Amartya Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in 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, decision theory, development economics, public health, and measures of well-being of countries. He has written over 30 books.
He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and India's Bharat Ratna in 1999 for his work in welfare economics.
Rabindranath Tagore gave Amartya Sen his name which means 'immortal or heavenly'
As a nine-year-old boy, he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people perished. In 1981, Sen published Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, 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.
Sen's revolutionary contribution to development economics and social indicators is the concept of "capability" developed in his article Equality of What. He argues that governments should be measured against the concrete capabilities of their citizens.
In his book Development as Freedom, 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. He outlines five specific types of freedoms: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security. Welfare economics seeks to evaluate economic policies in terms of their effects on the well-being of the community.
Governments and international organisations 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.
Sen has been called "the Conscience of the profession" and "the Mother Teresa of Economics".
Max Roser said that it was the work of Sen that made him create Our World in Data (OWID), scientific online publication.
Amartya Sen was born in a Hindu Baidya family in Bengal, British India, in 1933.
Nothing can stop Sen! While at Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1951 (when he was not even 19 years old), Sen was diagnosed with oral cancer, and given a 15% chance of living five years. 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. In 2018, Sen underwent 90 days of radiation therapy to treat prostate cancer.
Sen calls himself an atheist, but his knowledge of world religions is staggering. He has been married three times. Asked how he relaxes, he replies: "I read a lot and like arguing with people."
Also see: Amartya Sen's CV (30 pages, last updated in January 2013)