Amartya Sen

• 1. A Name From Tagore

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  Amartya Sen carries a name that was chosen for him by a Nobel laureate. Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize, gave the newborn the name অমর্ত্য. The boy was born on the 3rd of November 1933 in Santiniketan, Bengal, British India. In 1998 he received a Nobel Prize of his own, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, for his contributions to welfare economics. The prize captures only part of a strange and wide-ranging career. Sen devised a famous paradox about whether a society can protect personal choices and still agree on what is best. He explained hunger as a question of who is allowed to eat. He spent decades arguing that freedom is the purpose of development, and not merely its reward. How does one person end up studying voting, famine, philosophy and justice at the same time? And which scene from a childhood in Bengal kept pulling him toward the question of what poverty does to a person's choices?

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• 2. Santiniketan to Cambridge

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  In the fall of 1941, Sen was admitted to Patha Bhavana, the school at Santiniketan where he finished his education. His schooling had started a year earlier, in 1940, at St Gregory's School in Dhaka. Patha Bhavana had a distaste for examinations and competitive testing. It stressed cultural diversity and welcomed influences from the rest of the world.

  Sen's mother, Amita Sen, was the daughter of Kshiti Mohan Sen, an eminent Sanskritist and scholar of ancient and medieval India. K. M. Sen was a close associate of Tagore and served as the second vice-chancellor of Visva Bharati University, from 1953 to 1954. Sen's father, Ashutosh Sen, was a professor of chemistry at Dhaka University. He later became development commissioner in Delhi and then chairman of the West Bengal Public Service Commission. The family came from Wari and Manikganj, Dhaka, in present-day Bangladesh, and moved to West Bengal in 1945.

  In 1951, Sen went to Presidency College, Calcutta. He graduated from the University of Calcutta with a BA in economics, First in the First Class, and a minor in mathematics. While at Presidency, he was diagnosed with oral cancer and given a 15 per cent chance of living five years. Radiation treatment let him survive. In 1953 he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a second BA in economics in 1955, again with a first class and again topping the list. He was elected president of the Cambridge Majlis.

  At the age of 22, Sen was offered the first professorship and headship of economics at the newly created Jadavpur University in Calcutta. He was still officially a PhD student at Cambridge, though his research was finished. He led the department from 1956 to 1958 and is still the youngest chairman to have headed it. Meanwhile Trinity elected him to a Prize Fellowship, which gave him four years to study any subject. He chose philosophy.

  Sen explained the choice with care. Social choice theory draws on mathematical logic and moral philosophy, he said, and so does the study of inequality and deprivation. He also simply found philosophy very rewarding. The interest went back to his days at Presidency, where he read philosophy and debated it. One book that gripped him there was Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values.

  Cambridge in those years was divided between supporters of Keynesian economics and neo-classical economists who were sceptical of Keynes. Neither Trinity nor the wider university showed much enthusiasm for social choice theory. So Sen wrote his PhD thesis on a different subject, titled The Choice of Techniques, in 1959. He revised the work while teaching at Jadavpur, with advice from an adjunct supervisor in India, A. K. Dasgupta. His main supervisor was the post-Keynesian Joan Robinson, described as "brilliant but vigorously intolerant". Quentin Skinner notes that Sen also belonged to the Cambridge Apostles, a secret society, during his Cambridge years.

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• 3. The Impossibility Results

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  Maurice Dobb's work on development planning ran alongside the thesis Sen wrote at Cambridge. Sen's study of the choice of techniques complemented it, and together they produced what is called the Dobb-Sen strategy. In a developing country, the strategy relied on maximising investible surpluses and holding real wages constant. Every gain in labour productivity from new technology would go into raising the rate of accumulation. Put plainly, workers were expected to ask for no improvement in their standard of living even as they became more productive.

  Kenneth Arrow, an American economist, had already shown something unsettling about voting. When voters face three or more distinct options, any ranked-order voting system will, in at least some situations, clash with what most people assume are basic democratic norms. Sen's papers in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped build the theory of social choice that grew from this result. His contribution was to show under what conditions Arrow's impossibility theorem applies. He also extended and enriched the theory, drawing on the history of economic thought and on philosophy. While teaching in Delhi, he completed his magnum opus, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, in 1969.

  In 1970, Sen published a paper titled "The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal". It introduced what is now called the liberal paradox, or Sen's paradox. The paradox shows that no method of combining individual preferences into one social choice can meet three mild-sounding conditions at once. These are unrestricted domain, the weak Pareto principle, and a minimal guarantee of individual rights.

  The Pareto principle says that if every individual prefers option A to option B, society should prefer A as well. Minimal liberalism says each person should have the deciding say in purely personal matters, such as what to read or how to dress.

  Sen illustrated the clash with two imagined people named Lewd and Prude, and a single book. Prude thinks the book is indecent and should be disposed of, unread. But if someone must read it, Prude would rather read it than watch Lewd read and enjoy it, which seems worse. A social planner must then choose among forcing Lewd to read, forcing Prude to read, or letting the book go unread. Giving each person the decisive say over their own reading produces cyclic collective preferences, which violate acyclicity, or transitivity, in the social ordering.

  The result exposes a conflict between individual rights and social efficiency. In 1981, Sen carried this concern for rights and distribution into a book about hunger.

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• 4. Famine and Missing Women

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  Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation appeared in 1981 with a claim that surprised many readers. Famine, Sen argued, comes not only from a lack of food. It also comes from inequalities built into the mechanisms that distribute food. He applied the idea to the Bengal famine. In his account, an urban economic boom raised food prices, and millions of rural workers starved to death because their wages did not keep up.

  In 1999 he sharpened the point into a single line: "No famine has ever taken place... in a functioning democracy".

  The United Nations Development Programme publishes an annual Human Development Report that ranks countries on a range of economic and social indicators. The report owes much to Sen's work on measuring poverty and inequality, together with that of other social choice theorists. His influence on development economics therefore reaches well beyond the academic journals.

  In 1990, The New York Review of Books carried a controversial article by Sen titled "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing". It analysed how unequal rights between the genders affected mortality in the developing world, particularly in Asia. Other studies, including one by Emily Oster, argued that the figure was an overestimate. Oster has since recanted her conclusions.

  Years later, Max Roser said that it was Sen's work that led him to create Our World in Data.

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• 5. Capability and Justice

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  In 1979, Sen published an article titled "Equality of What?", which introduced the concept of capability. He argued that governments should be measured against the concrete capabilities of their citizens. His reasoning was that top-down development will always trump human rights while the meaning of terms stays in doubt. Is a right something that must be provided, or something that simply cannot be taken away?

  The right to vote in the United States shows his point. To Sen, a bare right to vote is fairly empty. To be able to vote, a citizen first needs what he calls functionings. These range from the very broad, such as the availability of education, to the very specific, such as transportation to the polls. Only when those barriers are removed can a citizen truly be said to act from personal choice. Each society must draw up its own list of minimum capabilities. Martha Nussbaum's Women and Human Development shows the approach in practice.

  Sen witnessed violence as a child in the run-up to the Partition of India in 1947. One morning, a Muslim daily labourer named Kader Mia stumbled through the rear gate of Sen's family home, bleeding from a knife wound in his back. Extreme poverty had pushed him into a mostly Hindu neighbourhood in search of work. His choices were starvation for his family or the risk of death. The price of his economic unfreedom was his life, and the memory started Sen thinking about unfreedom at a young age.

  In 1999, Sen advanced the capability approach in his book Development as Freedom. Development, he argued, should be seen as an effort to widen the real freedoms people enjoy, rather than a matter of GDP or income per head. He described five kinds of freedom. Political freedoms give people a voice in government and the ability to scrutinise authorities. Economic facilities concern the resources available in the market and the market mechanism itself. Social opportunities cover institutions that provide healthcare and education. Transparency guarantees let people deal with one another with some trust and knowledge. Protective security is the network of safety nets that keeps people in poverty from sinking into terrible misery.

  Before Sen, such freedoms had been treated only as the ends of development, luxuries for countries that first raise incomes. Sen argued that they are both the ends and the means. He pointed to their links: a healthy and well-educated person is better placed to make informed economic decisions and to take part in political life. He called the supposed split between freedom and development, implied by the idea of Asian values, meaningless and disingenuous. To illustrate how the freedoms interlock, he compared China and India, noting that China had been working on its economy since 1979 and India since 1991.

  In 2009, Sen published The Idea of Justice, which drew on his welfare economics, his work on social choice and his philosophy. He offered it as an alternative to the influential theories of John Rawls and John Harsanyi. He also broke with earlier thinkers including Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume. Inspired by Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft, he built a theory that is comparative and focused on realisations, rather than transcendental and institutional. He still treats institutions and processes as equally important.

  Where Rawls used the veil of ignorance, Sen chose the thought experiment of an impartial spectator. He also stressed public discussion, understanding democracy in the sense of John Stuart Mill. His theory further relies on people's capabilities and on the idea of universal human rights. That emphasis on discussion would shape how he later spoke about politics in India.

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• 6. Posts and Presidencies

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  From 1963 to 1971, Sen was Professor of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, a stretch regarded as a Golden Period in the school's history. His companions there included Manmohan Singh, the economist who later became Prime Minister of India. They also included K. N. Raj, founder of the Centre for Development Studies in Trivandrum, and Jagdish Bhagwati, a leading figure in international trade who now teaches at Columbia University. Sen was also a frequent visitor to Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Indian Statistical Institute and other Indian centres of economics.

  During 1960-61, on a visiting professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sen got to know Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Franco Modigliani and Norbert Wiener. He later visited the University of California, Berkeley in 1964-65, and Cornell University from 1978 to 1984. In between, he held a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1957 to 1963.

  In 1971 he joined the London School of Economics as professor of economics and taught there until 1977. From 1977 he taught at the University of Oxford, first as professor of economics and fellow of Nuffield College. From 1980 he was the Drummond Professor of Political Economy and a fellow of All Souls College. In 1987 he joined Harvard as the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor.

  In 1998, Sen became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, the first Asian head of an Oxbridge college. In January 2004 he returned to Harvard. He had been president of the Econometric Society in 1984, the International Economic Association from 1989 back to 1986, the Indian Economic Association in 1989 and the American Economic Association in 1994.

  In May 2007, Sen was appointed chairman of the Nalanda Mentor Group, which was to plan Nalanda University. The new university was meant to revive the ancient educational centre of Nalanda mahavihara. On the 19th of July 2012, he was named the first chancellor of the proposed university.

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• 7. A Political Voice

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  On the 20th of February 2015, Sen withdrew his candidature for a second term as chancellor of Nalanda University. He said the Government of India was not keen on his continuing in the post. The project had been criticised for inordinate delays, mismanagement and a lack of faculty on the ground. Teaching finally began in August 2014.

  In April 2014, Sen said that Narendra Modi, then announced as the BJP's candidate for prime minister, would not make a good prime minister. In December 2014 he conceded that Modi did give people a sense of faith that things can happen. Sen later told an interview with The New York Times that fearmongering among the Indian people was anti-democratic. He cited John Stuart Mill: "The big thing that we know from John Stuart Mill is that democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes." He disagreed with Hindu nationalism and advocated a more integrated and diverse ideology reflecting the heterogeneity of India.

  In August 2019, during a clampdown and curfew in Kashmir that lasted more than two weeks, Sen criticised the government. He said: "As an Indian, I am not proud of the fact that India, after having done so much to achieve a democratic norm in the world , where India was the first non-Western country to go for democracy , that we lose that reputation on the grounds of action that have been taken". He called the detention of Kashmiri political leaders "a classical colonial excuse" and urged a democratic solution involving Kashmiri people.

  In a 1999 article in The Atlantic, Sen recommended a middle path for India. One extreme was the hard-knocks policy that creates wealth at the expense of civil liberties. The other was a radical progressivism that protects civil liberties at the expense of development. Rather than invent a new theory of ethical development for Asia, he sought to reform the current model.

  In a 2013 article for The New York Times, Sen set out why India trailed behind China in economic development. He urged healthcare reform, because low-income people in India face exploitative and inadequate private healthcare. He recommended that India adopt the education policies Japan used in the late 19th century. He conceded a tradeoff between democracy and progress in Asia, since democracy is a near reality in India and not in China.

  He has also added his voice to the campaign against Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which targeted gay people. In 2025, he warned that the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar could disenfranchise poor and marginalised people if documentation requirements were too strict.

  Some have called Sen "the Conscience of the profession" and "the Mother Teresa of Economics". He rejects the second comparison, saying that he has never tried to follow a lifestyle of dedicated self-sacrifice.

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• 8. Honours and Home

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  By his own count of recognitions, Sen has received over 90 honorary degrees from universities around the world. He received India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 1999. The German Publishers and Booksellers Association gave him the 2020 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. Other honours include the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science in 2017, the Princess of Asturias Award in 2021 and the International Rescue Committee Freedom Award in 2023. In 2019, the London School of Economics announced the creation of the Amartya Sen Chair in Inequality Studies.

  A 56-minute documentary, Amartya Sen: A Life Re-examined, directed by Suman Ghosh, details his life and work. A second documentary, titled The Argumentative Indian after one of Sen's own books, was released in 2017. A 2003 portrait of Sen hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London, and a 2001 portrait by Annabel Cullen is in the collection of Trinity College. In 2022 he published a photo book, Around the World in Fifty Shots.

  Sen has been married three times. His first wife was Nabaneeta Dev Sen, an Indian writer and scholar. They had two daughters, Antara, a journalist and publisher, and Nandana, a Bollywood actress. The marriage broke up shortly after they moved to London in 1971. In 1978 he married Eva Colorni, an Italian economist who was the daughter of Eugenio Colorni and Ursula Hirschmann and the niece of Albert O. Hirschman. They had a daughter, Indrani, 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. That year Sen co-founded the Eva Colorni Trust at the former London Guildhall University in her memory. In 1991 he married Emma Georgina Rothschild, who is the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University.

  The couple have a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from which they teach during the academic year. They also have a home in Cambridge, England, where Sen is a Fellow of Trinity College and Rothschild is a Fellow of Magdalene College. He usually spends his winter holidays at his home in Shantiniketan, where he used to go on long bike rides until recently.

  Sen is an atheist. He has pointed to Madhava Acharya, a remarkable 14th century philosopher whose book Sarvadarshansamgraha surveys the religious schools of thought within the Hindu structure. Its first chapter, Sen noted, is "Atheism", a very strong presentation of the argument for atheism and materialism.

  Asked how he relaxes, he answers: "I read a lot and like arguing with people."

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