When I happened across the NYTimes review of An Uncertain Glory, by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, about contemporary India, I found myself “stuck” on the photo. You must read the review (after reading my post, of course).
According to the reviewer, the book is...
...a heartfelt plea to rethink what progress in a poor country ought to look like....“There is a real need for pragmatism here,” they write, “and to avoid both the crushing inefficiency of market denial . . . and the pathology of ideological marketization.”...This echoes the debate in the U.S. and Europe on “austerity” vs. “stimulation,” which has been dramatic in India as
...the “feud” between [1] Drèze and Sen, champions of the poor, and [2] the economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya, co-authors of Why Growth Matters and champions of market deregulation, who argue that too much spending on social welfare programs might derail economic growth....Though the U.S. and Indian continents are vastly different, Drèze and Sen are thinking analogously to the Obama administration by advocacy of
..investing significantly...in public services...health care, tolerably good schools and other basic facilities important for human well-being and elementary freedoms...But apparently the mandate is lacking because
...[the poor] have been shut out of public discourse...“What a democratic system achieves depends largely on what issues are brought into political engagement,” they write. That’s why An Uncertain Glory directs so much of its criticism toward the “celebratory media,” the proliferation of satellite channels and newspapers dominated by breathless gossip about cricketers, billionaires and Bollywood stars and point-scoring among the political elite.A great challenge for progressive leadership is to secure activist conscience within the normative order. Indeed,...
...acts of conscience can enrich public reasoning enormously...This is a matter of political education at the scale of a decade. The reviewer is underestimating this challenge—and the challenges of scaling up progressive instances of programmatic change—when he writes...
...In the interest of pragmatism, Drèze and Sen might have devoted more thought to how to make India’s existing social-welfare initiatives work better. They describe successes in a few forward-thinking states, but it is not clear how to replicate those results on a national scale...Scaling up is firstly about identifying scaleable successes. Given that, the best leadership would not easily get clear on how to replicate successes at great scale. Within the university, the policy institute, or the “think tank,” this is a great challenge for modeling that must be comprehensively appreciative of reality and realistic about how change can happen durably.
I want to return to this context in later discussion of programmatic progressivism. There are analogies (or—thinking of Habermasian social theory—homologies) between the challenges of progressive leadership in developed societies and the challenges for developing societies. There is transcultural analogy for two kinds of reason, at least: because (1) political economics has a transcultural character and (2) the basics of good quality of life are transcultural.
Caring for the development of public services and for generalized decency of quality of life—caring for our humanity—is transcultural.
