Who has criticized that economics is a Kuber worshiping science ?

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Correct — option (3), Karlail and Raskin — that is, Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, whose names are printed here in an unusual transliteration. The charge in the stem is the Marathi textbook rendering of a nineteenth-century English attack on classical political economy: that the new science had made a god of wealth, Kubera being the keeper and lord of riches in Indian tradition, so that a science organised around the getting of wealth was a science of wealth-worship. Carlyle and Ruskin were the two literary critics who pressed that attack hardest, and neither was an economist. Carlyle, the Scottish essayist and historian, gave political economy the label that has stuck to it ever since when he called it 'the dismal science' in an essay of 1849, and in Past and Present he had already denounced what he called Mammonism and the cash nexus — his term for a society in which the payment of wages had replaced every other bond between people. Ruskin, the art critic, took the argument further in Unto This Last, four essays published in 1860 and issued as a book in 1862, which attacked the political economists' picture of a self-interested economic man and insisted that value could not be separated from the human life it sustained; its most quoted line is that there is no wealth but life. The two are cited together because their objection was moral and aesthetic rather than technical: they did not dispute the economists' arithmetic, they denied that a discipline organised around wealth alone could describe a good society. Ruskin's essay has a direct Indian afterlife too, since Gandhi read it in 1904 and paraphrased it into Gujarati as Sarvodaya, the welfare of all.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus are the targets of this criticism, not its authors. They are the central figures of the classical political economy that Carlyle and Ruskin were attacking — Ricardo for the theory of rent, comparative advantage and the labour theory of value, Malthus for the argument that population grows faster than subsistence. The choice is genuinely tempting because Malthus is popularly and persistently linked to the phrase 'the dismal science', but that link runs the wrong way: the phrase was coined by Carlyle about economists of their kind, and the gloom it names is the gloom of their conclusions.  (b) Keynes and Marx — the paper prints 'Keneys and Karl Marks' — were both critics of the economics of their day, which is what makes this the most substantial of the wrong choices, but neither criticised it as wealth-worship. Keynes worked from inside the discipline, arguing in the General Theory that the classical account of employment was a special case and that output could settle at an equilibrium with mass unemployment; his quarrel was technical. Marx's critique of political economy was that it presented the arrangements of capitalist production as natural and permanent, and that it obscured the extraction of surplus value; his objection was structural and class-based, not a moralist's complaint about the pursuit of riches.  (d) Edward Chamberlin and Joan Robinson belong to a completely different debate and a much later one. Both published in 1933 — Chamberlin on monopolistic competition, Robinson on imperfect competition — and their shared achievement was to break the rigid textbook division between perfect competition and monopoly by describing the intermediate market forms in which most firms actually operate, with product differentiation, advertising and downward-sloping demand curves for individual sellers. That is refinement of price theory from within, the opposite of a moral rejection of economics as a wealth-worshipping science.

Concept: Classical political economy, as it stood in the middle of the nineteenth century, described the economy as a mechanism driven by self-interested individuals seeking gain, and derived from that description laws of wages, rent and population that appeared to leave little room for moral choice. The reaction against it in Britain came largely from writers outside the discipline, and it took two distinct forms. One was the socialist critique, which accepted that economics described the system accurately and objected to the system. The other was the literary and moral critique of Carlyle and Ruskin, which objected to the description itself: they held that treating human beings as maximisers of wealth was not a simplification but a falsification, that the cash payment could not be the sole nexus between people, and that a science built on that assumption would produce a society organised around the worship of riches. Ruskin's contribution was to insist that wealth means nothing except in relation to the life it makes possible, and that a nation's real accounting must include the condition of the people who produce its goods. This tradition matters in an Indian syllabus because it reached India directly — through Gandhi's reading of Ruskin and his reworking of it as Sarvodaya — and became one of the sources of the ethical strand in Indian economic thought.

State PCS 2024 Q49 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q49 — Economy PYQ with Answer