Economics and the Socratic Life at Presidency College

From L to R: Dipak Banerjee, Mihir Rakshit and Nabendu Sen.

These are notes written for a panel talk I gave on my undergraduate education at Presidency College in Calcutta, 1974-1977. 

I joined Presidency College in 1974 after finishing my BA in Economics from St. Xavier's College. I had taken the IIT entrance exam but my heart wasn't in it. Besides, I didn't want to go to Madras, Delhi or even Kharagpur. Then I read Samuelson's Economics text and I was hooked. Here was a language in which social concerns could perhaps be adequately expressed, and which aspired to some degree of precision.

I took the economics entrance exam at Presidency and to my great joy I was accepted. It was a small class and obviously I remember every one of my classmates with not a small amount of affection and pride. The best three students -- perhaps the best four -- were all women. (I don't believe any of them went on to do a Ph.D. in economics: read into that what you will.) The current principal of your college was in our class.

We had many excellent teachers, but in my mind, our great teachers were Nabendu Sen (NS), Mihir Rakshit (MKR), and Dipak Banerjee (DB). I know this is an occasion to remember Dipakbabu, but I cannot go on without setting this context. The three had very different personalities, by the way.

NS spoke as if he were reading from a book --- his own, for there was no one source that put together all the fascinating things he had to say.  Entire sentences, complete with appropriate semicolons and parentheses, flowed from him. I don't think he ever directly looked at any of us and we couldn't be sure that he knew that we were actually there. To this day I have never met anyone with such quiet, assured command over his lectures. I still have my lecture notes from those courses and recently I looked at them. In his quiet, composed and yet utterly fascinating way, he brought economic history to life. 

I loved MKR's lectures (and yes, I also have those notes, including some carbon copies made by Shubhashis Gangopadhyay --- evidently we took turns taking notes). The lectures were theoretical, mainly on macroeconomic theory. While I have subsequently grown not to understand the subject very well, I have never forgotten the layered complexity of his teaching. We were taught the version of Keynes that came from Mr. Keynes and the Classics, but he built very nicely on it, adding in one his famous four-quadrant diagrams (of which he was incredibly fond) whenever he had the chance. It was beautiful economics and still today, when I am confused in a macro seminar these ideas I learnt as an undergraduate serve as a rough cut, something that I can lean on. Occasional smatterings of information, in hindsight, served as signals that MKR Sir was on to his own extensions of the theory for developing economies, and sure enough, The Labour Surplus Economy emerged a few years later.

Dipak Banerjee had such an enormous influence on my life that I have written a separate post on him. DB taught us all sorts of things, including our first introduction to National Accounting, but to me he epitomized my favorite subject: economic theory. He was a theorist first and foremost, and his mind was a theorist's mind. There was constant questioning. What was a stock, and what a flow?  What did "autonomous investment" mean? If the marginal propensity to consume exceeds one, what sense do we make of the negative multiplier? What did the assumption of divisibility of the commodity space buy us? (All of this was interspersed with references to P.G. Wodehouse and the London Times crossword. "Crooked course of a Cockney courtship [6].") His approach had an odd and uncanny similarity to that of my late colleague Roy Radner, who loved to re-derive everything from first principles. In short, DB Sir was a great believer in getting the basic, the most fundamental concepts correct. Therefore everything was up for scrutiny. The last thing he wanted was for us to unthinkingly swallow a formula. For me, this was the deepest, most fundamental quality that was instilled in me as an undergraduate at Presidency College. 

Very soon, even in our first year, we were attempting our own feeble theories. My friend Abhijit Sengupta and I decided to write down the analogue of a tatonnement process for monopolistic competition. Prices bobbed up and down, firms entered and exited as our little model chugged its way towards an equilibrium. When this was all done we went off straight to Dilip Mookherjee, then in his third year and already a bit of a legend. Dilip looked at it with great seriousness. To this day I am not sure whether his straight face was put on or not. Then he said: you must show this to DB and MKR. Abhijit and I were petrified at the thought. But to our utter astonishment the reception we received from them was warm, sincere, encouraging, and most important, tendered to us with all the time in the world. I couldn't believe it. That little model means nothing to the world at large, but we had just been brainwashed into thinking that we could do research.

Pumped up with all this, we said we wanted to do some additional reading. (I should add that we were already reading from the classics: Samuelson's Foundations, Hicks's Value and Capital, Robinson, Chamberlin, and so on, though the General Theory was a banned book on the grounds that we would be irreversibly confused.) DB Sir didn't hesitate. Out came a copy of Arrow's book, and another of Debreu's Theory of Value. In our second year we read these books. None of them had anything to do with the impending Part I exam. Then DB would ask us questions and give us feedback. (I remember his very first question: what is the asymptotic cone of a bounded set?, followed by more serious inquiries into the mathematics section of Debreu's book.) As far as I can remember, the Socratic method employed by Dipak Banerjee --- us at the board, he at his desk smoking Charminars --- lasted through all three years of Presidency College. I was often wrong but I was never scared, and I was always excited and looked forward to these sessions.

It is now many years later and my tastes have moved on. I no longer think Debreu was a great economist (the same cannot be said of Arrow), and the hard technicalities no longer interest me in the same way as they did before. But I will never forget that basic training in rigorous, logical thinking, coupled with the constant questioning. Professionally, that stands at the heart of whatever I am today.

This little autobiographical account is perhaps interesting in itself, but it also speaks fundamentally to the theme of this panel, which is on the teaching of economics. The teaching of economics ... to what end though? Our students end up as bureaucrats, journalists, business executives, and other teachers and researchers. For each of these professions the ideal training is obviously somewhat different but that is irrelevant, for that degree of fine-tuning is infeasible (and perhaps undesirable) at the undergraduate level. So let me focus on one of the common elements, one that is tied very closely to the stories I have told about my favorite teachers. 

Some more autobiography: Like others in this room, I am directly involved with the recruiting of PhD students. Our Indian applicants come from the usual places: the Delhi School, the ISI, JNU, and so on. Their training stands out relative to applicants from other parts of the world. Or perhaps I should say: stood out, because now there are universities in China, Turkey, Argentina, Brazil (to mention only some parts of the developing world) which have very strong, extremely challenging programs. That said, any Indian student with a first class degree from a good university can stand her ground, as far as coursework is concerned.

But that last phrase --- "as far as coursework is concerned" --- cannot be overemphasized. When the time comes for taking that extra step into independent thinking, something is unquestionably missing. Our best Indian students underperform on average, relative to the best Italians, Israelis, Americans, Turks, Brazilians and even the English. It is a disappointment which happens again and again. During some years one can count the number of Indian applicants with obvious research potential on the fingers of one hand.

Why is that? Obviously the students are just as bright as they were Abhijit Banerjee's time, or Dilip’s and my time, or in Amitava Bose's time, or in Mukul Majumdar's time. One might argue that India's economic boom is luring the very smartest into business so that academia does not get the pick of the crop. But somehow I cannot believe that that is the whole story. We've always had some of the best people leaving academia and going elsewhere.

I think that at least part of the story is that we are not Socratic enough with our undergraduates, in the sense that Dipak Banerjee and Mihir Rakshit were. This is probably a very presumptuous thing to say because I am not teaching here and do not know the ground realities, and it is easy enough to be critical when you are not facing the music. But I wish that we could spend a bit less time on wide coverage and a bit more on cultivating that "edge" that lies dormant in every bright student: the edge that asks questions and takes nothing for granted. In some cases that edge will surface no matter what the odds. But in more mundane cases the questioning has to be encouraged. I am not sure it is.

Nor is it easy to do. I taught at the ISI for 8 years. We instituted a Socratic course with great enthusiasm. The students had to read a paper and give 20 minute "referee reports" on them. To my horror I found myself yelling at the kids instead of doing any serious nurturing. Clearly I lacked the experience and the skills that DB and MKR used on me. More importantly, I could not be sure how to "protect" those below the average while pushing the brightest students to think about research questions. In the United States the matter is resolved without any guilt. I found I could not do the same in Delhi.

When I was in school a popular debate topic was "University education polishes the pebble but dims the diamond". In the United States, the opposite is undoubtedly true: university education adds on a new layer of inequality by accentuating preexisting differences in ability. To the extent that diamond-dimming and pebble-polishing does happen in India and in Japan (in contrast to the US), is that such a bad thing?

I don't know enough about Nature versus Nurture to answer that question in a way that fits well with my own more basic ethics. But I would hazard the tentative guess that equality of opportunity should be left to the school system. Once in college there is not much point in polishing pebbles. We have to get those diamonds to shine. And the only way to do that is to engage in small-group Socratic learning.

A global pattern is evident after many years of looking after graduate students. The Indians, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Japanese, the Germans, the British and students from some parts of Latin America are remarkably respectful of the published word and therefore handicapped in generating their own takes and ideas. In contrast, many Americans entering graduate school are excessively skeptical of published material. For many of them such scorn ends in spectacular disaster. But for some of them --- the Arrows and Bernheims and Myersons of this world --- such skepticism can take them very far. 

Obviously these are not genetic differences though the ambient social cultures of questioning and acceptance may have a lot to do with it. But a good chunk of this has to lie in university education, in how we inculcate that mixture of respect and skepticism for the written word. We need a bit of both. I believe that the way we were taught by Dipak Banerjee and the other professors I have mentioned has useful and important implications for this kind of education.