Amartya Sen b. 1933

Amartya Sen is an Indian philosopher and economist, Nobel laureate in economic sciences, and one of the most influential thinkers on famines, social choice, and the foundations of justice. Poverty and Famines argued that famines are not primarily failures of aggregate food supply but of the social entitlements through which people command food, while his work with Martha Nussbaum on the capabilities approach grounded a non-utilitarian framework for human development. The Idea of Justice rejected the search for ideal institutions in favor of a comparative public reasoning that focuses on remediable injustices in the world we actually inhabit.

Amartya Kumar Sen was born at Santiniketan, West Bengal, in November 1933, on the campus of the school founded by his friend Rabindranath Tagore. He took his bachelor's at Presidency College in Calcutta in 1953 and a second bachelor's, master's, and doctorate at Trinity College, Cambridge, the doctorate in 1959 on the choice of techniques in development. He has held chairs at Jadavpur, the Delhi School of Economics, the London School of Economics, Oxford (Drummond Professor of Political Economy 1980–1988), and Harvard (Lamont University Professor 1988 onward), and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1998 to 2004.

His books include Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), On Economic Inequality (1973), Poverty and Famines (1981), Commodities and Capabilities (1985), On Ethics and Economics (1987), Inequality Reexamined (1992), Development as Freedom (1999), The Argumentative Indian (2005), Identity and Violence (2006), and The Idea of Justice (2009). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and India's Bharat Ratna in 1999.

Sen argued in Poverty and Famines that twentieth-century famines were caused not by absolute food shortages but by collapses of entitlements; together with Martha Nussbaum he developed the capabilities approach, on which a just society is one that secures the substantive freedoms people have reason to value rather than aggregate utility or primary goods. His comparative theory of justice and his writing on Indian secularism and pluralism extend the same framework into political philosophy.