Sen, Amartya Kumar (1933-…), an Indian economist, challenged the accepted idea that the main reason for famines was shortages of food. He became the first Asian winner of the Nobel Prize for economic sciences when he was awarded the prize in 1998 for his work on welfare economics, famine, and poverty.
Sen’s work made fundamental contributions to problems of welfare economics. In particular, he advanced thinking on how to balance collective decision-making and individual rights. He developed nonfinancial ways of measuring poverty, such as human rights and access to education and health facilities. These ways of measuring (known as the Sen index) are used by the United Nations in its work with developing countries.
Sen’s best-known book is Poverty and Famines (1981). This book shows that famines may be caused by factors other than food shortages, such as declining incomes and changes in the distribution of wealth. Sen showed that famine-stricken areas have sometimes exported food, and at other times the supply of food was the same as in years when there was no famine. His later work looks at how to prevent famine and how to limit its effects. Sen argued that even well-regulated markets cannot take care of other human problems that cause inequalities, such as inadequate education and a low level of health care. He argued for more political protest to reduce these inequalities.
Born in Santiniketan, Bengal, Amartya Sen received his Ph.D. in economics from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom in 1959. He taught in universities in India, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In 1996, Sen became the first non-American president of the American Economic Association, a professional organization for economists. In 1998, he gave up the professorship of economics and philosophy at Harvard University to become the first non-British master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
