Marking a change

SYLVIA NASAR

AMARTYA SEN has won the Nobel Prize for his work on human rights, poverty and inequality that has changed the way governments deal with famines and for what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said had "restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economics problems."

Just a decade ago, a member of the economics prize committee of the Swedish Academy confidently predicted that "Sen will never get the prize." Sen's unfashionable concerns with values and his equally unfashionable style (highly influential, but wide-ranging, diffuse, lacking a single killer theorem) seemed out of step with the value-free, specialised approach that the economics profession places emphasis on.

However, times have changed, including inside the secretive Swedish Academy that administers the economics prize. The economics prize was created in 1969 and has grown increasingly controversial within the Academy, which is dominated by hard scientists. In a seismic, yet, unannounced shift three years ago, the Academy, reacting to internal criticism over the quality of past and prospective recipients, essentially broadened the economics prize into a social science prize encompassing contributions to political science, psychology and sociology. At the same time, in a sweeping rule change, the Academy also purged the prize committee of the generation that had controlled the prize since its inception and demanded that non-economists be included in the seven-member committee.

A WIDE-RANGING scholar who has sometimes been criticised for spreading himself too thin, Amartya Sen has always responded by decrying the narrowness of modern economics and by asserting that juggling many balls badly is better than displaying virtuosity with one ball.

Amartya Sen's contributions to welfare economics, the basic theory of how societies make choices that are both fair and efficient, have become part of every graduate student's training in economic theory. His critiques of economic concepts that were once taken for granted are among the most quoted in economics, including his essay 'Rational Fools' in which he takes on the classical presumption that people are motivated primarily by self-interest. However, Amartya Sen is best known for his work on the causes of famine, on inequality and on the measurement of poverty - work that many believe has saved a large number of lives.

Amartya Sen's 1981 book Poverty and Famine (Oxford University Press) influenced the way international organisations and governments deal with food crises. He showed that famine was not just a consequence of nature, but an avoidable economic and political catastrophe. Drought and flood often precede starvation, but declines in food production rarely account for it. Typically, even if many thousands of people die, there is enough food in the country to go around or enough money to import it.

Disaster strikes, Sen found, when the poorest people can no longer afford to buy food because they lose their jobs or because food prices soar. In the great Bengal famine, in which three million people perished, India's food supplies were not unusually low. Colonial rulers, immune to democratic pressures, simply stood by.

Partly because of Amartya Sen's finding, governments now focus less on direct distribution of food and more on replacing the lost income of the poor, through, for example, public works projects.

Amartya Sen's theoretical work on inequality shows that all commonly accepted measures of inequality involve hidden, sometimes surprising value judgments. One of the most dramatic insights to grow out of his research was the devastating consequence of inequality between men and women. Demographers have long been aware that there were fewer women than men in some poor countries, instead of more as in most of the developed world. And economists, including Amartya Sen, have documented that girls and women got less food and medical care than men and boys. However, nobody had calculated how many more women would have been alive if the ratio of men and women more closely resembled that of other countries. Amartya Sen came up with the startling figure of 100 million 'missing' women, most of them in India and China, killed as it were by discrimination.

JEFF CHRISTENSEN/REUTERS
Sen with daughter Indrani and son Kabir in New York on October 14, after receiving news of the award.

The questions that he has asked in the course of his career, listed by the Academy in its press announcement and often posed in dense, mathematically demanding treatises, convey the flavour of his work. How can societies make majority decisions without infringing the rights of dissenting minorities? What measures of inequality are meaningful? How can we decide whether poverty is declining or increasing? What causes famines?

The questions go back a long way. As a child, during the Bengal famine of 1943, Sen handed out cigarette tins of rice to starving refugees as they passed his grandfather's house. The grandfather, a scholar, engaged the boy in hours of serious discussion on his beliefs about life. As a teenager, Amartya Sen considered becoming a Buddhist, but turned to economics, mathematics and philosophy instead.

At Cambridge in the 1950s, his teacher, the economist Joan Robinson, urged him to forget all that "ethics rubbish", but Sen did the opposite. "Amartya has thought more deeply than anyone about the nature of the judgments we make about economic welfare," said the Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, a lifelong friend. "What do we mean when we say that some group is better off?"

For all his moral and intellectual concerns, Sen is remarkably down to earth. His wife, Emma Rothschild, an Oxford economic historian who has just completed a book on 19th century economic thought, talks about his "great big laugh", his fondness for good wine and conversation, and his devotion to his friends and family.

Amartya Sen will receive his prize, which includes a cheque of about $964,000 in Stockholm on December 10.

New York Times Service

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