Amartya Sen

An analysis of the problem of hunger in the modern world and of the role that public action can play in combating it. It is aimed at economists, social scientists and all those concerned with the management of food and health resources.

Two of India's leading economists argue that, despite economic development, there must be a greater understanding of inequalities in India. - When India became independent in 1947 after two centuries of colonial subjugation, it immediately - and quite successfully - adopted a firmly democratic political system, with multiple parties, freedom of speech and extensive political rights. The famines that had been so common in colonial days disappeared, and steady economic growth replaced the almost complete stagnation characteristic of the long rule of the Raj. The growth of the Indian economy, which quickened over the last three decades, became the second fastest in the world. Despite a recent dip, it is still one of the highest among nations. Maintaining rapid as well as environmentally sustainable growth remains an important and achieveable goal for India. In An Uncertain Glory, two of India's leading economists argue that the country's main problems lie elsewhere, particularly in the lack of attention paid to the essential needs of the people, especially the poor. The deep inequalities in Indian society tend to constrict public discussion in India's vibrant media to the lives and concerns of the relatively affluent.One of the biggest failures has been the very inadequate use of the public resources generated by economic growth to expand India's lagging physical and social infrastructure (in sharp contrast, for example, to what China has done): there is a continued inadequacy both of social services such as schooling, medical care and immunization, and of physical services such as the provision of safe water, electricity, drainage and sanitation. Even as India has overtaken a large number of other countries in the rate of economic growth, it has, because of these inadequacies, fallen behind many of the same countries - often very poor ones - in the progress of quality of life. Because of the importance of democracy in India, addressing these failures will require not only significant policy rethinking by the government, but also a better public understanding of the abysmal extent of these social and economic deprivations. This book makes a powerful contribution to that understanding.

On Satyajit Ray, his motion pictures, and Asian civilization.

Recent acts of terrorism and the current unrest in the Middle East remind us how important it is to understand the relationship between violence, peace and democracy. In a challenging and insightful essay, Amartya Sen explores ideas around 'organised violence' (such as war, genocide and terrorism) and violence against the individual. Highlighting the inadequacies of some of the widely accepted explanations for violence—including the idea that the world is experiencing a 'clash of civilisations'—Sen makes a plea for a global, multilateral debate on the causes of conflict, and an understanding of the multiple identities of the individuals involved. The introductory essay draws on the findings of the Commonwealth Commission on Respect and Understanding, which was chaired by Sen, and established to promote mutual communication and understanding among all faiths and communities in the Commonwealth. Its timely report, "Civil Paths to Peace", suggests that governments, media and educators—indeed, everyone—must take the time to understand the complexities around violent behaviour and its causes, without prejudging what these might be.

This volume brings together leading public intellectuals Amartya Sen, Martha C. Nussbaum, François Bourguignon, William J. Wilson, Douglas S. Massey, and Martha A. Fineman to take stock of current analytic understandings of poverty and inequality. Contemporary research on inequality has largely relied on conceptual advances several decades old, even though the basic structure of global inequality is changing in fundamental ways. The reliance on conventional poverty indices, rights-based approaches to poverty reduction, and traditional modeling of social mobility has left scholars and policymakers poorly equipped to address modern challenges. The contributors show how contemporary poverty is forged in neighborhoods, argue that discrimination in housing markets is a profound source of poverty, suggest that gender inequalities in the family and in the social evaluation of the caretaking role remain a hidden dimension of inequality, and develop the argument that contemporary inequality is best understood as an inequality in fundamental human capabilities. This book demonstrates in manifold ways how contemporary scholarship and policy must be recast to make sense of new and emerging forms of poverty and social exclusion.

Development as Freedom is a 1999 book about international development by Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen. The American edition of the book was published by Alfred A. Knopf. (Source: [Wikipedia](

"Can the values which individual members of society attach to different alternatives be aggregated into values for society as a whole, in a way that is both fair and theoretically sound? Is the majority principle a workable rule for making decisions? How should income inequality be measured? When and how can we compare the distribution of welfare in different societies?" So reads the 1998 Nobel citation by the Swedish Academy, acknowledging Amartya Sen's important contributions in welfare economics and particularly his work in Collective Choice and Social Welfare. Originally published in 1970, this classic study has been recognized for its groundbreaking role in integrating economics and ethics, and for its influence in opening up new areas of research in social choice, including aggregative assessment. It has also had a large influence on international organizations, including the United Nations, notably in its work on human development. The book showed that the "impossibility theorems" in social choice theory--led by the pioneering work of Kenneth Arrow--do not negate the possibility of reasoned and democratic social choice. Sen's ideas about social choice, welfare economics, inequality, poverty, and human rights have continued to evolve since the book's first appearance. This expanded edition preserves the text of the original while presenting eleven new chapters of fresh arguments and results. Both the new and original chapters alternate between nonmathematical treatments of Sen's subjects, accessible to all, and mathematical arguments and proofs. A new introduction gives a far-reaching, up-to-date overview of the subject of social choice.--