C. T. Kurien

Development economist dedicated to reforming economics pedagogy

By Alex M. Thomas

CT Kurien

Christopher Thomas Kurien, popularly known as C. T. Kurien was born in 1931. While at school in Kerala, Kurien was struck by the glimpses of Indian socio-economic realities found in Minoo Masani’s Our India, which was a text for his English course. This cultivated his interest in economics. After pursuing  his Intermediate (today’s class 11 & 12) from St. Joseph’s College, Bengaluru between 1948 and 1950, Kurien did his B.A. (Honors) Economics at Madras Christian College (MCC). Since Madras University recognised B.A. (Honors) as equivalent to an MA in Economics, Kurien was eligible for lectureship and he joined the teaching faculty at MCC in 1953. 

Taking a leave of absence from MCC, Kurien moved to Stanford University in 1958 to begin work on his PhD, which was completed in 1962. His teachers included H. Houthakker, Kenneth Arrow, Irma Adelman, Hollis Chenery, Lorie Tarshis and Bernard Haley. Kurien’s PhD supervisor was Chenery, and when Chenery left to join the Kennedy administration, Moses Abramovitz became Kurien’s supervisor. Kurien’s PhD thesis was titled Factor Market Structure and Technological Characteristics of an Underdeveloped Country: An Indian Case Study.

In 1978, Kurien left MCC and joined Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) as its director on the invitation of Malcolm Adisheshiah, the founder of the Institute, and served as Chairman of MIDS from 1997 to 2003. At MIDS, he supervised ten PhD dissertations. In 1996, Kurien received UGC’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2002, he served as the President of Indian Economic Association.

Despite the good grounding in mainstream economic theory he would have obtained in Stanford, Kurien repudiated the common practice of studying economic issues from the perspective of a theoretical framework. This is exemplified in the subtitle of his co-authored Economic and Political Weekly paper ​“Urbanisation and Economic Change: A Pre-Theoretic Investigation of Tamil Nadu” (emphasis supplied) and in this passage from it: ​“Shorn of all streamlining that theorising imposes, the study of economic change essentially amounts to an appraisal of the change in lifestyles — in the modes and manners in which people make a living and live.”

What mattered to Kurien was not the mathematical elegance or the logical consistency of a theory but its relevance to study economic life. Akin to Amartya Sen’s classification of economic thought as being in the engineering and ethical streams, Kurien divided economic thought under two heads: ​“Logic-centred economics” which emphasised formulation of abstract theoretical models unconcerned about how realistic they were, and ​“Life-centred economics”, concerned with economic life actually lived. 

Favouring the ​“life-centred” approach, Kurien argued that economic inquiry cannot be divorced from ethical concerns about the kind of life people live.  Defining the economy as ​“A system of social relationships through which people control resources, produce goods, and share what is produced”, he contended that economic inquiry should address three questions: ​“who owns what?”, ​“who works for whom?”, and ​“who earns what?” It is evident that these ​“central questions” of economic inquiry are concerned with distribution. 

Kurien’s method of ​“doing economics” is displayed in his seminal work Dynamics of Rural Transformation: A Study of Tamil Nadu, 1950 – 1975. Kurien did not attempt to formulate a theory of rural transformation, nor did he view it from the perspective of an existing theoretical framework. Instead, to paraphrase a passage quoted earlier, he appraised it with reference to how rural transformation affected the life people lived. 

His study was based on whatever secondary data was available which he interpreted using decile groups to measure how much is earned by the richest 10 percent, Gini coefficients, to measure income and wealth inequality, and concentration ratios to measure the share of resources controlled by large farmers, small farmers, and agricultural labour. The emphasis on distribution should be noted.

Kurien inferred that since big farmers had the means to benefit from electric pumps, chemical fertilizers, and high yielding variety seeds introduced in rural areas in the study period, they became richer, aggravating the inequality between them and the small farmers and agriculture labour (answering the question” who earns what?”). Further, small farmers were so adversely affected that many of them sold their land to big farmers and became landless labourers working for them (answering the questions ​“who owns what?” and ​“who works for whom?”).

Four decades after it was published, Dynamics of Rural Transformation: A Study of Tamil Nadu, 1950 – 1975, is a model of how economics research should be carried out: using a range of secondary data with awareness of its limitations, applying only the tools or techniques relevant to the problem being studied instead of one’s favoured theory irrespective of its relevance, and being sensitive to how vulnerable groups are impacted by economic change. A seminal work in regional economics, it was adapted as a model study for other states by the Indian Council for Social Science Research.

Kurien’s reluctance to espouse a theory for thinking about the economy as well as the centrality he placed on distribution is evident in almost all his publications. For example, in the paper on the market and the state he observes that first, any society requires both the institutions. The market does not and cannot operate in a vacuum. It requires the state for, among other things, to enforce contracts, protect property rights, and for ​“public goods” which only the government can provide. Further, he questions the notion that markets function efficiently because individuals are driven by self-interest. He agrees with Amartya Sen that this is a simplistic model since people are motivated not just by self-interest but also by altruism.

More importantly, Kurien faults mainstream theory for overlooking how unequal distribution undermines the claim that the market system upholds ​“consumer sovereignty”, i.e., that it respects consumers’ preferences unlike centrally planned economies where government officials decide what is to be produced. However, the market produces not goods which people need, but which people can pay for. When income is unequally distributed, the market will produce mostly the goods which the wealthy groups consume. Consumer sovereignty in an unequal society does not apply to the great majority of the populace — an inequitable state of affairs. 

Kurien makes the same point about the mainstream view that increasing economic growth enhances social welfare; it ignores the implications of unequal distribution. When income is unequally distributed, growth will mean an increase in the output of goods and services which the rich, and not the poor, consume. If growth is to benefit society as a whole, it has to go hand in hand with redistribution of income in favour of low income groups.

Dominant economic theory, Kurien contends, was developed in countries where the primary focus of economists was on affluence and not on poverty. The result is that mainstream theory cannot accommodate a concept of poverty relevant to a poor economy like India. He says that this highlights the ​“poverty of economics”. This does not mean he was supportive of non-mainstream theories such as Keynesian or Marxian economics. Not only did he not find them useful in the Indian context, he felt that thinking in terms of one or other of these schools constrained India’s policy makers to thinking in terms of a ​“mixed economy”. For him this was indicative of impoverished economic thinking since the economists could not think of an alternative beyond an amalgam of the socialist model of the erstwhile Soviet Union and the capitalist model, a ​“mixed economy” being merely an amalgam of the two.

The alternative suggested by Kurien is to focus on the households, which he called the ​“core economy”. The core economy has characteristics which cannot be accommodated in either a Keynesian or a socialist framework. The former presumes that those who save are different from those who use the savings to invest, while individuals in households may save and invest what they save. In the socialist model investment decisions are taken by the planners, with others employed by the government to execute the plans; in households individuals may be self employed. 

Kurien criticised the planners for funding projects through deficit financing which resulted in inflation and economic slowdown, what he described as ​“inflationary recession”. He attributed this not to poor execution but something more fundamental: by ignoring the importance of the ​“core economy”, policy makers had a distorted picture of how the Indian economy functions. Kurien recommended replacing centralised decision making with decentralised decisions with the state acting more as a coordinator of household activities rather than the controller. This requires planners to work with them through the provision of investment goods, nudging them to go beyond consumer goods to the production of intermediate goods, thereby integrating them with the economy, making growth more stable. 

It is notable that Kurien dissented from the widely held view that small units were more desirable. He contended that remaining small hinders their growth, which meant that while he broadly approved of the Gandhian policy of household-centric production, he disapproved of the Gandhian vision of an economy centred on small households. This again illustrates his refusal to adhere to any dogmatic way of thinking about the economy. 

Kurien had a life-long interest in economics pedagogy. He recommended the inclusion of real-life issues, history of economic thought and economic history, and the collection and analysis of data in the economics curriculum. He sought to promote his ​“life centred” approach to economics through textbooks with students and teachers as the intended audience. 

The following passage is a fitting conclusion to this profile of Kurien: ​“My view is that…any serious study of social issues and of society, or of the economy as part of the study of society, is related to two basic queries: ​‘What is my responsibility to myself?’ and ​‘What is my responsibility to my neighbour?’, precisely because society (and economy) consists of myself and my neighbours and of our interaction.” 

Major works

References

This entry is based on a blog post written by Alex M. Thomas in Developing Economics and edited by N. Ramagopal with his permission.

About the author

Alex M. Thomas is Associate Professor in Economics at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. He has authored the textbook Macroeconomics: An Introduction and is a founding-member of the Indian Society for the History of Economic Thought. [Full Profile] 

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