Commencement Day Address June 8th, 2000 Amartya Sen "Global Doubts" On behalf of all the honorary graduands, I would like to thank Harvard warmly for making us so splendidly privileged. John Dryden, the English poet, has offered the sobering thought that honour is "but an empty bubble." But we honorary graduands refuse to be put off by old Dryden - especially today. I personally think that Dryden was only trying to rhyme with the previous line of his poem. Having said, "War, he sung, was toil and trouble," it would have been difficult to resist the temptation to rhyme it with "Honor but an empty bubble." We shall take no notice of all this, and opt not for rhyme, but for reason. And so, we are most grateful to Harvard for what it has done for us. It is also marvelous for us to join, on this occasion, the student graduands who have worked hard for their well-earned degrees. We honorary graduands are, in fact, free riding on the hard work of the students. Since my own research work has always strongly benefited from questions and comments of my students, I am very used to being thoroughly dependent on students. And free riding, as we all know, can be wonderfully pleasant. There is something extraordinarily exciting about good academic education. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than at Harvard. As teachers here, we all get used to astonishing brightness. Even before you have asked your question, your student proceeds to answer it, explaining modestly that her answer may have left room for doubt, going on to add - perhaps not so modestly - that the question that you chose to ask left even more room for doubt. Indeed, the cultivation of doubts and the sharpening of questions are an integral part of university education. Its importance lies partly in the close connection between science and doubting. Francis Bacon distinguished between two different contributions that doubt can make, in his essay on "The Advancement of Learning," published in 1605, nearly 400 years ago. "The registering and proposing of doubts has a double use," Bacon said. One use is straightforward: it guards us "against errors." The second use, Bacon argued, involved the role of doubts in initiating and furthering a process of inquiry, which has the effect of enriching our investigations. Issues that "would have been passed by lightly without intervention," Bacon noted, end up being "attentively and carefully observed" precisely because of the intervention of doubts. The constructive value of doubts applies not only to science and to academic studies in general, but also to the assessment of public policy. Take the current debates on globalization, which have been so active in recent years - not just in Seattle or Washington, D.C., but also in less organized protestations in Bangkok an Jakarta and Mexico City and Abidjan, and elsewhere. The case for global trade and worldwide use of modern technology and finance is strong - very strong. And yet we cannot begin to understand the intellectual content of these disputes without addressing the reasons that inspire the doubts and disputations. Unfortunately, we frequently encounter a dialogue of the deaf here. Those who blame globalization for all evils are ready to turn their doubts into indictments which propose summary rejection, and which then get translated into over-simple slogans. Those, on the other side, who believe that the anti-globalization rhetoric is ill founded, tend immediately to dismiss it as foolish - or worse. The two sides face each other like ships passing in the night. We have to question both sides. Opponents of globalization may see it as a new folly, but it is neither particularly new, nor, in general, a folly. It is largely an intensification of the processes of interaction involving travel, trade, migration and dissemination of knowledge that have shaped the progress of the world over millennia. The polar opposite of globalization is persistent separation and relentless autarky. There is a worrying image of seclusion that has been arrestingly invoked in many old Sanskrit texts in India (I know of four such texts, beginning about two and a half millennia ago, but there are undoubtedly many more references to the same concern). This is the story of a frog that lives its whole life within a well and is suspicious of everything outside it. This "kupamaduka" - the well-frog - has a world view, but it is a world view that is entirely confined to that well. The scientific, cultural and economic history of the world would have been very limited had we lived like such well-frogs. This is an important issue, since there are plenty of well-frogs around - and also, of course, many attorneys of well-frogs. The more immediate point, however, is that there is extensive evidence that the global economy has actually brought prosperity to many different areas of the globe. The productive and economic contributions of global integration can scarcely be denied. But we also have to recognize the enormous inequalities that exist across the globe and often within each country. Doubts about global economic relations come from different ends of the globe, and they are in this sense "global doubts" - not just an assortment of local opposition. We have to examine the manifest inequalities and disparities that give these global doubts the political salience they undoubtedly have. What is needed is not a rejection of the positive role of the market mechanism in generating income and wealth, but the important recognition that the market mechanism has to work in a world of many institutions. We need the power and protection of these institutions, provided by democratic practice, civil and human rights, a free and open media, facilities for basic education and health care, economic safety nets, and, of course, provisions for women's freedom and rights - a neglected area which is only now beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Let me give a few quick examples. First, a well-functioning market economy does not obviate the need for democracy and civil and political rights. The latter not only give people more freedom to live the way they would like (without being bossed around), they also allow people to have more voice to demand that their interests not be ignored. The fact that no famine has ever occurred in a democratic country with a free press and regular elections is only one rudimentary illustration of this connection. It is not surprising that the demand for democracy and for civil and political rights became much stronger in East and Southeast Asia, as the economic crisis of 1997 developed and spread. Voice as Albert Hirschman has discussed so well, is the alternative to exit. There is, of course, no basic conflict between economic globalization and the fostering of democracies. But quite often global capitalist institutions show distinct preference for orderly autocracies over the adversarial politics of democratic governance and the activist use of human rights. To take a second issue, the ability to participate in the market economy is radically influenced by social arrangements for education, health care, microcredit, land reform, and other public policies. Furthermore, the sharing of the benefits of the market economy also depends on social institutions. This applies even to very prosperous countries. Take the deprivation of disadvantaged groups in the United States, for example African Americans. It is often claimed that even though African Americans as a group are poorer than American whites, they are typically many times richer than people in the developing world. And so indeed they are in income per head. But in terms of the probability of surviving to mature ages, African Americans in the United States fall behind the population of many third-world regions, including substantial parts of China and India. For this the blame is often exclusively on death from violence, but the higher mortality rate of African Americans continues well beyond the ages when this can make any real difference. Lack of medical insurance has a role to play here, and so has the breakdown of inner city education and other social arrangements. The unprecedented economic boom that the American economy has enjoyed has not resolved these problems. Third, there is now overwhelming evidence that women's empowerment through schooling, employment opportunities, etc., has the most far-reaching effects on the lives of all - men, women and children. It reduces child mortality; it cuts down health hazards of adults arising from low birth weight; it increases the range and effectiveness of public debates; and it is more influential than economic growth in moderating fertility rates. We can see its influence in the halving of the fertility rate of Bangladesh in less than two decades, and in the fact that while some districts of India have high fertility rates, others with more gender equity already have fertility rates lower than the United States and Britain. The reach of social institutions that work for gender equity is astonishingly large. There is also a related point of great importance which John Kenneth Galbraith has made very forcefully. The role of institutions has to be assessed in terms of the "countervailing power" they exercise over one another. Asymmetric power in one domain can be checked by a different configuration of forces in another domain. All this - and more - was discussed in Galbraith's book American Capitalism, first published in 1952. I remember reading it as a college student in Calcutta, in a coffee house, while trying to resist being evicted by the waiter on the not unreasonable ground that I could not hog a chair and finish reading an entire book while consuming only one cup of coffee. On that occasion, I got by through using only the countervailing power of my voice and determined immovability, but in general we need an institutional balance more far-reaching than that. Distribution of power in the world relates closely to institutional plurality. This applies even to the institutional basis of world trade and finance, which includes, among other arrangements, such institutions as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the IMF, and so on. It is necessary to re-examine the balance of power in the running of different institutions that make up the global architecture. The present institutional architecture was largely set up in the middle 1940s, on the basis of the understanding of the needs of the world economy as interpreted in the Bretton Woods conference held just as the Second World War was coming to an end. That framework did help to foster trade and development, but not much distributional equity - either in the economic or the political sphere. The world was, in fact, very different in the 1940s, when the bulk of Asia and Africa was still under colonial rule of one kind or another, when the tolerance of insecurity and of poverty was much greater (even the West had just emerged from a massive depression and a very destructive war), and when there was little understanding of the huge global prospects of democracy, economic development and human rights in the world. The world of Bretton Woods is not the world of today. Even within the existing global architecture, the substantive policies followed by the principal institutions can make a big difference. For example, the recent changes in the policy priorities of the World Bank, with a much greater involvement with economic security and social development, has been undoubtedly influential. The existing institutions can address the global doubts more fully, and the United Nations can also play a very big role in forcing attention on these concerns. The U.N. has, of course, been kept in a state of financial precariousness particularly by member countries failing to pay their dues. There has also been a persistent attempt by some politicians to use ill-judged attacks on the functioning of the United Nations, trying their best to make a mole hill out of a real mountain. But the mountain is there, and the U.N. can play a most important part in the institutional balance in global economics and politics, provided it gets the support it deserves. The real debate on globalization is, ultimately, not about the efficiency of markets, nor about the importance of modern technology. The debate, rather, is about the inequality of power, for which there is much less tolerance now than in the world that emerged at the end of the Second World War. There may or may not be significantly more economic inequality today (the evidence on this is conflicting, depending on the indicators we use), but what is absolutely clear is that people are far less willing to accept massive inequalities now than they were in 1944. The global doubts partly reflect the new mood, and it is, to a great extent, the global equivalent of the within-nation protests with which we have been familiar for quite some time. The global doubts have something in common with the spirit of an old American song - a variant of a defiant verse composed originally by Leadbelly: In the home of the brave, land of the free, I will not be put down by no bourgeoisie. Attacks on globalization come from different quarters, in dissimilar styles, with disparate grumbles. It is not at all difficult to reject many of the criticisms that have been made, and it is right that rejectable points should be repulsed. But there is a basic need to recognize that despite the big contributions that a global economy can undoubtedly make to global prosperity, we also have to confront the far-reaching manifestations of global inequality. Many years ago, in the 1950s, when the present phase of globalization was in its infancy, an English friend of mine told me, after visiting India, that he was struck by the fact that the language of trade and commerce was so different in different countries. He had gone to a candy shop in New Delhi to buy sweets for his children and found two glass jars full of candies, prominently displayed in the shop. One described the contents, in bold letters, as "Superior," and the other said, also in bold letters: "Inferior." My English friend was not yet ready for such plain speaking; he would have expected the second jar to be called "regular," or "standard," or something like that. In the growing intolerance of inequality on which the global doubts draw, there is something of a similar inclination to recognize and react to disparities - not only in terms of affluence but also in terms of power. What may have looked like "regular" or "standard" inequality in 1944 appears more and more as an intolerable imposition of inferiority on hundreds of millions of people. This recognition does not, of course, validate all the slogans on the placards and posters of anti-globalization rhetoric. Nor can it be seen as an invitation to become well-frogs. Nor indeed does it obviate the need for critical examination of institutional reform and policy initiatives. There can be no holiday from scientific scrutiny in answering questions. But in deciding on what questions to ask, what problems demand attention, we cannot ignore the voices of concern - and of humanity. We cannot, to use Francis Bacon's words, let these broader doubts pass "lightly without intervention." The significance of the global doubts lies in the themes, not in the theses. These doubts may often take a critically destructive form, but their ultimate importance is constructive. We cannot ignore that importance any more than we can neglect the positive contributions of globalization. END Please note: requests to reproduce or translate Dr. Sen's commencement address should be sent by fax to: 44-1223-338500.