A Marital Tribute Like No Other

It may be the most astounding party a professor has ever thrown for his wife, and one that provided a rare public view into one of the most influential couples in world economic policy.

The tribute, from the world’s leading scholar on globalization and free trade, Jagdish Bhagwati, to the world’s leading scholar on Russian economic policy, Padma Desai, gathered Nobel laureates, heads of state, and dozens of top scholars in the field in the rotunda at Columbia University’s Low Library.

“What I adore in Padma is not just her determination to triumph against the greatest odds, and her reaching the pinnacle of glory in two areas of successive specialization: India and Russia. It is also her great warmth and generosity of spirit,” Mr. Bhagwati said, noting her excellence as a cook, mother, party hostess, seamstress, and lover of literature, from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Elizabeth Bishop.

Before Mr. Bhagwati spoke, there were 16 other speeches — by such luminaries as Harvard University ‘s president-elect, Drew Gilpin Faust, and a Nobel economics laureate, Paul Samuelson — celebrating her scholarly work on the occasion of her 75th birthday.

Her work in Russia garnered most of the attention. With the exception of Ms. Desai’s work, “I think the majority of things written in this country about the Russian transition is absolute nonsense,” a former Russian prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, who came from Moscow for the event, said.

“No analyst has shown more balance and better judgment than Padma,” Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, said in a letter read at the event. “Her approach has always been that of the true scholar: engaged, but disinterested, always aware of the complexities, and free of ill-judged enthusiasms.”

Throughout her career, Ms. Desai has used rigorous modeling and data crunching to examine essential questions, such as why the Soviet growth rate declined in the postwar period, and how productive it would have been if it had been organized as a market system. This was not an easy task in the early days of her career.

“There were challenges from various directions. Data was not available regularly in the ’70s and ’80s, and the computer software was far behind what we have today. It was not only time consuming, it required a lot of expertise and patience,” Ms. Desai said.

During President Yeltsin’s leadership, when workers were not paid wages for months on end, Ms. Desai asked, “How did factory managers decide whom to pay? How frequently were workers denied wages? What was the amount of nonpayment?”

She has turned her probing conclusions into books. A Princeton University professor of economics and international affairs, Paul Krugman, called “Financial Crisis, Contagion, and Containment: From Asia to Argentina” (Princeton University Press, 2003) the “best book yet on financial crises.” Ms. Desai’s latest book, “Conversations on Russia: From Yeltsin to Putin” (Oxford, 2006) “has already become a historic document,” Harvard’s Samuel W. Morris University Professor, Dale Jorgenson, said. “She interviewed all these self-important Russians, and got them to say what she needed them to say without their knowing,” a Nobel laureate in economics, Robert Solow, said of the work.

Ms. Desai has spread her ideas to a general audience with her books as well as newspaper articles, and appearances on CNN, BCC, Bloomberg TV, and “The Charlie Rose Show.”

Although the meal was lavish for a university catering service — salmon poached in green tea, herb crusted rack of lamb — it was nothing like the $2 million 40th birthday party the now-jailed former chief executive officer of Tyco International, Dennis Kozlowski, threw for his wife, Karen Kozlowski, at which revelers were served vodka “urinated” by an ice sculpture of Michaelangelo’s David. At the dignified tribute to Ms. Desai, marble figures of Demosthenes, Euripides, and Sophocles gazed down at guests from the top of the Low Library rotunda, which was designed by McKim, Mead, and White. On this night, the honor and the glory rightfully belonged to the married economists of Columbia, Ms. Desai and Mr. Bhagwati.

(Specifically, Ms. Desai is the Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor of Comparative Economic Systems, and the director of the Center for Transition Economics. Mr. Bhagwati holds the titles of University Professor, Arthur Lehman Professor of Economics, and professor of political science; there is also a professor’s chair named after him, currently occupied by Arvind Panagariya. Mr. Bhagwati is also a senior fellow in international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.)

The two met more than 50 years ago in Cambridge, Mass., when they were graduate students. “I was at MIT and she was at Harvard. She was already a legend in our home state of Gujerat. My father, who was at the time the vice-chancellor (i.e. President) of Bombay University and a judge on the High Court (our state Supreme Court), had told me about her spectacular good looks and brilliance; he had been the chief guest at a statewide debate which she had won handily,” Mr. Bhagwati said.

It was love at the first sight: He immediately imagined her serving him chicken curry for the rest of his life. “She was quite dazzling,” he said.

She was academically dazzling, too. Her dissertation led to an article in the Review of Economics & Statistics. “She should have started out as an assistant professor at Harvard. But those were the days when gender discrimination, still with us but more subtle now, was rampant,” her husband said.

She never let closed doors stop her, however. After Harvard, she became a professor at the Delhi School of Economics, and also did research at MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, Boston University, and Oxford.

“Few of the younger women who do well today, leave aside the men, realize what odds Padma, and the rare few women in those times, fought against to achieve professional recognition and to pave the way for them,” Mr. Bhagwati said.

The couple started by specializing in the Indian economy. In 1970, they co-authored the book “India: Planning for Industrialization,” (Oxford University Press). It was forward thinking. “When the government in 1991 undertook sweeping reforms in our industrial and trade policies, we were only implementing ideas that Jagdish and Padma wrote about two decades earlier,” the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said in a written statement read at the event.

Ms. Desai moved on to focus on the Soviet Union. She explained she did this because of her devotion to Dostoevsky, whose “disturbing” work intrigued her. “I had read ‘Crime and Punishment’ in my early teens and taken a pledge to read it in the original.” She learned Russian at Harvard while studying for her doctorate. Ten years later, she was at the Harvard Russian Research Center. “Within a decade, I felt equipped to wrestle with big questions,” she said.

When President Gorbachev came on the scene in 1985, her career moved into fast orbit. “Instant experts and advisers mushroomed all over in American academia and media, everyone offering his two-pennyworth on-the-spot expertise on the crumbling Soviet Union, and, later, the emerging Russia. I sparred with them endlessly,” Ms. Desai said. She told the story of a well-known economist who argued for speeding up reforms. “He asserted, ‘You cannot cross a chasm in two leaps.’ I shot back: ‘You cannot cross it in one leap, either, unless you are Indiana Jones.'”

Of today’s current situation, she says, “I refuse to join the chorus of condemnation that decries President Putin in a knee-jerk fashion and sees any assertion of an independent policy by a more prosperous Russia with a jaundiced eye. I remain optimistic about Russia’s future, based not merely on a 40-year affair of the heart, but also because nuanced argumentation points in the same direction.”

The celebration took place in conjunction with a two-day scientific conference in Ms. Desai’s honor: “Russia: Soviet Past, Present Performance, and Future Prospects.” One panel, “Where is Russia Headed?” drew more than 600 people; another considered the presence of “Dutch disease” in Russia. (“The current tax on oil is so high that companies have fewer resources to invest. So the question, therefore — which I built a model to answer — is: Does this effect investment in the economy?” Ms. Desai said. “I found that it does effect investment in the economy. So my suggestion to Putin would be to reduce the tax rate at the margin.”)

It is a moment for economists, Columbia University’s president, Lee Bollinger suggested in a letter read at the celebration. “For my generation, which grappled with questions of social justice, the dominant framework we used to address the problems of our time was the law. For today’s generation, it is economics.”

The married professors each lauded the support the other had shown for in their careers. “She has been a wonderful intellectual companion over almost half a century,” Mr. Bhagwati said at the tribute his wife organized for his 70th birthday in 2005. Ms. Desai was equally clear in her affection for her husband. “I must confess, indeed assert, that little of all this would have been possible without the steadfast intellectual and moral support of Jagdish,” she said.

She then read a poem by Bishop. “You are the joker in my pack, the prune in my pudding, the pepper in my pie, my package of peanuts,” she said, “…the moon in my sky.”

agordon@nysun.com