Amartya Sen

Nobel Prize Winner in Economic Sciences

Amartya Sen
English

Prior to 1999, the only two India-born Indians to be awarded the Nobel Prize were RabindranathTagore (in 1913) and CV Raman (in 1930). In October 1998 the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences selected Amartya Sen for the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The sixth Indian to be awarded the Nobel Prize was honoured for a life-time’s work to invest the dismal science with concerns that are far from the mundane. e was also awarded the inaugural Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize in recognition of his work on welfare economics in February 2015 during a reception at the Royal Academy in the UK

Social choice, poverty index, studies of famine – Amartya Sen’s interests are abstruse in comparison with the market-orientated research of the past few laureates.  These are undoubtedly lively areas of research, but light years away from Sen’s world of measuring poverty and inequality by the most rigorous scales and probing the reasons of the individual’s economic failure.

Graduating in 1953, Amartya Sen was the Lamont Professor of both economics and philosophy at Harvard University for over a decade; he had secured his place in the high table of “liberal” America. Amartya Sen 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.

In 1996, Amartya Sen became the first non-American president of the American Economic Association and his reputation was no less on the other side of the Atlantic. Throughout the 1970’s and most of the 1980’s he was in the best faculties, including the London School of Economics and Oxford.

In January 98, Amartya Sen returned to his alma mater to become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, a coveted post never before held by a non-white, or even a non-Brit.  It made Sen a truly international celebrity.

 

Collective Choice and Social Welfare


Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation

Inequality Re-examined

Development and Freedom

The Idea of Justice

Social justice: an ideal, forever beyond our grasp; or one of many practical possibilities? More than a matter of intellectual discourse, the idea of justice plays a real role in how—and how well—people live. And in this book the distinguished scholar Amartya Sen offers a powerful critique of the theory of social justice that, in its grip on social and political thinking, has long left practical realities far behind.

The transcendental theory of justice, the subject of Sen’s analysis, flourished in the Enlightenment and has proponents among some of the most distinguished philosophers of our day; it is concerned with identifying perfectly just social arrangements, defining the nature of the perfectly just society. The approach Sen favors, on the other hand, focuses on the comparative judgments of what is “more” or “less” just, and on the comparative merits of the different societies that actually emerge from certain institutions and social interactions.

At the heart of Sen’s argument is a respect for reasoned differences in our understanding of what a “just society” really is. People of different persuasions—for example, utilitarians, economic egalitarians, labor right theorists, no­-nonsense libertarians—might each reasonably see a clear and straightforward resolution to questions of justice; and yet, these clear and straightforward resolutions would be completely different. In light of this, Sen argues for a comparative perspective on justice that can guide us in the choice between alternatives that we inevitably face.

The Idea of Justice

Development as Freedom

By the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Economics, an essential and paradigm-altering framework for understanding economic development--for both rich and poor--in the twenty-first century.

Freedom, Sen argues, is both the end and most efficient means of sustaining economic life and the key to securing the general welfare of the world's entire population. Releasing the idea of individual freedom from association with any particular historical, intellectual, political, or religious tradition, Sen clearly demonstrates its current applicability and possibilities. In the new global economy, where, despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers--perhaps even the majority of people--he concludes, it is still possible to practically and optimistically restain a sense of social accountability. Development as Freedom is essential reading.

Development as Freedom

Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny

In this sweeping philosophical work, Amartya Sen proposes that the murderous violence that has riven our society is driven as much by confusion as by inescapable hatred. Challenging the reductionist division of people by race, religion, and class, Sen presents an inspiring vision of a world that can be made to move toward peace as firmly as it has spiraled in recent years toward brutality and war.

Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny