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By:

Kiran D. Tare

21 August 2024 at 11:23:13 am

The Inconvenient Economist

Gita Gopinath tells India to look past tariffs and focus on the air it breathes but speaks from the IMF’s Olympian perch. Gita Gopinath has the air of someone who expects to be listened to and usually is. Soft-spoken, rigorously precise and conspicuously unimpressed by political fashion, the IMF’s First Deputy Managing Director speaks less like a public intellectual than a judge reading out a finding. At Davos this week, she delivered one such verdict on India. Forget tariffs for now, she...

The Inconvenient Economist

Gita Gopinath tells India to look past tariffs and focus on the air it breathes but speaks from the IMF’s Olympian perch. Gita Gopinath has the air of someone who expects to be listened to and usually is. Soft-spoken, rigorously precise and conspicuously unimpressed by political fashion, the IMF’s First Deputy Managing Director speaks less like a public intellectual than a judge reading out a finding. At Davos this week, she delivered one such verdict on India. Forget tariffs for now, she advised and worry about pollution instead. Pollution, Gopinath warned, now sits at the heart of India’s growth problem. A 2022 World Bank study estimates that 1.7 million Indians (about 18 percent of all deaths) die each year due to pollution. The costs, she insisted, are not confined to environmentalists’ spreadsheets. Dirty air lowers labour productivity, raises healthcare spending and acts as a permanent drag on growth. Investors, too, notice. “If you are thinking of setting up operations in India and living there, the environment matters,” she said. Gopinath is not an activist parachuted into economics, but a card-carrying member of the profession’s high priesthood. As the IMF’s former chief economist and now its second-in-command, she oversees surveillance, research and the Fund’s flagship publications. She helped steer the institution through the Covid-19 shock, co-authoring a widely cited ‘pandemic paper’ that set global vaccination targets and corralled the IMF, World Bank, WTO and WHO into an unusually coordinated response. Her intellectual pedigree is impeccable. Educated and later ensconced at Harvard, with an earlier stint at Chicago Booth, she has spent two decades writing about exchange rates, capital flows, crises and monetary policy. Few economists of her generation have moved so seamlessly between the academy and the commanding heights of global policy. And yet, therein lies the tension. When Gopinath urges India to treat pollution control as a “mission” alongside deregulation, she is surely right. India’s air is among the dirtiest in the world and its burgeoning cities routinely vanish under a grey pall each winter. But the sermon comes from a familiar pulpit. For many in emerging economies, the IMF’s prescriptions, however empirically sound, often feel like lectures delivered from glass towers, far removed from political constraint and social messiness. The Fund has long been better at diagnosing problems than navigating democracies. It can quantify the productivity loss from polluted lungs with admirable precision. It is less adept at grappling with the electoral economy that sustains coal plants, diesel engines and construction dust. Advising India to prioritise pollution over tariffs is easy sitting in Davos but is harder to get done in Delhi, where growth and federal politics collide daily. Gopinath herself is more nuanced than the institution she represents. Unlike some IMF grandees of the past, she does not pretend that technocratic fixes operate in a vacuum. During the pandemic, she argued for pragmatic departures from orthodoxy like fiscal expansion, coordinated action, even industrial policy-lite to fix vaccine bottlenecks. Her work on the Integrated Policy Framework acknowledges that emerging markets cannot simply float their currencies and hope for the best. Still, the broader IMF worldview lingers in her prescriptions. Carbon taxes, tighter regulation and cleaner energy are presented as economic imperatives, not political battles. While that framing looks analytically tidy, it is also incomplete. India’s pollution crisis is bound up with urbanisation without planning, weak municipal governance and a political economy that rewards short-term fixes over long-term breathing space. To be fair, Gopinath did not deny this complexity. By calling pollution a “mission,” she implicitly invoked the scale of effort required. Her warning that environmental damage creates “deeper and longer-lasting” harm than tariffs is a reminder that growth debates obsessed with trade skirmishes risk missing the bigger picture. The irony is that institutions like the IMF, which once badgered countries about deficits and deregulation, are now among the loudest voices urging attention to air, climate and health. Perhaps the IMF has learned, partly through crisis, that growth divorced from health and environment is illusory. Gita Gopinath’s intervention in Davos captures both the strength and the limitation of this new posture. She is right to say that pollution is a bigger threat to India’s economy than tariffs. She is right to insist that environmental damage creates deeper and longer-lasting harm than trade skirmishes. But her warning also highlights the enduring gap between diagnosis and delivery. While India would do well to heed such warnings, those issuing it also must remember that the hardest part of reform is not diagnosis, but politics on the ground, which is far below the Davos air.

The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb

The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb

This year, the Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo, or the Japan Confederation of A- and H-bomb Sufferers Organizations - a national organization of groups of those who survived the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.


U.S. President Harry S. Truman’s decision to deploy atomic bombs against a Japan supposedly on its knees remains one of the 20th century’s most contentious acts. Yet, the historical context behind this momentous choice has been obscured over time, shaped by later fears of nuclear annihilation and the rise of anti-nuclear movements during the Cold War period and beyond.


The actual history has been further distorted by critics within the U.S. military and diplomatic establishment itself, like Admiral William Leahy, who later claimed to have condemned Truman’s decision to use the A-bomb by comparing it to the ethical standards of the Dark Ages, arguing Japan was already collapsing under naval blockades and conventional attacks. Likewise, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and later U.S. President, had expressed discomfort with the bombings.


J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist of the Manhattan Project, became an advocate against nuclear weapons after witnessing their destruction, while Paul Nitze, a key U.S. strategist known for his famously hawkish stance, also believed Japan’s surrender could have been secured without the bombings.


Yet, historical evidence shows that even after dropping the bombs, military hotheads who controlled Japan, were far from ready to surrender. As historian Richard Frank, in his tremendous Downfall (1999), showed that Truman’s decision to unleash nuclear weapons was not only a profound military strategy but one that spared countless lives on both sides.


As Frank, through use of declassified secret documents, convincingly proves that Japan’s unwillingness to surrender justified Truman’s course of action, despite the bitter legacy of nuclear destruction.


By 1945, the bloody island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific, from Iwo Jima to Okinawa, had demonstrated the ferocity of Japan’s resistance. Casualty projections for the invasion of Japan itself ranged from 250,000 to a million for the Americans, and many millions for the Japanese. Truman, having seen how American forces had suffered in these gruelling battles, could not justify an even greater bloodbath when a faster, though horrific, option was at his disposal in form of the A-Bomb.


Even while the U.S. blockade had strangled Japanese economy and firebombing had left its cities (like Tokyo) in ruins, and the Soviet Union loomed on Japan’s northern horizon, the idea of an unconditional surrender was still vehemently opposed by large factions of Japan’s military elite. In the government of Emperor Hirohito, voices advocating for peace, like Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki and Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, were drowned out by the hawks, led by Army Minister Korechika Anami.


In fact, the best evidence in favour of Truman’s decision comes from the Japanese themselves: In 1965, ‘Japan’s Longest Day,’ a book compiled by the Pacific War Research Society (a panel of distinguished Japanese authors and journalists) conclusively put to rest the myth that Japan would have surrendered anyway without the display of American force.


The book graphically gives a picture of the last 24 hours leading to the Japanese surrender, detailing the internal struggle between Japan’s surrender advocates, like Suzuki and Togo, and military hardliners led by Anami (who later committed ‘seppuku’ or ritual suicide). The latter continued to believe that Japan could secure better terms by inflicting heavy casualties on American forces even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed.


On August 14, 1945, radical officers attempted a coup to stop Emperor Hirohito’s surrender broadcast, fearing it would dishonour Japan. Though the plot failed, it underscored the military’s stubbornness, suggesting that without the bombings, Japan’s resistance - and a U.S. invasion - would have led to even greater bloodshed.


Truman’s decision to drop the bombs was not about revenge for Pearl Harbour or the desire to showcase American technological superiority. In the postwar years, images of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki have become potent symbols of human folly, shaping the moral consciousness of future generations. But viewed in the cold light of history, Truman was justified by the strategic and humanitarian imperative to end the war swiftly. Had he hesitated, the Pacific theater would have devolved into a blood-soaked nightmare.

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