Amartya Kumar Sen CH (Hon) (
Bengali : অমর্ত্য কুমার সেন,
Ômorto Kumar Shen) (born 3 November 1933), is an Indian
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics-winning economist, and Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at
Harvard University. He is also a fellow of
Trinity College,
Cambridge . He is known "for his contributions to
welfare economics" for his work on
famine,
human development theory,
welfare economics, the underlying mechanisms of
poverty,
gender inequality, and political
liberalism. He is a distinguished economist-philosopher who won the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in the year 1998 for his work on
welfare economics.
From 1998 to 2004 he was Master of
Trinity College at
Cambridge University, becoming the first Indian academic to head an
Oxbridge college. He is also a former honorary president of
Oxfam. Amartya Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. As of 2009 he has received over 80
honorary doctorates.
Biography
Personal life
Sen hails from a distinguished landed family from
East Bengal (present-day
Bangladesh). His maternal grandfather
Kshitimohan Sen was a renowned scholar of medieval Indian literature, an authority on the philosophy of
Hinduism. He was a close associate of
Rabindranath Tagore in
Santiniketan. He became the second
Vice Chancellor of
Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. His maternal grandfather was an uncle of the first Chief Election Commissioner of India,
Sukumar Sen and the Law Minister of India,
Ashoke Kumar Sen. Sen's father was Ashutosh Sen and his mother was Amita Sen, who were born at
Manikganj,
Dhaka. His father taught chemistry at
Dhaka University (now in
Bangladesh) and later became Chairman of the
West Bengal Public Services Commission. Sen's first wife was
Nabaneeta Dev Sen, a well known Indian writer and scholar, with whom he had two children:
Antara and
Nandana. 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 and Kabir. His present wife
Emma Georgina Rothschild, is an economic historian, an expert on
Adam Smith and Fellow of
King's College, Cambridge.
Sen brought up his youngest children on his own. Indrani is a journalist in
New York, and Kabir teaches music at
Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has produced 3 of his own hip-hop Albums. His eldest daughter
Antara Dev Sen is an Indian journalist who, along with her husband Pratik Kanjilal, publishes .
Nandana Sen is a
Bollywood actor.
Sen usually spends winter holidays at his home in
Shantiniketan 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."
Education and career
Sen was born in
Santiniketan,
West Bengal, the University town established by the poet
Rabindranath 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 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 before moving to
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a First Class (Congratulatory First)
BA (Honours) in
1956 and then a Ph.D. in
1959. 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 totally brilliant but vigorously intolerant
Joan Robinson.
While an undergraduate student of Trinity College he met
Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis in Cambridge. Mahalanobis, after returning to
Calcutta, recommended Sen to
Triguna Sen, then the
Education Minister of
West Bengal. When Sen arrived in India on a two year leave from Cambridge during his second year of doctoral research,Triguna Sen appointed him as
Professor and
Head of Department of Economics at
Jadavpur University,
Calcutta, his very first appointment, at the age of 23. Between
1960–
1961, he taught at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a visiting professor.
During his tenure at
Jadavpur University, he had the good fortune of having the great economic methodologist,
A. K. Dasgupta, who was then teaching in
Benares, as his supervisor. 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.”
He has taught
economics at
Calcutta,
Jadavpur University,
Delhi School of Economics(where he completed his
magnum opus Collective Choice and Social Welfare in 1970),
Oxford (where he was first a Professor of Economics at
Nuffield College and then the Drummond Professor of Political Economy and a Fellow of
All Souls College),
London School of Economics,
Harvard and was Master of
Trinity College,
Cambridge, between 1998 and 2004. 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.
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.
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.
Although Sen is a self-proclaimed
atheist, he claims that this can be associated with
Hinduism as a political entity.
Sen cites
Peter Bauer as a major influence on his thinking.
Honours and awards
- He received the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India in 1999.
- In 1999 he received honorary citizenship of Bangladesh from Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in recognition of his achievements in winning the Nobel Prize, and given that his family origins were in what has become the modern state of Bangladesh
- Eisenhower Medal, for Leadership and Service USA, 2000;
Publications
- Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Issues of Our Time), New York, W. W. Norton, 2006.
- Rationality and Freedom, 2004.
- Freedom, Rationality, and Social Choice: The Arrow Lectures and Other essays, 2000.
- Reason Before Identity, 1999.
- Choice of Techniques, 1960.
- Collective Choice and Social Welfare, 1970, Holden-Day, 1984, Elsevier.
- On Economic Inequality, 1973.
- Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, 1981.
- Hunger and Public Action, jointly edited with Jean Drèze, 1989
- India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, with Jean Drèze, 1995.
- Commodities and Capabilities, 1999.
- Sen, Amartya, On Economic Inequality, New York, Norton, 1973. (Expanded edition with a substantial annexe by James E. Foster and A. Sen, 1997).
- 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.
- Drèze, 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 0-19-951389-9
- Sen, Amartya, Development as Freedom, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999. ()
- Sen, Amartya, Rationality and Freedom, Harvard, Harvard Belknap Press, 2002.
- Sen, Amartya, The Argumentative Indian, London: Allen Lane, 2005. (, )
- Sen, Amartya, An Aspect of Indian Agriculture, Economic Weekly, Vol. 14, 1962.
