Washington Post
October 23, 98

The Not So Dismal Economist
By Stephen S. Rosenfeld

Amartya K. Sen, the India-born economist who just won the Nobel Prize, told this revealing story last week at a memorial for his cherished friend of nearly 50 years, Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq.

They were both new boys at Cambridge. "Do you think," the soft-spoken ul Haq asked, "that conventional economics has something to offer to countries like India and Pakistan?"

Sen flipped the question back to him, and he said, "We must learn it, but not use it much."

"Why not?"

"Well," came the reply, "it does not concentrate on the right questions.

Who really wants to know what determines the price of toothpaste?"

"Then, why learn it?"

"You will get nowhere -- no one will listen to you -- if you did not know all this stuff very well, and who knows, this stuff may prove indirectly useful in answering even the right questions."

I smiled at this story, knowing perfectly well that the journalists and many others whom Mahbub ul Haq befriended over the years were part of the constituency he undertook to construct to get people to listen to him. A man whose reach spanned two worlds, he sought to make a global difference.

Born in 1934, Mahbub came out of Cambridge, Yale and Harvard in the '60s to become a precocious star at the World Bank and later at the United Nations Development Program. It helped that he arrived at just the moment that the Vietnam experience had rendered many Americans and others more sensitive to the claims of the world's poor.

If you didn't know Mahbub, you might carelessly assign him to the company of Third World intellectuals who, as a group, came under a certain cloud in the West on account of a tendency toward anti-Americanism in politics and toward redistribution rather than growth in economics.

But he was not one of any group. He was an individual formed from his personal exposure to South Asia's cruel passions and disabilities and from his personal reach for the Western intellectual and political ideas -- but not Marxism -- with which to confront the dilemmas of his people.

Himself a scion of his own country's establishment, he turned, economist Sen recalled last week, to the diagnosis of that establishment's barriers to progress: the deeply unequal pattern of landholding, the stifling grip of the "20 families," the pervasive illiteracy, the political elite's patronage of traditional counterproductive ways. He came personally to know the limits imposed on social reform by military rule in Pakistan.

No doctrinaire planner, his first book, Sen said, was "informed by a general recognition that while a poor economy may take a very long time to become a rich country through GNP growth, the conditions of human living can be changed much more rapidly through intelligent policy making."

He meant that by "properly targeted social intervention," life expectancy -- for instance -- could be raised close to levels reached in the richest countries, all this without adversely affecting the growth of GNP itself.

This is how his guiding idea became the distinction between gross national product, a traditional Western quantitative measure of economic progress, and an alternative qualitative measure he came to term the Human Development Index, an aggregate of basic education, longevity and income per head.

At first his friend Sen doubted the utility of the Human Development Index, found it "coarse." But listening to Mahbub, Sen heard an echo of T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton":

Human kind
Cannot bear
very much reality.

"We need a measure," Mahbub explained to Sen, "of the same level of vulgarity as the GNP -- just one number -- but a measure that is not as blind to social aspects of human lives as the GNP is." The Human Development Index is now a central and recognized tool of development inquiry, embedded in the method of the U.N. Development Program.

I remember a lunch with Mahbub ul Haq in the '80s while he was impatiently but loyally doing a tour of ministerial duty in Islamabad. He was taking the hardest of tests -- to come home and accept responsibility for inserting one's ideas, polished abroad, into the punishing Pakistani political environment. That was Mahbub: quiet, intense, engaged, taking risks, serving; then, as always, someone eminently worth listening to.