On Tue Jan 25 2000, Brad De Long (delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU) wrote:
> Amartya Sen points out that democratic societies are inherently more
> egalitarian than, say, Maoist ones: mass famines haven't happened in
> democracies, while they happen with some frequency where the people do
> not elect the government and the press is not free. And the relative
> income gap between someone who has enough food to survive and someone
> who does not is very, very large...
Unless I'm misunderstanding, Sen seems to have at least once drawn the opposite conclusions: that Maoist society, while not democratic, was a step forward both in eqalitarianism and starvation proofing; and that the key to preventing starvation was not democracy but either guaranteed sufficient welfare entitlements or guaranteed employment at sufficient wages.
>From Sen's_Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation_,
pp. 6-7:
<quote>
The social security arrangements are particularly important in the context of starvation. The reason why there are no famines in the rich developed countries is not because people are generally rich on the average. Rich they certainly are when they have jobs and earn a proper wage; but for large numbers of people this conditions fails to hold for long periods of time, and the exchange entitlements of their endowments in the absence of social security arrangements could provide very meagre commodity bundles indeed. With the proportion of unemployment as high as it is, say, in Britain or America today [circa 1981], but for the social security arrangements there would be widespread starvation and possibly a famine. What prevents that is not the high average income or wealth of the British or the general opulence of the Americans, but the guaranteed minimum values of exchange entitlements owing to the social security system.
Similarly, the elimination of starvation in socialist economies -- for example in China -- seems to have taken place even without a dramatic rise in food availability per head, and indeed, typically the former has *preceded* the latter. The end of starvation reflects a shift in the entitlement system, both in the form of social security and -- more importantly -- through systems of guaranteed employment at wages that provide exchange entitlement adequate to avoid starvation.
<endquote>
Michael __________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com