What Dr Swamy did have in common with his father was an aptitude for mathematics. “One good piece of advice my father gave me: he said, ‘The way economics is taught in India, you won’t get very far. You do mathematics first,’” Swamy recalled. “So at Hindu College, I took mathematics, and that stood in me in great stead. At Harvard, that was what distinguished me from everybody else, because … mathematics at that time was just infecting economics.” Swamy’s economic papers are concise, and they frequently bristled with data and equations; a typical paper—such as Consistency of Fisher’s Tests from the July 1965 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Econometrica, on the holes in one of the four most important neoclassical microeconomic theories—is so dense with mathematics that it is almost more symbols than words. “Mathematics is poetry. It’s language. You can use it to express whatever you want,” the sociologist MN Panini, an old friend, remembered Swamy once telling him. Then, Panini said, “He also thinks anybody who doesn’t know mathematics is not worth talking to. It’s a typical South Indian mentality.” Swamy’s talent for mathematics was responsible for placing him on the warpath against Mahalanobis, and thence for securing him an admission into Harvard’s doctoral programme in economics. Armed even then with his fealty to the free market, Swamy found it easy to be contemptuous of Mahalanobis, the chief designer of the statistical methodologies used by Jawaharlal Nehru to plan his economy. At the ISI in Calcutta, studying for a master’s degree in statistics, Swamy was convinced that Mahalanobis was targeting him for being his father’s son. “Mahalanobis and my father were dead opposed to each other … There was bitterness between them,” he said. Some of his Tamil professors would tell him that they were “under pressure” to grade him poorly. “Everybody was telling me: ‘Your career is over. You better go become an apprentice at the Bhilai Steel Plant.’ Those days, that was the great thing: Bhilai Steel Plant.” Instead, Swamy decided to embrace his reputation—already acquired, but not yet burnished—as a rebel. In a paper, ‘Notes on Fractile Graphical Analysis’, that he mailed off to Econometrica in 1963 in an envelope made out of a brown-paper bag, Swamy showed how a statistical analysis method, which Mahalanobis claimed to have invented, was only a differentiated form of an older equation. The article, Swamy said, “literally destroyed” Mahalanobis. But in the paper itself, Swamy was not nearly so scathing. He stated gently that Mahalanobis’s claim of having invented a new method was “not quite correct”; even more warmly, he called Mahalanobis’s approach “refreshingly new”. The Econometrica referee for this paper, the Amsterdamborn American economist Hendrik S Houthakker, happened also to be serving on Harvard’s admissions committee, and Swamy told me that, on the basis of this article alone, Harvard admitted him with a full Rockefeller scholarship. According to Swamy, Mahalanobis tried to persuade him to withdraw his paper; when that failed, he angrily wrote to Harvard predicting that Swamy would fail his Master’s. “Harvard wrote back, saying, ‘We admitted him on the basis of … his demonstrated capacity for research, and therefore it doesn’t matter if he gets an MA or not,’” Swamy said. “Now that is the Harvard I knew.” Then, thinking of Harvard’s decision to drop him as a Summer School instructor following the outcry over his DNA op-ed, he added a little morosely: “I don’t know if it is the same Harvard today.” Read more at: The Outlier | The inscrutable politics of Subramanian Swamy wp.me/p5oF9Q-M
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 09:10:34 +0000