Economist, born in Bengal, E India. He studied at Calcutta and Cambridge universities, and became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (195763). He held professorial posts at New Delhi University (196371), the London School of Economics (19717), and Oxford (197788), then moved to Harvard. In 1988 he was appointed Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, UK. Noted for his work on the nature of poverty, famine, and social choice, he significantly advanced the social-choice theory by arguing, in his influential monograph, Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), that inequality ought to be a fundamental consideration in collective action. To this end, he developed several indices with which to measure the welfare of individuals in society, which have subsequently been used by other economists not only to compare the welfare of individuals across society, but also of countries around the world. In his 1981 book, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, he challenged the prevailing wisdom that declining food supply is the most important cause of famine. He concluded that there are social and economic factors at work which limit the economic opportunities of certain groups and so cause starvation. In 2005 appeared The Argumentative Indian, a collection of historical and philosophical essays. He was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics for his contributions to welfare economics.
Amartya Kumar Sen CH (Hon) (Bengali: অমর্ত্য কুমার সেন Ômorto Kumar Shen) (born 3 November 1933 in Santiniketan, India), is an economist and a winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences ("Nobel Prize for Economics") in 1998, for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare economics, the underlying mechanisms of poverty, and political liberalism.
From 1998 to 2004 he was Master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, becoming the first Asian academic to head an Oxbridge college. Amartya Sen is interested in the debate over globalization.
Among his many contributions to development economics, Sen has produced work on gender inequality, exemplified by his general use of female pronouns when referring to an abstract person. Amartya Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages.
Education and career
Sen was born in Santiniketan, West Bengal, the University town established by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, another Indian Nobel Prize winner. 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. Sen studied in India at the school system of Visva-Bharati University, Presidency College, Kolkata and at the Delhi School of Economics before moving to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a First Class BA in 1956 and then a Ph.D.
He has taught economics at University of Calcutta, Jadavpur University, Delhi, Oxford (where he was 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.
Important works
Sen's seminal papers in the late sixties and early seventies helped develop the theory of social choice, which first came to prominence in the work by the American economist Kenneth Arrow, who, while working in the fifties at the RAND Corporation, famously proved that all voting rules, be they majority voting 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, 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. This staggering loss of life was unnecessary, Sen later concluded. In his book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), Sen revealed that in many cases of famine, food supplies were not significantly reduced. Thus, Sen points to a number of social and economic factors, such as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food-distribution systems.
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." To Sen, this concept is fairly empty.
He wrote a controversial article in the New York Review of Books entitled "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing", analyzing the mortality impact of unequal rights between the genders in the developing world, particularly Asia.
Sen was a ground-breaker among late twentieth-century economists in his insistence on asking questions of value, long removed from "serious" economic consideration.
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." Sen devised methods of measuring poverty that yielded useful information for improving economic conditions for the poor. 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. 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.
Family
Sen's father was Ashutosh Sen and mother Amita Sen who were born at Manikganj, Dhaka. Sen's first wife was Nabaneeta Dev Sen, a much loved Indian writer and scholar, with whom he had two children: Antara and Nandana.
Sen brought up his youngest children on his own. His eldest daughter Antara Dev Sen is a notable Indian journalist who, along with her husband Pratik Kanjilal, publishes "The Little Magazine". Nandana Sen is a noted Bollywood actress.
Sen usually spends winter holidays at his home in 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.
Awards
He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work in welfare economics in 1998 He received the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India 1999.Quotes
The absurdity of public-choice theory is captured by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in the following little scenario: "Can you direct me to the railway station?" Reducing corruption in developing countries by opening markets would be reason enough to liberalize, even if no other economic benefits materialized. --Globalisation Institute and used without explicit quotation at Handbook of Economic Freedom No substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. --Democracy as a Universal Value, Journal of Democracy 10.3 (1999) 3-17Works
Recent works:
Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Issues of Our Time), W. Norton, 2006 The Argumentative Indian, 2005 Rationality and Freedom, 2004 Inequality Reexamined, 2004 Development As Freedom, 2000 Freedom, Rationality, and Social Choice: The Arrow Lectures and Other essays, 2000 Reason Before Identity, 1999Other works:
Choice of Techniques, 1960; Commodities and Capabilities, 1999List of main publications
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. Drèze, Jean and Sen, Amartya, Hunger and Public Action. Sen, Amartya, More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing. Sen, Amartya, Inequality Reexamined, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992. Nussbaum, Martha, and Sen, Amartya. 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 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.Review 1 Review 2 Other Publications on Google Scholar
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