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                                                                       Amartya Sen

Amartya Kumar Sen (born 3 November 1933), is an Indian economist and a Nobel laureate. He has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, and indexes of the measure of well-being of citizens of developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his work in welfare economics.
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, Oxfordand a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he previously served as Master from 1998 to 2004.[4][5] Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages over a period of forty years.

Early life and education[edit]

Sen was born in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, to Ashutosh Sen and his wife Amita. Rabindranath Tagore is said to have given Amartya Sen his name (Bengali অমর্ত্য ômorto, lit. "immortal"). Sen's family was originally from Wari, Dhaka, in present-day Bangladesh, and both of his parents were born in Manikganj, Dhaka. His father Ashutosh Sen was a professor of chemistry at Dhaka University who moved with his family to West Bengal during the Partition of India and worked at various educational institutions, eventually becoming Chairman of the West Bengal Public Service Commission. Sen's mother Amita Sen was the daughter of Kshiti Mohan Sen, a scholar and close associate of Rabindranath Tagore who became the second Vice Chancellor of Visva-Bharati University. She was also first cousin (through her father) of Sukumar Sen, ICS the First-Chief Election Commissioner of India, Ashoke Kumar Sen, M.P. and sometime Union Law Minister, and Amiya Sen, a distinguished Barrister.
Sen began his high-school education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka in 1941. After his family moved to West Bengal following the partition of the country in 1947, he studied at Visva-Bharati University school and then at Presidency College, Kolkata, where he earned a First Class First in his B.A. (Honours) in Economics (awarded by the University of Calcutta). The same year, 1953, he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a First Class (Starred First) MA (Honours) in 1956. He was elected President of the Cambridge Majlis. While still an undergraduate student of Trinity, he met the economist Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, the principal architect of India's (later much reviled) economic policy based on the soviet model of nationalized heavy industry. 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 completed his Tripos examination and enrolled for a PhD in Economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, he returned to India on a two-year leave. Triguna Sen immediately appointed him Professor and founding Head of Department of Economics at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, something quite extraordinary because Sen had hardly even begun his PhD studies at Trinity and was 23 years of age. 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 Benares Hindu University, as his supervisor. After two full years of full-time teaching in Jadavpur, Sen returned to Cambridge in 1959 to complete his PhD.
Subsequently, Sen won a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, which gave him four years of freedom to do anything he liked. 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] 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, Cambridge was like a battlefield. There were major debates between supporters of Keynesian economics 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" post-Keynesian, Joan Robinson.[7]According to Quentin Skinner, Sen was a member of the secret society Cambridge Apostles during his time at Cambridge.[8]

Professorships[edit]

Between 1960 and 1961, Sen was a visiting Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[9] He was also a visiting Professor at UC-Berkeley, Stanford, andCornell. 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),[10] 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.[11] In January 2004, Sen returned to Harvard. He is also a contributor to the Eva Colorni Trust at the former London Guildhall University. In June 2005 he received an Honorary Doctor of Economics, politics and international institutions degree from University of Pavia.

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 theAmerican Economic Association (1994). He has also served as President of the Development Studies Association (1980–1982) and is an 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[12] and is also a board council member of the Prime Minister of India's Global Advisory Council of Overseas Indians.[13]

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 economistKenneth Arrow, who, while working at the RAND Corporation, had most famously shown 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[14]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.[15]
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 theHuman Development Report,[16] published by the United Nations Development Programme.[17] 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".[18] 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 thepolls. 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.[19]
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.[20]
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[21] 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.[22][23] 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 transcendental 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.

Personal life and beliefs[edit]

Sen has been married three times. His first wife was Nabaneeta Dev Sen, an Indian writer and scholar, by whom he had two daughters: Antara, a journalist and publisher, and Nandana, a Bollywood actress. Their marriage broke up shortly after they moved to London in 1971.[24] In 1973, Sen married his second wife, Eva Colorni, who died from stomach cancer in 1985.[24] He has two children by Eva, a daughter Indrani, who is a journalist in New York, and a son Kabir, who teaches music at Shady Hill School. In 1991, Sen married his present wife, Emma Georgina Rothschild. They have no children together.
Sen maintains a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he and Emma spend the spring and long vacations. He usually spends his winter holidays at his home in Santiniketan in West Bengal, India, where he likes to go on long bike rides. Asked how he relaxes, he replies: "I read a lot and like arguing with people."[34]
Sen is an atheist and holds that this can be associated with Hinduism as a political entity.[35][36][37][38] In an interview for the magazine California, which is published by the University of California, Berkeley, he noted:[39]
“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[edit]

Sen has received over 90 honorary degrees from universities around the world.[40]


Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen NIH.jpg
Official Portrait at the Nobel Prize
Born3 November 1933 (age 80)
Santiniketan, Bengal Presidency, British India(present-day West Bengal,India)
NationalityIndian
Institution
FieldWelfare economics,development economics, ethics
School/traditionCapability Approach
Alma materPresidency College of the University of Calcutta (B.A.),
Trinity College, Cambridge(B.A., M.A., Ph.D.)
Influences
Influenced
ContributionsHuman development theory
AwardsNobel Prize in Economics(1998)
Bharat Ratna (1999)
National Humanities Medal(2012)[3]


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