Amartya Sen

Amartya Kumar Sen (born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher, who has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States since 1972.

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.

He is currently a Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University.

He formerly served as Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.

Sen began his school education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka in 1940.

In the fall of 1941, he was admitted to Patha Bhavana, Shantiniketan, where he completed his school education.

The school had many progressive features, such as distaste for examinations or competitive testing.

In addition, the school stressed cultural diversity, and embraced cultural influences from the rest of the world.

He moved with his family to West Bengal in 1945.

Sen's mother Amita Sen was the daughter of Kshiti Mohan Sen, the eminent Sanskritist and scholar of ancient and medieval India, who was a close associate of Tagore.

In 1951, he went to Presidency College, Calcutta, where he earned a B.A. in economics with First in the First Class, with a minor in Mathematics, as a graduating student of the University of Calcutta.

While at Presidency, Sen was diagnosed with oral cancer, and given a 15% chance of living five years.

K. M. Sen served as the second Vice Chancellor of Visva Bharati University from 1953 to 1954.

With radiation treatment, he survived, and in 1953 he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a second B.A. in economics in 1955 with a First Class, topping the list as well.

At this time, he was elected President of the Cambridge Majlis.

While Sen was officially a PhD student at Cambridge (though he had finished his research in 1955–56), he was offered the position of First-Professor and First-Head of the Economics Department of the newly created Jadavpur University in Calcutta.

He is still the youngest chairman to have headed the Department of Economics.

He served in that position, starting the new Economics Department, from 1956 to 1958.

Meanwhile, Sen was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, which gave him four years of freedom to do anything he liked; he made the radical 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, however, dates back to his college days at Presidency, where he read books on philosophy and debated philosophical themes.

One of the books he was most interested in was Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values.

In Cambridge, there were major debates between supporters of Keynesian economics, and the neo-classical economists who were skeptical of Keynes.

Because of a lack of enthusiasm for social choice theory in both Trinity and Cambridge, Sen chose a different subject for his PhD thesis, which was on "The Choice of Techniques" in 1959.

The work had been completed earlier, except for advice from his adjunct supervisor in India, Professor A.K. Dasgupta, given to Sen while teaching and revising his work at Jadavpur, under the supervision of the "brilliant but vigorously intolerant" post-Keynesian, Joan Robinson.

Quentin Skinner notes that Sen was a member of the secret society Cambridge Apostles during his time at Cambridge.

During 1960–61, Amartya Sen visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on leave from Trinity College.

Sen's work on 'Choice of Techniques' complemented that of Maurice Dobb.

In a developing country, the Dobb-Sen strategy relied on maximising investible surpluses, maintaining constant real wages and using the entire increase in labour productivity, due to technological change, to raise the rate of accumulation.

In other words, workers were expected to demand no improvement in their standard of living despite having become more productive.

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.

Arrow had most famously shown that when voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), any ranked order voting system will in at least some situations inevitably conflict with what many assume to be basic democratic norms.

Sen's contribution to the literature was to show under what conditions Arrow's impossibility theorem applied, 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 argued that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food.

In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and in 1999, 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.

Amartya Sen was born in a Bangal Hindu Baidya family in Santiniketan, Bengal, British India.

The famed polymath and writer, Rabindranath Tagore, gave Amartya Sen his name (অমর্ত্য, ).

Sen's family was from Wari and Manikganj, Dhaka, both in present-day Bangladesh.

His father Ashutosh Sen was a Professor of Chemistry at Dhaka University, Development Commissioner in Delhi and then Chairman of the West Bengal Public Service Commission.