Times Of India
Thursday 15 October 1998

Sen & Sensibility

It is a matter of great pride for the entire nation that Prof Amartya Sen has been awarded the Nobel Prize for economics. He is the sixth Indian to be honoured with a Nobel. As a pioneer explorer of the man-made geography of hunger, his achievement will inspire generations of Indians to strive for greater levels of excellence. Prof Sen's distinctiveness as an economist rests on the fact that he has ranged far and wide over the vast terrain covered under the rubric of economics. His diversity not only embraced different areas of economics but also bridged what, for most practitioners of the science, is an unbridgeable chasm -- that between the theoretical and the practical, combining empirical work with policy orientation. His contribution has been substantive to all the areas he has touched upon: social choice, definitions of poverty and welfare indices, causes of famine, and most importantly, the restatement of what indeed is development. Recognition of his outstanding insights to the science of economics has come in the form of a Nobel prize. Long anticipated by fellow economists, it is surprising that the deserved international honour has taken so long to come his way. Prof Sen concentrated on grassroot issues right from the start. He wrote on the choice of techniques within agriculture in a populous economy. Subsequently, he brought a much higher normative content to welfare economics, the field chosen by the Nobel committee for this year's award. His engagement with welfare economics dates back to his years as a doctoral student in Cambridge, where his mentors were Joan Robinson and Maurice Dobb, both of whom had a deep distrust of `received' economic mainstream (neo- classical) theory with its exclusive focus on the market mechanisms.
However, Prof Sen was not totally swayed by any anti-market philosophy. He acknowledged the information processing role of the market, but also started looking deeply into issues wherever he felt that people were being bypassed by the market. Such bypassing was inevitable under conditions where people lacked education, suffered from ill-health, or were discriminated against. Prof Sen studied this social underclass and its neglect by the state and society. That laid the foundations for his interest in the welfare aspects of the theory and philosophy of justice. Prof Sen's seminal contribution was in the area of squaring individual preferences with the collective good. Prof Sen re-worked the assumptions of rationality to include moral constructs in order to enable the squaring individual choices with the imperatives of social justice in a democracy. His later work showed that lack of capabilities and opportunities are responsible for poverty and hunger. His work on famines showed that it was not so much shortage of food as a set of social and economic conditions which deprived people of purchasing power and left them vulnerable to famines. He has carried forward the implications of this finding in his more recent work on development, and passionately advocated enhanced investment in health, education and the creation of opportunities. Above all, Prof Sen deserves the accolade for giving the `dismal science' of economics the humanist face of a universal moral philosophy.