PRAGOTI

Dear Ramakumar,

Reading your response to Panagariya was both profoundly edifying, despite the short space it occupied, and deeply pleasing especially for the discomfiting of the comfortably occupied.

It gave proof above all of the difference, typical for the economics profession, between someone who knows an economy and someone who knows ideologically-blinkered "economics".

To know an economy is to erect an interpretive understanding of it based upon (and only upon) knowledge of its history, its culture, its sociology, its politics, and, yes, the range and contextual meaning of quantitative descriptions of its inner functioning.

Establishment economics gets the socio-political economy wrong for just the reasons that it reserves its highest rewards for those who will defend the powers that be despite knowing better and for those who will blind the world with a mountain of meaningless technicalities only because they know nothing better.

Panagariya on Kerala may be a particularly egregious case but this does not detract from the generalization.

In a sensible universe, we would be all ears to the knowledgeable economist and summarily ignore the professional ideologue and the technical ignoramus.

I hope you will refine and revise your piece, and give it the widest possible airing in the professional and lay media.

Best...