Amartya Sen

Sponsorship the way you would do it

Amartya Kumar Sen (born November 3, 1933) was awarded The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (1998) (and later Bharat Ratna) for his work in mathematical economics. Amartya Sen is notable for his theories on welfare economics, which try to explain the underlying mechanisms of poverty. Sen was born in Bengal Province, India. Sen has taught economics at Universities in Calcutta, Delhi, Oxford, Harvard and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1997 and 2004. In Januray 2004 Sen returned to Harvard.

The absurdity of public-choice theory is captured by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in the following little scenario: "Can you direct me to the railway station?" asks the stranger. "Certainly," says the local, pointing in the opposite direction, towards the post office, "and would you post this letter for me on your way?" "Certainly," says the stranger, resolving to open it to see if it contains anything worth stealing.

-Linda McQuaig, All You Can Eat

The BBC report of his Nobel Prize was headed "The Economy Nobel prize for work on poverty and hunger".[1] The press release for his prize included

Sen's best-known work in this area is his book from 1981: Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Here, he challenges the common view that a shortage of food is the most important (sometimes the only) explanation for famine.

-Press Release: The Sveriges Riksbank (Bank of Sweden) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 1998.[1]

Sen's seminal papers in the late sixties and early seventies helped define the emerging field of Social Choice. The theory of Social Choice first came to prominence in the work by the American economist, Ken Arrow, who working in the fifties at the Rand Corporation proved in a famous result that all voting rules be they majority voting or two thirds-majority or status quo must inevitably conflict some basic democratic norm. Sen's contribution to the literature was to show under what conditions Arrow's Impossibility Theorem would indeed come to pass as well as to extend and enrich the field of Social Choice informed by his interests in history of economic thought and philosophy.

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 published by the United Nations Development Program. 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.

List of publications:

His most recent publication, Development as Freedom, was published by Oxford University Press in 1999.