Amartya Sen
Amartya Kumar Sen is an esteemed Indian philosopher and economist, renowned for his groundbreaking contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory. Born in Santiniketan, India, and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Sen's early experiences with communal violence and famine profoundly shaped his academic pursuits. He holds a Nobel Prize in Economics, awarded in 1998, for his significant work on the causes of famine and poverty, which emphasized that food scarcity is not the sole reason for famine; rather, socio-economic factors play a critical role.
Sen's educational journey took him from Calcutta to the University of Cambridge, where he developed his passion for economics. His influential works, such as "Poverty and Famines," challenge conventional views and advocate for understanding individual capabilities and opportunities in assessing welfare and poverty. Throughout his career, Sen has taught at prestigious institutions worldwide, including Harvard and Oxford, and has written extensively on topics such as justice and development. His approach integrates ethical considerations into economic analysis, making him a pivotal figure in contemporary economic thought. Sen’s personal life reflects his diverse background, having been married three times and parenting four children.
Subject Terms
Amartya Sen
Nobel Prize recipient, economist, and philosopher
- Born: November 3, 1933
- Birthplace: Santiniketan, West Bengal (India)
Education: PhD, University of Cambridge
Significance: Won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998 for his contribution to the field of welfare economics
Background
Amartya Kumar Sen, son of a chemistry professor from Dhaka-Ashutosh Sen, was born in Santiniketan, a university campus set up by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in West Bengal, India. Sen spent much of his childhood in Dhaka (current capital of Bangladesh). Sen returned to Santiniketan to complete his schooling. Shantiniketan was known for its liberalized education system that encouraged curiosity along with the development of pluralistic and rational thinking, which significantly influenced Sen’s young mind. Sen liked Sanskrit, math, and physics before discovering his love for economics.
Sen completed his Bachelors in Arts with Majors in Economics from Presidency College, Calcutta (India) in 1953. In the same year, he went to the University of Cambridge, where he took up another Bachelors program at Trinity College because he was too young for the postgraduate programs.
Later, while pursuing his Ph.D. at Cambridge in late ’50s, Sen returned to India for a brief teaching stint at Jadavpur University (JU), Calcutta. During his stay at JU, he submitted his Ph.D. thesis for the Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, which he won. Sen chose to study philosophy at Cambridge with the fellowship proceeds. Sen again returned to India in 1963. He started teaching at the prestigious Delhi School of Economics (DSE) and Delhi University. Between 1963 and 1971, Sen plunged into working on the Social Choice theory, for which he later won the Nobel Prize in the field of economics in 1998. He also set up an advanced school of Economics at DSE in the same period.
The communal riots in India in the 1940s and the famines in Bengal in 1943 gave a direction to Sen’s academic thinking. In one particular incident, during his stay in Dhaka, Sen saw a Muslim worker named Kader Mia enter through the gates of the Sen family home, screaming in pain. He had been stabbed from behind. In the early 1940s, Bengal, of which Dhaka was a part, had been undivided. However, by the mid-’40s, Bengal had succumbed to sectarian violence. Dhaka had become communally volatile and that was particularly true for Sen’s neighborhood. Mia had to go into the volatile areas to make a living. Sen, at that point, thought of the economic "unfreedoms," or lack of opportunities, that must have pushed Kader Mia to enter a volatile neighborhood and put his own life at risk. Yet another instance that later led Sen to do some prolific work in the field of famine studies was the famine of West Bengal in 1943. During the famines, Sen observed that the famine did not affect everybody equally. People around him on the campus and everybody he knew went about with their lives as usual without any real shortage of food. He saw that those who were dying of starvation, mostly the rural labor, were not necessarily dying due to shortage of food but due to socioeconomic factors such as lower income and lower "capabilities," or economic opportunities.
Life’s Work
Sen was deeply influenced by Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow’s ground-breaking study called Social Choice and Individual Values (1951). According to the study, any social choice model not involving authoritarian rule could not yield consistent governance decisions. Sen’s major contribution to the area of the social choice theory was his comparative study of the various conditions under which the outcomes could be more consistent. Sen raised another important issue in the discussion of the social choice theory in his book Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), that of the role played by inequality of opportunities or lack of "capabilities" in affecting these outcomes in different forms of decision making. His work on social choice theory answered questions such as: How could voting procedures be made more workable? How could aggregate poverty be measured, given the complex nature of the problem and varying degrees of poverty? How could the valuations of public goods like natural resources be determined?
Sen’s empirical work on causes and prevention of famine also gained worldwide recognition. In his book, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), Sen questioned the assumption that shortage of food was the major cause of famines. He had observed instances when the supply of food was not any lower than in the years preceding famines and in some other cases, famine-affected countries had actually exported food. Sen found out that an in-depth study of famines required taking into consideration the influence of factors like income, education, health, and other opportunities available to various groups. For example, Sen found in his study of the 1974 floods in Bangladesh that the decrease in work opportunities for agricultural laborers due to the destruction of cash crops, that caused real income to fall in the face of rising food prices affected their ability to buy food, which led to widespread starvation.
Sen also provided a sound theoretical foundation to the hitherto existing poverty and welfare indices. These poverty indices did not, until Sen’s intervention, take into account the varying degree of poverty among those whose incomes were below a stipulated line of poverty. Sen emphasized that welfare was inextricably linked to creation of opportunities or "capabilities" like justice, education, health, and individual liberties.
Sen’s work led to teaching affiliations with many prestigious universities, including Jadavpur University, University of Delhi, London School of Economics, Oxford University, Harvard, and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Impact
Sen was one of the first economists in the twenty-first century to bring the ethical focus back in solving economic problems, going beyond broad aggregate measurements of national output. He strengthened the theoretical basis for measuring poverty and welfare taking into account individual differences in opportunities. His work became a reference point for future researchers to develop the social choice theory to answer key questions like how best can ideas of equal justice, individual rights and preferences be accommodated within the process of collective decision making.
Personal Life
Sen had four children from his first two marriages. He was first married to Nabaneeta Dev, a poet and litterateur, with whom he had two children-Antara and Nandana. Sen separated from Dev in 1971 after they moved to London. From 1973 onwards, Sen lived with his second wife Eva Colorni, herself a celebrated academic and the daughter of Eugenio Colorni, a philosopher and a martyr in the Italian resistance and Ursula Hirschman, a German writer. Colorni passed away in 1985 from stomach cancer. Sen later married Emma Rothschild, a historian and economist at King’s College, London.
Principal Works: Books
- Choice of Techniques (1960)
- Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970)
- Growth Economics (1970)
- Choice, Welfare and Measurement (1982)
- Commodities and Capabilities (1987)
- The Standard of Living (1987)
- Development as Freedom (1999)
- Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006)
- The Idea of Justice (2009)
- An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (2013)
Bibliography
"Amartya Sen." Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2015. Web. 26 Nov. 2015. <http://www.britannica.com/biography/Amartya-Sen>.
"Amartya Sen." Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Dept. of Economics. The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2015. Web. 27 Nov. 2015. <http://scholar.harvard.edu/sen/home>.
"The Prize in Economic Sciences 1998—Press Release." Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB, 2014. Web. 25 Nov 2015. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel‗prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1998/press.html>
Reid-Henry, Simon. "Amartya Sen: Economist, Philosopher, Human Development Doyen." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 22 Nov. 2012. Web. 26 Nov. 2015. <http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2012/nov/22/amartya-sen-human-development-doyen>.
Sen, Amartya. "Amartya Sen—Biographical." Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB, 2014. Web. 26 Nov. 2015. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel‗prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1998/sen-bio.html>.
———. Collective Choice and Social Welfare. San Francisco: Holden, 1970. Print.
———. "Social Choice and Social Welfare." Project Syndicate. Project Syndicate, 26 Nov. 2014. Web. 26 Nov. 2015. <http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/kenneth-arrow-impossibility-theorem-social-welfare-by-amartya-sen-2014-11>.