Amartya Sen

Amartya Kumar Sen, CH (Bengali:

অমর্ত ্য কুমার সেন, Ômorto Kumar
Shen; born 3 November 1933) is an
Indian economist who was awarded
the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic
Sciences for his contributions to
welfare economics and social choice
theory and for his interest in the
Official Portrait at the Nobel Prize problems of society’s poorest
members. Sen was best known for
3 November 1933 (age 76) his work on the causes of famine,
Birth which led to the development of
Santiniketan, West Bengal, India
practical solutions for preventing or
limiting the effects of real or
Nationality Indian perceived shortages of food. He is
currently the Thomas W. Lamont
University Professor and Professor of
University of Cambridge
Economics and Philosophy at
Harvard University Harvard University. He is also a
Massachusetts Institute of Technology senior fellow at the Harvard Society
of Fellows and a Fellow of Trinity
Cornell University
Institution College, Cambridge, where he
University of Oxford previously served as Master from the
Delhi School of Economics years 1998 to 2004. He is the first
London School of Economics
Asian and the first Indian academic
to head an Oxbridge college.
Stanford University
Amartya Sen's books have been
Field Welfare economics, ethics translated into more than thirty
languages. He is a trustee of
Economists for Peace and Security.
St Gregory's School In 2006, Time magazine listed him
Patha Bhavana under "60 years of Asian Heroes”
Alma mater and in 2010 included him in their
Presidency College, Kolkata
"100 most influential persons in the
University of Cambridge world

John Rawls
Peter Bauer Early life and
Influences
John Stuart Mill education
Kenneth Arrow
Sen was born in Santiniketan, West
Bengal, the university town
Opposed Bernard Williams
established by the poet Rabindranath

Mahbub ul Haq
Influenced Kaushik Basu
Jean Dreze
Tagore, another Indian Nobel Prize winner. His ancestral home was in Wari, Dhaka in
modern-day Bangladesh. Rabindranath Tagore is said to have given Amartya Sen his name
("Amartya" meaning "immortal"). Sen hails from a distinguished family: his maternal
grandfather Kshitimohan 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 the first Chief Election Commissioner of India, Sukumar Sen and his brother,
Ashoke Kumar Sen, a former Law Minister of India. Sen's father Ashutosh Sen and mother
Amita Sen were born at Manikganj, Dhaka. His father was a Professor of Chemistry at Dhaka
University and became Chairman of the West Bengal Public Services Commission.

Sen began his high-school education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka in 1941, in modern-day
Bangladesh. His family migrated to India following partition in 1947. Sen studied in India at
the Visva-Bharati University school and Presidency College, Kolkata, where he earned a First
Class First in his B.A. (Honours) in Economics 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, where he also earned a First Class (Starred First) BA (Honours) in 1956. At
Cambridge he was elected as the President of the Cambridge Majlis in 1956. While still an
undergraduate student of Trinity College, he met Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis.
Mahalanobis, after returning to Calcutta, recommended Sen to Triguna Sen, the then
Education Minister of West Bengal. After Sen had enrolled for a Ph.D. in Economics to be
completed at Trinity College, Cambridge, he arrived in 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. During his tenure at Jadavpur University, he had the good fortune of having economic
methodologist, A. K. Dasgupta, who was then teaching in Benares, as his supervisor. Sen
returned to Cambridge after two years of full time teaching 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 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.”[6]

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 Joan
Robinson.[7][8] During his time at Cambridge, and according to Quentin Skinner, Sen was a
member of the secret society "The Apostles".[9]
Between 1960–1961, he taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Visiting
Professor.[10]. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Stanford, Berkeley, 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)[11], 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.[12] In
January 2004 Sen returned to Harvard. He is also a contributor to the Eva Colorni Trust at the
former London Guildhall University.

In May 2007, he was appointed as chairman of Nalanda Mentor Group to steer the execution
of Nalanda University Project, which seeks to revive the ancient seat of learning at Nalanda,
Bihar, India into an international university.

[edit] Research
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, famously proved 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 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 demonstrated that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but
from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. 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, published by the United Nations Development Programme. 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." 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.

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.[13]

Sen was seen as a ground-breaker among late twentieth-century economists for his insistence
on discussing issues seen as marginal by most economists. He mounted one of the few major
challenges to the economic model that posited self-interest as the prime motivating factor of
human activity. While his line of thinking remains peripheral, there is no question that his
work helped to re-prioritize a significant sector of economists and development workers,
even the policies of the United Nations.

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 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.

Perceptions: In comparisons
Amartya has been called "the Conscience and the Mother Teresa of Economics"[14] 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[15].

Personal life and Beliefs

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. In 1973, he married his
second wife, Eva Colorni, who died from stomach cancer quite suddenly in 1985. They had
two children, Indrani, a journalist in New York, and Kabir, who teaches music at Shady Hill
School.

His present wife, Emma Georgina Rothschild, is an economic historian, an expert on Adam
Smith and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. 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."

Sen is a self-proclaimed atheist, he claims that this can be associated with Hinduism as a
political entity.

Academic achievements, awards and honors

Amartya has received many honorary degrees (over 80) from universities around the world,
all including from the following:

 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.
 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
 2010: He was listed in 'World's 50 Most Influential People Who Matter' 2010 edition
of New Statesman.

[edit] Publications
 Choice of Techniques, 1960.
 Sen, Amartya, An Aspect of Indian Agriculture, Economic Weekly, Vol. 14, 1962.
 Collective Choice and Social Welfare, 1970, Holden-Day, 1984, Elsevier.
Description.
 Sen, Amartya, On Economic Inequality, New York, Norton, 1973. (Expanded edition
with a substantial annexe by James E. Foster and A. Sen, 1997).
 On Economic Inequality, 1973.
 Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, 1981a.
 Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famines : An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation,
Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982a.
 Sen, Amartya K., Choice, Welfare and Measurement, Oxford, Basil Blackwell,
1982b. Description and scroll to chapter-preview links.
 Sen, Amartya, Food Economics and Entitlements, Helsinki, Wider Working Paper 1,
1986.
 Sen, Amartya, On Ethics and Economics, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987. Scroll to
chapter-preview links.

 Drèze, Jean and Sen, Amartya, Hunger and Public Action. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
1989.
 Hunger and Public Action, jointly edited with Jean Drèze, 1989
 Sen, Amartya, "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing". New York Review of
Books, 1990. ([2])
 Sen, Amartya, Inequality Reexamined, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992.
 Nussbaum, Martha, and Sen, Amartya. The Quality of Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1993. Preview.
 India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, with Jean Drèze, 1995.
 Sen, Amartya, Reason Before Identity (The Romanes Lecture for 1998), Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-19-951389-9
 Commodities and Capabilities, 1999.
 Sen, Amartya, Development as Freedom, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999.
(Review by the Asia Times)
  Development as Freedom, 1999.
 Reason Before Identity, 1999.
 Freedom, Rationality, and Social Choice: The Arrow Lectures and Other essays,
2000.
 Sen, Amartya, Rationality and Freedom, Harvard, Harvard Belknap Press, 2002.
 Rationality and Freedom, 2004.
 Inequality Reexamined, 2004.
 The Argumentative Indian, 2005.
 Sen, Amartya, The Argumentative Indian, London: Allen Lane, 2005. (Review by the
Guardian, Review by the Washington Post)
 Sen, Amartya, The Three R's of Reform, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 40(19):
pp. 1971–1974, 2005.
 Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Issues of Our Time), New York, W.
W. Norton, 2006.
 Imperial Illusions: India, Britain, and the wrong lessons. By Amartya Sen. Response
by Niall Ferguson.
 Equality of Capacity by Amartya Sen
 The Idea of Justice Harvard University Press & London: Allen Lane,2009.
Description and scroll to chapter-preview links.
 Other Publications on Google Scholar

[edit] References
1. ^ http://moia.gov.in/writereaddata/pdf/PM_Global_Council_Notification_2.1.09.pdf
2. ^ http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=321
3. ^ http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=172
4. ^ "60 Years of Asian Heroes: Amartya Sen". Time. 13 November 2006.
http://www.time.com/time/asia/2006/heroes/at_sen.html.
5. ^ "The 2010 Time 100". Time. 29 April 2010.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1984685_1984745_1985494,00.
html.
6. ^ http://www.beijingforum.org/en/ShowArticle.asp?ArticleID=452
7. ^ http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1998/sen-autobio.html
8. ^ [1]
9. ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVdAhzqFLps
10. ^ http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1998/sen-autobio.html.
11. ^ http://econdse.org/
12. ^ The Master of Trinity
13. ^ http://papers.nber.org/papers/w13971
14. ^ COMMENTARY: THE MOTHER TERESA OF ECONOMICS BusinessWeek: October
26, 1998
15. ^ http://www.edbookfest.co.uk/the-festival/whats-on/amartya-sen An audience with Amartya
Sen at the 2010 Edinburgh International Book Festival
16. ^ Reported lecture http://www.facinghistory.org/node/246
17. ^ Self-proclaimed http://www.chowk.com/show_article.cgi?aid=00005503&channel=gulberg
18. ^ World Bank http://info.worldbank.org/etools/BSPAN/PresentationView.asp?
EID=354&PID=688
19. ^ Press meeting http://www.rediff.com/business/1998/dec/28sen.htm
 20. ^ Harvard University. "Curriculum Vitae of Professor Sen".
http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/sen/cv/CV-Final.June2008.pdf. Retrieved 2010-
12-07.
21. ^ "Amartya Sen - 50 People Who Matter 2010". New Statesman.
http://www.newstatesman.com/global-issues/2010/09/conscience-teacher-amartya-sen.
Retrieved 28 September 2010.

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Amartya Sen

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Amartya Sen

 Comprehensive list of articles by Sen

 Nobel Prize Biography
 Amartya Sen: The Possibility of Social Choice (Nobel lecture)
 Profile in The Guardian

Audio

 Sen interviewed about his book The Idea of Justice He discusses how prevailing
theories of justice have led us astray. April 2010.
 Amartya Sen discusses his book "Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny", on
Thoughtcast
 Interview on IT Conversations
 Immigration and Development, with Amartya Sen, on Open Source (radio show)
 Amartya Sen in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion show The Forum