Word: dissenters
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...chorus of dissent from business leaders, investors and even some regulators is rising. SEC commissioners Paul Atkins and Cynthia Glassman have argued against large fines against law-breaking corporations, reasoning that big fines only injure innocent shareholders. Christopher Cox, the new SEC chairman, is expected to lean the same direction. Meanwhile, even in the halls of congress there has been concern that the tough Sarbanes-Oxley corporate reform bill has placed too great a burden?and expense?on companies working to tow the line. Cox has already said he?s going to give small companies some relief from Sarbanes-Oxley...
...love of dissent certainly comes naturally to Sen. The Nobel Prize was awarded to him for his contribution to welfare economics. His body of work is diverse, but he is best known for challenging the conventional wisdom that famine is caused by a shortage of food. Sen pointed out that famine-struck areas often had enough food; the real culprit was a disturbance in the economic system?for instance, a sudden rise in prices?which made the food inaccessible. In his new book, Sen directs his iconoclastic zeal on the perception of India?held by many abroad, and also within...
Among Sen's targets are the Hindu fundamentalists, who permit no scope for diversity in their interpretation of India's history; so are those who insist that tolerance and dissent are uniquely Western concepts. Not so, he counters: they are as Indian as yoga and hot curry. He also takes a swipe at the "Asian values" theory, which was popular in the 1990s and emphasized a supposed dichotomy between "Western" values of individuality and democracy and "Asian" values of conformity, discipline and reverence for tradition. The dichotomy is fake. One of the basic requirements of a democratic political culture...
...Indian to dissent, I have to point out that the book has its problems. Sen gives too much weight to historical anomalies and aberrations to make his case. He loves to cite the Mughal Emperor Akbar as an illustration of how open-minded and inquisitive Indian monarchs could be. Yet Akbar was a one-off?none of his successors was as ecumenical, and a few were outright bigots. The might of orthodoxy and narrow-mindedness in Indian history is greater than Sen allows it to be, while acquired Western political traditions probably play a greater part in creating contemporary Indian...
These are minor quibbles. But having missed a golden opportunity to curry favor with Sen back in 1998 by walking out of his lecture, I am now scribbling down every point of dissent in the margins of his splendid, wonderfully written new book...