Jagdish bhagwati biography of albert einstein

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This is an excerpt from my not-yet-published book, Fifty-Million-Dollar Baby: A Skeptic’s Eyes on Economics, Ethics, and Health. The goal is to edit the manuscript in plain view—to seek your comments, corrections, and suggestions. A few passages of this piece are adapted from my “Viewer, Puzzler, Pleader, Seer,” published in the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond’s Equilibria magazine (Winter 1996/97).

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Last week, a reader I’ll call “Jack” emailed me to explain why, in his view, economics isn’t really science—a truism I’ve heard for forty-some years. Unlike the natural sciences, critics say, economics suffers from unrealistic assumptions, messy data, confounding variables, failed predictions, intractable disagreements, misguided policies, subjective distortions, and political biases. Natural sciences are different, they tell me. Like, for example, virology. Scientists working on COVID have provided nothing but airtight assumptions, pristine data, crystal-clear chains of causality, dead-on-accurate predictions, harmonious agreement, relentlessly successful policies, serenely dispassionate reasoning, and near-saintly absence of politics from their pronouncements. (For those nodding in agreement, please refer to Poe’s Law.)

Economics is as much a science as virology or physics. Same methods, same purposes. Arguing otherwise underestimates economics and overestimates natural science. As discussed recently in Bastiat’s Window, physicist Max Born described how methodological blinders and antisemitism distorted mid-1940s physics. Ten or more recent Bastiat’s Window essays have described how the decades-long madness of eugenics swept over medicine, biology, genetics, public health. All natural sciences suffer the same fallibilities as economics—less obvi

'He was nominated for the Nobel Prize 9 times and several scientists wrote to the academy pointing out the injustice.'
Ambassador T P Sreenivasan remembers E C G Sudarshan, the legendary physicist who passed into the ages on Monday, May 14.

IMAGE: Professor E C G Sudarshan, the legendary physicist.
'He had once asked whether it was fair, when a prize is given for a building, to honour those who built the higher floors, ignoring the one who built the ground floor.'

The Swedish Academy has not covered itself with glory this year when it was forced to postpone the Nobel Prize for Literature on account of charges of sex, lies and leaks against Claude Arnault, husband of Katarina Frostenson, an Academy member since 1992.

But the Nobel Prize, the most coveted international award, has not been above board even before. Prizes did not always go the the most deserving and some unworthy of the honour walked away with it.

Dr E C George Sudarshan, who just passed away, had been waiting for Nobel justice for long, since many scientists, who worked on his findings as a student were awarded the Nobel Prize.

He had once asked whether it was fair, when a prize is given for a building, to honour those who built the higher floors, ignoring the one who built the ground floor.

The unkindest cut was that he was not conferred the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum optics by the Nobel committee while presenting it to Roy J Glauber for the 'Sudarshan-Glauber representation' in 2005.

Dr Sudarshan said it was like the bubbles in a stream that rise up while the pebbles that carry mass go down. However, he maintained that he was willing to accept justice even if delayed.

He was nominated for the Prize 9 times and several scientists wrote to the academy pointing out the injustice.

Sadly, justice did not reach him before his demise.

He is now in the company of other Indians, who richly deserved the Nobel, but never made it, like Mahatma Gandhi