2000 Harvard Commencement Addre
2000 Harvard Commencement Addre由刀豆文库小编整理，希望给你工作、学习、生活带来方便”。
2000 Harvard Commencement Addre
Commencement Day Addre June 8th, 2000 Amartya Sen “Global Doubts” 哈佛大学教授,诺贝尔经济学奖获得者
On behalf of all the honorary graduands, I would like to thank Harvard warmly for making us so splendidly privileged.John Dryden, the English poet, has offered the sobering thought that honour is “but an empty bubble.” But we honorary graduands refuse to be put off by old Drydenperhaps not so modestlynot just in Seattle or Washington, D.C., but also in le organized protestations in Bangkok an Jakarta and Mexico City and Abidjan, and elsewhere.The case for global trade and worldwide use of modern technology and finance is strongor worse.The two sides face each other like ships paing in the night.We have to question both sides.Opponents of globalization may see it as a new folly, but it is neither particularly new, nor, in general, a folly.It is largely an intensification of the procees of interaction involving travel, trade, migration and diemination of knowledge that have shaped the progre of the world over millennia.The polar opposite of globalization is persistent separation and relentle autarky.There is a worrying image of seclusion that has been arrestingly invoked in many old Sanskrit texts in India(I know of four such texts, beginning about two and a half millennia ago, but there are undoubtedly many more references to the same concern).This is the story of a frog that lives its whole life within a well and is suspicious of everything outside it.This “kupamaduka”has a world view, but it is a world view that is entirely confined to that well.The scientific, cultural and economic history of the world would have been very limited had we lived like such well-frogs.This is an important iue, since there are plenty of well-frogs aroundnot just an aortment of local opposition.We have to examine the manifest inequalities and disparities that give these global doubts the political salience they undoubtedly have.What is needed is not a rejection of the positive role of the market mechanism in generating income and wealth, but the important recognition that the market mechanism has to work in a world of many institutions.We need the power and protection of these institutions, provided by democratic practice, civil and human rights, a free and open media, facilities for basic education and health care, economic safety nets, and, of course, provisions for women's freedom and rightsmen, women and children.It reduces child mortality;it cuts down health hazards of adults arising from low birth weight;it increases the range and effectivene of public debates;and it is more influential than economic growth in moderating fertility rates.We can see its influence in the halving of the fertility rate of Bangladesh in le than two decades, and in the fact that while some districts of India have high fertility rates, others with more gender equity already have fertility rates lower than the United States and Britain.The reach of social institutions that work for gender equity is astonishingly large.There is also a related point of great importance which John Kenneth Galbraith has made very forcefully.The role of institutions has to be aeed in terms of the “countervailing power” they exercise over one another.Asymmetric power in one domain can be checked by a different configuration of forces in another domain.All thiswas discued in Galbraith's book American Capitalism, first published in 1952.I remember reading it as a college student in Calcutta, in a coffee house, while trying to resist being evicted by the waiter on the not unreasonable ground that I could not hog a chair and finish reading an entire book while consuming only one cup of coffee.On that occasion, I got by through using only the countervailing power of my voice and determined immovability, but in general we need an institutional balance more far-reaching than that.Distribution of power in the world relates closely to institutional plurality.This applies even to the institutional basis of world trade and finance, which includes, among other arrangements, such institutions as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the IMF, and so on.It is neceary to re-examine the balance of power in the running of different institutions that make up the global architecture.The present institutional architecture was largely set up in the middle 1940s, on the basis of the understanding of the needs of the world economy as interpreted in the Bretton Woods conference held just as the Second World War was coming to an end.That framework did help to foster trade and development, but not much distributional equitya variant of a defiant verse composed originally by Leadbelly:
In the home of the brave, land of the free, I will not be put down by no bourgeoisie.Attacks on globalization come from different quarters, in diimilar styles, with disparate grumbles.It is not at all difficult to reject many of the criticisms that have been made, and it is right that rejectable points should be repulsed.But there is a basic need to recognize that despite the big contributions that a global economy can undoubtedly make to global prosperity, we also have to confront the far-reaching manifestations of global inequality.Many years ago, in the 1950s, when the present phase of globalization was in its infancy, an English friend of mine told me, after visiting India, that he was struck by the fact that the language of trade and commerce was so different in different countries.He had gone to a candy shop in New Delhi to buy sweets for his children and found two gla jars full of candies, prominently displayed in the shop.One described the contents, in bold letters, as “Superior,” and the other said, also in bold letters: “Inferior.” My English friend was not yet ready for such plain speaking;he would have expected the second jar to be called “regular,” or “standard,” or something like that.In the growing intolerance of inequality on which the global doubts draw, there is something of a similar inclination to recognize and react to disparitiesand of humanity.We cannot, to use Francis Bacon's words, let these broader doubts pa “lightly without intervention.” The significance of the global doubts lies in the themes, not in the theses.These doubts may often take a critically destructive form, but their ultimate importance is constructive.We cannot ignore that importance any more than we can neglect the positive contributions of globalization.
