Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen
Official Portrait at the Nobel Prize
Born	(1933-11-03) 3 November 1933 West Bengal, India
Nationality	Indian
Citizenship	India
Academic career
Field	Welfare economics, ethics
Institution	Jadavpur University University of Cambridge Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cornell University University of Oxford Delhi School of Economics London School of Economics University of California, Berkeley Stanford University
School or tradition	Welfare economics , Development economics , Public Health , Gender Studies , Political Philosophy , Utilitarianism
Alma mater	Presidency College University of Cambridge
Influences	John Rawls Peter Bauer John Stuart Mill Kenneth Arrow Piero Sraffa
Contributions	Human development theory
Awards	Bharat Ratna 1999 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 1998

Amartya Sen, CH (Bengali: অমর্ত্য সেন, Ômorto 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 problems of society’s poorest members. Sen was 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.

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. He is the first Indian and indeed the first Asian academic to head an Oxbridge college.

Amartya 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" and in 2010 included him in their "100 most influential persons in the world". New Statesman listed him in their 2010 edition of 'World's 50 Most Influential People Who Matter'.

Early life and education

Sen was born to a Bengali Hindu family in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. His ancestral home was in Wari, Dhaka, then part of India; now Bangladesh which became a new country in 1971 following its separation from Pakistan which, in turn, was formed as a result of the partition of British India in 1947. Rabindranath Tagore is said to have given Amartya Sen his name ("Amartya" meaning "immortal"). Sen hails from a distinguished family: his maternal grandfather 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, the first Chief Election Commissioner of India and his brother, Ashoke Kumar Sen, a former Union Cabinet Minister for Law and Justice 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 Service 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 the partition of 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.”

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. During his time at Cambridge, and according to Quentin Skinner, Sen was a member of the secret society "Cambridge Apostles".

Between 1960–1961, he taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Visiting Professor. He has also been a Visiting Professor at 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), 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. In January 2004 Sen returned to Harvard. He is also a contributor to the Eva Colorni Trust at the former London Guildhall University.

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, 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 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 also demonstrated 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. 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.

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" 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.

The Spinelli Group

On 15 September 2010, Sen supported the new initiative Spinelli Group in the European Parliament, which was founded to reinvigorate the strive for federalisation of the European Union (EU). Other prominent supporters are: Jacques Delors, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Guy Verhofstadt, Andrew Duff, Elmar Brok.

India: University mentor for growth and revival

Nalanda International University Project

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.

Presidency College, Kolkata

In June 2011, he was appointed as the Chief Mentor of Presidency College by West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

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 was Jewish, 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 agnostic and holds that this can be associated with Hinduism as a political entity. In an interview for the magazine California, which is published by the University of California, Berkeley, he noted:

In some ways people had got used to the idea that India was spiritual and religion-oriented. That gave a leg up to the religious interpretation of India, despite the fact that Sanskrit had a larger atheistic literature than what exists in any other classical language. Madhava Acharya, the remarkable 14th century philosopher, wrote this rather great book called Sarvadarshansamgraha, which discussed all the religious schools of thought within the Hindu structure. The first chapter is "Atheism" – a very strong presentation of the argument in favor of atheism and materialism.

Academic achievements, awards and honors

Amartya has received many honorary degrees (over 90) from universities around the world, including from the following:

Harvard University Yale University Columbia University University of Michigan Williams College Georgetown University Santa Clara University Tulane University New School for Social Research Oberlin College Syracuse University University of Connecticut University of Massachusetts Wesleyan University Bard College Clark University Mount Holyoke College Simmons College

University of Delhi University of Mumbai University of Calcutta Jawaharlal Nehru University University of Kerala Allahabad University Visva-Bharati University Jadavpur University University of North Bengal Chhatrapati Shahu Ji Maharaj University Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya University of Kalyani Rabindra Bharati University Assam Agricultural University Assam University

University of Oxford University of Edinburgh McGill University Queen's University University of Saskatchewan University of Essex University of Bath University of Caen University of Bologna Université catholique de Louvain London Guildhall University Athens University of Economics and Business University of Valencia University of Zurich

University of Tokyo University of Antwerp University of Kiel University of Padua University of Leicester University of Valencia University of Zurich Stockholm University University of East Anglia University of Nottingham University of the Mediterranean Heriot-Watt University Chinese University of Hong Kong

University of Florence University of London Technical University of Lisbon Jaume I University Durham University University of Southampton Pierre Mendès-France University Ritsumeikan University University of Sussex University of York University of Toronto University of British Columbia University of Natal Rhodes University Koç University York University

University of Göttingen University of Cape Town University of the Witwatersrand Sorbonne University College Dublin University of Osnabrück University of Exeter University of Dhaka University of Birmingham Rovira i Virgili University University of Pavia Complutense University of Madrid University of Coimbra University of British Columbia

• 1981; He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• 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.
• 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

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. ([1])
• 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

External links

• Template:Worldcat id
• Comprehensive list of articles by Sen
• Nobel Prize Biography
• Amartya Sen: The Possibility of Social Choice (Nobel lecture)
• Profile in The Guardian
• Profile at The International Institute of Social Studies (ISS)

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

Video

• Lecture at Duke University "The Uses and Abuses of Adam Smith" March 2010