Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta

PROFESSOR Sir Partha Dasgupta, who is one of the world’s most eminent economists, is a Cambridge academic who has been arguing for years and years that GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is a “rubbish” way of measuring human progress. That’s because “it’s a terrible, disgraceful index”, he tells GG2 Power List, speaking at his home in Cambridge where he is the Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics. He says, when a road, airport, dam or any kind of development takes place, its harmful effect on nature is not taken into account. His landmark report, The Economics of Diversity: The Dasgupta Review, which was commissioned by HM Treasury when Philip (now Lord) Hammond was the chancellor of the exchequer, was launched in February 2021 by the Royal Society with its former president, Nobel Laureate Prof Sir Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, presiding over the ceremony. There was global acclaim for the report. For example, broadcaster Sir David Attenborough summed up its findings: “Put simply, without nature, there would be no life. The economics of biodiversity is therefore the economics of nature. But nature’s resilience is being severely eroded, with biodiversity declining faster than at any time in human history.” Joseph E Stiglitz, the Columbia University professor who won the 2001 Nobel Prize for economics, described Dasgupta as the “world’s leading economist on ecology, economics, and growth and development”. Dame Fiona Reynolds, a former director-general of the National Trust and then Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, said: “If the coronavirus pandemic has had one benefit, it’s been to wake us all up to the vital importance of nature. But that’s not enough: we need to stem its decline and put it into recovery. The Dasgupta Review offers hope for nature across the whole planet by showing us how we need to think and what we need to do differently so that we live within nature’s limits, not beyond them.” Prince Charles, as he was then, also welcomed Dasgupta’s report: “It is sheer madness to continue on this path. Sir Partha Dasgupta’s seminal review is a call to action that we must heed, for ladies and gentlemen, it falls on our watch and we must not fail.” In January 2023, one of the highest honours in the land – Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire – was bestowed on Dasgupta “for services to economics and to the natural environment”. The economist has a knighthood from 2002. Dasgupta’s review, which is 610 pages long, is still available to read on the treasury website. For those who wanted a quicker read, Dasgupta produced an abridged 103-page version. Cambridge University Press is publishing the Dasgupta review, with added notes for graduate students.

During the pandemic, the economics guru did some 200 Zoom meetings with people in Bangladesh, Finland, Denmark, Holland, Canada and other countries. He engaged “not only with professionals from environmental and developmental charities, government departments, international organisations, scientific associations, think tanks, academic journals, literary magazines, research institutes, business schools, and groups representing indigenous people; but numerically even more, with financiers, bankers, farmers, ecologists, legal scholars, politicians, environmentalists, agronomists, statisticians, journalists, clerics, Earth scientists, and national and international civil servants”. But that is not the end of the story. Penguin Random House feels Dasgupta’s message about the interface between economics and nature is of such fundamental importance that it has commissioned him to write a popular book, stripped of mathematical equations and graphs. It has provisionally been titled, We and the World Around Us. Dasgupta laughs and wonders if that title is “sexy enough” for the publishers. He hopes to deliver the manuscript by April 2024 for publication next year. The publishers are already in touch with translators because this book is intended to be a global phenomenon, possibly along the lines of Rachel Carson’s seminal Silent Spring, which came out in 1962 and warned of the environmental damage that was being done by the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Dasgupta, now 81, has produced hundreds of academic papers in his career but he says he is very much enjoying the new experience of writing a popular book, which will be 35,000 to 40,000 words in length. He explains: “The book I’m writing is not an abridged version of the review. It’s a different book altogether. It has essentially the same ideas, but totally arranged in a different way.” He adds that since the review came out three years ago, “my ideas have changed. I found that over lectures that I have given that there are better ways of expressing myself. The book is going to be very different from even the abridged version of the review.” Penguin Random House no doubt feels that the book will have special appeal for young people all over the world.

In the preface to the book, which Dasgupta has shared exclusively with the Power List ahead of publication, he says HM Treasury agreed with him: “Something is not right with the character of economic development the world has experienced in recent decades, for it has been accompanied by continual degradation, even desecration, of the natural environment. Climate change is one global sign of the degradation, biodiversity loss is another.” He also says: “I had been working for more than four decades on ideas that skirt round the idea of biodiversity, on themes at the interface of human numbers, our living standards, and the environment around us.

“In the past seven decades Nature’s circumstance even at the global level have changed drastically. There is no excuse now, anywhere, to fashion ideas of economic development and the economics of poverty that don’t have the natural environment as an essential factor. “Food, potable water, clothing, a roof over one’s head, clean air, a sense of belonging, participating with others in one’s community, and a reason for hope are no doubt universal needs.” He finds that “the emphasis people place on the goods and services Nature supplies differs widely”. He puts it all in one sentence:

“To farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, it could be declining sources of water and increasing variability in rainfall in the foreground of global climate change; to indigenous populations in Amazonia it may be eviction not just from their physical home, but from their spiritual home too; to inhabitants of shanty towns everywhere, the worry may be the infections they are exposed and subjected to from open sewers; to the suburban household in the UK, it may be the absence of bees and butterflies in the garden; to residents of mega-cities, it could be the poisonous air they breathe; to the multi-national company, it may be the worry about supply chains, as disruptions to the biosphere make old sources of primary products unreliable and investments generally more risky; to governments in some places it may be the call by citizens, even children, to stem global climate change; and to people everywhere today, it may be the ways in which those varied experiences combine and give rise to environmental problems that affect us all, not least the Covid-19 pandemic and other emerging infectious diseases, of which land-use change and species exploitation are major drivers.” The author says: “I have been anxious not to make the book read like an academic text.” Cambridge, where Dasgupta lives, has old world charm. He and his wife, Carol, witness the changing of the seasons when they go for walks in Wandelbury country park near their home. He describes the subject of how nature impacts all our lives as “beautiful”.

“You are looking at the whole of nature and how we are a part of it and interacting with it,” he says. “What could be more beautiful than that? The interactions are beautiful and you have to dig deep into ecology. We are trying to understand how our rhythms fit in with the rhythms of nature; our rhythms in the sense of waking up, falling asleep, working, and how plants follow the rhythms of the seasons. I think of economics as interacting with the natural world. Economics is just a rough expression of our activities, how we wake up in the morning, we do this, we do that, we earn money to pay for food. I see all that as part of a larger scheme of things. We see new leaves in the spring. Of course, it’s beautiful visually but what about the processes that are creating this annual cycle? The processes are exceptionally attractive, too. That is an implication of seeing nature as an overarching entity we are studying because we are part of it.” He makes the point that while people feel they can do little about climate change “they can identify with what’s happening in their locality. The individual has very little effect on the climate because he’s just a small cog, one out of eight billion people. But he can have a substantial effect on his garden or his local neighbourhood. We have more agency over local biodiversity. You don’t have much agency over your local climate because if it’s going to rain, it’s going to rain.” He also argues that the preservation of biodiversity is very much linked to democracy. “Look at the Amazon forests,” he says. “The indigenous population in Brazil have absolutely no say – they get kicked out or shot. And we have plenty of examples from India, Pakistan, everywhere, including here (in the UK and the west generally). Surreptitiously, you have slight changes in zonal laws. If you have democracy at work, at least somebody can protest – and they do. That is extremely important.” He goes on: “It’s very easy to see why forest management is much better done by people who actually live there. It is better than, say, Delhi sending rangers who go round telling people, ‘You can’t do this.’ Decentralised choice is better. Of course, under some central guidance. It is collective action at the local level which is really important.”

” At the current rate of consumption of natural resources, the global population needs 1.7 earths to satisfy its demands. “That’s a metaphorical way of saying we need 1.7 earths to meet our current demand. But, of course, we don’t have 1.7 earths. We have one earth. So the implication is we have to cut down our demands.” Dasgupta can spot weaknesses in the current obsession with “clean energy”. He does not see people anywhere agreeing to a drop in their standard of living. “I don’t see it happening. They say, ‘Let’s try and be more efficient in our use of nature.’ In many ways, climate change economics has spoilt us because we can see possibilities of becoming more efficient in our use of energy. The idea is that you use less of nature’s resources, in this case, carbon – that is to say fossil fuels – and move to cleaner energy. That is sun, solar, wind, whatever. What nobody mentions is that when you build these huge wind spots, you use huge amounts of metal. It is the same thing with solar. You are ignoring the mining aspect of things. In order to reduce the use of fossil fuels, you are mining, tearing up the landscape and hitting biodiversity.

The propaganda has been we can substitute our way out of resource scarcity without having to reduce our lifestyle. That’s really unfortunate.” Looking back on his life, Dasgupta is grateful to a teacher called “Mr Vishwanathan” for getting him interested in nature when he was at school in Benares (now Varanasi) in India. He matriculated in his school finals in 1958 with an aggregate of 82 per cent – “I was very proud of that”. Mr Vishwanathan “got me interested in geography and the natural world. I had him for two years for geography”. Another great influence was his father, Amiya Kumar Dasgupta, a professor of economics “who had a spartan attitude to life. He had the same dhoti, the same one suit.”

Dasgupta grew up in a typically middle-class Bengali family, where money was never plentiful but where there was always a deep love of scholarship. He was born in Dacca (now Dhaka) on 17 November 1942, when East Bengal was part of India. In 1947, after the Partition of India, East Bengal became East Pakistan, but this broke away from West Pakistan after the civil war of 1971 and became Bangladesh. His father, who was a lecturer in Dacca, was given the chair of economics at Benares Hindu University after a three-year stint working for the International Monetary Fund in Washington. He has been hailed by Nobel Laureate Prof Amartya Sen as “one of the founding fathers of modern economics in India”. Partha Dasgupta graduated in physics from Hans Raj College in the University of Delhi in 1962, and was then admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read physics. But he switched to economics, graduating in 1965 and completing his PhD in 1968. That was the year he married Carol, the daughter of James Meade, who won the 1977 Nobel Prize for economics. After happy years at the London School of Economics and a stint at Stanford University in California, Dasgupta returned to Cambridge in 1985 as professor of economics. He stepped down from teaching and retired in 2010 under the rules of the university. But he remains an emeritus professor and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Dasgupta visited Dhaka for a workshop in 2002. “My wife and I went to Dhaka last year which was very moving.” It is, of course, the city of his birth. “My mother was also born in Dacca. I went to see my father’s birthplace, which was Barishal.” Dasgupta is the local boy made good. The English version of his book will be available in Bangladesh. There will also probably be a Bengali translation as well.