Kaushik Basu (born 9 January 1952) is an economist who was Chief Economist of the World Bank from 2012 to 2016 and Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India from 2009 to 2012. He is the C. Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and academic advisory board member of upcoming Plaksha University. He began a three-year term as President of the International Economic Association in June 2017. From 2009 to 2012, during the United Progressive Alliance's second term, Basu served as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. Kaushik Basu is winner of the Humboldt Research Award 2021.
Early life and education
Kaushik Basu was born in Kolkata, India, where he attended St. Xavier's Collegiate School. In an autobiographical essay he noted that finishing school in 1969 he was caught in a dilemma. His father wanted him to study physics. But those were revolutionary times and he wanted to study nothing. They settled on economics as half-way compromise between physics and nothing. In 1969 he moved to Delhi to do his undergraduate studies in Economics, from St. Stephen's College, Delhi. He then attended London School of Economics and was awarded MSc in economics from University of London in 1974. After earning his master's degree, Basu was supposed to move to England to study law and take over his father's legal practice, but he had fallen in love with the concept of logic and deductive reasoning and became fascinated by Amartya Sen's work. He remained at the London School of Economics, University of London for his PhD, from 1974 to 1976. He completed his PhD at University of London under the tutelage of Amartya Sen. He has received honorary doctorates from Lucknow University, Lucknow, in 2011, Assam University, Silchar, in 2012, Fordham University, New York, in 2013, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, in 2013, University of Bath, U.K., in 2016, on the occasion of the university's fiftieth anniversary, and the Jadavpur University Kolkata in 2018. His childhood interest in Euclidean geometry found expression and drew attention when he was Chief Economist of the World Bank and published a paper giving a new proof of the Pythagoras theorem, via a property of isosceles triangles.
Personal life and beliefs
Kaushik Basu is married to Alaka Malwade Basu with two children, Karna and Diksha. Alaka is a professor at Cornell's Department of Development Sociology and has been a visiting professor at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Economic and political views
Kaushik Basu has written on the importance of Adam Smith’s discovery of the invisible hand of the market and how that helps coordinating the self-interested behavior of individuals to achieve order and optimality in an economy. He feels that this is such an unexpected finding that it led many traditional economists to overlook and then forget that moral qualities, like honesty, fairness, and integrity are critical for an economy to flourish. They are the nuts and bolts that enable the invisible hand to be effective. These are important qualities that need to be inculcated in an individual for personal development as well as within the society for development. Basu also feels the need to promote quality thinking in government and public debate.
He has written in favor of Marx’s ideal of a society where each person gets according to their need and gives according to their ability. He argues in his book, Beyond the Invisible Hand, that the fault lies not in the Marxist aspiration but in using the wrong blue print to get to such an ideal. Some of the biggest blunders in history have been made from attempting to get to this ideal without a scientific roadmap. This is the reason why radical movements such as the one in the USSR began trying to build a humane, socialist society and ended up with crony capitalism. Kaushik Basu has recently worked on our collective moral responsibility and the role that individuals play in fulfilling them.
Views on bribery
In his paper, 'Why, for a class of Bribes, the act of Giving Bribes should be treated as legal", Basu refers to certain bribes as 'Harassment Bribes' that are given to get what a person is legally entitled to such as a ration card or a passport. In such cases, only the act of taking a bribe should be illegal. This will cause a divergence in the interests of the bribe giver and taker and the bribe giver will be willing to co-operate to help the bribe taker get caught. This view has been under a lot of public debate.