Customer Reviews

Rationality and Freedom

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

I found this book refreshing and insightful, it shares Sen's thoughts on how to value freedom as an aspect of choice in and of itself: If I would choose x anyhow, how much does it matter that I also am offered y & z as options.

Additionally he discusses plausible scenarios in which a selection is dependent upon the menu of choices offered e.g., given options of {x,y} I choose x, given options of {x,y,a,b} I choose y.

That said this book is a compendium of papers with the attendant repetition and overlap. The introduction is the best part.

Sen presents a compelling position on the use of rationality in economics and how it intersects with freedom. Both an accessible yet thought-provoking piece of work. Its foundations in the econmics literature makes it authoritative, while the introduction and use of philosophy makes it compelling. Overall a great read!

Like every other book of Amartya Sen, this book is designed to confuse. Sen professes himself to be speaking for the poor and the downtrodden, but his books are rarely decipherable even for the University educated students, let alone the layman.

A standard feature of every of Amartya Sen's book is that the entire book is a totally unnecessary expansion of the Introduction. Whatever little Sen had to say in this tome of more than seven hundred pages, he had said in Introduction. Still he put the reader under the extreme torture of plying through this unreadable book.

Without ever acknowledging the unique talents of Indian people he goes on to compare them to Western society and tells us that how are they not 'free', that they are incapable to take a decision for themselves. After plying through hundreds of meaningless phrases, unnecessary adjectives and torturous circumlocutions the reader is left exasperated at last, when he finds nothing meaningful related to either Economics or Society in Sen's book.

There are some writers like Richard Pipes and Bernard Lewis who say tomes in a few pages. There are economists like Steven Levitt who make special subjects accessible to the layman. There are writers like V S Naipaul who explain chapters in just one single incisive line.

But then... there are writers who take the base of nothing, mix it with honey and pepper of meaningless phrases and unnecessary adjectives and expand it into many hundreds of pages. Amartya Sen is one of those writers.

Yes it's true. The book of Sen it`s too much focused on the "theory of social choice" and it never makes an analysis of freedom and rationality by a pure philosophical point of view, but always by the point of view of the "social choice".

And it's also true that this kind of analysis is often related to the impossibility theorem of Arrow, as all the social choice theory could be reducted to that theorem

I think the title of the book does not say the essence of it, People philosophically intrested in these two concepts should read something else...

Amartya Sen rarely writes books relating to his own subject. He rarely writes books corresponding to their titles. He never writes books which do not have a heavy political purpose.

This is such another book of his - shamelessly leftist, parading naked propaganda.

Every book of Sen is heavily politically motivated but this is more so.

It is ignorant bile. Stay away from it.

I read through the 700 pages of this book, including the mathematics, hoping at some point that the Nobel Prize-winning Sen would have something to say about Rationality and Freedom. Alas! I was disappointed. About 500 pages are devoted to an almost entirely vacuous "social choice theory" and in particular Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. I was thinking maybe that Sen was doing a "reductio ad absurdum" and at the end, he would offer an alternative approach. Unfortunately not. The salaries of the thousands of academics who are paid to do this stuff should be collected and distributed to poor people in developing countries. A far better use of the money.