In memoriam

Deepak Lal 1940-2020

Deepak Lal, who died in London on April 30, after a brief illness, was a provocative economist always willing to swim against the current. He argued that there was no real evidence of homo sapiens-induced climate change, and that the current phase of global warming was simply the latest swing in a long line of cyclical warming and cooling. He was also convinced that smoking tobacco did no harm (he himself smoked a pipe until recently), and that the world would be better off if it abolished institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations, replacing them with an American empire (In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order).

Most such ideas found little purchase, except in the brief unipolar moment when articles in Foreign Affairs would ask what was wrong with an American imperium – a question that got a rude real world answer quite quickly in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. But make no mistake, Deepak Lal was no crank. He was widely admired for his intellectual rigour and breadth of knowledge, while readers also enjoyed his easy writing style. If nothing else, he served the important purpose of forcing you to rethink lazy intellectual positions.

Importantly, he was right on the big question of the day. His monograph of the early 1980s, The Poverty of Development Economics, was noteworthy as a frontal attack on much of mainstream thinking then, which favoured government interventions rather than price-driven markets to develop poor economies. This was published just after the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions had been launched to push back the overweening state. It was also when the World Bank was swinging right and advocating a set of policies that came to be known later as the Washington Consensus. This included free trade, open economies, competitive exchange rates, fiscal restraint and low government debt, deregulation, privatization and openness to foreign investment. Few developing economies followed such policies then, many more did so subsequently – including India to some extent from 1991. Deepak advised sundry governments, including Sri Lanka under Jayewardene, who launched his country’s reform programme 40 years ago with very good results.

An earlier book was the two-volume The Hindu Equilibrium, which argued that the caste system placed the Indian economy and society in a static equilibrium, registering little change over centuries until external interventions, first from Islamic raiders and conquerors and then from Europeans. A second volume, on the labour market, argued (predictably against the conventional wisdom) that India did not have surplus labour. The Times Literary Supplement described it as a ‘brilliant, Babur-like cavalry dash across the whole terrain of Indian social and economic history’and predicted that it ‘will remain a talking-point for years to come’. It is fair to point out that other reviewers were less impressed with his arguments and his analytical method.

In person, Deepak had an inner gentleness. He was good-humoured and urbane while arguing a point, usually from a higher intellectual plane than his interlocutor(s), bringing in economic theory to support an unfashionable viewpoint. He was old school in that he didn’t make a fuss or draw attention to himself, despite the signature bow-tie, hat and walking stick. His well-off family came from the part of Punjab that is now in Pakistan, and he went through the finishing processes of Doon School and St Stephen’s College before landing up at Oxford on a scholarship. He chose surprisingly to write the civil services exam and served three years in the Indian Foreign Service before quitting to devote himself to intellectual pursuits – which included stints at the Planning Commission and the World Bank.

He taught at University College, London, and later at UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles). He was a faithful member of the Mont Pelerin Society, which meets in interesting locales to discuss the classical liberal ideas of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman, among others. He served as the Society’s president in 2008-10, in the wake of several Nobel laureates. Deepak also ran a monthly column in Business Standard and enjoyed attending its weekly editorial brains trust meetings whenever he was in Delhi. He and his charming wife Barbara (a reputed sociologist who survives him along with a daughter and son) shuttled between homes in Los Angeles, London and New Delhi where they entertained an eclectic group of friends over excellent food and wine.

Through it all, the most notable thing about Deepak was the range and depth of his reading, and his ability to refer to an amazing set of scholarly texts to make his point, whether in a book or a newspaper article. His home in New Delhi’s Nizamuddin was lined with books in every room, while yet more books spilt over on to sundry tables and chairs. You could pick up any one of them and find he had read it carefully. The influence that those books had on him made Deepak Lal what he was, a unique intellectual.

T.N. Ninan