Amartya Sen

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Lore & Background

Amartya Sen was born on 3 November 1933 in a Bengali Baidya family in Santiniketan, Bengal, British India. Rabindranath Tagore gave him his name, which means 'immortal or heavenly'. He began school at St Gregory's School in Dhaka in 1940, then attended Patha Bhavana in Santiniketan, which had progressive features such as a distaste for examinations or competitive testing and stressed cultural diversity. He earned a BA in economics with First in the First Class, with a minor in mathematics, from Presidency College, Calcutta, as a graduating student of the University of Calcutta. While at Presidency, he was diagnosed with oral cancer and given a 15 per cent chance of living five years; with radiation treatment, he survived. In 1953 he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a second BA in economics in 1955 with a first class, topping the list. He was elected president of the Cambridge Majlis. At age 22, he was appointed First-Professor and First-Head of the Economics Department of the newly created Jadavpur University in Calcutta, serving from 1956 to 1958. He was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, giving him four years to study any subject; he chose philosophy. He was a member of the secret society Cambridge Apostles during his time at Cambridge.

Reader's Guide

Sen's work on social choice theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped develop the theory, showing under what conditions Arrow's impossibility theorem applied and extending the theory. His 1970 paper 'The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal' introduced the liberal paradox, demonstrating a conflict between individual rights and Pareto efficiency. In his 1981 book 'Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation', he argued that famine occurs not only from a lack of food but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food, and noted that no famine has taken place in a functioning democracy. His work in development economics has influenced the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report. He received India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999 for his contribution to welfare economics. The German Publishers and Booksellers Association awarded him the 2020 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for his pioneering scholarship addressing issues of global justice and combating social inequality in education and healthcare.

Did You Know?

• Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian Nobel laureate, personally gave Amartya Sen his name, which means 'immortal or heavenly'.
• While a student at Presidency College, Sen was diagnosed with oral cancer and given a 15 per cent chance of living five years; he survived after radiation treatment.
• At age 22, Sen became the youngest chairman to have headed the Department of Economics, as First-Professor and First-Head of the new Economics Department at Jadavpur University.
• Sen was a member of the secret society Cambridge Apostles during his time at Cambridge.
• Sen wrote in 1999 that 'No famine has ever taken place ... in a functioning democracy'.

A Name Bestowed by a Poet

Amartya Kumar Sen was born on 3 November 1933 in Santiniketan, Bengal, British India, into a Bengali Baidya family. Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize, gave Amartya Sen his name, which means 'immortal or heavenly'. His father, Ashutosh Sen, was a professor of chemistry at Dhaka University, then development commissioner in Delhi, and then chairman of the West Bengal Public Service Commission. His mother, Amita Sen, was the daughter of Kshiti Mohan Sen, an eminent Sanskritist and scholar of ancient and medieval India who was a close associate of Tagore and served as the second vice-chancellor of Visva Bharati University from 1953 to 1954. Sen began school at St Gregory's School in Dhaka in 1940, then in fall 1941 was admitted to Patha Bhavana, Santiniketan, where he completed his school education. The school had many progressive features, such as a distaste for examinations or competitive testing, and stressed cultural diversity. In 1951 he went to Presidency College, Calcutta, earning a BA in economics with First in the First Class, with a minor in mathematics. While at Presidency, he was diagnosed with oral cancer and given a 15 per cent chance of living five years; with radiation treatment, he survived. In 1953 he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, earning a second BA in economics in 1955 with a first class, topping the list. He was elected president of the Cambridge Majlis. At age 22, he was offered the position of First-Professor and First-Head of the Economics Department of the newly created Jadavpur University in Calcutta, serving from 1956 to 1958, and is still the youngest chairman to have headed the Department of Economics.

A Life Between Two Shores

Sen has taught and worked in England and the United States since 1972. He was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, which gave him four years to study any subject; he made the decision to study philosophy. Sen explained, '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.' His interest in philosophy dates back to his college days at Presidency, where he read books on philosophy and debated philosophical themes; one book he was most interested in was Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values. At Cambridge, there were major debates between supporters of Keynesian economics and neo-classical economists. Because of a lack of enthusiasm for social choice theory in both Trinity and Cambridge, Sen chose a different subject for his PhD thesis, 'The Choice of Techniques' in 1959, completed under the supervision of the 'brilliant but vigorously intolerant' post-Keynesian Joan Robinson, with advice from A. K. Dasgupta. Quentin Skinner notes that Sen was a member of the secret society Cambridge Apostles during his time at Cambridge. During 1960–61, he visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on leave from Trinity College. He previously served as master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and professor of economics and philosophy, at Harvard University.

The Architecture of Justice in Economics

Sen's research covers welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, decision theory, development economics, public health, and the measures of well-being of countries. In 1998, he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics. His work on 'Choice of Techniques' complemented that of Maurice Dobb; the Dobb-Sen strategy relied on maximising investible surpluses, maintaining constant real wages, and using the entire increase in labour productivity to raise the rate of accumulation. His papers in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped develop the theory of social choice, which first came to prominence in the work of Kenneth Arrow. Sen's contribution was to show under what conditions Arrow's impossibility theorem applied, as well as to extend and enrich the theory. In 1970, he published 'The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal,' introducing the 'liberal paradox' or 'Sen's paradox'—showing that no means of aggregating individual preferences into a single social choice can simultaneously fulfill unrestricted domain, the weak Pareto principle, and a minimal requirement of individual rights. In 1981, he published 'Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation', arguing that famine occurs not only from a lack of food but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food, and that the Bengal famine was caused by an urban economic boom that raised food prices. In 1999 he wrote, 'No famine has ever taken place ... in a functioning democracy'. His work in development economics has influenced the formulation of the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report.

Honours and the Wider World

In 1999, Sen received India's highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna, for his contribution to welfare economics. The German Publishers and Booksellers Association awarded him the 2020 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for his pioneering scholarship addressing issues of global justice and combating social inequality in education and healthcare. His interest in philosophy, which he traced back to college days at Presidency where he read books on philosophy and debated philosophical themes, remained central. One of the books he was most interested in was Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values. He explained that the broadening into philosophy was important because his main areas of interest in economics relate closely to philosophical disciplines, and because he found philosophical studies very rewarding on their own. His work on the concept of 'capability' in his article 'Equality of What?' (1979) argues that governments should be measured against the concrete capabilities of their citizens, with 'functionings' ranging from the availability of education to transportation to the polls.