Amartya Sen

Noble-prize winning economist Amartya Sen is regarded as one of the world's foremost thinkers in the field of famine, poverty, social choice and welfare economics. His ground-breaking work has not only been academically influential, but has also had a profound impact on the formation of development policy worldwide. Born in 1933 in Santiniketan, India, he was given his christian name by Rabindranath Tagore, India's first ever Nobel laureate and a close family friend.

He was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta, and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a BA in 1956, and a PhD in 1959. He has since held positions at universities around the world, including Calcutta, Delhi, Oxford, Berkley, Harvard and the London School of Economics. In 1997 he returned to Cambridge as Master of Trinity College, a post he held until 2004.

As a young man Sen was deeply affected by the violence that followed the 1947 partition of India - and in particular the effect that violence had on the poorest members of society - and, also, by the great Bengal famine of 1943 in which almost three million people died.
These two catastrophes proved the catalyst for a lifetime's interest in, and study of the economics of poverty and famine. He has published numerous highly influential books and articles, including the seminal "Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation" (1981) in which he proposed the radical - and now widely accepted - theory that famine occurs not because of a lack of food, but rather because of inequalities built into the mechanisms of distributing food. In recognition of his work he was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics, the first welfare economist to be thus honored. He has since used some of the prize money to establish the Pratichi Trust to promote primary education in India. 


 




Amartya Sen argues that democracy is the best way to avoid famines. Of course, a well-functioning democracy is not a sufficient condition for the absence of famines. Other mechanisms also contribute to famine prevention, so it’s not impossible to see famines in democracies.