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Amartya Kumar Sen was born in 1933, and grew up in Dhaka (then India, now Bangladesh). He has worked as a professor of economics since the age of 22, at Jadavpur University, the University of Delhi, the LSE, Oxford, Cambridge and (currently) Harvard. His many awards include the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics.

Sen is a leading spokesperson for ethical and rigorous economic inquiry, although he abstains from activism and policy advice. He is critical of neoclassical economists’ attachment to utilitarianism and markets, but has not adopted the structuralist reasoning and Marxist approaches of their critics.

His “cautious boldness” has been applied to social choice theory, welfare economics, the understanding and measurement of poverty, explanations of famine and hunger, agrarian change, gender and rural development in South Asia, identity politics, and the ethics, moral philosophy and meanings of “development.” Understanding and tackling inequality is the core of his work: Environmental issues are less central. Two areas of scholarship, chosen from many, stand out.

Human Capability

Capability is the freedom of a person to lead one kind of life rather than another, and for Sen it is the goal of development. In Development as Freedom (1999) he argues that “Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choices and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency.” Achieving development requires the expansion and improvement of capabilities and entitlements for the poor and underprivileged. He believes democracy is best suited to the expansion of freedoms, and-against Gandhi-he favors cosmopolitan, secular democracies over communitarianism, localism, and potentially damaging forms of identity politics.

Sen has also revised the measurement of poverty rates and human development, contributing to the Human Development Index (HDI) in the Human Development Report. The argument is that development policy should enhance capability, rather than blindly pursue economic growth. Critics have applauded Sen’s reasoning, but lament the lesser focus in his work on exactly how freedoms are diminished by violence, oppression, and state actions.

Poverty and Famine

Secondly, understanding poverty and famine. Sen witnessed the effects of the 1943-45 famine in India. His most famous work, Poverty and Famines (1981), suggests famine is caused by the inability of individuals to access food in times of great need, even when food supplies are adequate. Famine is a food demand problem, not a supply problem, as Malthus had argued. Those who starve are people who lack entitlements to food.

There are various types of entitlements, including those based on production, labor, trade, and inheritance. The entitlement model has been widely accepted. It is used in famine relief, and famine early warning systems now look carefully at price signals and purchasing behavior. Sen argues that famines don’t occur in political democracies. Yet as Ben Fine, a former Sen student, says, there is always a political economy to famine that best explains why people starve.

Michael Watts concurs that entitlements are constituted and reproduced through conflict, negotiation and struggle. Entitlement failure, therefore, is embedded within a social and political process. Alex de Waal and David Keen have pointed out the shortcomings of the entitlement model where war and conflict are used as political weapons by states and rebels-greed and grievance, rather than entitlement failures, may also explain the presence of famine in such situations.

These criticisms do not detract for the enormous influence Sen has had, as a public intellectual and scholar, in a variety of scholarly and applied debates and practical actions. He is widely praised as the “conscience” of neoclassical economics, although his contributions are much broader than this.

Bibliography:

Alkire, Valuing Freedoms. Sen’s Capability Approach and Poverty Reduction (Oxford University Press, 2002);
E. Corbridge, “Development as Freedom: The Spaces of Amaryta Sen,” Progress in Development Studies (2, 2002);
Devereux, “Sen’s Entitlement Approach: Critiques and Counter-critiques,” Oxford Development Studies (v.29/3, 2001);
Dreze and A. Sen, The Political Economy of Hunger, 3 vols. (Clarendon Press, 1990-91);
Fine, “Amartya Sen: A Partial and Personal Appreciation,” CDPR Discussion Paper 1601, Centre for Development and Policy Research (SOAS, 2001);
Gasper, “Development as Freedom: Taking Economics beyond Commodities-The Cautious Boldness of Amartya Sen,” Journal of International Development (12, 2000);
Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation (Clarendon Press, 1981);
Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1999);
Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (W.W. Norton, 2006).