Amartya Sen

Capability Approach
Official Portrait at the Nobel Prize
Born	(1933-11-03) 3 November 1933 (age 79) Santiniketan, Bengal Presidency, British India (present-day West Bengal, India)
Nationality	Indian
Institution	Harvard University University of Cambridge London School of Economics Jadavpur University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cornell University University of Oxford Delhi School of Economics University of Calcutta University of California, Berkeley Stanford University
Field	Welfare economics, development economics, ethics
Alma mater	Presidency College of the University of Calcutta (B.A.), Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.)
Influences	Rabindranath Tagore B. R. Ambedkar John Maynard Keynes John Rawls Peter Bauer John Stuart Mill Kenneth Arrow Piero Sraffa Adam Smith Karl Marx[1]
Influenced	Mahbub ul Haq Kaushik Basu Jean Drèze Sanjay G. Reddy Martha Nussbaum Kotaro Suzumura Robin Hahnel Ben Fine Esther Duflo Tony Atkinson Nancy Folbre Abhijit Bannerjee Bina Agrawal
Contributions	Human development theory
Awards	Nobel Prize in Economics (1998) Bharat Ratna (1999) National Humanities Medal (2012)[2]
Information at IDEAS/RePEc

Amartya Kumar Sen, CH (born 3 November 1933) is an Indian philosopher and economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society's poorest members. Sen is best known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food.^[3] He helped to create the United Nations Human Development Index.^[3] In 2012, he became the first non-U.S. citizen recipient of the National Humanities Medal.^[4]

He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, distinguished fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he previously served as Master from 1998 to 2004.^[5][6] Sen is a member of the Advisory Board of Incentives for Global Health, the not-for-profit behind the Health Impact Fund. He is the first Indian and the first Asian academic to head an Oxbridge college. He also serves as the first Chancellor of the proposed Nalanda International University.^[7][8]

Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages over a period of forty years. He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. In 2006, Time magazine listed him under "60 years of Asian Heroes"^[9] and in 2010 included him in their "100 most influential persons in the world".^[10] New Statesman listed him in their 2010 edition of "World's 50 Most Influential People Who Matter".^[11] Sen was one of the 20 Nobel Laureates who signed the "Stockholm Memorandum" at the third Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability in Stockholm, Sweden on 18 May 2011.^[12]

Early life and education [edit]

Sen was born to a Bengali Hindu Brahmin Vaidya family of Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. His ancestral home was in Wari, Dhaka, part of modern Bangladesh. Rabindranath Tagore is said to have given Amartya Sen his name ("Amartya" meaning "immortal"). Sen hails from a distinguished family: his maternal grandfather Acharya Kshiti Mohan Sen, a close associate of Rabindranath Tagore, was a renowned scholar of medieval Indian literature, an authority on the philosophy of Hinduism, and also the second Vice Chancellor of Visva-Bharati University. His maternal grandfather was an uncle of Sukumar Sen, ICS the First-Chief Election Commissioner of India and his equally distinguished brothers, Amiya Sen, a very well known doctor, and Barrister Ashoke Kumar Sen, M.P. and a former Union Cabinet Minister for Law and Justice of India. Sen's father Professor Ashutosh Sen and mother Amita Sen were both born in Manikganj, Dhaka. His father was a Professor of Chemistry at Dhaka University and later served for several years in Delhi, becoming the Chairman of the West Bengal Public Service Commission.

Sen began his high-school education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka in 1941, in modern-day Bangladesh. His family came to India following the partition of the country in 1947. In India Sen studied at the Visva-Bharati University school and then at the Presidency College, Kolkata, where he earned a First Class First in his B.A. (Honours) in Economics as a graduating student of the University of Calcutta, and emerged as the most eminent student of the well known batch of 1953. Subsequently, in the same year, he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge. There he earned a First Class (Starred First) BA (Honours) in 1956. He was elected as the President of the Cambridge Majlis in the same year. While still an undergraduate student of Trinity, he met Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. Mahalanobis, who was much impressed with Sen, returned to Calcutta and immediately recommended the brilliant Cambridge undergraduate to Triguna Sen, the then Education Minister of West Bengal, who had been instrumental in turning the National Council into the new Jadavpur University.

After Sen had completed his Tripos examination and had enrolled for a Ph.D. in Economics to be completed at Trinity College, Cambridge, he returned to India on a two-year leave. Triguna Sen immediately appointed him as Professor and the founder Head of Department of Economics at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, which was his very first appointment, at the age of 23. This still remains the youngest age at which anybody has been appointed to a professorship or a head of departmentship in India. During his tenure at Jadavpur University, Sen had economic methodologist A. K. Dasgupta, who was then teaching at the renowned Benares Hindu University, as his supervisor. After two full years of full-time teaching in Jadavpur, Sen returned to Cambridge to complete his Ph.D. in 1959.

Subsequently, Sen won a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, which gave him four years of freedom to do anything he liked, during which period he took the radical decision of studying philosophy. That proved to be of immense help to his later research. Sen related the importance of studying philosophy thus: "The broadening of my studies into philosophy was important for me not just because some of my main areas of interest in economics relate quite closely to philosophical disciplines (for example, social choice theory makes intense use of mathematical logic and also draws on moral philosophy, and so does the study of inequality and deprivation), but also because I found philosophical studies very rewarding on their own."^[13] However, his deep interest in philosophy can be dated back to his college days in Presidency, when he both read books on philosophy and debated philosophical themes.

To Sen, then Cambridge was like a battlefield. There were major debates between supporters of Keynesian economics and the diverse contributions of Keynes' followers, on the one hand, and the "neo-classical" economists skeptical of Keynes, on the other. Sen was lucky to have close relations with economists on both sides of the divide. Meanwhile, thanks to its good "practice" of democratic and tolerant social choice, Sen's own college, Trinity College, was an oasis very much removed from the discord. However, because of a lack of enthusiasm for social choice theory whether in Trinity or Cambridge, Sen had to choose a quite different subject for his Ph.D. thesis, after completing his B.A. He submitted his thesis on "the choice of techniques" in 1959 under the supervision of the "brilliant but vigorously intolerant" neo-Keynesian, Joan Robinson.^[14] According to Quentin Skinner, Sen was a member of the secret society Cambridge Apostles during his time at Cambridge.^[15]

Professorships [edit]

Between 1960 and 1961, Sen was a visiting Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.^[16] He was also a visiting Professor at UC-Berkeley, Stanford, and Cornell. He has taught economics also at the University of Calcutta and at the Delhi School of Economics (where he completed his magnum opus Collective Choice and Social Welfare in 1970),^[17] where he was a Professor from 1961 to 1972, a period which is considered to be a Golden Period in the history of DSE. In 1972, he joined the London School of Economics as a Professor of Economics where he taught until 1977. From 1977 to 1986 he taught at the University of Oxford, where he was first a Professor of Economics at Nuffield College, Oxford and then the Drummond Professor of Political Economy and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. In 1986, he joined Harvard as the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor of Economics. In 1998 he was appointed as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.^[18] In January 2004, Sen returned to Harvard. He is also a contributor to the Eva Colorni Trust at the former London Guildhall University.

Membership and associations [edit]

He has served as president of the Econometric Society (1984), the International Economic Association (1986–1989), the Indian Economic Association (1989) and the American Economic Association (1994). He has also served as President of the Development Studies Association (1980–1982) and is a Honorary Vice-President of the Royal Economic Society, which he has been since 1988.

He presently serves as Honorary Director of Center for Human and Economic Development Studies at Peking University in China^[19] and is also a board council member of the Prime Minister of India's Global Advisory Council of Overseas Indians.^[20]

Research [edit]

Sen's papers in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped develop the theory of social choice, which first came to prominence in the work by the American economist Kenneth Arrow, who, while working at the RAND Corporation, had most famously showed that all voting rules, be they majority rule or two thirds-majority or status quo, must inevitably conflict with some basic democratic norm. Sen's contribution to the literature was to show under what conditions Arrow's impossibility theorem^[21] would indeed come to pass as well as to extend and enrich the theory of social choice, informed by his interests in history of economic thought and philosophy.

In 1981, Sen published Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), a book in which he argued that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. Sen also argued that the Bengal famine was caused by an urban economic boom that raised food prices, thereby causing millions of rural workers to starve to death when their wages did not keep up.^[22]

Sen's interest in famine stemmed from personal experience. As a nine-year-old boy, he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people perished. This staggering loss of life was unnecessary, Sen later concluded. He presents data that there was an adequate food supply in Bengal at the time, but particular groups of people including rural landless labourers and urban service providers like haircutters did not have the monetary means to acquire food as its price rose rapidly due to factors that include British military acquisition, panic buying, hoarding, and price gouging, all connected to the war in the region. In Poverty and Famines, Sen revealed that in many cases of famine, food supplies were not significantly reduced. In Bengal, for example, food production, while down on the previous year, was higher than in previous non-famine years. Thus, Sen points to a number of social and economic factors, such as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food-distribution systems. These issues led to starvation among certain groups in society. His capabilities approach focuses on positive freedom, a person's actual ability to be or do something, rather than on negative freedom approaches, which are common in economics and simply focuses on non-interference. In the Bengal famine, rural laborers' negative freedom to buy food was not affected. However, they still starved because they were not positively free to do anything, they did not have the functioning of nourishment, nor the capability to escape morbidity.

In addition to his important work on the causes of famines, Sen's work in the field of development economics has had considerable influence in the formulation of the Human Development Report,^[23] published by the United Nations Development Programme.^[24] This annual publication that ranks countries on a variety of economic and social indicators owes much to the contributions by Sen among other social choice theorists in the area of economic measurement of poverty and inequality.

Sen's revolutionary contribution to development economics and social indicators is the concept of 'capability' developed in his article "Equality of What".^[25] He argues that governments should be measured against the concrete capabilities of their citizens. This is because top-down development will always trump human rights as long as the definition of terms remains in doubt (is a 'right' something that must be provided or something that simply cannot be taken away?). For instance, in the United States citizens have a hypothetical "right" to vote. To Sen, this concept is fairly empty. In order for citizens to have a capacity to vote, they first must have "functionings." These "functionings" can range from the very broad, such as the availability of education, to the very specific, such as transportation to the polls. Only when such barriers are removed can the citizen truly be said to act out of personal choice. It is up to the individual society to make the list of minimum capabilities guaranteed by that society. For an example of the "capabilities approach" in practice, see Martha Nussbaum's Women and Human Development.^[26]

He wrote a controversial article in The New York Review of Books entitled "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing" (see Missing women of Asia), analyzing the mortality impact of unequal rights between the genders in the developing world, particularly Asia. Other studies, such as one by Emily Oster, have argued that this is an overestimation, though Oster has recanted some of her conclusions.^[27]

Welfare economics seeks to evaluate economic policies in terms of their effects on the well-being of the community. Sen, who devoted his career to such issues, was called the "conscience of his profession." His influential monograph Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), which addressed problems related to individual rights (including formulation of the liberal paradox), justice and equity, majority rule, and the availability of information about individual conditions, inspired researchers to turn their attention to issues of basic welfare. Sen devised methods of measuring poverty that yielded useful information for improving economic conditions for the poor. For instance, his theoretical work on inequality provided an explanation for why there are fewer women than men in India^[28] and China despite the fact that in the West and in poor but medically unbiased countries, women have lower mortality rates at all ages, live longer, and make a slight majority of the population. Sen claimed that this skewed ratio results from the better health treatment and childhood opportunities afforded boys in those countries, as well as sex-specific abortion.

Governments and international organizations handling food crises were influenced by Sen's work. His views encouraged policy makers to pay attention not only to alleviating immediate suffering but also to finding ways to replace the lost income of the poor, as, for example, through public-works projects, and to maintain stable prices for food. A vigorous defender of political freedom, Sen believed that famines do not occur in functioning democracies because their leaders must be more responsive to the demands of the citizens. In order for economic growth to be achieved, he argued, social reforms, such as improvements in education and public health, must precede economic reform.

In 2009, a new book by Sen was published, The Idea of Justice.^[29][30] Based on his previous work in welfare economics and social choice theory, but also on his philosophical thoughts, he presented his own theory of justice that he meant to be an alternative to the influential modern theories of justice of John Rawls or John Harsanyi. In opposition to Rawls but also earlier justice theoreticians Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau or David Hume, and inspired by the philosophical works of Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft, Sen developed a theory that is both comparative and realizations-oriented (instead of being trancendental and institutional). However, he still regards institutions and processes as being important. As an alternative to Rawls's veil of ignorance, Sen chose the thought experiment of an impartial spectator as the basis of his theory of justice. He also stressed the importance of public discussion (understanding democracy in the sense of John Stuart Mill) and a focus on people's capabilities (an approach that he had co-developed), including the notion of universal human rights, in evaluating various states with regard to justice.

Perceptions: in comparisons [edit]

Sen has been called "the Conscience and the Mother Teresa of Economics"^[3][31] for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare economics, the underlying mechanisms of poverty, gender inequality, and political liberalism. However, he denies the comparison to Mother Teresa by saying that he has never tried to follow a lifestyle of dedicated self-sacrifice.^[32]

India: university mentor for growth and revival [edit]

Nalanda International University Project [edit]

In May 2007, he was appointed by the Government of India as chairman^[33] of Nalanda Mentor Group to examine the framework of international cooperation, and proposed structure of partnership, which would govern the establishment of Nalanda International University Project as an international centre of education seeking to revive the ancient center of higher learning which was present in India from the 5th century to 1197.

He was slammed by renowned scientist and 11th President of India APJ Abdul Kalam for forcing him out of his brainchild project. In the letter to Minister of External Affairs SM Krishna he mentioned that he was upset the way the project was being handled and hence he couldn't remain associated with it any longer.^[34][35] On 19 th July 2012, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen was named the first chancellor of the proposed Nalanda University (NU).^[36]

Presidency College, Kolkata [edit]

In June 2011, he was appointed as the adviser to the Mentor Group of Presidency College by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.^[37][38]

Media and popular culture [edit]

Film [edit]

A 57-minute documentary named Amartya Sen: A Life Re-examined, directed by Suman Ghosh, details his life and work.^[39][40]

Personal life and beliefs [edit]

Sen's first wife was Nabaneeta Dev Sen, an Indian writer and scholar, with whom he had two children: Antara, a journalist and publisher, and Nandana, a Bollywood actress. Their marriage broke up shortly after they moved to London in 1971.^[3] In 1973, he married his second wife, Eva Colorni, who died from stomach cancer in 1985.^[3] They had two children, Indrani, a journalist in New York, and Kabir, who teaches music at Shady Hill School.

Sen married Emma Georgina Rothschild in 1991. Sen usually spends his winter holidays at his home in Santiniketan in West Bengal, India, where he likes to go on long bike rides, and maintains a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he and Emma spend the spring and long vacations. Asked how he relaxes, he replies: "I read a lot and like arguing with people."^[41]

Sen is a self-proclaimed atheist and holds that this can be associated with Hinduism as a political entity.^{[42][43][44][45]} In an interview for the magazine California, which is published by the University of California, Berkeley, he noted:^[46]

Academic achievements, awards, and honors [edit]

Sen has received many honorary degrees (over 90)^[47] from universities around the world, including from the following:

• 1981; He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[48]
• 1982: He was awarded honorary fellowship by the Institute of Social Studies.
• 1998: He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in welfare economics.
• 1999: He received the Bharat Ratna 'the highest civilian award in India' by the President of India.
• 1999: He was offered the honorary citizenship of Bangladesh by Sheikh Hasina in recognition of his achievements in winning the Nobel Prize, and given that his ancestral origins were in what has become the modern state of Bangladesh
• 2000: He was awarded the order of Companion of Honour, UK.
• 2000: He received Leontief Prize for his outstanding contribution to economic theory from the Global Development and Environment Institute.
• 2000: He was awarded the Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service USA;
• 2000: He was the 351st Commencement Speaker of Harvard University.
• 2002: He received the International Humanist Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
• 2003: He was conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian Chamber of Commerce^[which?].
• He is awarded the Life Time Achievement award by Bangkok-based United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP)
• 2010: He was chosen to deliver the Demos Annual Lecture 2010
• 2011: The National Humanities Medal was given to Sen
• 2012: Sash in a special category Order of the Aztec Eagle^[49]
• 2013: He was made a Commander of the French Legion of Honour^[50]

Publications [edit]

• 1960. Choice of Techniques.
• 1962. "An Aspect of Indian Agriculture," Economic Weekly, v. 14.
• 1970a. "The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal," Journal of Political Economy, 78(1), pp. 152-157.
• 1970b. Collective Choice and Social Welfare, Holden-Day; Elsevier, 1984, with minor corrections. Description.
• 1973. On Economic Inequality, New York, Norton. 1997 expanded edition. Description.
• 1980. "Equality of What?" in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, v. 1, pp. 197-220. Utah U.P. and Cambridge U.P.
• 1981. Poverty and Famines : An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Description and chapter-preview links.
• 1982. Choice, Welfare and Measurement, Harvard U.P. and Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Description and ch.-preview links. Review extract.
• 1985a, 1999. Commodities and Capabilities, Elsevier, Oxford. Deacription and TOC. Review extract.
• 1986a. Food Economics and Entitlements, Helsinki, Wider Working Paper 1, .
• 1986b, "Social Choice Theory," in Handbook of Mathematical Economics, v. 3, ch. 2, pp. 1073–1181. Abstract.
• 1987. On Ethics and Economics, Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Deacription.
• 1989. Hunger and Public Action, ed. with Jean Drèze, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Description.
• 1990. "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing". New York Review of Books.[1]
• 1992. Inequality Reexamined, Harvard U.P. and Oxford U.P. Description and chapter-preview links.
• 1992. "Equality of Capacity" (reference-shortened version of Sen, 1992, sect. 1.1-2, and 1980, sect. 3-4).
• 1993. The Quality of Life, ed. with Martha Nussbaum, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Description and chapter-preview links.
• 1995. India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, with Jean Drèze.
• 1997. Social Choice Re-Examined, ed., with Kenneth J. Arrow and Kotaro Suzumura, ed., 2 vol., Palgrave Macmillan. Description.
• 1998. "The Possibility of Social Choice," Nobel lecture.
• 1999a. Reason Before Identity (The Romanes Lecture for 1998), Oxford, Oxford University Press, . ISBN 0-19-951389-9 Description.
• 1999b. Development as Freedom, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Review in Asia Times.
• 2000. Freedom, Rationality, and Social Choice: The Arrow Lectures and Other Essays.
• 2002. Rationality and Freedom, Harvard, Belknap Press. Description and Table of Contents links and preview.
• 2002, 2011. Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, ed., with Kenneth Arrow and Kotaro Suzumura, Elsevier. Description and chapter-preview links, v. 1 & 2.
• 2005. The Argumentative Indian, London: Allen Lane. Reviews in The Guardian[2] and The Washington Post[3].
• 2005. The Three R's of Reform, Economic and Political Weekly, 40(19), pp. 1971–1974,
• 2006. Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Issues of Our Time), New York, W. W. Norton.
• 2007. "Imperial Illusions: India, Britain, and the Wrong Lessons," The New Republic, Dec. 31.
• 2008a. "justice," The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition. Abstract & TOC.
• 2008b. "social choice," The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition. Abstract & TOC.
• 2009. The Idea of Justice, Harvard University Press & Allen Lane. Description and, at bottom, chapter-preview links.
• 2010. Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up, with Joseph E. Stiglitz and Jean-Paul Fitoussi. ISBN 978-1-59558-519-6, The New Press. Desciption and preview.
• 2011. Peace and Democratic Society. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers.
• Other Publications on Google Scholar

See also [edit]

• List of economists
• The equality of autonomy, a concept of equality posed by Sen
• The Kerala model, an expression or concept invented and introduced by Sen
• The Girl Effect
• List of University of London people

References [edit]

External links [edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Amartya Sen

Wikinews has related news: Extreme drought combined with inequalities will bring starvation in East Africa.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Amartya Sen

• Amartya Sen at Harvard University
• The Possibility of Social Choice 1998 lecture at NobelPrize.org
• Profile and Papers at Research Papers in Economics/RePEc
• Amartya Sen at Econlib
• Amartya Sen collected news and commentary at Stanford University
• Amartya Sen collected news and commentary at The New York Times
• Amartya Sen collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Amartya Sen collected news and commentary at Al Jazeera English
• Amartya Sen collected news and commentary at The Times of India
• Works by or about Amartya Sen in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Amartya Sen on Charlie Rose

• Amartya Sen at the Internet Movie Database
• Works by Amartya Sen on Open Library at the Internet Archive
• Amartya Sen at the Notable Names Database
• Interview at The Commonwealth Club, November 2007

v t e Bharat Ratna laureates Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1954) C. Rajagopalachari (1954) C. V. Raman (1954) Bhagwan Das (1955) Mokshagundam Visvesvarayya (1955) Jawaharlal Nehru (1955) Govind Ballabh Pant (1957) Dhondo Keshav Karve (1958) Bidhan Chandra Roy (1961) Purushottam Das Tandon (1961) Dr. Rajendra Prasad (1962) Dr. Zakir Hussain (1963) Pandurang Vaman Kane (1963) Lal Bahadur Shastri (1966) Indira Gandhi (1971) V. V. Giri (1975) K. Kamaraj (1976) Mother Teresa (1980) Acharya Vinoba Bhave (1983) Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1987) M. G. Ramachandran (1988) B. R. Ambedkar (1990) Nelson Mandela (1990) Rajiv Gandhi (1991) Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1991) Morarji Desai (1991) Abul Kalam Azad (1992) J. R. D. Tata (1992) Satyajit Ray (1992) A. P. J. Abdul Kalam (1997) Gulzarilal Nanda (1997) Aruna Asaf Ali (1997) M. S. Subbulakshmi (1998) Chidambaram Subramaniam (1998) Jayaprakash Narayan (1998) Ravi Shankar (1999) Amartya Sen (1999) Gopinath Bordoloi (1999) Lata Mangeshkar (2001) Bismillah Khan (2001) Bhimsen Joshi (2008)