Amartya Sen

Amartya Kumar Sen
Sen in 2000
Born	Amartya Kumar Sen (1933-11-03) 3 November 1933 Manikganj, Bengal, British India
Nationality	Indian
Spouse(s)	Nabaneeta Dev Sen (m. 1958; div. 1976) Eva Colorni (m. 1978; her death 1985) Emma Georgina Rothschild (m. 1991)
Institution	List Harvard University University of Cambridge London School of Economics Jadavpur University Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cornell University University of Oxford Delhi School of Economics University of Calcutta University of California, Berkeley Stanford University Nalanda University
Field	Welfare economics, development economics, ethics
School or tradition	Capability approach
Alma mater	University of Calcutta (BA) University of Cambridge (BA, MA, PhD)
Influences	List Rabindranath Tagore B. R. Ambedkar John Maynard Keynes John Rawls Peter Bauer John Stuart Mill Mary Wollstonecraft[1] Kenneth Arrow Piero Sraffa Adam Smith Karl Marx[2] Martha Nussbaum
Contributions	Human development theory
Awards	Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1998) Bharat Ratna (1999) National Humanities Medal (2012)[3] Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science (2017)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc
Amartya Sen's voice from the BBC programme Start the Week, 7 January 2013
Website	scholar.harvard.edu/files/sen/files/cv_sen_amartya_jan2013_0.pdf
Notes
Children: Antara Dev Sen (daughter) Nandana Sen (daughter) Indrani (daughter) Kabir (son)

Part of a series on
Liberalism
Schools History of liberalism Contributions to liberal theory
Ideas Civil and political rights Cultural liberalism Democracy Liberal democracy Economic liberalism Egalitarianism Free market Free trade Freedom of the press Freedom of religion Freedom of speech Gender equality Harm principle Internationalism Laissez-faire Liberty Market economy Natural and legal rights Negative/positive liberty Open society Permissive society Private property Rule of law Secularism Separation of church and state Social contract Welfare state
Variants Civic nationalism Classical liberalism Conservative liberalism Democratic liberalism Green liberalism Liberal feminism Equity feminism Liberal autocracy Liberal conservatism Liberal internationalism Liberal socialism Libertarianism Agorism Anarcho-capitalism Christian libertarianism/Libertarian Christianity Geolibertarianism Green libertarianism Libertarian conservatism Minarchism Paleolibertarianism Voluntaryism Muscular liberalism Neoliberalism National liberalism Ordoliberalism Radical centrism Radicalism Reformist Left Religious liberalism Christian Islamic Jewish Secular liberalism Social liberalism Technoliberalism Third Way Whiggism
People Lord Acton Rifa'a al-Tahtawi Juan Bautista Alberdi Chu Anping Matthew Arnold Raymond Aron Prosper de Barante Frédéric Bastiat Gary Becker Jeremy Bentham Isaiah Berlin William Beveridge Norberto Bobbio Ludwig Joseph Brentano John Bright Victor de Broglie Edmund Burke Ernst Cassirer Boris Chicherin Anders Chydenius Richard Cobden R. G. Collingwood Marquis de Condorcet Benjamin Constant Benedetto Croce Vincenzo Cuoco Jean le Rond d'Alembert Ralf Dahrendorf Guido De Ruggiero Antoine Destutt de Tracy John Dewey Charles Dickens Denis Diderot Zhang Dongsun Charles Dunoyer Ronald Dworkin Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed Ralph Waldo Emerson Karl-Hermann Flach Milton Friedman John Kenneth Galbraith William Lloyd Garrison David Lloyd George William Gladstone Piero Gobetti Francisco Luís Gomes John Gray Thomas Hill Green Friedrich Hayek Auberon Herbert Thomas Hobbes Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse John A. Hobson Baron d'Holbach Qin Hui Wilhelm von Humboldt Thomas Jefferson Zef Jubani Immanuel Kant Namık Kemal John Maynard Keynes Will Kymlicka Mariano José de Larra John Locke Salvador de Madariaga James Madison Harriet Martineau Minoo Masani Jules Michelet James Mill John Stuart Mill John Milton Ludwig von Mises Donald Barkly Molteno Theodor Mommsen Charles de Montalembert Leo Chiozza Money Charles de Montesquieu José María Luis Mora Dadabhai Naoroji Friedrich Naumann Robert Nozick Martha Nussbaum Bertil Ohlin José Ortega y Gasset Thomas Paine Alan Paton Karl Raimund Popper Richard Price Joseph Priestley Guillermo Prieto François Quesnay Ignacio Ramírez Walther Rathenau John Rawls Joseph Raz Charles Renouvier David Ricardo Wilhelm Röpke Richard Rorty Carlo Rosselli Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Baptiste Say Amartya Sen Li Shenzhi Hu Shih Judith Shklar Algernon Sidney Emmanuel Sieyès İbrahim Şinasi Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi Adam Smith Hernando de Soto Herbert Spencer Baruch Spinoza Anne Louise Germaine de Staël William Graham Sumner R. H. Tawney Augustin Thierry Johan Rudolph Thorbecke Henry David Thoreau Alexis de Tocqueville Anne Robert Jacques Turgot Abel-François Villemain Voltaire Lester Frank Ward Max Weber Mary Wollstonecraft Tao Xingzhi María Zambrano Gu Zhun
Organizations Liberal parties Africa Liberal Network (ALN) Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDEP) Arab Liberal Federation (ALF) Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats (CALD) European Democratic Party (EDP) European Liberal Youth (LYMEC) European Party for Individual Liberty (EPIL) International Alliance of Libertarian Parties (IALP) International Federation of Liberal Youth (IFLRY) Liberal International Liberal Network for Latin America (RELIAL) Liberal South East European Network (LIBSEEN)
Regional variants Europe Latin America Albania Armenia Australia Austria Belgium Bolivia Brazil Bulgaria Canada China Chile Colombia Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech lands Denmark Ecuador Egypt Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Iran Israel Italy Japan Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Macedonia Mexico Moldova Montenegro Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Nigeria Norway Panama Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Russia Senegal Serbia Slovakia Slovenia Spain South Africa South Korea Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Tunisia Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom United States Uruguay Venezuela Zimbabwe
Related topics Democratic capitalism Liberal bias in academia Regressive left
Liberalism portal Politics portal

Amartya Kumar Sen, CH, FBA (Bengali: [ˈɔmort:o ˈʃen]; born 3 November 1933) is an eminent economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in India, 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, and indices of the measure of well-being of citizens of developing countries.

He is the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor at Harvard University^[4] and member of faculty at Harvard Law School. He is a Fellow and former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences^[5] in 1998 and India's Bharat Ratna in 1999 for his work in welfare economics. In 2017, Sen was awarded the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science^[6] for most valuable contribution to Political Science.

In 2004, Sen was ranked number 14 in BBC's poll of the Greatest Bengali of all time.^[7][8][9]

Early life and education

Amartya Sen was born in a Bengali Baidya family in Santiniketan in West Bengal, British India, on the campus on Rabindranath Tagore's Viswa-Bharati University, to Ashutosh Sen and Amita Sen. Rabindranath Tagore gave Amartya Sen his name (Bengali অমর্ত্য ômorto, lit. "immortal"). 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 who moved with his family to West Bengal in 1945 and worked at various government institutions, including the West Bengal Public Service Commission (of which he was the chairman), and the Union Public Service Commission. Sen's mother Amita Sen was the daughter of Kshiti Mohan Sen, a well-known scholar of ancient and medieval India and close associate of Rabindranath Tagore. He served as the Vice Chancellor of Delhi University for some years.

Sen began his high-school education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka in 1940. From fall 1941, Sen studied at Patha Bhavana, Santiniketan. The school had many progressive features: at the school, any focus on examinations or competitive testing was deeply frowned upon. In addition, the school stressed cultural diversity, and embraced influences from the rest of the world.^[10] In 1951, he went to Presidency College, Kolkata, where he earned a B.A. in Economics with 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.^[11] With radiation treatment, he survived, and in 1953 he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a second B.A. in Pure Economics in 1955 with a First Class, topping the list as well. He was elected President of the Cambridge Majlis. While Sen was officially a Ph.D student at Cambridge (though he had finished his research in 1955–56), he was offered the position of Professor and Head of the Economics Department of the newly created Jadavpur University(among the top five Universities in India) in Calcutta, and he became the youngest chairman to head the Department of Economics. He served in that position, starting the new Economics Department, during 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".^[12] 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.^[13]

In Cambridge, there were major debates between supporters of Keynesian economics on the one hand, and the "neo-classical" economists who were skeptical of Keynes, on the other. However, because of a lack of enthusiasm for social choice theory in both Trinity and Cambridge, Sen had to choose a different subject for his Ph.D. thesis, which was on "The Choice of Techniques" in 1959, though the work had been completed much earlier (except for some valuable 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.^[14] Quentin Skinner notes that Sen was a member of the secret society Cambridge Apostles during his time at Cambridge.^[15]

Research work

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, while working at the RAND Corporation, 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^[16] 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. 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.^[17]

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 means to buy 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. Sen points to a number of social and economic factors, such as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food-distribution, which led to starvation. 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",^[18] published by the United Nations Development Programme.^[19] 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".^[20] 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.^[21]

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, including one by Emily Oster, had argued that this is an overestimation, though Oster has since then recanted her conclusions.^[22]

In 1999, Sen further advanced and redefined the capability approach in his book Development as Freedom.^[23] Sen argues that development should be viewed as an effort to advance the real freedoms that individuals enjoy, rather than simply focusing on metrics such as GDP or income-per-capita. Sen was inspired by violent acts he had witnessed as a child leading up to the Partition of India in 1947. On one morning, a Muslim laborer named Kader Mia stumbled through the rear gate of Sen's family home, bleeding from a knife wound in his back. Because of his extreme poverty, he had come to Sen's primarily Hindu neighborhood searching for work; his choices were the starvation of his family or the risk of death in coming to the neighborhood. The price of Kader Mia's economic unfreedom was his death. This experience led Sen to begin thinking about economic unfreedom from a young age.

In Development as Freedom, Sen outlines five specific types of freedoms: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security. Political freedoms, the first of these, refers to the ability of the people to have a voice in government and to be able to scrutinize the authorities. Economic facilities concern both the resources within the market and the market mechanism itself. Any focus on income and wealth in the country would serve to increase the economic facilities for the people. Social opportunities deal with the establishments that provide benefits like healthcare or education for the populace, allowing individuals to live better lives. Transparency guarantees allow individuals to interact with some degree of trust and knowledge of the interaction. Protective security is the system of social safety nets that prevent a group affected by poverty being subjected to terrible misery. Before Sen's work, these had been viewed as only the ends of development; luxuries afforded to countries that focus on increasing income. However, Sen argues that the increase in real freedoms should be both the ends and the means of development. He elaborates upon this by illustrating the closely interconnected natures of the five main freedoms as he believes that expansion of one of those freedoms can lead to expansion in another one as well. In this regard he discusses the correlation between social opportunities of education and health and how both of these complement economic and political freedoms as a healthy and well-educated person is better suited to make informed economic decisions and be involved in fruitful political demonstrations etc. A comparison is also drawn between China and India to illustrate this interdependence of freedoms. Both countries were working towards developing their economies, China since 1979 and India since 1991. Despite the fact that India opened its economy about a decade later, it was able to see more rapid development as it had always been pro health and education so its population was much more productive than that of China, where health and education was unavailable to about half of the population.

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^[24] and China despite 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-selective abortions.

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—for example through public works—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.^[25]

In 2009, Sen published a book called The Idea of Justice.^[1] Based on his previous work in welfare economics and social choice theory, but also on his philosophical thoughts, he presented his own theory of justice that he meant to be an alternative to the influential modern theories of justice of John Rawls or John Harsanyi. In opposition to Rawls but also earlier justice theoreticians Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau or David Hume, and inspired by the philosophical works of Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft, Sen developed a theory that is both comparative and realizations-oriented (instead of being transcendental and institutional). However, he still regards institutions and processes as being important. As an alternative to Rawls's veil of ignorance, Sen chose the thought experiment of an impartial spectator as the basis of his theory of justice. He also stressed the importance of public discussion (understanding democracy in the sense of John Stuart Mill) and a focus on people's capabilities (an approach that he had co-developed), including the notion of universal human rights, in evaluating various states with regard to justice.

Professional career

Sen began his career both as a teacher and a research scholar in the Department of Economics, Jadavpur University as a Professor of Economics in 1956. He spent two years in that position. From 1957 to 1963, Sen served as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Between 1960 and 1961, Sen was a visiting Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, where he got to know Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Franco Modigliani, and Norbert Wiener.^[26] He was also a visiting Professor at UC-Berkeley (1964-1965) and Cornell (1978-1984). He taught as Professor of Economics between 1963 and 1971 at the Delhi School of Economics (where he completed his magnum opus Collective Choice and Social Welfare in 1969).^[27] During this time he was also a frequent visitor to various other premiere Indian economic schools and centres of excellence like Jawaharlal Nehru University, Indian Statistical Institute, Centre for Development Studies, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics and Centre for Studies in Social Sciences. Sen was a companion of distinguished economists like Manmohan Singh (Ex-Prime Minister of India and a veteran economist responsible for liberalizing the Indian economy), K. N. Raj (Advisor to various Prime Ministers and a veteran economist who was the founder of Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, which is one of India's premier think tanks and schools) and Jagdish Bhagwati (who is known to be one of the greatest Indian economists in the field of International Trade and currently teaches at Columbia University). This is a period considered to be a Golden Period in the history of DSE. In 1971, he joined the London School of Economics as a Professor of Economics where he taught until 1977. From 1977 to 1988, he taught at the University of Oxford, where he was first a Professor of Economics and Fellow of Nuffield College, and then the Drummond Professor of Political Economy and a Fellow of All Souls College from 1980. In 1987, he joined Harvard as the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor of Economics. In 1998 he was appointed as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge,^[28] becoming the first Asian head of an Oxbridge college.^[29] In January 2004, Sen returned to Harvard. He also established the Eva Colorni Trust at the former London Guildhall University in the name of his deceased wife.

Membership and associations

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.^[32]

Sen has been called "the Conscience of the profession" and "the Mother Teresa of Economics"^[33][34] 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.^[35] Amartya Sen also added his voice to the campaign against the anti-gay Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.^[36]

Sen has served as Honorary Chairman of Oxfam, the UK based international development charity, and is now its Honorary Advisor.^[37][38]

Sen is also a member of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council.^[39]

Sen is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge.^[40]

Media and culture

A 57-minute documentary named Amartya Sen: A Life Re-examined directed by Suman Ghosh details his life and work.^[41][42]

A 2001 portrait of Sen by Annabel Cullen is in Trinity College's collection.^[43] A 2003 portrait of Sen hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.^[44]
In 2011, he was present at the Rabindra Utsab ceremony at Bangabandhu International Conference Centre (BICC), Bangladesh. He unveiled the cover of Sruti Gitobitan, a Rabindrasangeet album comprising all the 2222 Tagore songs, brought out by Rezwana Chowdhury Bannya, principal of Shurer Dhara School of Music.^[45]

Political views

Sen was critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he was announced as the prime ministerial candidate by the BJP. In April 2014, he said that Modi would not make a good Prime Minister.^[46] However, he conceded later in December 2014 that Modi did give people a sense of faith that things can happen.^[47] In February 2015, Sen opted out of seeking a second term for the chancellor post of Nalanda University, stating that the Government of India was not keen on him continuing in the post.^[48]

Personal life and beliefs

Sen has been married three times. His first wife was Nabaneeta Dev Sen, an Indian writer and scholar, with whom he had two daughters: Antara, a journalist and publisher, and Nandana, a Bollywood actress. Their marriage broke up shortly after they moved to London in 1971.^[33] In 1978 Sen married Eva Colorni, an Italian economist, daughter of Eugenio Colorni and Ursula Hirschmann and niece of Albert O. Hirschman. The couple had two children, a daughter Indrani, who is a journalist in New York, and a son Kabir, a hip hop artist, MC, and music teacher at Shady Hill School. Eva died of cancer in 1985.^[33] In 1991, Sen married Emma Georgina Rothschild, who serves as the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University.

The Sens have a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is the base from which they teach during the academic year. They also have a home in Cambridge, England, where Sen is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Rothschild is a Fellow of Magdalene College. He usually spends his winter holidays at his home in Santiniketan in West Bengal, India, where he used to go on long bike rides until recently. Asked how he relaxes, he replies: "I read a lot and like arguing with people."^[33]

Sen is an atheist and holds that this can be associated with one of the atheist schools in Hinduism, the Lokayata.^[49][50][51] In an interview for the magazine California, which is published by the University of California, Berkeley, he noted:^[52]

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 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.

Awards and honours

Sen has received over 90 honorary degrees from universities around the world.^[53]

• Adam Smith Prize, 1954
• Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1981^[54]
• Honorary fellowship by the Institute of Social Studies, 1984
• Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 1998
• Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian award in India, 1999
• Honorary citizenship of Bangladesh, 1999
• Order of Companion of Honour, UK, 2000
• Leontief Prize, 2000
• Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service, 2000
• 351st Commencement Speaker of Harvard University, 2001
• International Humanist Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union, 2002
• Lifetime Achievement Award by the Indian Chamber of Commerce, 2004
• Life Time Achievement award by Bangkok-based United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP)
• Honorary degree, University of Pavia, 2005
• National Humanities Medal, 2011
• Order of the Aztec Eagle, 2012^[55]
• Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour, 2013^[56]
• 25 Greatest Global Living Legends In India by NDTV, 2013^[57]
• Top 100 thinkers who have defined our century by The New Republic, 2014
• Charleston-EFG John Maynard Keynes Prize, 2015^[58]
• Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, 2017

Bibliography

See also

• The equality of autonomy, a concept of equality posed by Sen
• Feminist economics
• Human Development Index
• List of feminist economists
• The Kerala model, an expression or concept invented and introduced by Sen
• Instrumental and value rationality, describing some of his differences with John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and James Gouinlock.

References

Further reading

• Forman-Barzilai, Fonna (2012), "Taking a broader view of humanity: an interview with Amartya Sen.", in Browning, Gary; Dimova-Cookson, Maria; Prokhovnik, Raia, Dialogues with contemporary political theorists, Houndsmill, Basingstoke, Hampshire New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 170–180, ISBN 9780230303058
• Various (2003). "Special issue, on Amartya Sen". Feminist Economics. Taylor and Francis. 9 (2–3).

External links

• Amartya Sen at Harvard University
• The Possibility of Social Choice 1998 lecture at NobelPrize.org
• Amartya Sen on Cultural Relativism and "the good life" on Berggruen Institute's YouTube channel
• Profile and Papers at Research Papers in Economics/RePEc
• Fearing Food edited by Julian Morris. Chapter on Sen
• Amartya Sen (1933– ). The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Library of Economics and Liberty (2nd ed.). Liberty Fund. 2008.
• Appearances on C-SPAN