Everything about Amartya Sen totally explained
Amartya Kumar Sen CH (Hon) (
Ômorto Kumar Shen)
(born
3 November 1933), is an
Indian
economist,
philosopher, and a winner of the
Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (
Nobel Prize for Economics) in 1998, "for his contributions to welfare economics" 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. He has given lectures to senior executives of the
World Bank and is a former honorary president of
Oxfam.
Among his many contributions to
development economics, Sen has produced work on
gender inequality. He is currently the Lamont University Professor at
Harvard University. Amartya Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security.
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 school system of
Visva-Bharati University and
Presidency College, Kolkata before moving to
Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a First Class
BA in 1956 and then a
Ph.D. in 1959. Between 1960-1961, He taught at
MIT as a visiting professor
(External Link
). He was also allowed four years to immerse himself in philosophical issues during his stay at Trinity College.
He has taught
economics at
University of Calcutta,
Jadavpur University,
Delhi,
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.
Important works
Sen's 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 (
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 didn't 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 wasn't affected. However, they still starved because they were not positively free to do anything, they didn't 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 can't 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", 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.
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's 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 don't 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.
Often Sen is criticized as an anti-market proponent by some economists. It is magnified by his silence on globalization issues in the late nineties and on privatization policies in India. Sen, however, denied the claim that he supports anti-globalization views. Srinavasan, an economics professor at Yale and a long time colleague says “many of us were trained in the fifties to believe that states should be active in planning the economy. Sen didn't give up that idea until later than some others.” Sen cites
Peter Bauer as a major influence on his thinking.
Family
Sen's maternal grandfather
Kshitimohan Sen was a renowned scholar of medieval Indian literature, an authority on the philosophy of
Hinduism and a close associate of
Rabindranath Tagore in Santiniketan. Sen's father was Ashutosh Sen and mother Amita Sen who were born at
Manikganj,
Dhaka. His father taught chemistry at
Dhaka University (now in
Bangladesh). Sen's first wife was
Nabaneeta Dev Sen, a much loved Indian writer and scholar, with whom he'd 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. However, she died from
stomach cancer quite suddenly in 1985. They had two children, Indrani and Kabir. His present wife is The Hon.
Emma Georgina Rothschild, an economic historian, and 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, and has produced 3 of his own Hip-Hop Albums. 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. Asked how he relaxes, he replies: "I read a lot and like arguing with people."
Criticism
Amartya Sen has been criticized for his writings outside of economics, especially for his views on the
history of Islam and
Jihad, by
Fouad Ajami in
The Washington Post.
Economist
Peter Bowbrick has accused Sen of misrepresenting historical data and being wrong on his theory of famines. In fact Bowbrick argues that Sen's views coincide with that of the Bengal government at the time of the Bengal famine and the policies Sen advocates failed to relieve the famine. Bowbrick accused Sen's theory of being the cause of famines.
Historian Mark Tauger disagrees with Sen that food availability wasn't a problem in 1940s Bengal and argues that the famine was mainly the result of a natural disaster.
Awards
He received the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India 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
He received the 2000 Leontief Prize for his outstanding contribution to economic theory from the Global Development and Environment Institute.
In 2002 he received the International Humanist Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
Eisenhower Medal, for Leadership and Service USA, 2000;
Companion of Honour, UK, 2000.
In 2003, he was conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian Chamber of Commerce.
Life Time Achievement award by Bangkok-based United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP)
Quotes
When referring to sanctions against Myanmar: they "are more likely to be effective there than almost anywhere else I can imagine" — provided other countries join in.
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) 3-17
Works
Recent works:
Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Issues of Our Time), W. W. Norton, 2006
The Argumentative Indian, 2005
Rationality and Freedom, 2004
Inequality Reexamined, 2004
Development as Freedom, 1999
Freedom, Rationality, and Social Choice: The Arrow Lectures and Other essays, 2000
Reason Before Identity, 1999
Other works:
Choice of Techniques, 1960;
Collective Choice and Social Welfare, 1970;
On Economic Inequality, 1973;
Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, 1981;
Hunger and Public Action, jointly edited with Jean Dreze, 1989;
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, with Jean Dreze, 1995;
Commodities and Capabilities, 1999
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. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1989.
Sen, Amartya, More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing. New York Review of Books, 1990. ((External Link))
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 (Review by the Asia Times)
Sen, Amartya, Rationality and Freedom, arvard, Harvard Belknap Press, 2002
Sen, Amartya, The Argumentative Indian, London: Allen Lane, 2005. (Review by the Guardian, Review by the Washington Post)
Sen, Amartya, Identity and Violence.The Illusion of Destiny New York W&W Norton.
Other Publications on Google ScholarFurther Information
Get more info on 'Amartya Sen'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://amartya_sen.totallyexplained.com">Amartya Sen Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
