Amartya Sen Speaks at Cornell
Introduced to the packed audience of professors and students in Call auditorium as “one of the most prominent intellectuals of our time,” Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen delivered a lecture this afternoon titled “Capitalism and Confusion.” The lecture was full of jokes, self-deprecating humor, and entertaining stories about his colleagues, but his talk was very theoretical in the ways in which it addressed the question of what it means for an economy to be capitalist. He made many interesting points about Adam Smith’s initial conceptions of capitalism, saying that even Smith believed that governments should intervene to ensure the enforcement of property rights and to protect the safety and security of their citizens.
His main argument can be summarized as follows: In this time of economic crisis, we should not fall into a dichotomous mode of thinking, deciding whether or not capitalism or socialism is the optimal route for economic organization. Instead, we need an approach that analyzes individual market and bureaucratic institutions and decides which ones would be best for our current situation. He also said that in the past, reason has been a great source of human strength, and that our current problems can be solved by making our choices adhere to practical, pragmatic reasoning, and not by simply adhering to our personal investments in socialist or capitalist economic systems.
Please feel free to comment if you attended the talk or are familiar with Sen’s work, and look out for a full article and analysis in the next issue of the Review.
