David Engerman takes Dan Banik inside the lives and rivalries of six South Asian economists who helped define what ādevelopmentā would mean in the postcolonial world. From Cambridge seminars to global institutions, the conversation reveals how their debates on trade, planning, inequality, and human welfare still shape the choices governments face today.
In this episode of In Pursuit of Development, Dan Banik speaks with Yale historian David Engerman about how ādevelopmentā became one of the most powerful and contested ideas of the modern era. Drawing on Engermanās 2025 book Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made, the conversation follows six influential South Asian economists and policymakers, Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, Manmohan Singh, Mahbub ul Haq, Rehman Sobhan, and Lal Jayawardene, from Cambridge classrooms to planning commissions and global institutions. Along the way, they unpack the enduring arguments that still shape policy today: poverty versus inequality, markets versus states, trade versus protection, and expertise versus politics. The episode also explores how ideas associated with human development emerged, why āthe Global Southā became a category with political force, and what these intellectual friendships and rivalries reveal about the promises and tensions inside the development project.
[Dan Banik]
David, lovely to see you. Welcome to the show.
[David Engerman]
Thanks for having me.
[Dan Banik]
David, my show is about development, and I've been making the case over the last five years that the show has been running that development is a contested idea.
Not everybody agrees what development is.
One of the arguments I'm making is that the global north seems to think that there ain't no development, and the global south doesn't always agree.
Given that you also write about development as a contested concept in the book,
And given that you're a historian, I wonder whether we could start, if I can ask you to give a brief history of the idea of development as you see it.
[David Engerman]
Well, that could take up most of our time. Let me start.
I mean, the historian's mantra is always that things started earlier and they're more complicated. So I'll do both of those as quickly as I can.
I mean, I think there's a move among some, especially in Western Europe, to associate development as a kind of colonial ideology.
And there are ways in which development was seen as a form of
reinforcing empire in the middle decades of the 20th century as it hurtled toward its ultimate demise.
But I think it's also important to note that just as it was colonial development, there was anti-colonial development.
And development was a nationalist project.
And when colonies became nations, it was a national project and remained that.
I do think it's really important to emphasize the contestation.
I'm glad to hear that's such a core theme in the podcast.
Because we do talk about a kind of a global South perspective or a global North perspective.
And one of the great things about looking at these six individuals from South Asia, which I do in Apostles of Development, is it really confounds any notion of not just a global South perspective or even a South Asia perspective, but there's not a single Indian perspective either.
And in fact, that contest has been around for years from its founding, right?
Whether development was a source to reinforce or to overthrow empire in the 1930s and 40s into the 50s.
And then after that, about what development's goals were, is the main goal of development to reduce inequality?
And if so, is it inequality between nations or within them?
Or is it to eliminate poverty?
And like my colleague, Joanne Marowitz, I do see the sort of turn toward poverty eradication as a central goal as easy way out is too tough a way to put it, because eradicating poverty is actually very difficult.
But it became a non-zero-sum approach that you could stand, as we see, say, in South Asia since 1990, increased inequality joined to decreasing poverty.
And so that's one of the core debates once development gets going.
And then there are all kinds of issues of technique and sequencing.
The role of trade in development, one of the interesting things about this group of six who I write about is quite early on, even in the early 60s, they're looking at trade as a vehicle for development, which was certainly not popular in South Asia, especially in India, but also was not universally accepted across the global South.
I can go on about more of the debates as we march through time, or maybe we can just take them up as a conversation.
[Dan Banik]
In my own work, I've often found that talking about poverty reduction, which became very popular at a certain point of time, was rather comfortable for a lot of people to talk about.
But not so much poverty production, the causes of poverty, you know, because reducing, everybody agrees we have to reduce, a bit like eradication, even though it may be a far-fetched goal.
So I think there's something about these concepts, these ideas, and I like the main argument in the book that these six apostles, we can get back to why you call them apostles.
Maybe they were preaching, they were on a missionary zeal to propagate certain ideas, but the veryinteresting aspect is that you have six individuals from the global south coming up with solutions, very informed by their own lived experiences.
I was mentioning to you my relationship with Amartya Sen and, you know, having worked on famine, etc., And Amartya Sen often talks about how it was, you know, for him to experience the Bengal famine and to see people, you know, outside the house, you know, begging for food.
And it's not a big surprise that he ended up studying famine.
So what would you say were the core ideas that these six individuals had?
came up with, which contrasted perhaps with much of what was being propagated by global north actors, such as modernization theory or, you know, be like us, do like us, and you will all grow or trickle down economics.
What was it that
This group, and by the way, it has to be mentioned, they have a lot in common.
They all went to Cambridge.
Three of them were for India, one from Sri Lanka, one from Bangladesh, one from Pakistan.
They all had very similar backgrounds.
They liked each other.
Sometimes they did not like each other.
There was lots of agreements and disagreements.
But how would you characterize the uniqueness of this group of apostles, as you call them?
[David Engerman]
Well, one of the things I think it's important to emphasize, and I don't mean to downplay the individual achievements of them, is just their particular generation.
And so they all were born in the early to mid 1930s.
So they were too young to be active in anti-colonial movements.
They were too old to be Midnight's children. I kind of joke sometimes that I could have called them Midnight's teenagers, but it seems a little...
It seemed a little dismissive.
But they came of intellectual age, their university work.
And it's also worth noting, you're right that they all went to Cambridge.
But five of the six actually had economics training in South Asia before they left for Cambridge.
Two of them actually had master's degrees.
Two others had just a bachelor's.
So their ideas about economics and their region were already, I wouldn't say fully formed, but already well on their way before they arrived at Cambridge.
And there's this moment of possibility, I think, that is easy to forget.
It's easy to criticize India's license permit Raj, the development dictatorship of Field Marshal Ayub Khan in Pakistan, et cetera, and they're worth criticizing.
But we can't forget that this was a particular generation
that thought that they and their cohort with their intelligence, their training, and their hard work would really be able to create a modern economy in their lifetimes.
You don't find specific statements to that effect from any of these, but there's a general sense.
that we can do this.
Jawaharlal Nehru says, you know, in 10 years, he says 1953, he says in 10 years, we'll have employment for all, we'll have eliminated poverty, et cetera.
Now, I don't need to tell you that in 1963, that's actually not an apt description of the Indian economy.
But there was this real sense of possibility, and it's that that they came into.
They were among the best of their peers, which is how they experienced
evidenced by how they excelled at the universities in south asia and how they excelled once they got to came but that well the fact that they got to cambridge and how they excelled once there five of the six earned first class honors one went all the way down to an upper second the prize for best economics paper the Adam Smith Prize two of them won at three one honorable mentions right so they they topped a very impressive wherever they were they were at or near the top uh
of their cohort.
And they really set themselves to understanding the problems around them.
Manmohan Singh tells a story that he'd read in a book.
He attributes it to Mini Masani, but I think it was actually Nehru who said this, that India is a rich country with poor people, and he wanted to understand how that was so.
Jagdish Bhagwati told me that he wanted to study economics to understand the poverty he saw around him and to figure out what to do about that.
[Dan Banik]
I wasn't aware that I think among the six, there was one person who did not grow up in a middle class or upper middle class household.
That was Manmohan Singh.
[David Engerman]
Or actually upper class in a couple of cases.
[Dan Banik]
Yeah, because the others were, you know, elites in the sense that their parents were doing well.
They were growing up maybe in urban centers.
But Manmohan Singh was the outlier, was he?
Ā
[David Engerman]
Yes, he was.
So he was raised by his grandparents.
His mother died when he was very, very young in a town called Gah.
I think it's around 150 kilometers west of Lahore, now in Pakistan, obviously.
But he was, I think, welcomed into the elite in a certain sense.
He had got advice from I.G. Patel, one of the great Indian policymakers, economic policymakers from the 50s through the 80s, really, and was welcomed into the elite.
Others were born into it.
In Amartya Sen's case, a kind of cultural elite, Bengali cultural elite.
His name, Amartya, was given to him by Rabindranath Tagore.
Rehman Soban was born to substantial comfort and married into great wealth.
And this actually speaks to a point that I wish I'd done more about in the book, which is that development for them was something of a top-down process.
And there are even ways that people like Rehman Sobhan and Amartya Sen, who are
fervent and deeply, you have a kind of deep-seated vision of democratic society, still have elements of this sort of top-down process.
And we're used to seeing this or thinking of this as the objects of development are from the global South and the subjects of development, if you were.
are from the global north, but it's actually, it's a process, it's a dynamic that's replicated also within their countries.
And that gives development a certain kind of approach and willingness to put up with certain sacrifices in the name of a larger cause.
I was surprised, for instance, to look at the growth model that Amartya Sen worked out with K.N. Raj, a great Indian socialist economist in the late 50s and early 60s, which sounds an awful lot like the kind of Western approach that, you know, need for capital, need for industrialization.
He comes out firmly in support of the second five-year plan in India in the late 50s, which is very, very much focused on import substitution industrialization.
And yet you can read that actually in Sen's growth model, Raj-Sen's growth model, I should say.
[Dan Banik]
So you have these six individuals arriving at Cambridge.
This is the heyday, I suppose, of Keynesian economics.
They meet many of these very influential mentors who take them under their wings.
It could be Joan Robinson or Maurice Dobb, some left-leaning scholars, others not so.
What happens in those formative years?
Do they strike friendships with each other?
Do they agree on the way forward?
Are there deep disagreements?
We know that later on in life, there were deep disagreements between Bhagwati and Sen, for example.
And there were lots of disagreements between Sobhan and Mahbub ul Haq on the inequality question.
So how were those formative years?
And to what extent did Joan Robinson play
a very important role in forming some of those initial ideas, at least for some of them, I suppose, not for all of the six.
[David Engerman]
Well, this might get me in trouble in Cambridge, England, but in some ways, I think it's possible to overstate the direct influence that those teachers had on them.
Not just because, as I mentioned earlier, they all had substantial economics training before they come there.
Sen actually describes Cambridge as something of a letdown after his undergraduate career at Presidency.
Now, some of that is, I think, the self-mythologizing of Presidency College Calcutta, which
which is on par with the self-mythologizing of Cambridge economics.
[Dan Banik]
But apparently it was also because of the textbooks.
They weren't very advanced.
[David Engerman]
No, I mean, I actually spent some time looking at the reading lists and lecture lists and so on, and I could see why Sen said this.
The one kind of axis I would emphasize, at least in Sen's case, is the allergy of Cambridge economists to mathematics or to mathematical economics.
Joan Robinson was kind of bold and forthright, I guess as she was in most things, bold and forthright about her lack of interest in mathematical economics.
And so by the time they get to Cambridge, which is 1954 plus or minus one year, you know, Paul Samuelson's work is taking the United States economics profession by storm at LSE, at Oxford, that you're seeing more and more mathematical economics, and yet there's almost nothing to that effect.
There is a field on economic statistics, but it amounts to looking up tables and books.
It's not like statistical inference or anything that we would see as resembling even an early version of econometrics.
So what they learned at Cambridge, I think, were a few things.
One is, as you've alluded to, that they learned that economics is an argument argument.
It's not an answer.
And that was particularly true for development economics.
The arguments were pretty fierce among Cambridge faculty in the 1950s, some of which were over substance, some of which were kind of petty personal battles.
I mean, until Keynes died in 1946,
Everything was, the entire economics faculty was essentially oriented around him.
And that created, even after he died, this sort of legacy of angling for influence or the claims to be the successor
the successor to Keynes, not necessarily in stature, but within the faculty.
And they definitely treated, these apostles definitely treated economics as an argument.
I think that's really important to note.
Again, as this point I mentioned earlier, that there's no one global South position on economics.
I was glad that these six were the only six South Asians who were studying at Cambridge in the mid-50s.
I didn't leave anyone out.
If I'd gone a little bit earlier, there would have been another interesting group of people, although they wouldn't have agreed with each other either.
I was really glad that there were some interested in trade.
And it wasn't just Bhagwati.
It was also Lal Jayawardene who really saw trade as central.
Now, the Sri Lankan economy or Sinhalese economy at that point was very different than the Indian one.
It was oriented around the export of agricultural products.
And so it fit more readily into a kind of a trade model than India, where the ruling view was import substitution.
So that's one thing they learned. Economics is an argument.
They also learned economics is a kind of practical effort that it's actually driven by a desire to solve specific problems and not grand theorizing.
And we, I think, scholars and not just economists like to flatter ourselves by thinking that, you know, we just retreat into our study and these great ideas emerge fully formed.
But in fact, we're actually trying to solve particular problems.
Schumpeter actually has this line about Keynes' general theory, that in fact, it wasn't general at all.
It was, as Schumpeter put it, English advice born of English problems.
And I think that applied widely.
Some things they didn't learn, they didn't learn anything about South Asia.
There was no, there were almost no writings on the extra European world, I guess, if I could say that, that I could find in there in the reading lists.
That which there were, were elementary, but also highly suspect.
And so they also didn't learn development economics.
There was no field called development economics at that point.
Some universities would have one course on the topic.
Here at Yale, they had one course called Policy in Underdeveloped Areas, but it was actually about American policy, not about what development should be.
And that gave them this advantage to draw widely across economic fields.
I've already mentioned trade, but to see trade as tied to development, we think of that as something that happened in the economics profession much, much later.
But in fact, that is part of the debate of the day for them in the 1950s.
[Dan Banik]
David, I also read in the book that, say, Joan Robinson and her husband actually spent some time in India.
So even though she did not maybe write so much about India, I think some of that experience perhaps shaped some of her thinking, right?
And the same with Nicholas Kaldor, same with many others who seem to gravitate towards spending a few months.
So that was one thing.
The other thing that struck me, and there were lots of really interesting pieces of information in your book,
was that none of the six apostles felt that they were living in a racist society, that they did not feel that they were so different.
Cambridge seems to insulate them from all of these other things, except perhaps finding housing, which maybe was a challenge if you lived outside campus.
But a final thing I want to mention in this context is I've spoken with Meghnad Desai and Pranab Bardhan has been on my show, both of them actually.
And I think Pranab Bardhan went there, he was junior to this group, but he told me how important these friendships were and they still, you know, keep in touch regularly.
That kind of bonding that happened at Cambridge lasted quite a long time.
So did some of the animosity.
[David Engerman]
Yes, I mean, well, I guess you could say it's like a family, but what family doesn't have its own internal fissures?
The interesting thing about the faculty encounters with South Asia, you mentioned Joan and Austin Robinson. Austin Robinson was less known as a publishing economist, although he was president of the International Economics Association for a long time.
They actually lived in India in the 20s while Austin was serving as a tutor, private tutor to a prince. And then Joan made a number of trips back, frequently enough.
I'm not sure how it affected her thinking, but it affected her wardrobe.
She was apparently seen around campus in salwar kameez or saris.
But it's really distinct from their work. And Maurice Dobb and Nicolas Caldor went.
But here's one way you can see it as distinct.
So Joan Robinson is working on a book in the 1950s called The Accumulation of Capital, which is also, not coincidentally, the title of a book by Rosa Luxemburg a generation earlier.
And Luxemburg's book accounts for capital accumulation on a global scale.
I wouldn't say it's a proto-Wallerstein, but it's centered on the economic growth
the economies of Western Europe, but it actually recognizes their advantageous situation in the world economy.
Robinson's accumulation of capital doesn't do that.
It really is kind of a macroeconomics that ends at national borders.
Nicholas Kaldor wrote a number of pieces promoting, for instance, consumption tax for India, which he also tries to bring to the UK.
Dobbs gives lectures at the Delhi School in 1951.
But none of them really make that a kind of core question in their work.
And so there is this discrepancy that's notable there.
It's what they do kind of extracurricularly almost.
[Dan Banik]
And that's what the six of these apostles actually do by returning home, right?
And I wanted to ask you, how would you sum up that impact?
So some of them, of course, did, you know, different degrees and they went back and forth.
If I could even use the term home, you know, because for Amartya Sen, he wrote a book called A Home in the World, there's so many different dimensions here.
But when they did return home after that initial stint at Cambridge, how would you characterize that impact?
Were they confronting traditional, conventional economics advice?
And they were interacting with the local planning commission, with policymakers.
Were they taking their home constituents by storm?
[David Engerman]
Well, I mean, first thing I should say by way of apology is, you know, true to the statement that everything is more complicated.
I mean, they all took very different paths.
Sen was very proud of not being involved directly in kind of government advising.
Bhagwati was seeking out opportunities to do so and actually worked in the planning commission for a little bit in the early 60s.
The others were mostly in the policy world, Singh.
goes back to teach at his home university, and then comes to Oxford to get a PhD, and then returns and teaches at Delhi School for a few years.
Actually, he takes Bhagwati's job in the late 60s after Bhagwati leaves for the United States.
So, they are a peripatetic bunch.
They're always going places.
They always do come home, as you say.
They don't all engage directly.
I think for the most part, people are either in or out of the policy world.
Haq is in, Jayawardena is in.
Jayawardena never holds an academic post, nor does Haq.
Sen and Bhagwati are primarily academics.
They're the only two who I'd say the economics profession would recognize as professional economists.
The others were primarily in the policy sphere.
Stopan comes back to, decides to move to Dhaka, actually, which, and it's not back to, he'd almost never spent time in Dhaka.
He didn't know Bangla, he says, when he started teaching there.
So they all have the, they do all have these different paths, but all of them are driven, I think, to understand and to try and work out paths forward in Dhaka.
the core question of the day, which is what to do about poverty and inequality in the region and in their specific countries.
[Dan Banik]
Right. So they're applying whatever they've learned in Cambridge to that local context, right?
And I was thinking about many of the chapters of your book.
There were agreements and disagreements on what is economic growth.
How should one actually advocate for pro-poor growth?
You know, Haq and Sen later talked about and developed the idea of human development together. Sen was interested in philosophy.
There were disagreements on the role of globalization, trade.
That's where Bhagwati and maybe Manmohan Singh on the one side, Sen on the other.
The role of the state versus markets, the role of inequality rather than just focusing on poverty. And then democracy, which Sen has been very interested with.
I remember reading and I was a student in Bhagwati saying there's a cruel choice dilemma between democracy and development.
And of course, later on, he changed his mind, which is wonderful that he admitted to changing his mind. And so you have all of these debates, you know, disagreements and agreements.
And then you also have this other layer that some consider themselves more comfortable with activism. Perhaps Sobhan is one of them, having, you know, worked very closely with the Awani League constitution, drafting the constitution or the economic manifesto, I think, of Awani League. Whereas Sen has said he's never been an activist, you know, he supports from afar. So how would you characterize these sort of debates that they had with themselves, between themselves? Say on trade, there you have Bhagwati as being one of those dominant figures advocating for a certain prescription, which people like Sen disagreed with.
And these debates were shaping a lot of the climate, if you can say so, at the D School in Delhi, because they were both serving there at the same time.
[David Engerman]
I think you can tell the story as conflicts, and there definitely were conflicts.
But there are also some unexpected convergences.
So my reading of Bhagwati's early work in trade, and one of the things I'm really determined to do is show his significance as a trade economist, because he's
He's often seen, especially in South Asia, as a kind of globalization pamphleteer, basically.
But one of the things that Bhagwati is trying to do is essentially apply welfare economic ideas to trade, or we might also say kind of a political economy of trade that
Trade isn't in all cases necessarily beneficial.
It has certain beneficiaries and certain people who pay the price or groups who pay the price or sectors. And he's actually interested in those questions right at the outset.
So you can see divergence and there's plenty of that, but you can also see these elements of convergence.
I would say that convergence really heats up in the 90s.
And so I'm taken by a couple of data points here. One is Amartya Sen writing about Singh's economic reforms of the early 90s, which Bhagwati calls not just the liberalization, but the liberation of India. And Sen says, well, it's really good that the government has gotten out of the places it shouldn't be, but now we'd like to see it do more in the areas where the government should be acting, and particularly in the realm of social welfare.
And that's not radically different than Singh's position.
Singh spends, you know, the 90s, he's known as the great reformer, but he does both rhetorically and in certain ways in practice, although less than rhetorically, he is trying to ensure specifically pro-poor programs.
And you can see this particularly in Singh's term as prime minister, 2004 to 14, where a whole raft of kind of pro-poor policies, most notably the employment guarantee in Regha, but also
rights to food, rights to information, which is actually framed as a development question, forest rights, etc.
All of these sorts of programs emerge under that flag, a flag called inclusive growth, I guess.
Sobhan also starts writing in those ways.
So he is also promoting inclusive growth, slightly different meaning than Singh, but plenty of convergence there.
Sobhan also
I think undergoes this change in the 1990s where he starts, for much of his career, he saw the market as a generator of inequality.
And so that you seek solutions to inequality outside the market.
By the 90s, he's actually looking to level the playing field.
And so the idea, rather than change the game, if you will, trying to level the playing field.
And so he's looking for ways in which poor Bangladeshis can have access to the market on fair terms.
And that's a pretty big shift, right?
I mean, it basically accepts the market as a fundamental, if not the fundamental, allocative mechanism.
[Dan Banik]
Staying on inequality, David, I found it quite fascinating to note the kind of disagreements that Rehman Soban and Mahbub ul Haq had on inequality, because Soban was pointing out this great inequality caused by Pakistan's policies on Bangladesh, and also the fact that Haq was perhaps comfortable working under a dictator.
How did that play out?
[David Engerman]
So that's interesting.
I think there are two dimensions of inequality at play here.
And Soban is pro-equality on both of them.
One is what you might call horizontal or regional disparity.
And then the other is vertical, like within a specific society.
But I think they had some agreement on vertical, right?
Huq introduces himself to the larger world of development with a speech called 22 Families.
well, nicknamed 22 Families, about the problems of development.
Which is quite controversial, I read.
Yes.
Well, I mean, it's controversial because it's an attack on Ayub Khan's economic policies, which he, as much as any other single person, was responsible for defending and describing.
So it has a certain controversy just out of the reversal, his reconsideration there.
In the early stages, the
The principal dimension of focus on inequality is more horizontal than vertical.
And this takes place in the international arena as well.
So there's the Pearson Report of 1968, which is sponsored by the incoming World Bank president, Robert McNamara.
And then there's a book organized, a conference and a book organized by Barbara Ward, who is kind of one of the remarkable forgotten figures in international development.
And the book is called The Widening Gap.
But for her, as for Pearson, and for most people, the widening gap was a gap between rich countries and poor ones, not between rich and poor within the country.
And that really starts to change only in the 70s.
Huq is in some ways working toward this when he works for McNamara's essentially president's office and uses that as a chance to promote basic human needs, which is a kind of rethinking of society.
the purposes of development.
McNamara says that his goal is to help the poorest people in the poorest countries, right?
And so you see that change of inequality for Haq.
Huq, it's interesting.
What I knew of Huq is when I started working on this as an international historian was kind of as a progressive, not a radical, but a progressive force helping push the World Bank to become a development agency rather than a finance agency.
inventing human development at UNDP.
So those are the 70s and the 90s.
When I went to Pakistan, I was really taken by how vociferous the criticism of Huq was from younger scholars there.
Yeah, they don't remember the 70s and the 90s.
They remember the 60s and the 80s.
And so he's working for, I guess I'd call a development dictator, Ayub Khan through the 60s.
And then this is even more unforgivable for these young Pakistanis.
He's a member of the cabinet in various incarnations and roles for General Zia-ul-Haq in the 80s.
And I think they see the 80s as the moment that has put Pakistan on its current course, which they are deeply skeptical of.
[Dan Banik]
How do you think Amartya Sen, who champions democracy, viewed Haq's support of the military rule in Pakistan?
[David Engerman]
I don't know.
I did not ask Sen that question.
I mean, Huq's defense, especially in the 80s, was that he could do something to moderate the worst effects of General Zia-ul-Haq from the cabinet rather than from outside.
And it's certainly true there was not a vibrant public sphere in which he could have played any role.
I also think that Haq was quite ambitious and really had wanted to become finance minister.
He tries to become finance minister for Bhutto in the 70s, but that doesn't come to pass.
And the fact that he's willing to work for Bhutto and for General Zia-ul-Haq suggests that maybe his kind of personal ambitions played some role there.
[Dan Banik]
These people, these six apostles, are moving back and forth from India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, to MIT, to Yale, to Cambridge, to Oxford, getting their degrees.
And some of them, of course, also end up in international organizations.
Haq is one of those who starts working for the World Bank.
Jayawardena, I think, does he start with UNCTAD?
[David Engerman]
Both Jayawardena and Singh worked for UNCTAD briefly in the mid-60s.
[Dan Banik]
Right.
And then, of course, Sen moves back and forth from the U.K.
to the U.S., lots of visiting positions, etc.
We've already mentioned human development as one of those key ideas that they developed.
What are the others?
I mean, Haq and Sen talk about, well, they spent a lot of time in the late 80s, early 90s, developing the Human Development Index, working closely with the U.N.
Jayawardena sets up WIDER, you know, UNU WIDER.
He gets Sen and Marta Nussbaum and all of these people there, a vibrant environment.
What is Bhagwati doing?
He's at Columbia.
He's interacting extensively with the UN agencies, right?
[David Engerman]
His UN engagements really don't start till the 1990s.
So he makes his transition in the 90s from being less of a journal article publishing economist and more of a kind of public figure writing on economic questions.
And it's in that latter role, which really picks up in the 90s, that he is involved in a number of UN member and UN commissions and never major, major roles.
[Dan Banik]
But his stature as an economist is growing at Columbia, right?
Yep.
And he has influential students like Paul Krugman.
[David Engerman]
Yes, yes.
Although I think Krugman's advisor was actually Charles Kindleberger, but Bhagwati definitely taught Krugman as well.
So they all do engage in the wider world, but Sen perhaps least of all.
I think Sen's kind of lasting move, I would say starting in the 80s, is going from the kind of quite abstruse field of
collective choice in welfare economics, social choice, toward kind of bringing those ideas down to earth.
And so you see the first, the entitlement concept he introduces in his work on famines, and then the capabilities and functionings.
And you're right, he has this very productive intellectual project running with Martha Nussbaum at Wider.
He also has an equally productive and a little bit more down to earth, even more down to earth project with Jean Dreze.
That's correct.
running, of course, over the 90s.
Jai Wardena, it turns out, was great at creating productive environments.
His time there was tense.
The Finns had put money toward the project in the hope of integrating Finnish scholars toward international circles of development.
But it ended up being mostly people from outside Finland coming to Helsinki in the summer and furthering their own work.
[Dan Banik]
Sen told me that he really enjoyed spending, you know, the time that he did in Helsinki.
It was so productive.
And more so because of Hunger and Public Action, you know, some of that work that I've been very inspired by took place in Helsinki.
[David Engerman]
As did Quality of Life.
No, Sen really made the most of it.
And I think you could say that Diwarden's strategy was to put wider on the map.
And to do that, you took established scholars and brought them in.
He also did a large project on structural adjustment.
I mean, he takes office in the mid-1980s, in the year of structural adjustment, that produced, I think, 17 volumes, plus Lance Taylor from MIT writing a summary volume about paths and patterns and structural adjustment.
So for Jayawardena, Wider was both a place to support kind of intellectual innovation.
So Sen's quality of life work with Martha Nussbaum, the hunger and public action with Jean Dreze, Sobhan spends time there, plenty of other economists not related, were not Cambridge graduates of the 50s, are also coming through there.
But
At a certain moment, I think the Finns wanted this integration to take place, to have more Finnish scholars present.
And so there was a bit of, I don't know if I would say a conspiracy, but a kind of collective enterprise to kind of cause why there's some trouble that ultimately leads to Jayawardena's resignation in, I think, 93 or 94.
[Dan Banik]
What about the impact of these individuals on the World Bank and IMF?
I read in your work, of course, how the IMF did not have poverty as a crucial part of its work, but they were able to push the needle slightly.
[David Engerman]
I would say that they did not have much success at the IMF.
But there's an episode in the early 70s called the Committee of 20, which is a committee to consider the international monetary system
and other issues or something like that.
And Munmun Singh and Lal Jaiwardena both are representatives on the committee through the IMF kind of structure.
And it is a series of a long effort of advocates for and from the global south to push the IMF away from its principal interest in financial and monetary stability into a broader role.
by taking on longer period loans, what becomes eventually the extended fund facility.
They'll not long-term by more bank perspective, but longer than they had been.
And to consider a variety of changes, some of which would have amounted to essentially resource transfer through the issuance of what IMF called SDRs, this sort of currency unit of account that's widely used in the IMF now.
But it really doesn't get very far.
And so the report, the final report when it's issued has about five pages of outlining agreement and about 180 pages of outlining disagreements.
They couldn't even, you know, they wanted to form a committee to carry on the work afterward.
It eventually becomes the Joint World Bank IMF Development Committee.
But even that was hard to get through.
So I don't see it as success, but I see it as a very important failure because it's a failure that leads, I think, directly to the new international economic order.
And it makes the new international economic order, which is announced on May day, 1974 in the general assembly into a kind of matter of venue shopping, right?
They could, they, the system, the, the,
Power within the IMF did not give them much leverage, any leverage, really.
Whereas in a one country, one vote General Assembly roster, they could do far better.
The problem was that the UN could pass a resolution, but they couldn't actually provide the kinds of financing that representatives from the global south were seeking.
So I guess I would say that extended fund facility does emerge in part out of that committee.
And perhaps ironically, so does structural adjustment, which comes to the fore in the 1980s.
But we're seeing efforts along those lines in the 1970s as well, a part of a proposal that would make financing contingent on following particular policies, the kind of conditionality that defines structural adjustment.
So I don't think that structural adjustment came about solely from the results of that committee.
But I think it's an interesting story that hasn't really been told.
The IMF claims that all the proceedings of the committee are actually executive board discussions.
And so they're not releasing them.
And it's not even subject to seeking disclosure of the materials.
So the story can't fully be told.
But I think I found enough from other places.
to be able to show what that committee was trying to do, what these apostles had to do with it, and what that looked like in a longer history of development finance.
[Dan Banik]
A lot of the episodes on the show in season six, David, has been on the rise of the Global South.
and one of the many stories fascinating stories i read in your book is you know about the brand commission and how the global south the term emerged that map was drawn and there were attempts by one or two of the apostles to perhaps um nominate in one of the colleagues in as part of the commission was it or did i get this wrong so you're i mean there's two things here there's a global south as a category
[David Engerman]
And then there's this group called the South Commission, which is now the South Center, still exists in Geneva.
So the term Global South, as near as I can tell, was first used by a British banker in about 1960.
And you can see move towards something like it in the Group of 77, which is founded at the first UNCTAD session in 1964.
But if you look, I mean, the...
Google Ngram, which is not, of course, a research tool, but we all use it anyway.
You'll see Global South becoming into more and more usage over the course of especially the 70s and 80s.
NIO, which is really a global G77 effort.
uses it by the 80s so the brand commission reports in 1982 it uses global north global south in its title and then the cover is a map obviously the term is not so taken for granted that they feel a need to define and explain it so there's a map of the world
that has this very squiggly line that separates the global south and the global north.
It has to put Indonesia in the global south and Australia in the global north.
It has only tenuous relationship to the compass.
And then that term becomes more and more used and replaces third world.
Now, third world is fundamentally being as a Cold War term.
although I don't think that's actually being true to its origins.
The term is first used by a French demographer in the early 50s in an article called Three Worlds, One Planet.
And, you know, like any good French intellectual, his reference point for today is the Revolution of 1789, in which the third estate was the revolutionary force.
And he saw that this new third world,
could become a revolutionary force as well.
So it wasn't defined by ranking.
First comes the first world, the West, then comes the second world, Soviet Union, the socialist state, and then the third world below it.
Then in the 80s comes this category, the fourth world, right?
That's actually not where the term comes from, but somehow that origin doesn't matter.
[Dan Banik]
But the apostles, I mean, are they comfortable with these terms?
Are they pushing for a more politically correct term?
[David Engerman]
They are not.
I would say that the most active in trying to create a category, to sort of fill out the category of Global South is Raymond Sobhan.
Starting shortly after the oil crisis of 73, he starts trying to bring oil producing states to start using some of their windfall for development programs.
in the Global South, and in particular, from Bangladesh to the Muslim countries, Muslim majority countries in the Global South.
So that's the Global South as a category.
By the 80s, it becomes common usage.
Global North is a little less used than the Global South, I think.
And the Global North is essentially the Cold War West.
Like it basically writes the socialist bloc out of the story.
The South Commission, on the other hand, is I see it as a last ditch effort to try and resuscitate or get something from the impetus of the new international economic order, which had been a dozen years earlier, mid 70s.
And it's led by Julius Nere, the kind of founding father, if you will, of capitalism.
modern Tanzania, socialist.
He's pretty determined to have a South Asian service secretary general, South Asian economist.
And I think that Mahbub ul Haq, Rehman Soban, Manmohan Singh were all kind of considered for the post.
It ends up going to Sing, which is an unlikely combination that his boss was Nurere.
But it's very interesting.
And they actually had some papers in their basement that's not an archive.
It's just their old storage that were really quite interesting to learn about Sing.
And what's striking about it, and this is actually what led me to this project in the first place,
I can ask almost any Indian economist who Singh's boss was before he became finance minister in 91, and almost no one will say Julius Narendra.
And it's this kind of shift from socialism to liberalization that kind of got me interested in the project and telling it biographically.
Thing's biography and his archive are not sufficient to have a single person do it.
But fortunately, he had these five classmates that allowed me to tell that story.
[Dan Banik]
Two final questions for you, David.
One is, how did the remaining five view Manmohan Singh's tenure as the accidental prime minister?
That's one.
And the second thing, if you could tell my listeners, what is this disagreement about the Nobel Prize all about?
[David Engerman]
Okay, this is a tough one.
I want to do the Nobel one first.
I don't want to end on that note.
So there is a rivalry between Sen and Bhagwati going for decades.
They worked together and actually did a number of things together when they were both at Delhi School.
They both got there, I think, in 1962.
Bhagwati left in 1968, Sen a few years later.
But it really, you know, there's overdetermined why this would be.
Bhagwati resented Sen's relative wealth and stature.
He, you know, at this moment, Bengali economists generally inclined to the left are pretty dominant in a number of institutions outside West Bengal.
And he's, you know, this talk of a kind of Bengali mafia situation.
is there.
There's a dispute over hiring in the early 60s that involves a friend of Sen's on the one hand and Bhagwati's wife Padma Desai on the other.
So there's lots of reasons for it, but it really takes off after Sen wins the Nobel in 1998.
And so Bhagwati is sort of in the running for the Nobel.
He's in that conversation, at least one of hardly like.
[Dan Banik]
Was it nine times he was nominated?
[David Engerman]
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not sure that that's as much about his caliber.
But it says more about his determination to get it.
And when he didn't, it really, really has set him off.
And so his daughter, Anuradha Bhagwati, has written a memoir that talks very briefly about this and how every fall was so difficult in the Bhagwati Desai household as he awaited the news. And he's pretty blunt or unfiltered, I guess I would say, about it.
I mean, I think the case for Sen to win a Nobel Prize is very, very strong.
And Bhagwati's most important contributions to the field of economics came quite early in his career and were not by the 1990s.
As I said, he's not publishing in top economics journals, for instance, but in more public settings.
He's doing a very good job of it. He's a good writer.
And I think that has colored a lot of Bhagwati's post-1998 public utterances and has tarnished, I guess, his reputation in India for being just so focused on it.
It's unfortunate.
One of the things that made me proudest is when someone told me they hadn't realized Bhagwati was such a good economist until they read my book.
And I take that as praise.
As for how they saw Singh, I think Bhagwati ultimately is a little disappointed in Singh.
The liberalization efforts stall during the prime ministership from 4 to 14.
Now, of course, accidental prime minister is a term that Sanjaya Baru, who was a spokesperson for Singh both in the 90s and after, takes.
It's a cruel and, I think, unfair description.
Sen actually does get involved in lobbying with Singh for, lobbying Singh and his government about the food guarantees.
Kind of stoked, I think, by Jean Dreze, but coming to make appearances in Delhi along with Singh to promote this.
It's this that actually gives rise to the very public airing of dirty laundry in 2012-13, when both Sen and Dreze have a new book, and Bhagwati and his co-author Arvind Panagaria have a new book and they're both on book tours and Bhagwati is lobbing various potshots at Sen.
So I think Bhagwati is ultimately disappointed because he saw kind of opportunities for liberalization flipping away.
I think Sen and Sobhan had a mixed picture of Singh.
Jayawardena is no longer living.
He dies just before, well, I think while the elections are happening in 2004.
Haq died in 1998.
So that's really where they were with it.
And Singh's prime ministership becomes a sort of Rorschach test for what you think about economics.
As he's trying to tow this line of inclusive growth, of growth-oriented economic policy while building up a more robust social welfare state.
And that's an issue that's still facing us today, right?
It's how do you balance general growth versus targeted anti-poverty programs?
And that was a dilemma that I think it was a compromise that was bound to leave no one totally satisfied.
[Dan Banik]
David, thank you so much for coming on my show and for this wonderful chat that we've just had.
Thanks very much.
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