Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen
Amartya Kumar Senis an Indian economist and philosopher of Bengali ethnicity, who since 1972 has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, and indexes of the measure of well-being of citizens of developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and Bharat Ratna in 1999 for his work in welfare economics. He...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth3 November 1933
CountryIndia
Amartya Sen quotes about
You have to be interested in inequality. The issue of inequality and that of poverty are not separable.
Human life depends not only on income but also on social opportunities, [for example] what the state does for educating.
Anything that increases the voice of young women tends therefore to reduce the fertility rate.
Violence is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.
[Globalization] has enriched the world scientifically and culturally and benefited many people economically as well.
If the government is vulnerable to public opinion, then famines are a dreadfully bad thing to have. You can’t win many elections after a famine, and you don’t like being criticized by newspapers, opposition parties in parliament, and so on. Democracy gives the government an immediate political incentive to act.
While I am interested both in economics and in philosophy, the union of my interests in the two fields far exceeds their intersection.
No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.
The elimination of ignorance, of illiteracy... and of needless inequalities in opportunities (is) to be seen as objectives that are valued for their own sake. They expand our freedom to lead the lives we have reason to value, and these elementary capabilities are of importance on their own
It is important to reclaim for humanity the ground that has been taken from it by various arbitrarily narrow formulations of the demands of rationality
It’s very easy to capture pictures of jubilant people in the street after the nuclear bomb. But there were no pictures of morose people sitting in their kitchens and living rooms.
If a theory of justice is to guide reasoned choice of policies, strategies or institutions, then the identification of fully just social arrangements is neither necessary nor sufficient.
The governments and the hard-headed military establishment and the general conservative part of America have never taken much interest in democracy, anyway.
Development cannot really be so centered only on those in power.