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Amartya K. Sen, 1933-
It may be a slight exaggeration to claim that "Welfare Economics" is but a synonym for Amartya Sen, but few economists have taken that field as far, as seriously and as profoundly as Sen. A perennial Nobel Prize candidate (he has been winning straw polls among economists for several years running - and finally won the Nobel in 1998), Sen is one of the few modern academics that has commanded much respect and recognition from all corners of the intellectual spectrum.
Born in Dhaka (then British Bengal), Amartya K. Sen studied at Presidency College, Calcutta, and subsequently Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a student of Joan Robinson, receiving his Ph.D. in 1959. Sen taught at Delhi University in India from 1963, but eventually returned to Britain in 1971, to join the faculty at LSE. In 1977 he moved up to Oxford, becoming Drummond Professor in 1980. In 1988, Sen moved to the United States to take a position as professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard. He returned to the UK in 1998, as master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Sen returned to Harvard in 2004.
Amartya Sen quickly transcended his Cambridge School roots to simultaneously embrace social choice theory and economic development - breaking the barrier between mathematized "high theory" and "real-world" economics. It was a logical marriage for Sen: the peasants and rural households which he studied have economic modes of behavior which often contradict the postulates of the "rational hedonist" that dominate economic theory. In particular, certain collective enterprises (e.g. during harvest season) often contradict individual rationality. In this line, Sen exploited game-theoretic notions to account for such collective behavior. Nonetheless, the problem Sen identified through his research is the common assumption in welfare economics of incomparable interpersonal utilities. His famous 1970 treatise, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, finds that this is indeed the keystone in the famous "Arrow Impossibility Theorem". Without it, Sen argued, the theorem can fall; with it, the theorem is vacuous. In another famous work (1970), Sen turned his methodological sights on the the Pareto-Optimality criteria - arguing that the assumption of Pareto-optimality in welfare theory was not value-neutral but rather contradicted the old J.S. Mill notion of "liberalism" as the Paretian criteria has no safeguards for "personal space".
Sen was no detached thinker, however. In 1972, Sen co-authored a famous UN guideline for development project evaluation which has proven invaluable for many organizations. His work on poverty, which has included innumerable theoretical insights, has also proved fruitful in application. Sen's celebrated 1981 study on famines, drawing on his research as well as his personal experience of the 1943 Bengal famine, put the blame squarely on distribution rather than food shortages. Sen continued to work on a variety of issues related to poverty, becoming one of the foremost scholars of the bottom quintiles of the population.
Sen's approach to development theory has emphasized the importance of political institutions, inequality, education and health as critical factors that need to be addressed not only in combination with economic development policy, but as a prelude and necessary conditions for their success.
Amartya K. Sen combined his work on philosophy and poverty in his Development and Freedom (1998). Sen proposes a new "capability approach" to understand the concept of individual and social welfare, going beyond the simplistic utilitaranism of conventional theory, to consider what people are actually capable of doing and achieving, thus providing a basis for a more subtle and useful understanding of equality and justice.
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