Amartya Kumar Sen is an Indian economist, who since 1972 has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, decision theory, development economics, public health, and measures of well-being of countries.
Three million people died in India’s 1943 Bengal famine. Living through it was a 9-year-old boy named Amartya K. Sen, who, 55 years later, won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on poverty and famine. Sen, Lamont University Professor Emeritus and a current adjunct and visiting professor at Harvard, was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics Wednesday for his contributions to welfare economics.
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 believed that there was an adequate food supply in India at the time but that its distribution was hindered because particular groups of people—in this case rural labourers—lost their jobs and therefore their ability to purchase the food.
Sen was educated at Presidency College in Calcutta (now Kolkata). He went on to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received a B.A. (1955), an M.A. (1959), and a Ph.D. (1959). He taught economics at a number of universities in India and England, including the Universities of Jadavpur (1956–58) and Delhi (1963–71), the London School of Economics, the University of London (1971–77), and the University of Oxford (1977–88), before moving to Harvard University (1988–98), where he was professor of economics and philosophy. In 1998 he was appointed master of Trinity College, Cambridge—a position he held until 2004, when he returned to Harvard as Lamont University Professor.
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 such as individual rights, 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.
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. Instead, a number of social and economic factors—such as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food-distribution systems—led to starvation among certain groups in society. He argued that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. Sen also argued that the Bengal famine was caused by an urban economic boom that raised food prices, thereby causing millions of rural workers to starve to death when their wages did not keep up.
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.
In May 2007, he was appointed as chairmanof Nalanda Mentor Group to examine the framework of international cooperation, and proposed structure of partnership, which would govern the establishment of Nalanda International University Project as an international centre of education seeking to revive the ancient center of higher learning which was present in India from the 5th century to 1197.
On 19 July 2012, Sen was named the first chancellor of the proposed Nalanda University (NU). Sen was criticized as the project suffered due to inordinate delays, mismanagement and lack of presence of faculty on ground. Finally teaching began in August 2014. On 20 February 2015, Sen withdrew his candidature for a second term.
He has served as president of the Econometric Society (1984), the International Economic Association (1986–1989), the Indian Economic Association (1989) and the American Economic Association (1994). He has also served as President of the Development Studies Association and the Human Development and Capability Association. He serves as the honorary director of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Human and Economic Development Studies at Peking University in China.
Sen has been called “the Conscience of the profession” and “the Mother Teresa of Economics” 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, saying that he has never tried to follow a lifestyle of dedicated self-sacrifice. Amartya Sen also added his voice to the campaign against the anti-gay Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Sen has served as Honorary Chairman of Oxfam, the UK based international development charity, and is now its Honorary Advisor. Sen is also a member of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council. Sen is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. He is also one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders.
He has won the following awards: Adam Smith Prize in 1954, Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984, Honorary fellowship by the Institute of Social Studies in 1984, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998, Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India in 1999, Honorary citizenship of Bangladesh in 1999, Order of Companion of Honour, UK in 2000, Leontief Prize in 2000, Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service in 2000, 351st Commencement Speaker of Harvard University in 2001, International Humanist Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union in 2002, Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian Chamber of Commerce in 2004, Life Time Achievement award by Bangkok-based United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, National Humanities Medal in 2011, Order of the Aztec Eagle in 2012, Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour in 2013, 25 Greatest Global Living Legends In India by NDTV in 2013, Top 100 thinkers who have defined our century by The New Republic in 2014, Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize in 2015, Albert O. Hirschman Prize, Social Science Research Council in 2016, Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science in 2017, Bodley Medal in 2019, and Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels in 2020.
