 A very good evening to everybody joining us from South Asia. A very good afternoon to everybody joining from Europe. And a very good morning to everybody joining us from North America and South America. My name is Dipankar Basu. I'm Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at UMass Amherst. On behalf of the co-organizer, my friend and colleague Debar Shidas, Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Gohati, I would like to welcome you all for this event. Today we are gathered here to release a first shift for Amit Bhaduri and to celebrate the contributions of Amit Bhaduri to heterodox economics. The book that we are releasing today grew out of a conference that Debar Shidas and I co-organized in March 2019 at the Department of Economics in UMass Amherst. Amit Bhaduri obtained his bachelor's degree from Calcutta in 1960 and from Cambridge in 1963. He finished his PhD in economics from the University of Cambridge in 1967. Over the years, Amit has taught at various universities across the world, including in India, Europe and Latin America. But his association has been longest with the Center of Economic Studies and Planning in the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He taught in JNU from 1973 to 2001 with a short gap in between. After 2001, Amit was Emeritus Professor in JNU and then in January 2020, he resigned from his Emeritus Professor status in protest against the Vice Chancellor of JNU. Amit's contribution to heterodox economics is too numerous to list. But if we are to identify some key sub-areas where Amit has made lasting contributions, then there are at least three. One is heterodox macroeconomics in which the Bhaduri Marglin investment function and wage-led and profit-led growth has become a workhorse in heterodox macroeconomics. His contributions in political economy of agrarian change in the late 16th and early 70s was also something which led to lot of subsequent research. His contributions to classical political economy and neocardian economics, which he had engaged during his PhDs was also a very fruitful area of research. The book that we are releasing today reflects this breadth of Amit's contribution to heterodox economics. I hope you will engage with its content at leisure. Today we are fortunate to have three leading economists to talk about this book and about Amit's contributions to economics in general. The first speaker will be Robert Blacker, Professor of Economics at American University. The second speaker will be Moushumi Das, Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi, India. And the third speaker will be Anjan Mukherjee, Professor Emeritus in JNU, New Delhi, India. With that, I would like to briefly mention how we are going to organize our meeting today. So after I finish, we will have the three speakers talk about the book about Amit's contribution, each speaker will roughly speak for 15 minutes. After that, we will hand it over to Amit Bhaduri to make comments that he wants to make. After that, we will open up for questions and comments from contributors, from participants. And what I would like to suggest is that if you want to speak, you just write your name or you just say, I want to speak in the chat box and I will maintain a list. Once we come to that list, we will go down the list as we have. Depending on how much time we have, we will allocate time to each speaker. And at the end, Debra Siddhas will make a note of thanks. So with that, I would also like to just mention that if you're not speaking, please keep your microphone muted. That will be useful for people hearing the person who is speaking. So with that, I would now like to turn it over to Robert Blecker for his comments on the book and Amit's contributions. Robert. Well, thank you and good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. It's great to see so many familiar faces and fellow fans of Amit. And I want to say what a great honor it is for me to participate in this event. I want to thank Dipankar and Dibarshi for inviting me to lead off this conversation. And this is a truly humbling experience for me. Second, I would like to salute them, the two editors for the publication of this enormously useful and comprehensive volume. This is not only something that honors Amit, but it covers most of the areas of economics and political economy that Dipankar referred to, which Amit has emphasized in his career. Now I just received an electronic copy of the book recently. So I have only begun to delve into its chapters, but each of the ones I've read has been a gem and time constraints certainly prevent me from talking about any chapter in any detail. But I find it to be a rich assembly of articles by some of the finest minds in political economy today. And I commend it to everyone to read it, cover to cover when you have the chance. And I'm especially pleased, this is more of a personal note, to see that two of my former Stanford classmates who I think are here today, Peter Si Wing Ho and Tracy Mott of the University of Denver, but we all studied together at Stanford, have chapters of the book. Fittingly, all the chapters I've looked at break new ground in numerous areas. And they're the cutting edge of contemporary discussions in both economic theory and economic policy. The essays in this book will bear reading and rereading for many years to come. But I want to devote most of my time today to expressing my admiration and appreciation for the work of Amit Baduri and his influence on my own career and my own work. And that of so many colleagues around the world. I first read some of Amit's work in graduate school at Stanford, where I was studying under Donald Harris in the early 1980s. And I met Amit in person when he visited Stanford and worked with Don in the mid 1980s. Unfortunately for me, timing wasn't the best. I left Stanford in 1985 to take up my position at AU in Washington shortly after he arrived, after Amit arrived. But I know he had a great influence on other graduate students there in addition to Peter, for example. Also my colleague now at American University, Maria Flora, also known as Sergey Flora, has told me that Amit was very helpful to her when she was working in her doctoral dissertation. Now I stayed at Stanford just long enough to connect with Amit and to see him present an early version of his work with Steve Marglin in a seminar. It was a truly captivating and inspiring moment for me because I was working on related areas in my dissertation. I also attended a seminar on Amit's joint paper with Don Harris on the complex dynamics of the simple Ricardian system, which was published in the QGE in 1987. But I have to confess that as I was writing this 36 years later, I could not recall which of them presented the paper. I remember the paper, but it was either Don or Amit or both of you, I really can't remember who gave the actual presentation. Anyway, I then met Amit again at the Trieste Summer School in 1987, where he lectured on a revised version of the Baduri Marglin model as we now call it. And he counseled me about my own efforts to publish my dissertation research and what became my 1989 Cambridge Journal article on growth of distribution in an open economy. At that time, I was very concerned about the potential overlap between what I was writing and what Amit and Steve were doing in their famous model. But Amit was very positive and encouraging to me. He advised me that if I focused on the open economy dimension and properly cited their work, there would not be any problem. And that advice benefited me greatly in the early stages of my own career. Now I could not have imagined then, 34 years ago, how influential the Baduri Marglin model would become in the subsequent literature in post-Keynesian or heterodox macroeconomics. Not to mention how much of my own career for decades has been occupied with related concerns. But as we look back, I think it's important to remember how subtle and nuanced their original analysis was, which has sometimes been forgotten in later discussions. Of course, their work was most famous for demonstrating the possibility of profit led demand or what they call exhilarationism in a closed economy. Even in a demand-driven system, depending on the parameters in the saving and investment functions. Whereas earlier, Neo-Kaletsky and models had only allowed for what we now call the wage-led case or stagnationism. But Amit and Steve also recognized from the beginning that there was not a simple bifurcation, excuse me, into wage-led and profit-led demand regimes. On the contrary, they showed how distributional shifts could have divergent impacts on key variables such as the rate of capacity utilization, the profit rate, the rate of accumulation or growth rate and the level of employment, excuse me. These distinctions led them to identify what they called cooperative and conflictual or some say conflictive cases of both stagnationism and exhilarationism. Which have often been overlooked in more recent theoretical discussions and empirical estimates. Moreover, for the authors, this was not simply an intellectual exercise. Their objective was to illuminate the political economy of macro and distributional policies at the time. Remember, they were writing around the first decade of what we now call the neoliberal era and the class dynamics underpinning alternative political strategies. Since 1990, when their two articles were published, the literature building on the Baduri-Marglen model has become truly voluminous. This literature has branched out in numerous directions, including endogenizing income distribution, linking to conflicting claims models of inflation, further open economy extensions, including models with balance of payments constraints, building in financial sectors and analyzing financialization, connecting demand regimes to labor markets, technical change, labor productivity, neo-goodwinnian models of business cycles, structuralist models for developing countries and much, much more. And of course, our meet has contributed to these extensions, especially on the financial and the policy side. Oh, I even forgot to mention monetary and fiscal policy, which have been additional extensions. Meanwhile, empirical estimates of demand regimes have mushroomed in the past two decades, especially the last 10 years. Although to this day, they still find puzzling conflicts in their results, which have been the source of continuing controversies. And I'm actually working on a project along those lines as we speak. Now, most recently, I meet published a paper in the review of political economy, just at the end of last year, in which he applies his theoretical approach in analyzing the future direction of capitalist democracies and the prospects for social democratic policies. In this article, I meet links the demand regime to the behavior of the social wage. He starts by considering how the social wage would have to adjust, rise or fall, to maintain a given rate of capacity utilization in response to a rise of the profit share, where this relationship varies according to whether demand is wage-led or profit-led. This analysis shows, among other things, that the conservative argument for a lower social wage rests on assuming a profit-led demand regime. I meet in this paper also addresses fiscal policy, highlighting the potentially negative impact of a budget surplus and endogenous responses of the social wage to changes in income distribution, among other questions. He concludes, and I quote, suitable variation in the level of investment in the social wage through sustained fiscal policies can bring about a regime change, not surprisingly, budgetary measures affecting the social wage are a fiercely fought ideological territory, end of quote. And that is certainly a very apt observation today. We are about to see it play out in real time as President Biden and Vice President Harris submit their economic plans to Congress and I'm sure in India and countries around the world, the same kinds of debates are occurring. Now, I cited this most recent paper of Amit in some detail, not only because of the important issues he considers, but also to show that he fully retains both the intellectual acuity and the political engagement that have characterized him throughout his career. I last saw Amit in person at a conference in Berlin in October 2018, where we both delivered introductory lectures and I look forward to seeing him again in person as soon as possible after we all get vaccines and get past this pandemic. Thank you very much. I look forward to seeing a lot of the rest of you too. Thank you, Robert. We will now have Moshmidas, Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi. Okay, truly, thank you, Deepankar and Devoshi. It's truly an honor and a privilege to be associated with this book release event in honor of Professor Amit Bhaduri and thank you for giving me this opportunity to express my deep indebtedness and profound admiration for Professor Bhaduri and his work. So, before I go to the bit of a discussion about the book, as much I've read, I've been able to read it, I just wanted to say that my, I mean, the first time I came across Professor Bhaduri's work was again, during my undergrad days in Presidency College and much like as Professor Amit Bhaduri has mentioned in his article in this particular volume, I was taught his article on agriculture backwardness and semi-feudalism in the undergrad course and the teacher didn't fail to mention that Professor Bhaduri was a student of the same institution with great pride, he mentioned that he was also a student of Presidency College and then he also mentioned that, he was a founding faculty at the Jahlal Nehru University. But unfortunately, when I joined JNU in early 1990s, Professor Bhaduri wasn't there, he was then in Europe. So, but to my great excitement, when I was after completing my MA, when I was doing my PhD, he came back to the center and so I remember that even though I was not formally his student, I didn't take any of the formal classes, attended a formal or took an exam with him. I remember that all of them, my entire cohort doing PhD in JNU at that time would sit and attend his macro courses that were offered for the MA students. And it was, I still remember that for all of us, including the current students, it was a great matter of great discussion and argument to decide who was the best teacher in CSP at that point of time, the three contenders, the three stars being, and all three of them are present here I can see, where Professor Bhaduri, Professor Anjan Mukherjee and Professor Prabhat Patnaik. You know, much like the three stars of Hindi film industry in the 1950s, Dilip Kumar, Dev Anand and Raj Kapoor. So we had this, they had their own fan clubs and used to have heated argument about who is the best and at the cost of disappointing Professor Patnaik and Professor Mukherjee, I must confess that, you know, it was Professor Bhaduri was always the winner of this, you know, in the majority vote will always go to Professor Bhaduri. So having said that, I also want to say that after attending those lectures by Professor Bhaduri, those deep insights that I gained from his lectures, I carried them with me when I myself joined the teaching profession in the School of Economics. The School of Economics then, as it is now, was the leaning was more towards mainstream than heterodox, but I think coming from JNU with some perspective about heterodox economics and that gave me a unique vantage point to look at both the streams and trying to look for its similarities rather than, you know, differences. And to some extent, my evaluation of the book or my comments about the book today are based on the sort of similarities, which I'm going to explain in a moment between the two streams, even though that's a sort of, you know, that's an unusual take on heterodox and mainstream economics, but I think, you know, that's to some extent, I think there are great similarities and this book also can point direct towards that. So having said that, its volume, this, you know, I haven't, again, I receive the volume much like others, I receive the volume pretty late. So I haven't been able to go through all the essays, but I have gone through the first few essays and the part one of the book, which all of them deal with growth and distribution and they deal with, in particular, almost all of them are talking about distribution, it's linked to demand or distribution and power and relationship between power, conflict and distribution. And, you know, so first of all, the first thing that I noticed across all these seven articles that are part of this, first part of this volume is how topical the book is. In some sense, as I was reading them, I was, you know, reflecting upon the rising inequality, not only in India, definitely in India, but across the world. I was thinking about the conflict, not necessarily probably the classical, you know, class conflict, but class conflict reshaping itself in terms of conflict across religion, conflicts, cultural conflicts, conflicts in, you know, in terms of race and, you know, ethnicity. So I couldn't help wondering how, you know, how topical and how one can actually take these insights back to the real world, which as we are, as it's unfolding before us today. So that probably to me was in some sense the greatest contribution of this volume in the sense that it gives us a handle to analyze the problems around us. At least the first seven articles are telling, giving me deep insights about how I'm going to analyze what is happening around us today. And that's to about everybody, whether he or she is coming from mainstream or from heterodox background. It also talks about the first, some of those articles also talk about the problem of demand. And again, sitting in India today, I think, you know, we cannot help noticing how relevant those articles are, especially even before the COVID crisis, the Indian economy. There was a lot of discussion about how aggregate demand has become a huge problem. So again, I think this volume, many articles from this volume gives you the precisely the tool to analyze those problems and come to a sort of a logical conclusion about which direction the economy should take. Having said that, I was sort of, you know, as I said, I was going through those articles in the volume and given my sort of familiarity with both the heterodox school as well as the mainstream school now, having taught a little bit of, you know, mainstream economics in the early school, I would like to point also on, you know, something which is probably a bit unusual, which is that no matter what, you know, which perspective you're coming from, you cannot, if you are familiar with today's mainstream macroeconomics or mainstream development growth and development economics, you can't help noticing how fast it is approaching towards, you know, in terms of its view towards heterodox school. So when I pick up the articles from mainstream, I find inequality there, I find distribution there, I find demand problems there. So in some sense, therefore, I was reflecting on that and I was reflecting about what exactly is the similarity and the difference. And to my mind, I realized that the one of the highlighted differences between the mainstream and the heterodox approach, where the mainstream is basing its analysis more on optimizing agent, whereas the heterodox believe more on behavioral relationship. I felt as I was analyzing those through the lens of these articles in this volume as well as the mainstream literature, it appeared to me that, you know, that is probably that difference that dichotomy is probably a bit exaggerated in the sense that there is nothing in optimizing behavior which will not generate by suitably tweaking the assumption which will not generate, let's say a constant savings ratio and so on. I think the more fundamental difference is coming or usually comes from the fact that a part of the mainstream literature all talks about believes in market fundamentalism. Although, even that approach towards looking in economic coming from mainstream background increasingly becoming more and more sort of rare. So people I think even in mainstream, increasingly people are realizing that markets inherently are imperfect. In the market, you have to take into account our distribution, you have to take into account so political economy and power distribution and income inequality. These are becoming part of mainstream approach, not necessarily neoclassical, but certainly mainstream. And that is where I feel that the contribution of this volume to my mind is in some sense, you know, towards bridging this gap between these two schools to my mind. This is probably the first time I'm seeing sort of convergence, at least part of the mainstream literature with the heterodox literature, not necessarily in terms of the tools that they use, but in terms of the way they want to look at the society and the economy and the way they think, you know, what are the things that are important in the society and the economy. And to my mind, that's where the importance of this volume coming as I was shifting through the volume, I felt that these are going to be extremely important articles, which not just the heterodox economics people, but the mainstream people who are interested in these issues should look at. And I think the greatest contribution of this volume or many articles of this volume is in terms of bridging that gap. That gap is, to my mind, is already narrowing. And I think this volume does a great job in terms of bringing the two streams closer together, more probably, you know, than what the editors had realized. So they are really, this is basically, I think, to my mind, this is probably a great opportunity for all the mainstream economics, not necessarily market fundamentalists to read up this volume and think about solving the problem, which are, you know, which are bothering all of us in this deeply divided society. It's bothering the heterodox school as much as it's bothering the mainstream non-neoclassical school. So to my mind, that's exactly where the, you know, contribution of this volume lies. Thank you for giving me this opportunity. Thank you, Moshmidi. I would now like to turn over to Professor Anjer Mukherjee, emeritus professor in Jawaharlal University in New Delhi. Professor Mukherjee. Thank you. Friends, we have gathered today to launch conflict, demand and economic development and facilitate Omid Bhaduri. I must thank Dipankar and Deborshi for allowing me into this select group. Now being the last speaker has some problems because you've decided on some points, right? And I was aghast that most of them have been touched upon. So I am reconstructing my talk as I go along. So let me share with you my experience in having worked with Omid Bhaduri for a long time. I think in this group, I probably know him the longest time because the first time I met him, as I was telling the others the other day, was 62 perhaps. When he came back, I was an undergraduate and he had just finished his tripos and he came back to Presidency College to teach for a brief period. And there were friends of mine who were doing economics. I wasn't doing economics. Who came and told me about this young person who had joined, who had done so brilliantly in Cambridge. So I was just curious. You see, I had come to study in Calcutta from a small town in elsewhere, Patna in Bihar. So I had no idea of what Cambridge was and someone doing so well in Cambridge. So I went and took a lecture. And if I recollect, this was 62 perhaps. I think he drew some boxes. And then there was a person in the class who made an ass of himself by asking stupid questions. So this is the usual undergraduate class. And so next day I ran into Amit Bhaduri in the coffee house. And I was shocked because he seemed to have recognized my face and he came and asked me, were you all able to follow what I said? So I said, no. So he looked crestfallen. So I said, but I'm not a student of economics. I had just gone to watch the fun. So he said, what fun? So he was a bit irritated if I recollect. But then I didn't attend anything else. But I used to see him very often thereafter. My next chance encounter that could have happened was probably 1967 because the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta wanted to set up an economic research unit. And I said, I don't know. I don't know how many of you know. I mean, some of Amit, that would remember him and Mosumi probably also would remember that he came and told me that Amit Bhaduri is joining. Why don't you come and join us? So I was not doing anything at all. Right. I mean, I was working with him. I was not doing anything at all. Right. I mean, I was working at the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta and I was getting bored. So I thought of joining, but then that didn't work out. In 1973, I joined JNU. Right. And the only other person who was there was Krishna Bharadwaj. And one day I saw Amit Bhaduri coming out of the history department. Now, this is 73 April, May around then and I lashed on to him because I badly needed someone to talk to and I, the only other person I knew was Amit Bhaduri. So I said, look, you are coming here joining the center. And he said, no, I'm thinking of joining the history center. So I was aghast. What are you going to do with the history center come yet supposed to be starting an economics department. So I ran to Krishna and I told Krishna, what is this? Amit Bhaduri joining the history center. So he said, I know, but Amit is being difficult. So he has something anyway. So I don't know what happened, but finally he joined us. There's a group of three. And then the center was announced. I think from July and then I think somewhat later, Professor Pravad Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik and Sunanda Sen joined, right? So the first admissions, the three of us did together. So the first batch of JNU, MA economics, which had all kinds of people. Incidentally, the first time the center was located at the bottom of the school of languages. And the students had a lovely story, which I must share with you. They said that the reason was that we also taught Greek. That is why the center was located at the bottom of the school of language. But then, you see, that was when the exciting things happened. You see, almost every other day Amit would walk in with a huge sheaf of these green colored sheets. I mean, those of you who are working in North America, you have your yellow pads. We had our green sheets. They're slightly larger than your yellow pads. But they had, is you right, and still writes, I suppose, big block letters. There are very few lines, but they're big and sprawling across the page. And by the way, all the papers that were being written at that time, that was very exciting. I got to read. I was learning a lot of economics. So my education properly began then. And these are most of the papers that appeared in the volume called unconventional economic cases later on. But they appeared in journals before that, of course. And they were she and Deepankar talk about them in the volume introduction. Now regarding Amit Badri, all of you have spoken about how he has chosen problems which are of interest and they are different from what the usual set of problems that are studied. So emphasis should also be placed on the manner of his presenting his arguments always within the context of well-defined models. In fact, very early on, I can share with you my recollections of a conversation we had with June Robinson. June Robinson was at the center. In fact, staying with Professor Bhaduri, I think. And one evening, I'd been almost in the morning, I'd been blown away by June Robinson because of a discussion that we had and someone introduced me to her by saying that this is our resident Valerazian and immediately of course there was all kinds of problems. But in the evening she was much mellowed, of course. And she was advising me and I think at Amit Bhaduri's house about what should be done, what kind of problems to study. It is not about the tools of analysis. It was about the problems that you studied. What concerns you? She said it is all right to consider an equilibrium or uniqueness or something like that. They might give you something if you are trying to analyze something in particular. Amit was one of those who chose topics which were different from the rest of us. I would have said that he is better than any one of us. It's not different. And here I had a difference of opinion with most of my colleagues. All of my colleagues. Because I think they claimed except Amit I think. I think they claimed we were different. In fact, our students also claimed we were different. And I kept on saying for heaven's sake say that we are better. I am willing to go with you and say that we are better. Don't say we are different. As soon as you say we are different then you get into all kinds of trouble. But anyway. Although he did not say so or support me in this sort of difference of opinion. But I think this is what he also thought. People haven't talked about his contributions to capital theory. They've talked about his more. But they were probably his early contributions. And I remember the same time that Joe Robinson was there. Amitya Sen was visiting there and I remember a conversation when the three of them were sitting in the winter sun sipping chai. I remember Amitya Sen saying that look we can have a conference on capital theory because there were the three exponents on capital theory of different types there. So his role there was quite well established. I think Moshoomi mentioned this I think the most important work so far as I am concerned was his paper on semi feudalism appeared in the economic journal appeared slightly before he JNU. The paper grew out of his extensive traveling across the villages of Bengal. It led to the extensive literature on share cropping and analyzing incentive to various types of prevalent contracts. Something that is routinely done today you know when we talk about incentives today it doesn't sound very strange but I'll tell you I did my PhD in 1973 and someone who was my contemporary I will not mention the university it's one of the prominent universities of North America I asked that person about incentives whether that was an issue and he said well they had large planning models were being discussed students were working on it but no one was working or looking at the question of incentives so incentives did not appear in the seventies except perhaps the paper by Hurwitz which appeared which placed the topic firmly on the center stage and that was in 1970 but yet here was Amit around the same time talking about incentives and attributing the fact that the landlords didn't have incentives to invest in their land because of the contract that was written and the Bhaaduli paper was relating the reason that consider to the fact that this was not only evidence based research this is something that I learned recently that you do evidence based research everyone talks about evidence based research well here was Bhaaduli doing evidence based research in 1970 when no one was working on that not only that it was firmly grounded on his interaction with the farmers in Bengal what could be more orthodox in today's terms and always there were models that were simply and elegantly presented we used to have long conversations on his travels in Bengal I think they were really fresh in his mind and I think you could not but be affected by what he saw was the ground reality the stark conditions under which farmers operated remain indelibly printed on my mind I'll just give you something a question something that I could not even imagine of for example in the dark how do you cross paddy fields walking on the embankments so in the dark you have to cross the paddy fields and I remember telling me that you know how you have to cross the paddy fields you say no you say you have to clap as you cross why in the dark because the places are infested with cobras and cobras move away because of the sound so just imagine the kind of framework within which the farmer has to operate I mean this was something which affected me tremendously consider in fact application of nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory to show the nature of complex dynamics he was among one of the earlier exponents of this new tool and in fact one of the reasons why I started dabbling with these things also was because of the kind of thing that introduced and it was not too far away from what I used to do in any case but then all these good things but then Omid could create problems for us I'll give you one example is he Omid Bhaaduri was exasperated with what he called neoclassical growth theory or growth theory and you'd go around telling everyone growth theory is horrendous, terribly irrelevant all kinds of things so one of our sister centers in the school of social sciences where too some economists were employed got it into their heads that they want to teach an MA course in economics too and they wanted us to join in and so they drafted the entire curriculum and in that growth did not figure so of course naturally we picked on that we said what is this why didn't you have growth theory we talked with Omid, Omid said you don't need to teach anything about growth so you see there is a problem without following Omid without understanding fully what he's been saying well I could go on I think I have more or less exceeded my limit I've been trying to collapse six decades of interaction into few minutes it's not possible let me end with just two points and again one of course compliment Dipankar and Diwarshi for doing this job very well done I looked at the book and the and the important thing that I notice is that almost every essay refers to some paper of Omid Bhaduri so that provides a cohesion which I have seldom seen in a poetry it is remarkably well done I think Mushumi has also talked a lot about this point and I'd like to mention this because I think there is only one thing which I disagree with completely and I'd like to put it slightly more forcefully than Mushumi the statement that the editors have claimed Omid is an important heterodox scholar I wonder what that word heterodox is doing there I tried to find a definition if I could of heterodox I was found the only thing I found that it's not orthodox well I don't know what orthodox is perhaps orthodox today would be unless you run RCTs you are not orthodox none of us are orthodox everyone is heterodox that heterodox word I think is perhaps is inappropriate so far as I'm concerned and I think is an injustice to Omid's work I'd strongly argue that on the basis of his body of work Omid Bhaduri is the leading economist of the post-war generation and I'm so glad that when I looked at the blurbs part and I notice someone else who is the other one who has written it I can't go back anyway none of them mention this that Omid is only important as an heterodox scholar this is delimiting he calls his own essays unconventional I would agree with that he calls himself a critic of course he is a critic everyone has to be a critic and today we have to realize we have to learn that we have to take our critiques into consideration without considering the critiques on both sides no matter what the essential thing is choice of topics that you are working with and in that if someone criticizes you fine you have to look in that criticism but you can't say that okay you belong to a different school I belong to a different school and economics has had many problems but the worst problem is that when you start dividing people up into different schools of thought actually they are not Moshoomi has argued that I mean I had to spend a bit more time but Moshoomi has already done that he talks about convergence I said there is no convergence if they do good economics or if they do bad economics I think that's the only distinction that I would like to make and Omid Bhaduri has done first rate economics and with that I would like to hand over to Omid for him the critique and an ideal that we like to follow but can't get there thank you thank you professor Mukherjee I would now like to ask professor Omid Bhaduri to share his comments can you hear me yes I can yes we can hear you can I start can I start I must say this whole business of a drift for me has been a little bit overwhelming for me very sincerely when I think of my own work I have done it partly for pleasure mostly for pleasure research is for pleasure and I have partly done it because of my political interests but I never thought it was something which is what I contributed is really worth celebrating I mean it in all genuine humility I think you know some of this of course I think has given me and I hopefully to a few others some insight and rather than speaking at length I will myself review what I consider to be the most interesting papers or interesting ideas which I worked on I think Anjan is absolutely right I think my you know during my PhD and soon after that I published papers I became got jobs and so on on working for capital theory but that was really not what led to anything not because it was a dead subject but because of the fact that it did not open up anything about the real world my notion of connection between economics and real world came when I resigned from a job in the United Nations in early 1970s and came back to India without a job deliberately without a job because I wanted to understand Indian countryside Indian countryside which basically Indian agriculture there were lots of political you know fireworks going on at that time and I came back and I travelled as Anjan said in quite difficult conditions and that was when I think out of my experience it was almost like doing experiment it was out of my experience I didn't keep systematic notes but I kept short notes and so on out of which I wrote a paper that was that paper on semi feudalism and then I wrote another paper which has on userious interest rates both of these papers were you know noted and I think lots of people wrote on them later controversies on and so on this is not the place to talk about the paper this is let me tell you just a story which actually set me on the paper you know I do not believe that in a subject like economics you really collect a lot of data without any primitive idea of why you are collecting data and you come to an understanding of anything deep out of this no matter how much data you look at what you know I have seen enough of people doing this including high frequency data and so on I think where do you get your insight is actually completely from unsuspected quarters and the semi feudalism paper I have never told this came from one such insight when I was traveling in the Bengal villages in early 1971 or late 1970 I once I felt ill I was quite I had very high temperature I could not actually walk around so I could not come to the railway station or to the bus stop so I sat down under a tree and there was nobody with me the day before there had been a police raid in that area so everybody was frightened and so on so I was just sitting under a tree and trying to recover strength and I realized I was running a fairly high temperature it was at that time one very kind gentleman a villager but he was this kind of reasonable middle peasant or somebody he saw me obviously from my face and my spectacles and so on he suspected I was not a peasant and he took and he asked me and I said I am not feeling very well he said you come I think so he took me to his home and this is the semi feudism he took me to his home and I sort of more or less passed out next day I think I stayed there for two nights and before I but then I recovered and before I came back I when I recovered and I said thank you very much I now want to leave they said no you cannot leave you must have a proper meal because you are a guest in the village in any village anywhere it has happened to be in other parts of India also in Punjab in Maharashtra many places in Kerala you cannot leave the house without having a meal so and they really produced a meal of fried bread which we call Luchi and something which was a great delicacy for me at that time so when his wife was serving the meal I was serving the food I noticed that she had gold bangles lot of gold bangles on her on her wrist and I had also noticed that they had a cauliflower garden which was actually quite stuffed of water the qualifers were drying it was like the month of April or May it was quite hot so I casually asked you know to make the conversation I said you know why don't you sink a tube well for the cauliflower in your garden so he said we can't do this because of my son because of our brother in law so I said I did quite understand and then he said only one sentence he said you see my brother in law is a money lender here so I did not connect the two I got into the bus and I was sitting in the bus and I was looking at my notes nothing made a connection and then I suddenly realized that if you as a money lender if you are making getting interest then it must be that the patient must when poor so that you can get you can regularly keep money and your business can continue and because it is a sort of joint family because he was a money lender this man could not make the family you know go wrong create family problem by breaking his business and trying to make some of the patients better off and his interest income would go down this was the beginning of my understanding of semi feudalism that if you have two modes of making income two modes of exploiting or two modes of making income then they can come into conflict of what Anjan said that the incentive structure becomes quite different from what you read in textbooks and profit motive single you know incentive and so on this was a semi feudalism paper and similarly there was the other paper which I remembered another conversation which Anjan would remember this was with who recently died with Arup Malik we are both traveling to Calcutta University I had gone for some reason and we were both traveling in the past we did not have a seat and we are both standing so I told you know I have now discovered why banks do not lend money to small peasants because you know for various reasons but local money lenders are quite willing to lend them money and make so much money out so is it really how so I said you know it is the story of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov you know Raskolnikov was a man who killed the old woman who gave the so I said Dostoevsky so Arup who I think gets the argument this was my paper and you know usually has interest on which many others work in Koshik and so on the Arup immediately said I mean the if you have got Dostoevsky mathematics then it must be right this was Arup Malik and that was my other paper which I think was actually came completely out of experience none of these papers had any reference to anybody they did not come from reading literature they did not come from systematic you know shifting through data but they came from enormous impression which I collected over a one and a half year it was you can call it anthropological you can call it sociological you can call it like an observing scientist who observes nature and comes up with this there are famous examples in biology of that you know there is the example of the first Nobel Prize winner in economics Tim Bergen whose brother in case you do not know Tim Bergen's younger brother left school he did not finish his high school because he was too interested in observing nature and he finally got it also Nobel Prize in biology for noticing the hard behavior of a certain kind of fish now you see observing like for scientists observing nature for economists observing the society I think is a fundamental importance if you do not do it I mean this I mean all sincerity and if there is anything of value if really there is anything of value in my writings and so on it is because of this my observing society and being involved with the society I see in the phase shift I have been you know defined by many as somebody who combines activism with research and my research goes out to my activism and so on but what they call activism is actually not a conscious deliberate scientific interest to write papers for which I do that is but the two sort of somehow automatically merge in my personality I do certain things like you know I went when all this people are also doing we all observe how land was being taken away and I wrote a paper on that quite recently in land acquisition what it means what it you know etc now this is where I think really economics lies the other thing which I I think I did and for which I think in America and in Europe my work is much better known is macroeconomics now there I think there is one thing which I learned which I had not learned before that is you see and this is something which Schumpeter had said about Marx Schumpeter who did not like Marx but I admire him Schumpeter had said that you see if you are really a good economist scientist whatever it is if you are really good at something and if you have really found something in theory then it must be that it is not particularly biased to one one way of looking at the problem now I this is something when Steve Margeline who was then at Harvard and had come from Harvard and I had gone from Calcutta when we were working together I realized and this was one of the constant quite frequent conversation between Steve and me that you see if Kansas theory is really good in which we both believe then Kansas theory must be something which can accommodate many different trends of this and this is how our profit led wage led paper to which you know Robert started or paper started that the Keynesianism is something which is a much broader in its scope and what you make out to be as one simple version of Keynesianism now this particular thing apart I think there is not much else in my work if you I mean you know papers you write papers you publish papers in international journals and this is a kind of thing which we do as a part of our profession but if anything which stays a little bit beyond of lasting value this is simply this notion that economists must learn to observe society and learning to observe society is not for just to just to make like papers but if you are on the other hand you see if you learn to observe society you automatically get involved you see it is quite different from science it is quite different from physical sciences where you can be a physicist you can look at an experiment and you can see out of it and you can observe it from a distance in the problem with economics is you observe society and as you observe society you cannot remain neutral you and this is what they call me an activist economy that's how they have described here this is where my root of activism and my root of thank you I think I have finished thank you very much Professor Vaduri so we have some time I would like to invite anybody who wants to speak just put your name in the chat box and I will maintain a list and we will go down it right now there is nobody on the list so if anybody wants to go just let me know through the chat box the reason for going through the chat box is I cannot see everybody in one pane so if you raise your hand I will not be able to write you so the best ways to go through the chat box anybody wants to make any comments maybe somebody Sunil Asha please go ahead and then Maria Floreau am I audible yes and I would ask you to please keep your comment short between a minute or so actually I just wanted to congratulate you on such a great book and work of Professor Amit Bhathri whom I work with my PhD at JNU and I understood a lot of interesting macroeconomics as I was a classmate of Moshmi who just now spoke and I really understood macroeconomics for the first time I would say despite being from the deli school of economics where I don't know what I understood because I could not really feel that it stayed with me at all so after finishing my M field I realized that I really don't want to kind of do any more stuff so then at that time Professor Amit Bhathri had just come back and then we all PhD students were sitting last benching in his class and there basically I was working also at NIPFP at the same time with one Professor Parthasathesh Shom and Sheetal Chan from IMF who were teaching us I mean working on the financial programming model which are basically based on quantitative money and then I couldn't really figure out what they are doing but then in the process I kind of collected some data and did some inflation analysis and all and then in one of the classes Professor Amit Bhathri was teaching that financial programming model and I really kind of certainly you can say that I really understood things so well that I was so amazed and then I realized that I wish I could get him as my PhD supervisor and then I worked very hard to show that inflation and how does it not really get affected by money supply but also agricultural output dynamics and buffer stocks and all play a very important role and that basically made me going and I kind of later on got to work with him and then understood so much of the macroeconomics which now I teach as a teacher of macroeconomics in a management school and I give them a very different perspective than the standard thing they are taught and I feel kind of a really great that's the small comment I'll just make Thank you very much Sunil Next we have Maria Floreau Yes, thank you Deepana for giving me the time to share my you know my admiration to Amit Amit I don't know whether you remember me I was student of Don Harris as well at Stanford Sergei Floreau I want to mention that I have admired you from afar I know that you've been traveling all over the world but what I really admire is how you see scholarship and research for a greater objective not only did you observe society which I followed in my field work in the Philippines collecting data about money lenders as well you were the source of that you know inspired me for working on that but you write about your observation and use that for the greater good which is to help transform society so you link your political activism with the work and research that you have been doing all these years and I want to say that I benefited a lot from your unwavering support and encouragement during also the difficult time when I collected field work in the Philippines on informal credit and trying to bring out the underlying social relations and power relations one last thing I want to mention too is that Amit is a great supporter of gender analysis in economics and and my being a feminist economist is also partly to do with Amit Baduri's support for the gender working group on if you remember Nilufer Chatai and others who put together this you know I would say Pivotel and Seminal group of gender economies and macroeconomies so I just want to thank you for all that you know inspiration and guidance that you have given me and other gender feminist economies thank you thank you Maria next we have Arun Kumar so you know I was Professor Bhadri's PhD student way back in 77 I had come back from Princeton University where I was doing PhD in physics and I quit physics and wanted to do economics so I learnt a hell of a lot from him his paper you know this semi feudalism paper was very influential but he also encouraged me to do a lot of other work you know apart from doing the PhD in terms of trade and incomes that was my topic so I went he was collaborating with Janaki you know Devki Jain sorry and I went to textile labour association in Ahmedabad to study the agriculture labour there and I also was working on sugar industry so I realised you know what the role of trade and government is in agricultural markets as a result of that and that also pushed me into working towards the black economy which I have been researching since 1979-80 and that was entirely empirical because you know hardly any work was going on on this issue of black economy but I learnt a lot of macro history box diagrams and you know other such things and that led me you know to do my research on the black economy which I have been researching since then and that also led me to go into you know the public finance area and I managed to do a lot of macro public finance also because of what I learnt from him and then you know by observing what he was doing so it's been entirely observational you know my research so I really how much influence he has had on my research and on my work so thanks Professor Bhadri for being there and you know I look forward to more of your writings thanks Thank you very much Next we have Santosh Kumar and activist from Delhi Hi Professor I have a question for Professor Amit Bhadri Sir I just want to a brief comment on contextualising the current farms agitation, present movement in Delhi in terms of political economy of agrarian change because this is not the demand for the land so how you are seeing this protest Thank you Well so far as the farmers movement is concerned I have written several pieces on it in newspapers and they have all been published in Indian languages and I fully support it I support it for one simple reason we cannot discuss it in detail you see if you today they say that the farmers are exploited by traders because the traders really are money from the farmers particularly in Punjab and so on but the farmers are in favour of it they at least have an assured market now you see what the government wants to do is to take the market out of the smaller traders and give it to two or three big traders certainly Adani already has seen those Ambanis who have best interest two of the richest businessmen in India now this is really corporatisation of agriculture so I think this has been a disaster this will be a disaster in India for various reasons which I cannot get into and it's not ideological we can discuss it the second thing which is very important and which is not mentioned is they want to take away the civil rights they are not civil rights civil rights they want to take away the rights of the farmers to complain legally because you see what the bill consists of is that the government passes the law and the government is the one which will decide whether the farmers are right or not so the executioner becomes the judge now no democracy can accept it so to this is the bill which must go I think the farmers are absolutely right must believe it but here we cannot go more into it if you want to read you can write me an email I will send you some of the articles I have been writing on it for a long time on this thank you so we have next go go thank you thank you Deepangara I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Prof. Bhaduri his writings have been enormously influential for me in shaping both my thinking about economics and the society particularly on my research particularly his three papers the Bhaduri Margarine paper the endogenous growth paper which was published in CG in 2006 or 7 and the dynamics of profit led and wage led growth I think those two papers came one after another and another another of his writing which not only me but many of us who studied from JNU even though Prof. Bhaduri did not teach us was his book the macroeconomics of the dynamics of commodity production for most of us who have come from JNU that's the book I remember Prof. Pernayak taught us that course and other than his lecture notes what we studied were Prof. Bhaduri's book and few essays of Kileski and that is what is the interest that we have so many of us have in macroeconomics somewhere I think those macro classes and his book has sustained and I think even some of us have gone off and studied other schools mainstream your classical but you know it's because of I believe it's because of the interest that Prof. Bhaduri's writing has generated kind of inspired some of us to go and read others also thanks, thank you Dipankwada and Devo Sita for organizing this Thank you Gogo so we are reaching 11 so I think there are no more people on the stack okay I see yeah there are no more people on the list so I can make a comment like to now sorry did somebody want to say something yeah I just you know I have been in touch with Dr. Amit Bhaduri I am one of the few lakh fans that legendary Amit Bhaduri has and this is Bhanikant Mishra I do research in I teach finance do research in economics finance so I talk to him but since in public I would like him to share is social science under a threat now in many parts of the world and particularly in the particular economics non-men's-to-economics is under threat more so because it is exposing the vested interest like the ones this what can you do to ensure that both the non-men's-to-economics and social sciences don't vanish so Dr. Bhaduri would you like to respond well most of them have said how much they found my work interesting influential etc what can I say really nothing but I would like to just mention two things which one is you know Robert I am talking to Robert Brecker I think one of the things which I wanted to say the open economy profit-led wage-led thing I read one of your latest papers I can't remember which one where I think you have got what is needed to start on linking it with big-scale you know industries corporations and so on that is when wage is raised it does not necessarily lead to wage-led growth because it depends on how the profit margin gets affected that is basically your argument because how much the profit margin gets affected this is something which I have long thought to be case that whether you know they can just pass on the wage increase to the consumers or whether they have to bear it part of it themselves and in extreme cases it can become actually if they take most of it then stays wage-led the limits to wage-led growth under corporatism is something which I think is really worth writing simply about because you know this is something which I don't think people have fully understood and I think you are one of the few people whose latest work I have seen this being done long time ago I did try to do something in a paper in I think in Vienna in honour of somebody maybe Steindl when I had tried to make this but I think it comes out much more clearly in your paper this is one thing I want to tell you because you mentioned the last paper of mine and I mentioned because it is one of your latest papers which is not published with that I will now hand it over to Debra Siddhas for the note of thanks yeah I hope I am audible so I thank all of you for joining us at this not very usual time at least for India so starting off we had this Facebook conference in UMass Amherst in 2019 so the funders were University of Massachusetts Amherst so we thank them for funding the Facebook conference participants at the conference many of them actually came thousands of kilometers and this was the time when the air traffic schedule was thrown haywire because there was a war like situation between Pakistan and India so it was not easy traveling to US during that time yet people came contributors to the Facebook we thank them all they have kept to the deadline they have been very patient with us the editors the publication house, Taylor and Francis especially we would like to thank Remina, Shoma and Tharmendra the people who have guided us through the process we thank Priyanka Shivastav for letting us use the picture so I should show you at least the book because we are releasing a book so this is the book the South Asian edition is this one and the picture that you see on the cover is by Priyanka so she has been generous to allow us to use this picture and this is the international edition so these two books have come out simultaneously I hope the Indian edition will come out in the market very soon we also thank obviously the panelists who have attended today and made it a very lively discussion, Prof. Blaker Prof. Das, Prof. Mukherjee and of course Prof. Vaduri we should thank him for being our teacher and for being an inspiration beyond the classroom also many people have mentioned this and I could not articulate myself better than the others and finally I thank you all for giving us your time and being here thank you thank you very much and hope to see many of you and be in touch and I hope you have a chance to read the book. Thank you I will end the session now Thank you very much for having this session Thank you very much