Amartya Sen, CH , Ômorto Shen; born 3 November 1933) is an

Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic
Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory,
and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members.[1] Sen was
best known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the
development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of
real or perceived shortages of food.

He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of

Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at
the Harvard Society of Fellows, distinguished fellow of All Souls College,
Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he previously
served as Master from 1998 to 2004.[2][3] He is the first Asian and the first
Indian academic to head an Oxbridge college.

Amartya Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages
over a period of forty years. He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and
Security. In 2006, Time magazine listed him under "60 years of Asian
Heroes"[4] and in 2010 included him in their "100 most influential persons in
the world".[5] New Statesman listed him in their 2010 edition of 'World's 50
Most Influential People Who Matter'.[6]

Sen was born to a Bengali Hindu family in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India.
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 hails from a distinguished family: his maternal
grandfather Kshiti Mohan Sen, a close associate of Rabindranath Tagore, was
a renowned scholar of medieval Indian literature, an authority on
thephilosophy of Hinduism, and also the second Vice Chancellor of Visva-
Bharati University. His maternal grandfather was an uncle of Sukumar Sen,
the firstChief Election Commissioner of India and his brother, Ashoke Kumar
Sen, a former Union Cabinet Minister for Law and Justice. Sen's father
Ashutosh Sen and mother Amita Sen were born at Manikganj, Dhaka. His
father was a Professor of Chemistry at Dhaka University and became
Chairman of the West Bengal Public Service Commission.
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, where he earned a First Class First in his
B.A. (Honours) in Economics and emerged as the most eminent student of
the well known batch of 1953. Subsequently in the same year, he moved
to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he also earned a First Class (Starred
First) BA (Honours) in 1956. At Cambridge he was elected as the President of
the Cambridge Majlis in 1956. While still an undergraduate student of Trinity
College, he met Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. Mahalanobis, after returning
to Calcutta, recommended Sen to Triguna Sen, the then Education
Minister of West Bengal. After Sen had enrolled for a Ph.D. in Economics to
be completed at Trinity College, Cambridge, he arrived in India on a two year
leave. Triguna Sen immediately appointed him as Professor and the Founder-
Head of Department of Economics at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, which
was his very first appointment, at the age of 23. During his tenure at
Jadavpur University, he had the good fortune of having economic
methodologist, A. K. Dasgupta, who was then teaching in Benares, as his
supervisor. Sen returned to Cambridge after two years of full time teaching
to complete his Ph.D. in 1959.

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.”[7]

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 brilliant but vigorously
intolerant Joan Robinson.[7][8] During his time at Cambridge, and according
to Quentin Skinner, Sen was a member of the secret society "The Apostles".
[9]

Between 1960–1961, he taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as

a Visiting Professor.[10] He has also been a Visiting Professor at Berkeley,
Stanford, and Cornell.

He has taught economics also at the University of Calcutta and at the Delhi
School of Economics (where he completed his magnum opus Collective
Choice and Social Welfare in 1970),[11] where he was a Professor from 1961
to 1972, a period which is considered to be a Golden Period in the history of
DSE. In 1972 he joined the London School of Economics as a Professor of
Economics where he taught until 1977. From 1977 to 1986 he taught at
the University of Oxford, where he was first a Professor of Economics
at Nuffield College, Oxford and then the Drummond Professor of Political
Economy and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. In 1986 he
joined Harvard as the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor of Economics.
In 1998 he was appointed as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.[12] 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.

In April 2011, Sen will be awarded an honorary degree by the University of

British Columbia, Canada.[13] The Institute of Social Studies (ISS) awarded its
Honorary Fellowship to Amartya Sen in 1982.
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, had
most famously showed 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.[14]

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 Chinadespite 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.

Perceptions: In comparisons

Amartya has been called "the Conscience and the Mother Teresa of
Economics"[15] for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare
economics, the underlying mechanisms of poverty,gender inequality,
and political liberalism. However, he denies the comparison to Mother
Teresa by saying that he has never tried to follow a lifestyle of dedicated
self-sacrifice.[16]

Personal life and beliefs

Sen's first wife was Nabaneeta Dev Sen, an Indian writer and scholar, with
whom he had two children: Antara, a journalist and publisher, and Nandana,
a Bollywood actress. Their marriage broke up shortly after they moved to
London in 1971. In 1973, he married his second wife, Eva Colorni who was
Jewish,[17] who died from stomach cancer quite suddenly in 1985. They had
two children, Indrani, a journalist in New York, and Kabir, who teaches music
at Shady Hill School.

His present wife, Emma Georgina Rothschild, is an economic historian, an

expert on Adam Smith and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. Sen usually
spends his winter holidays at his home in Santiniketan 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."

Sen is a self-proclaimed atheist and holds that this can be associated

with Hinduism as a political entity.[18][19][20][21] In an interview for the
magazine California, which is published by the University of California,
Berkeley, he noted[22]:

“ In some ways people had got used to the idea that India was spiritual
and religion-oriented. That gave a leg up to the religious interpretation
of India, despite the fact that Sanskrit had a larger atheistic literature
than what exists in any other classical language. Madhava Acharya, the
remarkable 14th century philosopher, wrote this rather great book
called Sarvadarshansamgraha, which discussed all the religious schools
of thought within the Hindu structure. The first chapter is "Atheism" – a
very strong presentation of the argument in favor of atheism and
materialism.
 1998: He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for
his work in welfare economics.
 1999: He received the Bharat Ratna 'the highest civilian award in India'
by the President of India.
 1999: He was offered the honorary citizenship of Bangladesh by Sheikh
Hasina in recognition of his achievements in winning the Nobel Prize, and
given that his ancestral origins were in what has become the modern
state of Bangladesh
 2000: He was awarded the order of Companion of Honour, UK.
 2000: He received Leontief Prize for his outstanding contribution to
economic theory from the Global Development and Environment Institute.
 2000: He was awarded the Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and
Service USA;
 2000: He was the 351st Commencement Speaker of Harvard
University.
 2002: He received the International Humanist Award from
the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
 2003: He was conferred the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian
Chamber of Commerce[which?].
 He is awarded the Life Time Achievement award by Bangkok-
based United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the
Pacific (UNESCAP)
 2010: He was chosen to deliver the Demos Annual Lecture 2010