Cover Story: The Conscience of Economics

Young Sen with parents and sister Suparna

Sen, who proudly wears his Indian citizenship on his sleeve, was born into a scholastic tradition. His maternal grandfather Acharya Kshitimohan Sen was a venerable Sanskrit scholar who assisted Tagore in his office work at Santiniketan. Sen's father, Ashutosh, was an agro-scientist who headed the state's Public Service Commission. To pedigree was added lived experience. As a 10-year-old boy, Sen saw -- from the safety of the ancestral home in Dhaka -- the 1943 Bengal famine, a man-made catastrophe in which five million died. That childhood experience made a difference. Sen reminisced, in an interview in 1986, of dying beggars clamouring for "a few drops of rice starch". The experience, like an ulcer on the membrane of memory, stayed on, and perhaps drove him on a life-long quest for the tools to measure the underlying reasons of food, educational and gender-related deprivations.

SENOLOGY

"The fact that economics is also concerned with the poor, the downtrodden, the underdogs of society is something that is very close to my heart."

"I know of no one who was affected by the famine ... no relation, no friend, no one I ever associated with. That, to me, was a great insight later, I thought, though I didn't see it at that time. I just thought we were lucky."
(On the 1943 Bengal famine.)

"The economies that have been most successful in the recent development of world trade, namely Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and now China, have all been very oriented towards education. Unfortunately in India, education is still a neglected and under-appreciated value."

"It is not a question of more or less government but what kind of government."

"I take the view that globalisation is ultimately a major force for good, and indeed, if adequately backed by national policies, it can be a major force of prosperity in the world."

As a schoolboy in Santiniketan, Sen dreamt variously of becoming a Sanskrit scholar and a physicist. But when he entered Calcutta's Presidency College, after topping the intermediate exam, he was in no doubt about his true calling -- economics. Says Tapas Majumdar, former JNU professor and Sen's teacher in Presidency College: "What struck us all in those days was Amartya's unusual and un-student-like ability to enter into serious academic debates." Majumdar recalls that at a tutorial, when the Malthusian population theory -- that population grows faster than the availability of food -- was the topic of discussion, 18-year-old Sen stood up to ask if nature had a "bias" against food because, unlike the animal kingdom, agricultural crop couldn't independently replicate itself. It was arguably not the query expected from a teenager.

The wonder kid of the '50s Presidency College has grown, over the decades, into a consummate scholar. His forays into philosophy are well known. Mind, the authoritative US journal of philosophy, has published his paper on rationality and justice. In Oxford, the late philosopher Bimal Krishna Matilal was among his best friends. Sen still takes time off to brush up on his Sanskrit classics, Tagore and even the latest Bengali pulp fiction appearing in the puja annuals. Some years ago, his articles on Tagore's essays and paintings in the New York Review of Books were well received. They reinforced Sen's amazing versatility. Indeed, Sen has revived the fading tradition of the economist being more than a mere number cruncher. He belongs to the tradition of Adam Smith, Marx, Keynes and even Hayek.

Not given to ostentation, Sen is cautious about money. A prudent investor, he has moved to Britain but has retained his house in Harvard, which he visits every few weeks. At Cambridge, he uses a decent Ford Taurus -- no BMW, thank you -- and keeps an impressive wine cellar. However, Sen's personal life has been less settled. He went through a painful divorce from Nabanita Dev, his first wife and litterateur, to marry Eva Colorni, the ex-wife of a DSE colleague. After Eva's death, he married Emma Rothschild, a member of the famous clan, who teaches philosophy at Cambridge. He was also a close companion of American philosopher Martha Nusbaum. He is the father of four cross-cultural children, all of them carrying Indian names: Antara, Nandana, Indrani and Kabir.

As a family man, Sen has remained 'other worldly' though he maintains relations with his long 'ex' file and is warm and supportive of the children. As an economist, he is venerable but not so proactive as some of his younger former Harvard colleagues. At a ripe 65, and after the climactic finale with the Nobel, Sen can only mellow into a philosopher in the classical mould, testing on the crucible of logic some of the eternal issues like justice and equality.

SEN'S WORK

Social Choice: Amartya Sen's seminal work, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, published in 1970, offered an answer to US economist Kenneth Arrow's "impossibility theorem". Arrow argued that it is impossible to devise a voting system with an outcome which is both rational and egalitarian. If it was rational, allowing full harmonisation of individual preferences, it may well be dictatorial and, therefore, not egalitarian. Sen alleviated this pessimism, showing that there are grey areas in individual and group choices. He even attempted to quantify these subtle deviations from the straight and narrow. While Arrow had, in effect, said farewell to democracy, Sen indicated that the case for democracy wasn't lost and that there was a lot of middle ground in the analyses of choice.

Sen's Collective Choice, and his later works on the subject, notably a philosophical exercise on rationality and justice, published in Mind, the authoritative American philosophical journal, added a new dimension to the work of philosopher John Rawls, who criticised utilitarians for subordinating individual claims to the overriding demands of the general good. Sen enhanced the argument, establishing, among other things, that individuals transact better among themselves when they are better informed about each other. This is only possible in a democracy.

Welfare Indices: Inequality in an economy cannot be measured without a proper yardstick. Sen, in his 1973 work, On Economic Inequality, provided the tools. While the poverty line is a common measure of the share of population below a tolerable standard of living, Sen claimed that it ignores the levels of deprivation among the poor. The people below the poverty line don't shrink much even if the poorest get a better deal. Sen devised a new formula for poverty indexation, based on income inequality of people below the poverty line. This formula, called the Sen Index, is now a standard tool for calculating the Human Development Index (HDI), used by the late Mahbub-ul Haq, a Pakistani economist.

Famine: In the early '80s, Satyajit Ray made Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder), a film about the 1943 Bengal famine which he showed as man-made, caused more by the war hysteria and the consequent hoarding instinct than actual production shortfall. Around the same time, in 1981, Sen published his milestone work, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. It went to the extent of showing that famines are the result of maldistribution rather than food shortage, and that famine-stricken areas have even exported food.

Social Opportunity: The argument of Sen's most recent concern runs like this: even well-functioning markets cannot take care of the problems posed by a shortfall in "human capabilities". These are caused by inadequate basic education, a low level of health services, poor ownership patterns, skewed social stratification and gaping gender inequalities. The other argument is that these variations in social opportunities can be reduced by more political protest and opposition. India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, the book that Sen co-authored in 1995 with Belgian economist Jean Dreze, is a strong activist text.