Acclaimed economist Jagdish M Bhagwati has once again lashed out at Nobel laureate Amartya Sen over the latter’s stand on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetisation drive.
Acclaimed economist Jagdish M Bhagwati has once again lashed out at Nobel laureate Amartya Sen over the latter’s stand on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetisation drive. Sen had reportedly questioned whether note ban move was democratic or not, according to FirstPost report. In a hard-hitting attack Bhagwati termed Sen as fool and asserted that the move was a democratic one. Bhagwati also claimed Sen rushed in and expressed his opinion without taking public view, the report says.
This, not the first time that Bhagwati had trained his guns at Sen. Earlier, in March, Bhagwati had said demonetisation will promote growth while Sen and other experts who denounced it stand “humiliated and exposed”. He said, “On the effects of demonetisation on growth, I should say that I was the one economist who had argued (with my co-authors), from first principles, that demonetisation would increase, not diminish, growth,” according to PTI report.
Bhagwati said that the Prime Minister’s success in Uttar Pradesh has, therefore, meant that Amartya Sen and his friends who argued that demonetisation would hurt growth, have been humiliated and exposed as much as the Congress,” Bhagwati was quoted as saying PTI.
The aftermath of demonetisation, Sen asserted that demonetisation was a ‘despotic act’. In reply, Bhagwati said, “Not knowing finance, he (Amartya Sen) made the mistake of taking a strange position that the demonetisation action was ‘despotic’”.
Bhagwati is a professor of Economics, Law, and International Relations at the Columbia University.
