Por Alejandro Chafuen: Publicado el 30/5/20 en: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrochafuen/2020/05/30/good-public-policy-requires-better-multidisciplinary-studies-the-legacy-of-deepak-lal-1940-2020/#47b023aa1537
Deepak Lal’s death caught me in semi-quarantine away from my books, including my collection of his works. He died one month ago in London. He was a prolific and profound writer on many topics, and the many questions he raised in his writings richly deserve to be remembered. Deepak Lal was one of the few champions of the free economy that I always read. I could never predict his analyses and conclusions, but I always knew I would learn something valuable.
Deepak Lal championed a free economy with solid arguments. His «Reviving the Invisible Hand» was … [+] ALEJANDRO CHAFUEN PHOTO OF BOOK COVER
F.A. Hayek in his classic Road to Serfdom warned that few things have “done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez-faire.” Hayek had in mind the many advocates of the free economy who, confronted with any policy problem, offer the simplistic response “it’s the government’s fault, the free market will solve it.” Deepak Lal, like Hayek, found fault in many government policies, and advocated an increased reliance on the free market to solve problems. His considerations, however, were not based on “rules of thumb.” He used a multidisciplinary approach and his analyses drew on contributions from many different social and physical scientists.
The first of Lal’s books that I read, The Poverty of Development Economics, was written in 1982 and published by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in 1983. The book was originally a long paper written for educated laymen. It gave greater intellectual clout to the theories championed by Peter T. Bauer, an early critic of foreign aid (his Foreign Aid: An Instrument for Progress? was published by the IEA in 1966). Through his outstanding books, Bauer was a solitary academic voice challenging conventional views on development and stressing the importance of a free economy. Lal wrote in the same vein and helped start a change in economists’ approach to growth. Melvin Krauss at the Manhattan Institute and the Hoover Institution, and Hernando de Soto of Peru’s Institute for Liberty and Democracy, also made important contributions. Notice that in all these cases, it was free-market think tanks and not university faculties that were promoting and publishing such works.
Deepak Lal during an excursion in an Argentine «Estancia», after the Mont Pelerin Society Meeting in … [+] ALEJANDRO CHAFUEN
Lal went beyond economics and was a keen student of culture. Much of his work in this field was presented in the prestigious Ohlin Lectures of 1998, which appear in his book Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Factor Endowments, Culture, and Politics on Long-Run Economic Performance (The MIT Press, 1998).
Lal tackled acient civilizations, Greece and Rome, Hindu, Islam, and so forth. When he came to the rise of the West, he stressed the importance of what he labeled the “twin papal revolutions.” These “included the introduction of all the legal and institutional requirements of a market economy.” He touched on this topic again in Reviving the Invisible Hand: The Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2006), where he described the positive economic consequences resulting from “a change in the cosmological and material beliefs mediated by the Catholic Church in the sixth through eleventh centuries, through its promotion of individualism, first in family affairs and later in material relationships. The first were a series of pronouncements by Pope Gregory I in the sixth century on family matters, and the second those by Gregory VII in the eleventh century on property and institutionally related issues.”
He distrusted China. His obituary in Business Standard, the newspaper for which he wrote a monthly column, described his views on China well: “He regarded its economic policies as bizarre. In many articles in this paper as well as in other publications, he would praise its achievements and then go on to say these were not sustainable. Human freedom is what makes for long-lived greatness, he believed, and the communist party’s lack of regard for them would hold China back.” In the end, it was a virus that originated in Wuhan, and the response to it, which took his life.
The last article by Lal that I read, Reflections on the Pandemic, was written in late March, just over a month before he succumbed to COVID-19. I do not know if he was sick at the time. It was his monthly column in the Business Standard, this one of course focusing on the coronavirus pandemic. He was about to return to India from London when the travel ban forced him and his wife Barbara, also a superb intellectual, to stay in the city, a hotspot of the virus. The article’s subtitle summarizes his approach perfectly: “We need a national survey of the incidence of coronavirus by testing a representative sample of population, not lockdowns.”
He was an independent thinker and was not afraid to be politically incorrect. With his book on globalization, In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order (Palgrave, 2004), he put himself out of the running for a potential Nobel Prize. In Lost Causes: Retreat from Classical Liberalism (Biteback, 2012), he tackled many of today’s most difficult policy questions. As one of the reviewers wrote, for Deepak Lal, government health policies should have “no business getting involved with interfering with a lifestyle choice, albeit a dangerous one. He concedes that the idea of public health can be useful in combating infectious diseases, whose nature means they are a threat to the wider public.” Deepak enjoyed his pipe – for him, tobacco use, even if it causes disease, should also be outside the purview of government intervention.
I recall that he also criticized some of the Thatcher government’s policies, and even presented his critiques at the Heritage Foundation, which has a Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom. But as he presented them in a balanced way, and with no hidden political agenda. He remained a close friend of the Heritage Foundation’s great former president Ed Feulner, Jr. until the end.
Deepak Lal was never afraid of tackling difficult topics, here presenting his «War or Peace» book at … [+] ALEJANDRO CHAFUEN
He was an active member of the Mont Pelerin Society and served a term as president from 2008 to 2010. The current president, noted Stanford economist John B. Taylor, has recalled Lal’s conviction that classical liberals should present a coherent response to the financial crisis. As president Lal called a special meeting of the Society, which took place in New York in 2009. Taylor writes that today’s crisis calls for a similar effort. Lal was also the driving force for a special meeting in Ecuador, which included a trip to the Galapagos Islands. This meeting focused on “Evolution, The Human Sciences and Liberty.” I do not believe in genetic determinism, but it was Deepak Lal’s writings that made me aware that our DNA plays a role in how we behave, especially the most entrepreneurial and less risk-averse among us. The program included presentations and papers by researchers and policy experts from a wide range of fields, from neuroscientist Peter Whybrow of UCLA to religious experts from the think tank world such as the Acton Institute’s Rev. Robert Sirico.
Deepak Lal was an active and engaged member of the Mont Pelerin Society. Here listening to a comment … [+] ALEJANDRO CHAFUEN
Discussions of the current pandemic are often limited by participants’ tendency to view issues only through the lens of their own expertise – as economists, epidemiologists, businesspeople, political scientists, and so on. This situation convinces me of the validity of what I hope will be a lasting legacy of Deepak Lal’s work: his call for a revival of “the tradition of the 19th-century social scientists like de Tocqueville and Max Weber.” He wrote those words in the conclusion of The Poverty of Development Economics, and added that he regarded that revival as a “precondition for thinking sensibly about these unsettled questions concerning economic transformation and development.” It is not that he thought a multidisciplinary approach would find all the answers. It would, however, certainly be a boon to civilized discourse and human learning: something Deepak Lal taught us with his life as a professor, researcher, and writer.
Alejandro A. Chafuén es Dr. En Economía por el International College de California. Licenciado en Economía, (UCA), es miembro del comité de consejeros para The Center for Vision & Values, fideicomisario del Grove City College, y presidente de la Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Se ha desempeñado como fideicomisario del Fraser Institute desde 1991. Fue profesor de ESEADE. Síguelo en @Chafuen
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