Courtney Barrett

Amartya Sen

(1) Introduction Amartya Sen has a twenty-six page curriculum vitae, twenty-two of which comprise of his publications (1). Across the publications of articles there are twenty sections of the topics that he has written on. This alone speaks for Sens well accomplished career. It seems that his academic career was predestined as he was born on the campus of an Indian University and lived on campuses for all of his life. Biography (2) Born: November 3, 1933, Santiniketan, India Between the ages of three and seventeen Sen studied Sanskrit, mathematics and physics. Educated primarily at Rabindranath Tagores School in Santiniketan where grades were frowned upon and curiosity held up with much esteem. In 1943, a large famine struck India killing about 3 million people. This event molded the intellectual slant of young Sen. In 1951, Sen went on to study economics, among various other subjects, at Presidency College in Calcutta, India. He graduated with a degree in economics with a minor in mathematics in 1953.

Courtney Barrett

2 In 1953, Sen moves on to Trinity College at Cambridge. While there he learns from both strict Keynesians and neo-classical thinkers. He receives a second B.A. in 1955 and his PhD in 1959. From 1956 to 1958, at the age of twenty-two, Sen is the chair of Economics at Jadavpur University. After three years in Calcutta, Sen is given permission from Trinity College to study whatever he wants for four years. He chooses philosophy and begins to write extensively on philosophical subjects. From 1960 to 1961, Sen visits M.I.T. and studies with Samuelson, Solow, and Modigliani. From 1963 to 1971, Sen teaches for the Delhi School of Economics From 1964 to 1965, Sen is a visiting professor for California at Berkeley, where he takes up begins to study and teach social choice theory. In 1970, Sen publishes Collective Choice and Social Welfare. In 1971, Sen takes a position with the London School of Economics. A year after divorcing his first wife, Nabaneeta, Sen marries Eva Colorni in 1973. In 1977, Sen takes a position at Oxford University. In 1981, Sen publishes Poverty and Famines. In 1985, Eva dies of stomach cancer. In order to keep his children from missing their mother too much he takes them to America. With his children he settles on Harvard University. This same year he publishes Commodities and Capabilities In 1988, Sen works with Martha Nussbaum on a collection essays which later become the book Quality of Life. In 1998, Sen accepts a position at the London School of Economics. This same year he is awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work in Welfare Economics. In 2004, Sen returned to Harvard where he currently holds a professor emeritus position. (3)

Selected Works (3)

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Sen, Amartya, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, San Francisco, Holden-Day, 1970 Sen, Amartya, On Economic Inequality, New York, Norton, 1973 Sen, Amartya, Poverty and Famines : An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982 Sen, Amartya, Choice, Welfare and Measurement, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982 Sen, Amartya, Food Economics and Entitlements, Helsinki, Wider Working Paper 1, 1986 Sen, Amartya, On Ethics and Economics, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987 Drze, Jean and Sen, Amartya, Hunger and Public Action. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1989. Sen, Amartya, More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing. New York Review of Books, 1990. Sen, Amartya, Inequality Reexamined, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992 Nussbaum, Martha, and Sen, Amartya. The Quality of Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993 Sen, Amartya, Reason Before Identity (The Romanes Lecture for 1998), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999. ISBN 0199513899 Sen, Amartya, Development as Freedom, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999 Review Sen, Amartya, Rationality and Freedom, Harvard, Harvard Belknap Press, 2002 Sen, Amartya, The Argumentative Indian, London: Allen Lane, 2005. Sen, Amartya, Identity and Violence. The Illusion of Destiny New York W&W Norton.

Economic Contributions Due to the uniqueness of Amartya Sens education (the heavy mathematics gained from Presidency College, the abstract economics gained from Cambridge, as well as the four years of philosophical immersion) he has been able to merge these three trains of thought into a vast array of ideas. Sen has made extensive contributions to the field of Social Choice theory. One of his major contributions was the use of Kenneth Arrows Impossibility Theory to prove that the majority and two-thirds voting requirements contradict the principles of democracy (3). Sen also argues that the actions of the impoverished do not line up with the assumption of self-interest; using game theory he explains why these actions benefit these groups more than the actions taken under the hedonist assumption (4). Sen argued that famine cannot be solely blamed on the food supply of the area that experiences the famine. Problems with the distribution of the food should also bear some of the blame. He also suggests that famines do not occur in democratic societies that work because the leaders of these societies must answer to the voting populace. This idea was put forth in his Poverty and Famines book and it was the idea that won him the Nobel Prize (3).

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4 Sen has made significant contributions to the field of welfare economics. He has created a measurement process that calculates the level of poverty and which yields better suggesting for battling that poverty. Sen believes that the ranking of economic policies should be based on the welfare, or well-being, of the community as a whole and not just the privileged class (3). Sen also merges his concepts of welfare economics with his ideas on social choice to make assertions about development economics. In this argument he proposes that there cannot be any real social choice if the citizens within a society do not have the capabilities to make a choice (3).

References 1. http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/sen/cv.pdf 2. http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/1998/sen-autobio.html 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen 4. http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/sen.htm