1. In 1998, Amartya Sen received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics.
59 Facts About Amartya Sen
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Amartya Sen has made major scholarly contributions to social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, decision theory, development economics, public health, and the measures of well-being of countries.
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Amartya Sen previously served as Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.
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Amartya Sen was born on 3 November 1933 in a Bengali family in Santiniketan, Bengal, British India.
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Amartya Sen's family was from Wari and Manikganj, Dhaka, both in present-day Bangladesh.
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Amartya Sen's father, Ashutosh Sen, was a Professor of Chemistry at Dhaka University, then the Development Commissioner in Delhi and then Chairman of the West Bengal Public Service Commission.
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Amartya Sen served as the second Vice-Chancellor of Visva Bharati University from 1953 to 1954.
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Amartya Sen began his school education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka in 1940.
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Amartya Sen served in that position, starting the new Economics Department, from 1956 to 1958.
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Meanwhile, Amartya Sen was elected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, which gave him four years to study any subject; he made the decision to study philosophy.
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Dasgupta, given to Amartya Sen while teaching and revising his work at Jadavpur, under the supervision of the "brilliant but vigorously intolerant" post-Keynesian Joan Robinson.
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Quentin Skinner notes that Amartya Sen was a member of the secret society Cambridge Apostles during his time at Cambridge.
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Amartya Sen argued that the Bengal famine was caused by an urban economic boom that raised food prices, thereby causing millions of rural workers to starve to death when their wages did not keep up.
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Amartya Sen argues that governments should be measured against the concrete capabilities of their citizens.
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Amartya Sen wrote a controversial article in The New York Review of Books entitled "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing", analysing the mortality impact of unequal rights between the genders in the developing world, particularly Asia.
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Amartya Sen argued that development should be viewed as an effort to advance the real freedoms that individuals enjoy, rather than simply focusing on metrics such as GDP or income-per-capita.
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Amartya Sen was inspired by violent acts he had witnessed as a child leading up to the Partition of India in 1947.
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In Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen outlined five specific types of freedoms: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security.
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Development encompassing non-economic areas, Amartya Sen argues, renders the notion of a dichotomy between "freedom" and "development," as implied by the concept of Asian values, meaningless and disingenuous.
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However, Amartya Sen argued that the increase in real freedoms should be both the ends and the means of development.
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In 2009, Amartya Sen published a book called The Idea of Justice.
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In opposition to Rawls but earlier justice theoreticians Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau or David Hume, and inspired by the philosophical works of Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft, Amartya Sen developed a theory that is both comparative and realisations-oriented.
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Amartya Sen stressed the importance of public discussion and a focus on people's capabilities, including the notion of universal human rights, in evaluating various states with regard to justice.
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Amartya Sen began his career both as a teacher and a research scholar in the Department of Economics, Jadavpur University as a professor of economics in 1956.
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From 1957 to 1963, Amartya Sen served as a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
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Between 1960 and 1961, Amartya Sen was a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, where he got to know Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Franco Modigliani, and Norbert Wiener.
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Amartya Sen was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley and Cornell University.
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Amartya Sen taught as Professor of Economics between 1963 and 1971 at the Delhi School of Economics.
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In 1985, Amartya Sen co-founded the Eva Colorni Trust at the former London Guildhall University in memory of his deceased wife.
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In 1987, Sen joined Harvard as the Thomas W Lamont University Professor of Economics.
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Amartya Sen chaired the Social Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2009 to 2011, and the Humanities jury from 2012 to 2018.
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On 19 July 2012, Amartya Sen was named the first chancellor of the proposed Nalanda University.
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Amartya Sen was criticised as the project suffered due to inordinate delays, mismanagement, and lack of presence of faculty on ground.
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On 20 February 2015, Amartya Sen withdrew his candidature for a second term.
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Amartya Sen has served as president of the Econometric Society, the International Economic Association, the Indian Economic Association and the American Economic Association.
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Amartya Sen has served as president of the Development Studies Association and the Human Development and Capability Association.
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Amartya Sen serves as the honorary director of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Human and Economic Development Studies at Peking University in China.
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Amartya Sen has been called "the Conscience of the profession" and "the Mother Teresa of Economics" for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare economics, the underlying mechanisms of poverty, gender inequality, and political liberalism.
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Amartya Sen added his voice to the campaign against the anti-gay Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.
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Amartya Sen has served as Honorary Chairman of Oxfam, the UK based international development charity, and is its Honorary Advisor.
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Amartya Sen is a member of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council.
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Amartya Sen is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge.
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Amartya Sen is one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders.
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Amartya Sen unveiled the cover of Sruti Gitobitan, a Rabindrasangeet album comprising all the 2222 Tagore songs, brought out by Rezwana Chowdhury Bannya, principal of Shurer Dhara School of Music.
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Max Roser said that it was the work of Amartya Sen that made him create Our World in Data.
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Amartya Sen was critical of Narendra Modi when he was announced as the prime ministerial candidate for the BJP.
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Amartya Sen conceded later in December 2014 that Modi did give people a sense of faith that things can happen.
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In February 2015, Amartya Sen opted out of seeking a second term for the chancellor post of Nalanda University, stating that the Government of India was not keen on him continuing in the post.
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Amartya Sen regarded the detention of Kashmiri political leaders as "a classical colonial excuse" to prevent backlash against the Indian government's decision and called for a democratic solution that would involve Kashmiri people.
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Amartya Sen has spent much of his later life as a political writer and activist.
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Amartya Sen has been outspoken about Narendra Modi's leadership in India.
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Amartya Sen wrote an article for The New York Times in 2013 documenting the reasons why India trailed behind China in economic development.
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Amartya Sen advocated for healthcare reform, because low-income people in India have to deal with exploitative and inadequate private healthcare.
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Amartya Sen recommended that India implement the same education policies that Japan did in the late 19th century.
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Rather than create an entirely new theory for ethical development in Asia, Amartya Sen sought to reform the current development model.
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In 1978 Amartya Sen married Eva Colorni, an Italian economist, daughter of Eugenio Colorni and Ursula Hirschmann and niece of Albert O Hirschman.
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In 1991, Amartya Sen married Emma Georgina Rothschild, who serves as the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University.
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Amartya Sen usually spends his winter holidays at his home in Shantiniketan in West Bengal, India, where he used to go on long bike rides until recently.
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Amartya Sen has received over 90 honorary degrees from universities around the world.