, which is a hom-
icidal attitude. Spiritual worldliness kills! It kills the soul! It
kills the person! It kills the Church!
The Church of Mercy (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2014)
 6
KAUSHIK BASU
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014
India at 60 / Mother at 90
kaushik basu
I
t is a reasonable forecast that 30 to 40 years from now,
India will be a developed country. And when that happens,
I believe it is the 1990s that will be viewed as the decade
when the nation broke from its past.
The decade had not started out well. The shock waves of the
first Gulf War caused remittances into and exports out of India
to take a nosedive, and this triggered a spiralling economic cri-
sis during 19912. That year the nations per capita income
recorded a negative growth rate.
The crisis turned out to be a blessing in not too much of a
disguise. As a nation we had fallen into a groovenurturing a
mindless bureaucracy in the name of socialism, repeating the
same tired policies, and refusing to admit the need for change.
It was like Mr Needleman, who, in a Woody Allen short story,
leaned out from his balcony seat during an opera and fell into
the orchestra pit. And then, as Mr Allen puts it, Too proud to
admit that it was a mistake, he attended the opera every night
for a month and repeated it each time.
It needed courage to break the logjam. Tribute has to go
to the then finance minister, Manmohan Singh, for ushering
in what was arguably the most dramatic policy shift in inde-
pendent Indias history. Indias notorious licensing system was
dismantled, the mindlessly high import tariffs lowered, and
exchange controls eased. The gamble paid off. The economy
turned round from the brink of major chaos and international
debt default. And by 1994, the economy was booming. The next
three years would be the best that independent India had seen
till then, with gross domestic product (GDP) growing at above
7 per cent per annum. There was a small dip after that as the
whole of East Asia plunged into a major economic depression.
But growth rate picked up again after two years, and currently
the economy seems to be cruising at a remarkable 8 per cent per
annum average rate.
Indias balance of payments used to be forever crisis-rid-
den. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, the nations foreign
exchange reserves were stuck at what, to use a tired expression,
could be described as the Hindu foreign exchange balance entrepreneur you do not have to be corrupt and a money-hawk.
around $5 billion. The reforms did the impossible. By 1994, the
balance rose to $25 billion, by 2002 to $75 billion, and now it is
close to $200 billion.
While the reforms were critical for the turnaround of the
economy, we would be remiss not to recognize that there were
other factors of importance. Indias savings rate had risen
sharply in the 1970s, following the bank nationalisation of 1969,
and this was critical for the success of the economy. As a nation
we had for a long time over-invested in higher education, pro-
23
ducing more engineers than what the economy could absorb,
more English-language skills than would be recommended on
narrow utilitarian grounds. But once the technology revolution
in Americas Silicon Valley occurred, there was a surge in global
demand for these resources and the overinvestments paid off
unexpectedly and handsomely.
This shows that the argument that the success of the reforms
proves the Nehruvian policy to be wrong and India should have
adopted the 1990s reforms 40 years ago, need not be valid.
While it is true that India had been excessively stubborn about
policy and experimented too little, the success of the particular
policy package adopted in the early 1990s depended on several
complementary pre-conditions. There are many Latin Ameri-
can nations that had undertaken similar reforms in the 1960s
and 1970s and plunged into crisis and political instability. For
one, cutting deals with multinationals is a challenging task. The
contracts can run into hundreds of pages and a nation that ven-
tures to this before acquiring the necessary expertise can end
up unwittingly losing more than it gains. History is replete with
instances of such voluntary impoverishment.
Finally, I consider the 1990s to be a decade of critical polit-
ical and social change. In global politics, India has come to
occupy a strategic space that it never had before. With the rise
of China and the decline of Russia, it is now evident that the
US and China confront a future where they will either have to
live with a bilateral face off or have the comforting presence of
a third pole, which India can provide. This is in the interest of
both China and the US and an advantage handed to India on a
platter. India has also come to occupy a critical space, beyond
its own making, in Americas antiterrorism strategy.
Even more importantly, this was a decade of critical social
change. It saw the rise of a new class of honourable people
(albeit still very few) in business and politics. In the psyche
of middle-class India, business has long been a dirty word.
The arrival of people like Mr Narayana Murthy of Infosys sent
a message to a whole generation of youngsters that to be an
In politics, Manmohan Singh represented a rare combination of
intelligence and personal integrity.
New research in economics shows that one important trait
that helps a nation or a community prosper economically is
trust. Crosscountry studies suggest that nations where the citi-
zens are known to be trustworthy tend to do better. The reason
is not difficult to see. Not every deal and contract in life can be
enforced by the courts and the police (certainly not our police).
Hence, when we cut deals relating to trade or any transaction
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 KAUSHIK BASU
with people, we often have to rely on the expected innate integ-
rity and trustworthiness of the people.
On the flip side, being trustworthy means having to give up
some quick short-term gains, but one can expect to do better in
the long run. Hence, trustworthiness and integrity are forms of
social investment. One foregoes immediate gains but benefits
in the long run. With the rise in this kind of investment, one can
not only hope for more economic development but also a decline
in corruption. Indias financial investment is on the risewe have
data on that. My belief is that even our social investment (in
being more dependable and trustworthy) is on the rise, though,
admittedly, it is difficult to produce hard data on this. The trend
was started in the 1990s. And if my conjecture is right, the ben-
efits of this will accrue for many decades to come.
Mother at 90
My mother turned 90 on 28 February 2009. I am now con-
vinced that it is a myth that people lose their hair, sight, and
digestive ability with age. My mothers head seems to have
sprouted more hair than in her youth, she reads the morning
newspaper without glasses, and eats more than any of us sib-
lings can muster up digestive juices to handle.
It is true that she cannot come to America any more; the long
flight, which till even five or six years ago she undertook glee-
fully, she can no longer handle. Ever the environmentalist, she
would collect all the disposable cups and plates and spoons that
came her way, occasionally even reaching out to wasteful but
good-natured co-passengers in her quest, during the long jour-
ney and bring the booty cheerfully along to our home in upstate
New York.
My mother now lives alone in Kolkata. She has good house-
hold help and a day-nurse to assist her with some of the chores
that she finds diffi cult. My three sisters who live in Kolkata take
turns to make sure one of them drops in each day. As for me,
whenever I go to anywhere in Asia, I try to make a diversion to
24
stop by and spend a few days with her in Kolkata, which elates
her spirits more than anything else. Old age is not easy, espe-
cially when none of the children live under the same roof. To
keep boredom at bay, we got her to play a couple of rounds of
Chinese Checkers each day with her nurse. When I asked her
how that was going, she said, Very well. The nurse is improving
and even defeats me occasionally.
My mother was always the epitome of unaffected self-confi
dence. I recall, several years ago, my wife, sisters, and I discuss-
ing guilt feelings with my mother. I told them how guilt feeing
was an emotion I did not know, my sisters said they rarely had
guilt feeling, and my wife said how she, on the contrary, was well
acquainted with this emotion. My mother then caught us all by
surprise, telling us how she was extremely prone to guilt feeling.
She then added that she had however never felt guilty, because
she had never done anything wrong. That is my mother for
you.
While the health and the mind are fine, what goes with age,
I am now convinced, is political correctness. During this last
year, some of my mothers utterances on age, sex, and religion
would make Larry Summers appear a font of moderation and
correctness. Details on this will, however, have to go unreported.
The other thing that goes is short-term memory. She now
routinely confuses the word economist with Communist,
boosting my reputation among Bengals left intelligentsia. She,
like so many women of her age, is totally apolitical.
Some time ago, when I phoned my mother, she lamented that
she was no longer what she used to be and did not enjoy going
out anymore. But that week she felt she would go to see an uncle
of mine, who was one of her favourite cousins. These were times
of such uncertainty, she added to justify the excursion, that she
worried she would not get to see her favourite people anymore.
Since this cousin of hers had just turned 75, she said she could
not help feeling apprehensive that she would suddenly one day
hear that he was no more. My mother was about to turn 90.
Extracted from An Economists Miscellany (OUP India, 2011)
 7
MARY BEARD
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014
Do Classics have a future?
mary beard
T
he year 2011 was an unusually good one for the
late Terence Rattigan: Frank Langella starred on
broadway in his play Man (a topical tale of the col-
lapse of a financier), its first production in New
York since the 1960s; and a movie of The Deep Blue
Sea, featuring Rachel Weisz as the wife of a judge who goes off
with a pilot, premiered at the end of November in the UK and
opened in the US in December. It was the centenary of Rat-
tigans birth (he died in 1977), and it brought the kind of re-
evaluation that centenaries often do. For yearsin the eyes of
critics, although not of London West End audienceshis ele-
gant stories of the repressed anguish of the privileged classes
were no match for the working-class realism of John Osborne
and the other angry young dramatists. but we have been learn-
ing to look again.
I have been looking again at another Rattigan play, The
Browning Version, first performed in 1948. It is the story of
Andrew Crocker-Harris, a 40-something schoolteacher at an
English public schoolan old-fashioned disciplinarian who is
being forced into early retirement because of a serious heart
condition. The Crocks other misfortune (and the Crock
is what the children call him) is that he is married to a truly
venomous woman called Millie, who divides her time between
an on-off affair with the science teacher and devising various bits
of domestic sadism to destroy her husband.
But the title of the play takes us back to the classical world.
The Crock, as you will already have guessed, teaches Classics
(what else could he teach with a name like Crocker-Harris?),
and the Browning Version of the title refers to the famous 1877
translation by Robert Browning of Aeschylus play Agamemnon.
Written in the 450s BC, the Greek original told of the tragic
return from the Trojan War of King Agamemnon, who was mur-
dered on his arrival home by his wife Clytemnestra and by the
lover she had taken while Agamemnon had been away.
This classic is, in a sense, the real star of Rattigans play. It
is given to the Crock as a retirement present by John Taplow,
a pupil who has been taking extra Greek lessons, and who has
gradually come to feel some affection for the crabby old school-
master. The giving of the gift is the key moment, almost the
moment of redemption, in the plot. It is the first time that
Crocker-Harriss mask slips: when he opens the Browning Ver-
sion, he cries. Why does he cry? First, because it forces him to
face how he himself is being destroyed, as Agamemnon was,
within an adulterous marriage (this is not exactly a feminist
play). But he cries also because of what young Taplow has writ-
ten on the title page. Its a line from the play, carefully inscribed
26
in Greek, which the Crock translates as God from afar looks
graciously upon a gentle master. He interprets this as a com-
ment on his own career: he has made sure not to be a gentle
schoolmaster, and God has not looked graciously upon him.
Rattigan is doing more here than exploring the tortured psy-
ches of the British upper-middle class (and its not just another
school story, that quirky fixation of some British writers).
Well-trained in the Classics himself, he is also raising central
questions about Classics, the classical tradition, and our mod-
ern engagement with it. How far can the ancient world help us
to understand our own? What limits should we place on our
re-interpretation and re-appropriation of it? When Aeschylus
wrote God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master,
he certainly did not have a schoolmaster in mind, but a military
conqueror; in fact, the phraseand this too, I guess, was part of
Rattigans pointwas one of the last spoken by Agamemnon to
Clytemnestra before she took him inside to kill him.
To put it another way, how do we make the ancient world
make sense to us? How do we translate it? Young Taplow does
not actually rate Brownings translation very highly, and indeed
to our tastesit is written in awful 19th-century poetry-speak
(Who conquers mildly, God, from afar, benignantly regardeth,
as Browning puts the key line, is hardly going to send most of us
rushing to the rest of the play). But when, in his lessons, Taplow
himself gets excited by Aeschyluss Greek and comes out with a
wonderfully spirited but slightly inaccurate version of one of the
murderous bits, the Crock reprimands himyou are supposed
to be construing Greekthat is, translating the language liter-
ally, word for wordnot collaborating with Aeschylus.
Most of us now, I suspect, are on the side of the collaborators,
with their conviction that the classical tradition is something to
be engaged with, and sparred against, not merely replicated and
mouthed. In this context, I cant resist reminding you of the fla-
grantly modern versions of Homers Iliad by the English poet
Christopher Logue, who died in December 2011 Kings, War
Music, and othersthe best translation of Homer since [Alex-
ander] Popes, as Garry Wills once called them. This was, I
think, both a heartfelt and a slightly ironic comment. For the
joke is that Logue, our leading collaborator with Homer, knew
not a word of Greek.
Many of the questions raised by Rattigan underlie the points
I have to make here. I am not trying to convince anyone that
classical literature, culture or art is worth taking seriously; I sus-
pect that would, in most cases, be preaching to the converted.
I want instead to suggest that the cultural language of Classics
and classical literature continues to be an essential and inerad-
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 MARY BEARD
icable dialect of Western culture, embedded in the drama of
Rattigan, as much as in the poetry of Ted Hughes or the novels
of Margaret Atwood or Donna TarttThe Secret History could
not, after all, have been written about a department of Geogra-
phy. but I also want to examine a bit more closely our fixation
on the decline of classical learning. And here too Rattigans The
Browning Version, or its sequels, offers an intriguing perspective.
The play has always been popular with impoverished thea-
tre and TV companies, partly for the simple reason that Ratti-
gan set the whole thing in Crocker-Harriss sitting room, which
makes it extremely cheap to stage. But there have also been two
movie versions of The Browning Version, which did venture out-
side Crocker-Harriss apartment to exploit the cinematic poten-
tial of the English public school, from its quaint wood-panelled
classrooms to its rolling green cricket pitches. Rattigan himself
wrote the screenplay for the first one, starring Michael Red-
grave, in 1951. He used the longer format of the film to expand
on the philosophy of education, pitting the teaching of science
(as represented by Millies lover) against the teaching of Classics
(as represented by the Crock). And he gave the Crocks succes-
sor as the Classics teacher, Mr Gilbert, a bigger partmaking it
clear that he was going to move away from the hard-line Latin
and Greek grammar grind, to what we would now call a more
pupil-centred approach.
In 1994 another movie version was made, this time starring
Albert Finney. It had been modernised: Millie was renamed
Laura, and her science-master lover was now a decidedly preppy
American. There was still some sense of the old story: Finney
held his class spellbound when he read them some lines of
Aeschylus and he cried at the gift of the Browning Version even
more movingly than Redgrave had. But in a striking twist, a new
narrative of decline was introduced. In this version, the Crocks
successor is in fact going to stop teaching Classics entirely.
My remit, he says in the film, is to organise a new languages
department: modern languages, German, French, Spanish. It
is after all a multicultural society. The Crock is now to be seen
as the very last of his species.
But if this movie predicts the death of classical learning, it
inadvertently appears to confirm it too. In one scene, the Crock
is apparently going through with his class a passage of Aeschy-
lus in Greek, which the pupils are finding very hard to read. Any
sharp-eyed classicist will easily spot why they might have been
having trouble: for each boy has on his desk only a copy of the
Penguin translation of Aeschylus (with its instantly recognisa-
ble front cover); they havent got a Greek text at all. Presum-
ably some bloke in the props department had been sent off to
find twenty copies of the Agamemnon and knew no better than
to bring it in English.
That spectre of the end of classical learning is one that is
probably familiar to most readers. With some trepidation, I
want to try to get a new angle on the question, to go beyond the
usual gloomy clichs, and (with the help in part of Terence Rat-
tigan) to take a fresh look at what we think we mean by Clas-
sics. But let us first remember what recent discussion of the
current state of Classics, never mind their future, tends to stress.
The basic message is a gloomy one. Literally hundreds of
books, articles, reviews and op-ed pieces have appeared over
the last ten years or so, with titles like The Classics in Crisis,
Can the Classics survive?, Who Killed Homer?, Why Amer-
ica Needs the Classical Tradition and Saving the Classics from
Conservatives. All of these in their different ways lament the
27
death of Classics, conduct an autopsy upon them, or recom-
mend some rather belated life-saving procedures. The litany of
gloomy facts and figures paraded in these contributions, and
their tone, are in broad terms familiar. Often headlined is the
decline of Latin and Greek languages in schools (in recent years
fewer than three hundred young people in England and Wales
have taken classical Greek as one of their A-levels, and those
overwhelmingly from independent schools) or the closure of
university departments of Classics all over the world.
In fact, in November 2011 an international petition was for-
mally launched to ask Unescoin the light of the increasing
marginalisation of the classical languagesto declare Latin and
Greek a specially protected intangible heritage of humanity.
I am not sure what I think about treating classical languages as
if they were an endangered species or a precious ruin, but I am
fairly confident that it was not great politics, at this moment, to
suggest (as the petition does) that their preservation should be
made the particular responsibility of the Italian government (as
if it did not have rather too much on its plate already).
W
hat has caused this decline attracts a variety of
answers. Some argue that the supporters of Clas-
sics have only themselves to blame. Its a Dead
White European Male sort of subject that has
far too often acted as a convenient alibi for a whole range of cul-
tural and political sins, from imperialism and eurocentrism to
social snobbery and the most mind-numbing form of pedagogy.
The British dominated their empire with Cicero in hand; Goeb-
bels chose Greek tragedy for his bedside reading (and, if you
believe Martin Bernal, he would have found confirmation for
his crazed views of Aryan supremacy in the traditions of clas-
sical scholarship itself). Chickens have come home to roost, it
is sometimes said, for Classics in the new multi-cultural world.
Not to mention the fact that, in England at least, the learning
of the Latin language was for generations the gatekeeper of
rigid class privilege and social exclusivityalbeit at a terrible
cost to its apparent beneficiaries. It gave you access to a nar-
row elite, thats for sure, but committed your childhood years
to the narrowest educational curriculum imaginable: nothing
much else but translation into and out of Latin (and when you
got a little older, Greek). In the movie of The Browning Version
we find Crocker-Harris making his pupils translate into Latin
the first four stanzas of Tennysons The Lady of Shalott: an
exercise as pointless as it was prestigious.
Others claim that Classics have failed within the politics of
the modern academy. If you were to follow Victor Davis Han-
son and his colleagues, you would in fact lay the blame for the
general demise of the subject firmly at the door of careerist Ivy
League, and no doubt Oxbridge, academics who (in the pur-
suit of large salaries and long sabbaticals) have wandered down
some self-regarding postmodern cul-de-sac, when ordinary stu-
dents and the folks out there really want to hear about Homer
and the other great paragons of Greece and Rome. To which
the retort is: maybe it is precisely because professors of Clas-
sics have refused to engage with modern theory and persisted
in viewing the ancient world through rose-tinted spectacles (as
if it was a culture to be admired) that the subject is in imminent
danger of turning into an antiquarian backwater.
The voices insisting that we should be facing up to the
squalor, the slavery, the misogyny, the irrationality of antiquity
go back through Moses Finley and the Irish poet and classicist
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 MARY BEARD
Louis MacNeice to my own illustrious nineteenth-century pre-
decessor in Cambridge, Jane Ellen Harrison. When I should be
remembering the glories of Greece, wrote MacNeice memora-
bly in his Autumn Journal,
I think instead
of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists, The
careless athletes and the fancy boys
the noise
of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women
pouring libations over graves
And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta
and lastly I think of the slaves.
Of course, not everything written on the current state of Clas-
sics is irredeemably gloomy. Some breezy optimists point, for
example, to a new interest among the public in the ancient
world. Witness the success of movies like Gladiator or Stacy
Schiff s biography of Cleopatra or the continuing stream of lit-
erary tributes to, or engagements with, Classics (including at
least three major fictional or poetic re-workings of Homer in
2011 alone). And against the baleful examples of Goebbels and
British imperialism, you can parade a repertoire of more radical
heroes of the classical traditionas varied as Sigmund Freud,
Karl Marx (whose Phd thesis was on Classical Philosophy), and
the American Founding Fathers.
A
s for Latin itself, a range of different stories is told in
the post-Crocker-Harris world. Where the teaching of
the language has not been abolished altogether, you
are now likely to read of how Latin, freed of the old-
fashioned grammar grind, can make a huge impact on intellec-
tual and linguistic development: whether thats based on the
studies from schools in the Bronx that claim to show that learn-
ing Latin increases childrens IQ scores or on those common
assertions that knowing Latin is a tremendous help if you want
to learn French, Italian, Spanish or any other Indo-European
language you care to name.
But theres a problem here. Some of the optimists objections
do hit home. The classical past has never been co-opted by only
one political tendency: Classics have probably legitimated as
many revolutions as they have legitimated conservative dicta-
torships (and Aeschylus has over the years been performed both
as Nazi propaganda and to support liberation movements in
sub-saharan Africa). Some of the counterclaims, though, are
plain misleading. The success of Gladiator was absolutely noth-
ing new; think of Ben Hur, Spartacus, The Sign of the Cross, and
any number of versions of The Last Days of Pompeii right back
almost to the very beginning of cinema. Nor is the success of
popular classical biography; countless people of my genera-
tion were introduced to antiquity through the biographies by
Michael Grant, now largely forgotten.
And I am afraid that many of the arguments now used to
justify the learning of Latin are perilous too. Latin certainly
teaches you about language and how language works, and the
fact that it is dead can be quite liberating: I am forever grate-
ful that you dont have to learn how to ask for a pizza in it, or
the directions to the cathedral. But honestly, if you want to learn
French, you would frankly be better off doing that, not starting
with some other language first. There is really only one good
reason for learning Latin, and that is that you want to read what
28
is written in it.
That is not quite what I mean, though. My bigger question is:
what drives us so insistently to examine the state of Classics,
and to buy books that lament their decline? Reading through
opinion after opinion it can sometimes feel that you are enter-
ing a strange form of hospital drama, a sort of academic ER,
with an apparently sick patient (Classics) surrounded by dif-
ferent doctors who cannot quite agree on either the diagnosis or
prognosis. Is the patient merely malingering and really fighting
fit? Is a gradual improvement likely, but perhaps never back to
the peak of good health? Or is the illness terminal and palliative
care or covert euthanasia the only options?
But, perhaps even more to the point, why are we so inter-
ested in whats going to happen to Classics, and why discuss it
in this way, and fill so many pages with the competing answers?
There is something a bit paradoxical about the decline of Clas-
sics debate and the mini publishing industry that appears to
depend on a large number of key supporters of Classics buy-
ing books that chart their demise. I mean, if you dont give a
toss about Latin and Greek and the classical tradition, you dont
choose to read a book on why no one is interested in them any
more.
Of course, all kinds of different assumptions about what we
think Classics are underlie the various arguments about their
state of health: from something that comes down more or less to
the academic study of Latin and Greek toat the other end of
the spectruma wider sense of popular interest in the ancient
world in all its forms. Part of the reason why people disagree
about how Classics are doing is that when they talk about
Classics or (more often in America) the classics they are
not talking about the same thing. I do not plan here to offer a
straightforward redefinition. But I am going to pick up some of
the themes that emerged in Terence Rattigans play to suggest
that Classics are embedded in the way we think about ourselves,
and our own history, in a more complex way than we usually
allow. They are not just from or about the distant past. They are
also a cultural language that we have learned to speak, in dia-
logue with the idea of antiquity. And to state the obvious, in a
way, if they are about anybody, Classics are, of course, about us
as much as about the Greeks and Romans.
But first the rhetoric of decline, and let me offer you another
piece of gloom:
On many sides we hear confident assertions that
the work of Greek and Latin is done that their day
is past. If the extinction of these languages as potent
instruments of education is a sacrifice inexorably
demanded by the advancement of civilization, regrets
are idle, and we must bow to necessity. But we know
from history that not the least of the causes of the fall of
great supremacies has been the supineness and short-
sightedness of their defenders. It is therefore the duty of
those who believe that Greek and Latin may continue
to confer in the future, as they have done in the past,
priceless benefits upon all higher human education,
to inquire whether these causes exist, and how they
may be at once removed. For if these studies fall, they
fall like Lucifer. We can assuredly hope for no second
renaissance.
As you will have guessed from the rhetorical style, that was not
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 MARY BEARD
written yesterday (although you could have heard much the
same points made yesterday). It is, in fact, by the Cambridge
Latinist JP Postgate, lamenting the decline of Latin and Greek
in 1902a famous lament, published in an influential London
magazine (The Fortnightly Review) and powerful enough to lead
directly, over one hundred years ago, to the establishment in the
UK of the Classical Association, whose aim was to bring like-
minded parties together explicitly to save Classics.
The point is that you can find such lamentations or anxieties
almost anywhere you look in the history of the classical tradi-
tion. As is well known, Thomas Jefferson, in 1782, justified the
prominence of the Classics in his own educational curriculum
partly because of what was happening in Europe: The learning
of Greek and Latin, I am told, is going into disuse in Europe. I
know not what their manners and occupations may call for: but
it would be very ill-judged in us to follow their example in this
instance.
All this seems almost preposterous to us; for, in our terms,
these are voices from the Golden Age of classical study and
understanding, the age that we have lost. But they are a pow-
erful reminder of one of the most important aspects of the
symbolic register of Classics: that sense of imminent loss, the
terrifying fragility of our connections with distant antiquity
(always in danger of rupture), the fear of the barbarians at the
gates and that we are simply not up to the preservation of what
we value. That is to say, tracts on the decline of Classics are not
commentaries upon it, they are debates within it: they are in
part the expressions of the loss and longing and the nostalgia
that have always tinged classical studies. As so often, creative
writers capture this sense rather more acutely than professional
classicists. The sense of fading, absence, past glories, and the
end of an era is a very clear message of The Browning Version.
But another side of the fragility is a major theme of Tony
Harrisons extraordinary play The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, first
performed in 1988featuring (in one part of a complex plot
that mixes ancient and modern) a pair of British classicists who
are excavating in the rubbish dumps of the town of Oxyrhyn-
chus in Egypt for the scraps of papyrus, with all the new bits
of classical literature that they may contain, or the precious
glimpses they might give of the mundane and messy real life of
the ancient world. But as Harrison insists, all you ever get are
the fragments from the wastepaper basketsand the frustra-
tion and disappointments of the process send one of the exca-
vators mad.
The truth is that Classics are by definition in decline; even
in what we now call the renaissance, the humanists were not
celebrating the rebirth of Classics; rather like Harrisons
trackers, they were for the most part engaged in a desperate
last-ditch attempt to save the fleeting and fragile traces of Clas-
sics from oblivion. There has been no generation since at least
the second century AD that has imagined that it was fostering
the classical tradition better than its predecessors. But there is
of course an upside here. The sense of imminent loss, the per-
ennial fear that we might just be on the verge of losing Classics
entirely, is one very important thing that gives themwhether
in professional study or creative re-engagementthe energy and
edginess that I think they still have.
I am not sure that this helps us very much in predicting the
future of Classics, but my guess is that in 2111 people will still be
engaging with Classics, edgily and creatively, that they will still
be lamenting their declineand probably looking back to us as
29
a Golden Age of classical studies.
But the question still remains: what do we mean by Clas-
sics? I am conscious that I have been almost as inconsistent
as those I have criticised. Sometimes I have been referring to
Latin and Greek, sometimes to a subject studied by people who
self-describe as classicists, sometimes to a much more gen-
eral cultural property (the stuff of movies, novels and poetry).
Now definitions are often false friends. The smartest and most
appealing tend to exclude too much; the most judicious and
broadest are so judicious as to be unhelpfully dull. (One recent
attempt to define Classics runs: The study of the culture, in the
widest sense, of any population using Greek and Latin, from the
beginning to (say) the Islamic invasions of the seventh century
AD. True, but)
I
am not going to construct an alternative. But I do want
to reflect on what the coordinates of a definition might
beon a template that might be more helpful in think-
ing about what Classics are, and how their future might
lie. At its simplest, I think that we have to go beyond the super-
ficially plausible idea (embedded in the definition Ive just
quoted) that Classics areor are aboutthe literature, art, cul-
ture, history, philosophy and language of the ancient world. Of
course they are partly that. The sense of loss and longing that
I described is, to some extent, for the culture of the distant
past, the fragments of papyrus from the wastepaper baskets of
Oxyrhynchus. But not solely. As the nostalgic rhetoric makes
absolutely clear, the sense of loss and longing is also for our
predecessors whose connections to the ancient world we often
believe to have been so much closer than our own.
To put this as crisply as I can, the study of Classics is the
study of what happens in the gap between antiquity and our-
selves. It is not only the dialogue that we have with the culture
of the classical world; it is also the dialogue that we have with
those who have gone before us who were themselves in dialogue
with the classical world (whether Dante, Raphael, William
Shakespeare, Edward Gibbon, Pablo Picasso, Eugene ONeill
or Terence Rattigan). Classics (as writers of the second cen-
tury AD had already spotted) are a series of dialogues with the
dead. But the dead do not include only those who went to their
graves two thousand years ago. This is an idea nicely captured
in another article in The Fortnightly Review, this time a skit that
appeared in 1888, a sketch set in the underworld, in which a trio
of notable classical scholars (the long-dead Bentley and Porson,
plus their recently deceased Danish colleague Madvig) have a
free and frank discussion with Euripides and Shakespeare. This
little satire also reminds us that the only actual speakers in this
dialogue are us; it is we who ventriloquise, who animate what the
ancients have to say: in fact, here the classical scholars complain
what a terrible time they are having in Hades, because they are
constantly being told off by the ancient shades who complain
that the classicists have got them wrong.
Two quite simple things follow from this. The first is that we
should be much more alert than we often are to the claims we
make about the classical worldor, at least, we should be more
strategically aware of whose claims they are. Take, for exam-
ple, the common statement, The ancient Athenians invented
democracy. Put like that, it is simply not true. As far as we
know, no ancient Greek ever said so; and anyway democracy
isnt something that is invented like a piston engine. Our word
democracy derives from the Greek, that is correct. Beyond
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 MARY BEARD
that, the fact is that we have chosen to invest the fifth-century
Athenians with the status of inventors of democracy; we have
projected our desire for an origin onto them. (And its a pro-
jection that would have amazed our predecessors two hundred
years ago for most of whom fifth-century-BC Athenian politics
was the archetype of a disastrous form of mob rule.)
The second point is the inextricable embeddedness of the
classical tradition within Western culture. I dont mean that
Classics are synonymous with Western culture; there are of
course many other multi-cultural strands and traditions that
demand our attention, define who we are, and without which
the contemporary world would be immeasurably poorer. But the
fact is that Dante read Virgils Aeneid, not the epic of Gilgamesh.
What I have stressed so far is our engagement with our pre-
decessors through their engagement with Classics. The slightly
different spin on that would be to say that it would be impossi-
ble now to understand Dante without Virgil, John Stuart Mill
without Plato, Donna Tartt without Euripides, Rattigan with-
out Aeschylus. Im not sure if this amounts to a prediction about
the future; but I would say that if we were to amputate Classics
from the modern world, it would mean more than closing down
some university departments and consigning Latin grammar
to the scrap heap. It would mean bleeding wounds in the body
of western cultureand a dark future of misunderstanding. I
doubt well go that way.
I would like to close with two final points, one a slightly aus-
tere observation about knowledge and expertise; the other
something rather more celebratory.
First, knowledge: I have referred several times to the way
that we ourselves have to ventriloquise the ancient Greeks and
Romans, and to animate their writings and the material traces
they have left; the dialogue that we have with them is not an
equal one; were in the drivers seat. But if it is going to be a
useful and constructive dialogue, not an incoherent and ulti-
mately pointless babel, it needs to be founded on expertise in
the ancient world and in ancient languages. Now I do not mean
by this that everyone should learn Latin and Greek (any more
than I mean that no one can get anything out of Dante unless
they personally have read Virgil). Luckily, cultural understand-
ing is a collaborative, social operation.
The important cultural point is that some people should
have read Virgil and Dante. To put it another way, the over-
all strength of Classics is not to be measured by exactly how
many young people know Latin and Greek from school or uni-
versity. It is better measured by asking how many believe that
30
there should be people in the world who do know Latin and
Greek, how many people think that there is an expertise in that
worth taking seriouslyand ultimately paying for. My one con-
cern, I suppose, is that while there is still a huge and widespread
enthusiasm for Classics, expertise in the sense I have just men-
tioned is more fragile. Christopher Logue knew no Greek when
he embarked on the Iliad; but he knew a man who did know it,
very wellDonald Carneross, who went on to become Professor
of Classics at Boston University. Compare that collaboration to
the way, even in significant publications in academic disciplines
bordering on Classics (in Art History, for example, or English),
you repeatedly find misprinted, garbled, wrongly translated
Latin and Greek. I dont mind the authors not knowing the lan-
guages; thats fine. But I do mind that they do not bother to
call on someone elses expertise to help them get it right. Most
ironically of all, perhaps, in my own recent copy of Rattigans
Browning Version, the bits of Greek that are central to the play
are so misprinted that they make little sense. The Crock would
be turning in his grave. Or to put it my way, you cannot have a
dialogue with nonsense.
But I would like to end with a less curmudgeonly thought.
Looking over what I had written, I noticed that there was one
important thing about Classics that I had left out: a due sense
of wonderment. Professional classicists are not good in this
respect. You will most often hear them complaining about all
the things we dont know about the ancient world, bemoaning
that we have lost so many books of Livy, or that Tacitus does
not tell us about the Roman poor. But that is to miss the point.
What is truly amazing is what we have, not what we dont have,
from the ancient world. If you did not already know, and some-
one were to say that material written by people who lived two
millennia ago or more still survived in such quantities that most
people would not be able to get through it all in a lifetime
you wouldnt believe them. It is astonishing. But it is the case;
and it offers the possibility of a most wondrous shared voyage
of exploration.
At this point it is worth going back to Brownings translation
of the Agamemnon and looking more carefully at how he intro-
duced it. May I be permitted, he writes, to chat a little, by
way of recreation, at the end of a somewhat toilsome and per-
haps fruitless adventure? Toilsome? Probably. Fruitless? I dont
think so, despite the very old-fashioned ring of Brownings lan-
guage. Adventure? Yes certainlyand adventures in Classics are
something we can all share.
Extracted from Contfronting the Classics (Profile Books, 2014)
 8
PETER HIGGS
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014
The Higgs Universe
frank close
P
eter Higgs is used to delays. The Nobel Prize-win-
ning physicist waited for sight of the eponymous
Higgs bosonthe God particle of media head- the universe is filled with some weird stuff, which has become
linesfor 48 years. Then, on 4th July 2012, scien-
tists at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern, Geneva,
announced the proof of this fundamental entity, but for which
our material universe could not exist. But, the waiting was far
from over for Higgs who had to endure another year of spec-
ulation of a different sort, before his achievement was finally
capped on 8th October this year by the joint award of the Nobel
Prize to himself and Franois Englert of the Universit Libre de
Bruxelles. In a final nail-biting twist, the announcement of his
long-awaited victory was delayed by an hour as the committee
struggled to reach the famously reclusive scientist. Unlike Sam-
uel Beckets Vladimir and Estragon, who waited for Godot in
vain, Higgs has been successful.
I was watching on the Internet as the Nobel Committee
explained that it had given the prize for the: theoretical discov-
ery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the
origin of mass of subatomic particles. As tweets flooded my
inbox it seemed that the whole of the physics world was watch-
ing too. All, but one it seems. Peter Higgs had gone on holiday
to avoid the media storm. Without a phone. In a prepared state-
ment released by the University of Edinburgh, Higgs expressed
his humble thanks and said: I hope this recognition of funda-
mental science will help raise awareness of the value of blue-
sky research.
Everyone has heard of his boson, even if they dont know what
it is or why physicists give it such huge importance. For most of
the last half century, Higgs has had a quiet life, away from the
spotlight. Now, in the space of a few years, he has become a
celebrity and public property.
How does he feel to have seen his theory proved correct after
waiting so long? Did he ever doubt his theory, or worry that he
was wrong as thousands of scientists and engineers devoted
their professional careers to pursuit of the boson? Now that the
eponymous particle is found, how does he react: with relief, or
trepidation that his life will be irrevocably changed? What does
he foresee as the future of physics? These are the questions that
I have been discussing with him during the last four years, as he
lived through the dramatic days that have moved a theory from
speculation to lore, establishing for all time some of the most
profound implications about the nature of the universe.
In 1964 Higgs, and five others independent of him (Fran-
ois Englert and Robert Brout in Belgium; Tom Kibble, Gerald
Guralnik and Carl Hagen at Imperial College), produced a the-
32
ory about the nature of matter and the fundamental forces of
nature, with remarkable consequences. The theory assumes that
known as the Higgs field. We have been immersed in this
essence forever, and been unaware of it. The idea that there is a
ghostly presence everywhere, seemingly invisible, but which can
be made manifest only when some clever people smash pieces
of atoms into one another at almost the speed of light, sounds
dangerously like the tale of a gullible public being told that their
king, who was in reality naked, was clothed in wonderful rai-
ment visible only to the highly intelligent. Even some renowned
physicists had their doubts.
Nonetheless, the theory had some remarkable successes. It
explains why the sun barely stays alight, the force converting its
hydrogen fuel into helium and liberating energy being so fee-
ble that the sun, instead of expiring almost immediately, has
survived billions of yearslong enough for evolution to have
worked its magic, producing sentient humans, collections of
atoms capable of knowing the universe. These ideas also explain
how the basic particles of matter, such as electrons and quarks,
can form molecules and atoms rather than flying around at the
speed of light in some form of cosmic goo. In summary: they
explained how the universe that erupted in a Big Bang some
13.8bn years ago is today full of shapes and forms, rather than
being a bland morass.
It is easier to be Shakespeare or Beethoven than a theoreti-
cal physicist, is how I introduced Higgs to the audience at the
Borders Book Festival in Melrose during June 2012. Being in
Scotland, I suggested that changing a few words in Macbeth, or
a few notes in Mendelssohns Hebrides Overture, would still leave
wonderful works of art; change a mere handful of symbols in
Peter Higgs equations, however, and they would not work.
The theory is exciting conceptually, constructed from beau-
tiful mathematical structures. Had this been a symphony or a
work of literature, its value would have been recognised several
decades ago. However, the ultimate value of a physical theory
should not be decided by public opinion, but by experimental
testing.
Among the sextet of theoristsknown by colleagues as the
Gang of SixHiggs alone identified a means of testing the
theory by a direct experiment. He drew attention to an ephem-
eral particle, known as the Higgs boson, which the theory
implies must exist. Find it, and confirm that it behaves as the
theory predicts, and you have made a major breakthrough in
understanding.
No such entity was known in 1964. No one, least of all Higgs,
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 PETER HIGGS
anticipated that nearly half a century would pass before the
issue would be settled.
The idea leading to the Higgs boson is similar to something
quite familiar: the nature of light as an electromagnetic wave. A
compass needle will point towards the north magnetic pole as
it senses the presence of the Earths magnetic field. Add energy
to a magnetic or electric field, in the form of heat say, and it will
stimulate an electromagnetic wavesuch as a radio wave, or a
sunbeam. In quantum mechanics, such waves consist of stac-
cato bundles of photons: massless particles of light. A similar
idea applies to the Higgs field. Add energy, and Higgs bosons
the analogues of the photonswill emerge.
The Higgs field is ubiquitous. Unlike a light, you cannot
switch it off. This is because the vacuum of space is never empty
but, according to quantum theory, is filled with ephemeral par-
ticles of matter and antimatter flitting in and out of existence,
including the Higgs field. As an analogy, imagine space as an
infinitely deep placid lake, whose surface is so smooth that we
are unaware of it in everyday affairs. Supply energy, however,
and waves form. In the real universe, these ripples, which her-
ald the Higgs boson, are the telltale signs of that profound all-
pervading stuff: the Higgs field.
A big difference between a photon and the Higgs boson is
that it is easy to create a particle of light as it has no massa
torch battery is sufficient. The Higgs boson, however, is mas-
siveweighing in at more than an atom of iron. To produce
this beast out of the vacuum requires a huge concentration of
energy, greater than has existed since the first moments of the
Big Bang. This technological challenge was beyond reach for
at least 20 years after the theory was formulated, but the ideas
underlying the Higgs boson increasingly interested the physics
community.
As the Gang of Six laid claims to the original insights, I
asked Higgs how his name had come to such prominence. In his
opinion, it was partly due to an accident. Three years after the
appearance of the Gang of Sixs original papers, Higgs met the
leading American theorist, Ben Lee, at a physics conference,
in Rochester New York. Up to that time, their ideas had been
largely ignored, but Lee had realised the significance. At the end
of that conference, Lee met Higgs at a party, and their conversa-
tion had a far greater impact than either anticipated.
I was standing with a plate in one hand and a glass of wine
in the other, being interrogated by Ben about my papers. I
didnt realise that five years later Ben Lee would be the [key-
note speaker] at the High Energy Physics conference in Chi-
cago, Higgs told me, with a gentle laugh. In 1972, Lee must
have recalled that conversation and forgotten the wider prove-
nance of some of the ideas as in his talk he referred prominently
to the massive Higgs boson (which is justified as only Higgs
drew attention to this special aspect of the theory) and also the
Higgs field (which has a wider provenance, Tom Kibble in par-
ticular having made unique contributions). In modern vernacu-
lar one would say that at that moment #Higgs began to trend.
Peter Higgs had not been in Chicago. The first that he knew
of this was when he met a colleague, Ken Peach, in the Edin-
burgh University staff club. Peach, just returned from the con-
ference, announced: Peter! Youre famous!
Lee had made Higgs famous, but finding the boson was out
of reach at that time. What was Higgs reaction back then? At
that time it looked as if the question would not be answered
in my lifetime. In the 1980s, I began to realise that finding the
33
boson might be possible, but the timescales were completely
unclear.
In 1983, the Americans started designing a machine known
as the Superconducting Super Collider, or SSC, capable of find-
ing the Higgs boson. The SSC was a pragmatic but ambitious
approach, which involved building a gargantuan ring of mag-
nets underground in a tunnel, 87 kilometres in length. Their
strategy was to produce the boson by means of conventional
technology and brute force. Higgs says that for the first time
it began to look as if I might see the answer after all. But this
burst of optimism was quickly dashed as in 1993 the Americans
quit. The future of particle physics, including the quest for the
Higgs boson, was now in jeopardy.
The cancellation of the SSC was a disappointment because
they should have been able to find [the boson] with their
technology. Then the LHC [Large Hadron Collider] plans
came through. Given some years of technological develop-
ment, I began to hope again it might happen after all while
I was around to see it. This emotional rollercoaster contin-
ued, Higgs recalling: Perhaps I was more optimistic [than
I should have been] as I was ignorant of some of the techno-
logical challenges facing the LHC. Compared to the SSC, the
LHC is relatively compacta ring the size of the Circle Line
on the London Underground. To produce the necessary con-
ditions in this device would require novel techniques, however.
There were any number of possible showstoppers: technological
barriers that could ruin the project. It took 20 years to design,
and build the LHC. In addition, scientists and engineers from
around the world had to construct detectors the size of battle-
ships, to record the results and tease out the Higgs boson, which
would live for less than a billionth of a billionth of a second.
P
eter Higgs, luckily, had not worried about this. Even-
tually, in 2008, the LHC was complete; beams of pro-
tons circulated, collided and experiments were eagerly
anticipated. Then there was a component failure, so
serious that the repairs took over a year to complete. By then I
was getting frustrated, Higgs reflected, as he reviewed the tale
of two steps forward and one step back. Finally all was well, and
in 2010 the data began to pour in.
Looking for the Higgs boson is analogous to rolling a pair of
dice inside a closed box. If sixes happen every time, you can be
certain that the dice are specialthe boson exists. However if
sixes happen once every 36 throws, the results are no more than
random chance and there is no Higgs boson. Opening the box is
the analogue of smashing two protons head on at the LHC and
detecting the debris. Recording the characteristics of the by-
productstheir varieties, energies and flight paths of the con-
stituent particlesis analogous to determining the numbers on
our metaphorical dice. Correlations among the particles may
show them to be the debris from the decay of an ephemeral
bosonthe dice each being a six.
If only it were that simple. In practice what happens is that
the sixes turn up slightly more often than mere chance and
you have to decide whether this is significantevidence for the
bosonor mere vagaries of luck, in which case there is no boson.
Perform a few throws and it is not possible to tell the answer;
after millions of throws, clear excess will become more certain.
By the end of 2011 there was a hint the dice were coming
up six more often than mere chance, but many more throws
would be needed to establish this with confidence. If there were
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 PETER HIGGS
no breakdowns and the LHC continued to work well, then the
autumn of 2012 seemed to be the earliest that a clear answer
would emerge. Thus it was that I found myself in Melrose in
June 2012, talking to Higgs during the interregnum, before an
answer was known.
The total cost of the enterprise has been estimated in the
order of 10bn. In the publics perception this has all been done
with the purpose of finding Higgs boson. So my first question
at Melrose was this: Peter, if tomorrow you found a mistake
in your arithmetic, would you tell anybody? It was a rhetori-
cal question as there are no mistakes. The basic ideas of the
theory have been used like pieces of Lego, building other the-
ories, which have been tested experimentally. As the 21st cen-
tury began, awareness that the boson could be found began to
take hold. Higgs boson became a brand, the answer to cryp-
tic crosswords, as an anagram within the clue: Gosh! Bigs no
way to describe it though its important in theory. One reason
why the public has been so enamoured could be the solid ordi-
nariness of the name, one syllable long. Had it been Kibble or
Englert for example, less attention might have ensued.
Two weeks after our event in Melrose, I met Higgs again, in
the hilltop Sicilian town of Erice. We were at a summer school
giving lectures to the new generation of young particle physi-
cists. All of them knew of Peter Higgs; most had never met him
or knew what he looked like. Unlike some, who hog the lime-
light and are highly visible at conferences, Higgs has for most
of the last half century been primarily a name, the man him-
self having managed to maintain a life of peace and quiet and
devoting much time to activism on behalf of the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament (he stopped when they extended their
campaign to opposing nuclear power). That was rapidly chang-
ing, and events were about to overtake him much earlier than
he had expected.
C
ern had planned some months before to make a pro-
gress report on 4th July. As the date approached, it
was like being at the eye of a hurricane. As rumours
as to the likely birth announcement of the Higgs
boson raged all around the globe, the man himself was in a
haven of peace in Erice.
A Dutch film crew, who were making a documentary about
Higgs and the boson, had come to Erice for three days. On 30th
June they were with Higgs, in the Restaurant Venus, for lunch.
Higgss colleague and aide, Alan Walker, had been trying to find
out how significant the 4th July event might be, as Peter was
due to return to Scotland, with no plans to go to Cern. He had
contacted the Cern press office in the morning to ask: What
should we do? Suddenly the lunch was interrupted when his
phone rang. He recalled: I saw the code +41, which is Switzer-
land, so I thought it was the Cern press office calling me back,
but it was John Ellis [a senior theorist at Cern]. So as not to
disrupt the lunch, Alan left the table and went over to the win-
dow to take the call. He turned round to see the film crew had
set up their equipment and were filming the moment. The
crew motioned to him to continue acting naturally so Alan
started a conversation with Peter sayingPssst, its John Ellis have been cured forever, perhaps to come down with another
saying we should go to Cern. Higgs replied: If John Ellis says
that, then we should go.
If there was a moment when Higgs knew that, at last, theory
was about to become lore, that was it. After 48 years of waiting,
instead of a feeling of triumph, his immediate reaction was of
34
panic. His life had become increasingly taken over in the previ-
ous couple of years with the media attention given to a person-
ality. The discovery of the Higgs boson would have unexpected
consequences. I had in a way been dreading the occasion, and
been preparing for how to cope with it, and suddenly realised
that I was going to have to face up to this event in my life some
months earlier than I had expected.
Two experiments at Cern were chasing the Higgs boson, and
both announced their results to a packed auditorium, and to
several millions watching thanks to the world wide webitself
one of the unexpected creations that had arisen out of the inter-
national quest for knowledge at Cern. When the first experi-
ment announced that they had strong evidence for the boson,
the audience burst into prolonged applause. When the sec-
ond speaker announced that they too had found the same phe-
nomena, independently, and with the same conclusions, there
was cheering. Former directors-general who had gathered for
the occasion, including staid octogenarians, were slapping one
another on the back, like excited children. We were witnessing a
seminal moment in human culture. What had been conjecture
for so long was now on the tablets for all time.
Peter recalled that, before the announcement, he was rea-
sonably sure that his ideas were correct and that the boson was
there to be found, but was not prepared for the overwhelming
emotions that erupted. It was very moving. I burst into tears.
It was partly the result of the audience reaction, their euphoria.
There was a huge buzz.
I was in England, watching online then as well, with a crowd
of physicists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxford-
shire. Even as kibitzers, we felt the sense of living through a his-
toric moment. Only three weeks had elapsed since I had talked
with him in Melrose, but it seemed a lifetime. The questions
from the audience on that occasion had included: Is this a semi-
nal moment in culture or is it a media creation? If it is real, what
do we know now that we didnt before, and what happens next?
The answer to the first question was already obvious. Many of
the scientists had devoted 20 years to the endeavour. Higgs had
waited for more than half a lifetime. What had been conjecture
was now confirmed as reality, knowledge about the fundamental
nature of the universe that would be there for as long as human-
ity itself, passed down the generations, as we ourselves have
been taught about the insights of Isaac Newton, Archimedes,
Pythagaros. The mysterious power of mathematics had been
confirmed once more; the ability of equations written on pieces
of paper to know nature. If a thunderbolt had come through the
roof of the auditorium at that moment, with the voice of Charl-
ton Heston berating impertinent humans for entering where we
had no right, I could hardly have been more overwhelmed than
in those moments when I felt contact with the infinite.
With the eponymous boson confirmed, speculation grew
about the destination of the 2012 Nobel Prize. During the early
autumn each year, as the second week of October approaches,
a highly selective epidemic breaks out: Nobelitis, a psychologi-
cal condition that takes over the minds of scientists who see the
finishing line of the Nobel race coming into their view. Some will
fear: do I deserve to be counted as one with Einstein? Others
will have a temporary remission, before suffering a renewed out-
break next year.
Cautious, or wise, counsel said that the discovery of the boson
was probably too late for it to affect the destination of any award
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014
that same year, but this did not prevent a media circus gener-
ating controversy by making speculations on how to select at
most three out of a cast of worthy characters. The debate con-
tinued to rage all the way up until this years announcement.
The question became not so much will Peter Higgs win it as
who will share it with him? Three at most can share a Nobel,
and as we have seen, at least six had ideas similar to Higgs in
the halcyon days of 1964 when this story began. So, there was
a degree of surprise when only two names were announced on
8th October 2013. Both Englert and Higgs were much-predicted
recipients, but for a deserving third place: Tom Kibble, Jeffrey
Goldstone or even the CERN laboratory itself were among the
numerous suggestions. However, I think that the Nobel commit-
tee has made a profound decision. Englert produced his prize-
winning work with the US/Belgian theoretical physicist Robert
Brout. Brout sadly passed away last year. Had he been alive, he
would have completed the trio.
A year after our memorable first visit, on 30th June 2013,
Higgs and I were once again in Erice, in the same restaurant
where he had received the call to Cern. I asked him how the real-
ity had compared with the anticipation. Although he had been
thrust into the spotlight for some time before the announce-
ment, he realised that the experimental confirmation would
make an order of magnitude difference. And had it? Yup
A few orders of magnitude judging by the numbers of incom-
ing emails.
Although his face is not recognised like that of a TV person-
ality, in his home city of Edinburgh he is increasingly stopped
on the street. I had noticed the change myself, between our per-
formance at Melrose in June 2012, and when I interviewed him
at the Edinburgh Festival in August that year, just four weeks
after the confirmation. In Melrose everyone was thrilled that
Higgs was there on stage; the applause was loud but standard
length. In Edinburgh it was quite singular. When an audience
applauds before an event, its as if there is a metronome in your
head, which tells you when you expect the clapping to die down.
But it didnt. It went on. And on. I realised: This is their boy. I
thought: We dont need to say anything. We can stand here for
an hour, let them applaud and they will be happy.
PETER HIGGS 35
How does the discovery affect our view of the universe and
the future of physics? In the publics mind, the Large Hadron
Collider was made in order to find the Higgs boson. Is this a
great success for physics? Higgs was cautious: The LHC was
built to explore many things, not just the boson. There could
be a reaction like OK, you can close the machine down now.
Its expensive and it has done its job. That particular aspect
[the boson] was possibly too successful at the expense of the
other things.
The LHC is currently being refurbished and will start up
again in a little over a year from now with more power. Higgs
is hoping that when the LHC restarts it will find evidence for
supersymmetry, and dark matter particles. Therein is the sober
message of what we know and, more relevant perhaps, what we
do not yet know. The stuff that we are made of, and whose exist-
ence is now beginning to be understood thanks to the discovery
of the boson, constitutes only about 5 per cent of the total. Most
of the universe is made of dark matter, which tugs the galax-
ies by gravity, but which does not shine. The particles that make
this, the dominant stuff, remain to be discovered.
After the ancient Greeks started musing about the nature of
matter, at last, following the discovery of the Higgs boson, we
are at the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end. We
are made of mere flotsam on a sea of dark matter. What this is
made of, and whether there are further dark Higgs bosons to
be found, is for the future. Theorists suspect that dark matter
may consist of supersymmetric particles, whose existence will
be within reach of the LHC in the next round of experiments.
Whether the existence of supersymmetry will be revealed within
a few years, or whether we are at the start of another long wait,
comparable to that which Higgs endured, we cannot know.
This article was published in Prospect in November 2013.
Frank Close is a particle physicist and Professor of Physics at the
University of Oxford. His latest book, The Infinity Puzzle, tells the
full story of the search for the Higgs Boson
 9
HA-JOON CHANG
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014
Life, the Universe
and Everything
ha-joon chang
What is economics?
A reader who is not familiar with the subject might reckon that
it is the study of the economy. After all, chemistry is the study
of chemicals, biology is the study of living things, and sociol-
ogy is the study of society, so economics must be the study of
the economy.
But according to some of the most popular economics books
of our time, economics is much more than that. According to
them, economics is about the Ultimate Questionof Life, the
Universe and Everythingas in The Hitchhikers Guide to the
Galaxy, the cult comedy science fiction by Douglas Adams,
which was made into a movie in 2005, with Martin The Hob-
bit Freeman in the leading role.
According to Tim Harford, the Financial Times journalist
and the author of the successful book The Undercover Econo-
mist, economics is about Lifehe has named his second book
The Logic of Life.
No economist has yet claimed that economics can explain the
Universe. The Universe remains, for now, the turf of physicists,
whom most economists have for centuries been looking up to as
their role models, in their desire to make their subject a true sci-
ence. But some economists have come close they have claimed
that economics is about the world. For example, the subtitle of
the second volume in Robert Franks popular Economic Natural-
ist series is How Economics Helps You Make Sense of Your World.
Then there is the Everything bit. The subtitle of The Logic of
Life is Uncovering the New Economics of Everything. According
to its subtitle, Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dub-
nerprobably the best-known economics book of our timeis
an exploration of the Hidden Side of Everything. Robert Frank
agrees, even though he is far more modest in his claim. In the
subtitle of his first Economic Naturalist book, he only said Why
Economics Explains Almost Everything (emphasis added).
So, there we go. Economics is (almost) about Life, the Uni-
verse and Everything.
When you think about it, this is some claim coming from a
subject that has spectacularly failed in what most non-econo-
mists think is its main jobthat is, explaining the economy.
In the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, the majority of the
economics profession was preaching to the world that markets
are rarely wrong and that modern economics has found ways
to iron out those few wrinkles that markets may have; Robert
Lucas, the 1995 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, had
declared in 2003 that the problem of depression prevention
has been solved. So most economists were caught completely
by surprise by the 2008 global financial crisis.Not only that,
37
they have not been able to come up with decent solutions to the
ongoing aftermaths of that crisis.
Given all this, economics seems to suffer from a serious case
of megalomaniahow can a subject that cannot even man-
age to explain its own area very well claim to explain (almost)
everything?
Economics Is the Study of Rational Human Choice
You may think I am being unfair. Arent all these books aimed at
the mass market, where competition for readership is fierce, and
therefore publishers and authors are tempted to hype things up?
Surely, you would think, serious academic discourses would not
make such a grand claim that the subject is about everything.
These titles are hyped up. But the point is that they are hyped
up in a particular way. The hypes could have been something
along the line of how economics explains everything about the
economy, but they are instead along the lines of how econom-
ics can explain not just the economy but everything else as well.
The hypes are of this particular variety because of the way
in which the currently dominant school of economics, that is,
the so-called Neoclassical school, defines economics. The stand-
ard Neoclassical definition of economics, the variants of which
are still used, is given in the 1932 book by Lionel Robbins, An
Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. In the
book, Robbins defined economics as the science which stud-
ies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce
means which have alternative uses.
In this view, economics is defined by its theoretical approach,
rather than its subject matter. Economics is a study of rational
choice, that is, choice made on the basis of deliberate, system-
atic calculation of the maximum extent to which the ends can
be met by using the inevitably scarce means. The subject matter
of the calculation can be anythingmarriage, having children,
crime or drug addiction, as Gary Becker, the famous Chicago
economist and the winner of 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics,
has written aboutand not just economic issues, as non-econ-
omists would define them, such as jobs, money or international
trade. When Becker titled his 1976 book The Economic Approach
to Human Behaviour, he was really declaring without the hype
that economics is about everything.
This trend of applying the so-called economic approach to
everything, called by its critics economics imperialism, has
reached its apex recently in books like Freakonomics. Little of
Freakonomics is actually about economic issues as most peo-
ple would define them. It talks about Japanese sumo wrestlers,
American schoolteachers, Chicago drug gangs, participants in
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 HA-JOON CHANG
the TV quiz show The Weakest Link, real estate agents and the
Ku Klux Klan.
Most people would think (and the authors also admit) that
none of these people, except real estate agents and drug gangs,
have anything to do with economics. But, from the point of view
of most economists today, how Japanese sumo wrestlers collude
to help each other out or how American schoolteachers fabricate
their pupils marks to get better job assessments are as legiti-
mate subjects of economics as whether Greece should stay in
the Eurozone, how Samsung and Apple fight it out in the smart-
phone market or how we can reduce youth unemployment in
Spain (which is over 55 per cent at the time of writing). To those
economists, those economic issues do not have privileged sta-
tus in economics, they are just some of many things (oh, I for-
got, some of everything) that economics can explain, because
they define their subject in terms of its theoretical approach,
rather than its subject matter.
or Is It the Study of the Economy?
An obvious alternative definition of economics, which I have
been implying, is that it is the study of the economy. But what
is the economy?
The economy is about moneyor is it?
The most intuitive answer to most readers may be that the econ-
omy is anything to do with moneynot having it, earning it,
spending it, running out of it, saving it, borrowing it and repay-
ing it. This is not quite right, but it is a good starting point for
thinking about the economyand economics.
Now, when we talk of the economy being about money, we are
not really talking about physical money. Physical moneybe it
a banknote, a gold coin or the huge, virtually immovable stones
that were used as money in some Pacific islandsis only a sym-
bol. Money is a symbol of what others in your society owe you,
or your claim on particular amounts of the societys resources.
How money and other financial claimssuch as company
shares, derivatives and many complex financial products, which
I will explain in later chaptersare created, sold and bought is
one huge area of economics, called financial economics. These
days, given the dominance of the financial industry in many
countries, a lot of people equate economics with financial eco-
nomics, but it is actually only a small part of economics.
Your moneyor the claims you have over resourcesmay be
generated in a number of different ways. And a lot of econom-
ics is (or should be) about those.
The most common way to get money is to have a job
The most common way to get moneyunless you have been
born into itis to have a job (including being your own boss)
and earn money from it. So, a lot of economics is about jobs. We
can reflect on jobs from different perspectives.
Jobs can be understood from the point of view of the individ-
ual worker. Whether you get a job and how much you are paid
for it depends on the skills you have and how many demands
there are for them. You may get very high wages because you
have very rare skills, like Cristiano Ronaldo, the football player.
You may lose your job (or become unemployed) because some-
one invents a machine that can do what you do 100 times faster
as happened to Mr Bucket, Charlies father, a toothpaste
cap-screwer, in the 2005 movie version of Roald Dahls Char-
lie and the Chocolate Factory. Or you have to accept lower wages
38
or worse working conditions because your company is losing
money thanks to cheaper imports from, say, China. And so on.
So, in order to understand jobs even at the individual level, we
need to know about skills, technological innovation and interna-
tional trade.
Wages and working conditions are also deeply affected by
political decisions to change the very scope and the charac-
teristics of the labour market (I have put political in quota-
tion marks, as in the end the boundary between economics
and politics is blurry). The accession of the eastern Euro-
pean countries to the European Union has had huge impacts
on the wages and behaviours of western European workers, by
suddenly expanding the supply of workers in their labour mar-
kets. The restriction on child labour in the late 19th and early
20th centuries had the opposite effect of shrinking the bound-
ary of the labour marketsuddenly a large proportion of
the potential employees were shut out of the labour market.
Regulations on working hours, working conditions and
minimum wages are examples of less dramatic political
decisions that affect our jobs.
There are also a lot of transfers of money going on in the economy
In addition to holding down a job, you can get money through
transfersthat is, by simply being given it. This can be either in
the form of cash or in kind, that is, direct provision of particu-
lar goods (eg food) or services (eg primary education). Whether
in cash or in kind, these transfers can be made in a number of
different ways.
There are transfers made by people you know. Examples
include parental support for children, people taking care of
elderly family members, gifts from local community members,
say, for your daughters wedding.
Then there is charitable giving, that is, transfer voluntarily
made to strangers. Peoplesometimes individually sometimes
collectively (eg through corporations or voluntary associa-
tions)give to charities that help others.
In terms of its quantity, charitable giving is overshadowed in
many multiples by transfers made through governments, which
tax some people to subsidise others. So a lot of economics is nat-
urally about these thingsor the areas of economics known as
public economics.
Even in very poor countries, there are some government
schemes to give cash or goods in kind (eg free grains) to those
who are in the worst positions (eg the aged, the disabled, the
starving). But the richer societies, especially those in Europe,
have transfer schemes that are much more comprehensive in
scope and generous in amounts. This is known as the welfare
state and is based on progressive taxation (those who earn more
paying proportionally larger shares of their incomes in taxes)
and universal benefits (where everyone, not just the poorest or
the disabled, is entitled to a minimum income and to basic ser-
vices, such as health care and education).
Resources earned or transferred get consumed in goods or services
Once you gain access to resources, whether through jobs or
transfers, you consume them. As physical beings, we need to
consume some minimum amount of food, clothes, energy, hous-
ing and other goods to fulfil our basic needs. And then we con-
sume other goods for higher mental wantsbooks, musical
instruments, exercise equipment, TV, computers and so on. We
also buy and consume servicesa bus ride, a haircut, a dinner
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 HA-JOON CHANG
at a restaurant or even a holiday abroad.
So a lot of economics is devoted to the study of consumption
how people allocate money between different types of goods
and services, how they make choices between competing vari-
eties of the same product, how they are manipulated and/or
informed by advertisements, how companies spend money to
build their brand images and so on.
Ultimately goods and services have to be produced
In order to be consumed, these goods and services have to be
produced in the first placegoods in farms and factories and
services in offices and shops. This is the realm of production
an area of economics that has been rather neglected since the
Neoclassical school, which puts emphasis on exchange and con-
sumption, became dominant in the 1960s.
In standard economics textbooks, production appears as a
black box, in which somehow quantities of labour (work by
humans) and capital (machines and tools) are combined to
produce the goods and services. There is little recognition that
production is a lot more than combining some abstract quanta
called labour and capital and involves getting many nitty-
gritty things right. And these are things that most readers may
not normally have associated with economics, despite their
crucial importance for the economy: how the factory is phys-
ically organised, how to control the workers or deal with
trade unions, how to systematically improve the technologies
used through research.
Most economists are very happy to leave the study of these
things to other peopleengineers and business managers.
But, when you think about it, production is the ultimate foun-
dation of any economy. Indeed, the changes in the sphere of
production usually have been the most powerful sources of
social change. Our modern world has been made by the series of
changes in technologies and institutions relating to the sphere
39
of production that have been made since the Industrial Revolu-
tion. The economics profession, and the rest of us whose views
of the economy are informed by it, need to pay far more atten-
tion to production than currently.
Concluding Remarks: Economics as the Study of the
Economy
My belief is that economics should be defined not in terms of its
methodology, or theoretical approach, but in terms of its sub-
ject matter, as is the case with all other disciplines. The sub-
ject matter of economics should be the economywhich involves
money, work, technology, international trade, taxes and other
things that have to do with the ways in which we produce goods
and services, distribute the incomes generated in the process
and consume the things thus producedrather than Life, the
Universe and Everything (or almost everything), as many
economists think.
Defining economics in this way makes this book unlike most
other economics books in one fundamental way.
As they define economics in terms of its methodology, most
economics books assume that there is only one right way of
doing economicsthat is, the Neoclassical approach. The
worst examples wont even tell you that there are other schools
of economics than the Neoclassical one.
By defining economics in terms of the subject matter, this
book highlights the fact that there are many different ways of
doing economics, each with its emphases, blind spots, strengths
and weaknesses. After all, what we want from economics is the
best possible explanation of various economic phenomena
rather than a constant proof that a particular economic the-
ory can explain not just the economy but everything.
Extracted from Economics: The Users Guide (Pelican Books,
2014)
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 HA-JOON CHANG 40

10
DANIEL KAHNEMAN
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014
Thinking fast and slow
daniel kahneman
E
very author, I suppose, has in mind a setting in
which readers of his or her work could benefit
from having read it. Mine is the proverbial office
watercooler, where opinions are shared and gossip
is exchanged. I hope to enrich the vocabulary that
people use when they talk about the judgments and choices
of others, the companys new policies, or a colleagues invest-
ment decisions. Why be concerned with gossip? Because it is
much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label
the mistakes of others than to recognise our own. Question-
ing what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times,
and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can
benefit from the informed opinions of others. Many of us spon-
taneously anticipate how friends and colleagues will evaluate
our choices; the quality and content of these anticipated judg-
ments therefore matters. The expectation of intelligent gossip
is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful
than New Year resolutions to improve ones decision making
at work and at home. To be a good diagnostician, a physician
needs to acquire a large set of labels for diseases, each of which
binds an idea of the illness and its symptoms, possible anteced-
ents and causes, possible developments and consequences, and
possible interventions to cure or mitigate the illness. Learn-
ing medicine consists in part of learning the language of med-
icine. A deeper understanding of judgements and choices also
requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday lan-
guage. The hope for informed gossip is that there are distinc-
tive patterns in the errors people make.
Systematic errors are known as biases, and they recur pre-
dictably in particular circumstances. When the handsome
and confident speaker bounds onto the stage, for example,
you can anticipate that the audience will judge his comments
more favorably than he deserves. The availability of a diagnos-
tic label for this biasthe halo effectmakes it easier to antici-
pate, recognise, and understand. When you are asked what you
are thinking about, you can normally answer. You believe you
know what goes on in your mind, which often consists of one
conscious thought leading in an orderly way to another. But that
is not the only way the mind works, nor indeed is that the typi-
cal way. Most impressions and thoughts arise in your conscious
experience without your knowing how they got there. You can-
not trace how you came to the belief that there is a lamp on the
desk in front of you, or how you detected a hint of irritation
in your spouses voice on the telephone, or how you managed
to avoid a threat on the road before you became consciously
aware of it. The mental work that produces impressions, intui-
41
tions, and many decisions goes on in silence in our mind. Much
of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition. How-
ever, the focus on error does not denigrate human intelligence,
any more than the attention to diseases in medical texts denies
good health. Most of us are healthy most of the time, and most
of our judgments and actions are appropriate most of the time.
An extract from Thinking Fast and Slow (Penguin, 2011)
Decisions, decisions
by Emmanuel Roman
Daniel Kahneman was one of the founders of behavioural eco-
nomics in the 1970s. His new book shows that he remains an
indispensable thinker.
For a long time, economists have tried to deal with the prob-
lem of decision-making. Daniel Kahneman, in his new book
Thinking Fast and Slow, argues that, until he and his colleague
Amos Tversky started behavioural economics in the 1970s, econ-
omists had been misguided. And for better or for worse, he is
mostly right.
Think of a person offered the following gamble. Flip a coin;
tails wins 50 and heads, just as likely as tails, wins nothing.
The expected value of the gamblea central concept in micro-
economic theoryis one half of 50 plus one half of zero, or
25. Being willing to pay 1 to play this game strikes most of us
as sensible, but paying 49 seems foolish. Deciding how much
to pay, why and when illustrates many of the problems sur-
rounding decision theory.
This is not a new problem. In his 1670 work, Les Penses,
Blaise Pascal came up with the original framework for comput-
ing expected value on the basis of probabilities. Economic the-
ory was built on that premise. People with different attitudes
to risk act differently, but they are rational and maximise their
own utility or the satisfaction they expect to get. The simplic-
ity and symmetry of this framework allowed economists to build
many models to deal with policy issues ranging from economic
growth to the optimal allocation of resources.
However, something was missing, as shown in one of Kahne-
mans examples. Suppose one flips the coin, but the player will
either lose 100, or win 150. There is the same 50-50 probabil-
ity and the expected value remains 25. But when faced with
threat of a loss, people in real life react very differently and will
modify their calculation of the expected value of the gamble.
This is called loss aversion and many studies show one needs
at least a 200 win to balance the fear of losing 100.
PROSPECT WORLD THINKERS 2014 DANIEL KAHNEMAN
In the 1970s, Kahneman and Tversky published a series of
papers that changed what economists believed about decision
theory. The most famous is Judgment under Uncertainty: Heu-
ristics and Biases, published in Science in 1974, and now taught
in most economics doctoral programs. For his work in this area,
Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002.
Discussing bias, Kahneman uses the following example: some
healthcare studies show that the lowest incidence of kidney can-
cer occurs in rural, sparsely populated, Republican, American
states. Why is this? Our minds are already racing ahead, cre-
ating all sorts of biases, making all sorts of inferences about
epidemiology in South Dakota. But lets think about it for ten
seconds. The explanation is simply in the numbers: sparsely
populated states have a higher chance of exhibiting extreme
outcomes, both good and bad. In this case, the extreme out-
come is a low occurrence of cancer.
Our guesses are also anchored. Kahneman and Tversky
ran an experiment in which estate agents were asked to sell a
house. Half were shown a brochure from the seller with a very
high price. The other half was shown the same document with
a low price. Both sets of agents were asked to evaluate the price
for which they could sell the house. The first group came back
with a much higher figure due to the anchoring effect of the
asking price, although both sets of brokers tried to justify their
thought processes with objective data.
We owe Richard Thaler from the University of Chicago for
some of the most interesting applications of Kahnemans work
in terms of understanding and influencing economic policy. In
his excellent book Nudge (co-written with Cass Sunstein), Thaler
explains that a framework in which consent is the default option
for organ donation would save many lives. Other examples are
programmes in US cities to pay $1 to teenage girls for every day
they are not pregnant. These have shown a reduction in unwanted
pregnancies with very favourable ratios of cost to benefit.
Thalers work is fascinating. One of his conclusions is that a
society can preserve freedom of choice while nudging people in
various directions that will improve their lives. But most of the
recommendations stemming from the work of Kahneman and
Thaler are small-scale improvements. They dont necessarily tie
up with other economic problems in a general framework, as the
following example illustrates.
For centuries, the stock market has exhibited bubbles and
crashes. We understand, sort of, how investors can get over-
optimistic about new technologies and push stock prices to
extreme levels, but remain quite puzzled as to why the stock
market moves so much, or why it suddenly plunges. Perhaps we
can find, in the works of Kahneman and the behavioural finance
school, an explanation for why people suddenly panic. As Rob-
ert Shiller of Yale explains, the recent worldwide stock market
boom and then crash had its origins in human foibles and arbi-
42
trary feedback relations. The challenge for the economists is to
make this reality a better part of their models. One would want
a behavioural finance model to tie up with macroeconomic vari-
ables such as growth, corporate earnings and price action.
Another interesting application of behavioural economics has
been in the field of development economics by, among others,
Esther Duflo from MIT. Her work has dealt with issues as broad
as poverty, HIV and immunisation. For example, she looked at
prevention of HIV/Aids in 19,000 adolescents in Kenya over
seven years. The Nudge in her work is that coupling an edu-
cation subsidy with an HIV curriculum leads broadly to young
women deferring their first pregnancy and to lower levels of sex-
ually transmitted diseases.
Kahnemans underlying thesis is that decision-making has
two systems: an automatic system (the autopilot one) and a sec-
ond system, performing more complex analyses such as choice,
concentration and computing. One would assume that in a stock
market crash, most participants System Two goes into over-
drive and many sub-optimal decisions are made at the same
time. Panic selling also has to be a physiological phenomenon,
wherein market participants exhibit surges of adrenalin and
other measurable symptoms.
At some point, one hopes from an epistemological stand-
point that Kahnemans empirical observations are tied to cur-
rent work in neurobiology on how people make decisions. Some
researchers have looked at delayed gratification decisions
through a brain scanner. People willing to delay gratification
exhibit more activity in lateral areas of the cortex involved in
higher cognitive operations. John Coates, an expert in neuro-
science and finance at Cambridge, and others, are trying to tie
physiological changes to investors behaviour and risk prefer-
ences. In one of his papers, Coates looks at levels of testosterone
(reward) and cortisol (risk) in traders in the City. The data sug-
gests that increasing hormone levels of traders during bull and
bear phases of the market can shift risk preferences to such an
extent that they destabilise the market. The study implies that
the age and gender composition of traders and asset managers
may impact market volatility and instability. It is hard not to be
excited about what the future work of behavioural neuroscien-
tists will show.
What will remain of behavioural economics in 20 or 50
years is not obvious. Our understanding of neuroscience and
its impact on decision-making may make behavioural econom-
ics less relevant. As we start to understand better the memory
that covers conscious activity and its links to vision and lan-
guage, we may better understand some types of decisions. In
the meantime, we can all make better decisions, and be better
homo economicus.
This article was published in Prospects December 2011 edition