Amartya Sen

Independent University | IUB · Computer Science

János Kornai a décidé de devenir économiste après avoir lu Das Kapital de Karl Marx. Sa relation avec cet auteur n’était pas seulement politique, mais aussi professionnelle. Kornai avait certes « rompu avec le marxisme » en 1956, mais sans pour autant rompre avec la pensée de Marx. Après 1956, ses travaux peuvent être examinés à la lumière des idée...

Janos Kornai chose to become an economist after reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Kornai’s relation with Marx is not merely political, but also professional. Kornai “broke with Marxism” in 1956, but his relationship with Marx’s thoughts were not severed then. Kornai’s post-1956 works can be examined in the light of Marx’s ideas, dealing particularly...

This conversation between Nobel Laureates Amartya Sen and Angus Deaton, moderated by Annual Review of Economics Editorial Committee Member Tim Besley, focuses on bringing ethical issues into economics, and the implications that this has for the practice and teaching of economics. A video of this interview is available online at https://www.annualre...

Kotaro Suzumura can be seen as the most complete social choice theorist the subject has ever had. No area of social choice has failed to benefit from Suzumura's penetrating analyses. Among the many important contributions made by Suzumura is the use of the idea of incompleteness of evaluation in his analysis of consistency, particularly in the form...

The article is the opening address at the Conference “Albert Hirschman scienziato sociale” held in Rome on the 6th May 2014 at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and at the presence of the President of Italian Republic, Sen. Giorgio Napolitano. A previous version of this article was published in Italian and available on line on Moneta e Credito, 20...

The articles included in this symposium on my book The Idea of Justice cover a wide variety of issues, which is not surprising since my book too addresses a number of distinct problems, reflecting very different concerns connected with the idea of justice. In my response I have discussed each article individually. While most of the authors have bee...

This paper discusses the relationship between justice and identity. While it is widely agreed that justice requires us to go beyond loyalty to our simplest identity – being just oneself – there is less common ground on how far we must go beyond self-centredness. How relevant are group identities to the requirements of justice, or must we transcend...

The great poet and novelist Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) once remarked that he was extremely sad that he was not alive when Gautama Buddha was still around. Tagore very much wished he could have had conversations with Buddha. I share that sentiment, but, like Rabindranath, I am also immensely grateful that, even now, we can enjoy - and learn fro...

The idea of ‘sustainability’ received serious attention in the so-called Brundtland Commission Report that has many attractive features. In particular, it highlighted the importance of intergenerational justice while maintaining a concern for the poor of each generation and shifted the focus away from resources to human beings. I argue that this wa...

This article is based on a talk given in honour of Maurice Salles at the University of Caen on 10th June 2009. Among other subjects, the essay discusses the relevance of social choice theory for political philosophy in general and for the theory of justice in particular – a subject in which Salles has had a long-standing interest and involvement. M...

We live in a world in which the idea of human rights is persistently invoked. However, despite the tremendous appeal of the idea of human rights, it is also seen by many as lacking in foundation. I have argued, particularly in my book The Idea of Justice, that human rights are best seen as articulations of commitments in social ethics, comparable t...

Kenneth Arrow founded the modern form of social choice theory in a path-breaking contribution at the middle of the twentieth century. The editors of the Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare other than Arrow begin this final volume by noting the continuing need to read Arrow's decisive contribution in his epoch-making book Social Choice and Individ...

The social engagement on which Buchanan has placed his focus is particularly important to bear in mind in solving the problems that the world faces today. Whether we are concerned with global warming or other environmental challenges, or with crippling unemployment and a stalled economy, the need for interactive public reasoning has never been stro...

Words have meanings, often more than one. Many words also have evocative power and communicative reach. It is important to look beyond the legal route in making human rights more effective, and to endorse but proceed beyond human rights being seen as motivation only for legislation (the particular connection on which Herbert Hart commented). Within...

With his Nobel Prize award money, Amartya Sen set up the Pratichi Trust which carries out research, advocacy and experimental projects in basic education, primary health care, and women’s development in West Bengal and Bangladesh. Professor Sen himself took active interest in this work—helping set the agenda, looking at the evidence from research,...

Mismeasuring Our Lives is the result of this major intellectual effort, containing pressing relevance for anonyme engaged in assessing how and whether our economy is serving the needs of our society. The authors offer a sweeping assessment of GDP's limitations as a measurement of the well-being of societies and introduce a bold array of new concept...

Incl. bibl.

In February 2008, the President of the French Republic, Nicholas Sarkozy, unsatisfied with the present state of statistical information about the economy and the society, asked, Joseph Stiglitz (President of the Commission), Amartya Sen (Advisor) and Jean Paul Fitoussi (Coordinator) to create a Commission, subsequently called "The Commission on the...

Nous voulons faire du PIB la mesure de toute chose -performance, bien-être, qualité de la vie, alors qu'il ne représente qu'une mesure de l'activité économiques marchande.Il est possible au contraire de construire des mesures fiables des déterminants matériels du bien-être, de la répartition des revenus, de la qualité de la vie, de la durabilité de...

Commission pour la mesure des performances économiques et du progrès social (France)

Los argumentos políticos y sociales a menudo recurren a reivindicaciones morales basadas en derechos intrínsecamente valiosos. Hace ya muchísimo tiempo que se invocan los derechos relacionados con la propiedad. Pero existen también otrostipos de derechos que han sido considerados como "innatos e inalienables", y la Declaración de Independencia de l...

No abstract provided. Economics Version of Record

This chapter presents the book Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare in two volumes, essays on past and on-going work in social choice theory and welfare economics. The first volume consists of four parts. In Part 1 (Arrovian Impossibility Theorems), various aspects of Arrovian general impossibility theorems, illustrated by the simple majority cycl...

Any procedure of social choice makes use of some types of information and ignores others. For example, the method of majority decision concentrates on people's votes, but pays no direct attention to, say, their social standings, or their prosperity or penury, or even the intensities of their preferences. The differences between distinct procedures...

This article reviews the literature critiquing the United Nations Development Programme’s Gender-related Development Index (GDI), which is a measure of human development penalized for the extent of gender inequality in each country; presents several original critiques of GDI; and presents proposed corrections to the GDI in response to both received...

This paper attempts to integrate the concern for human development in the present with that in the future. In arguing for sustainable human development, it appeals to the notion of ethical “universalism”—an elementary demand for impartiality of claims—applied within and between generations. Economic sustainability is often seen as a matter of inter...

Este artículo revisa el estado actual de las teorías del desarrollo teniendo en cuenta la experiencia histórica y la evolución interna de la teoría desde finales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Aunque la comprensión del desarrollo ha mejorado, se han hecho generalizaciones indebidas y extraído lecciones infundadas. Sen rechaza la oposición entre Esta...

Following the viewpoint of pure procedural justice, we analyze a social decision procedure for choosing fair allocation rules in production economies, which is formulated as an extended Arrovian constitution that aggregates each profile of individual social welfare functions into a social so-cial welfare function. The identified allocation rule is...

The subject of social choice includes within its capacious frame various problems with the common feature of relating social judgments and group decisions to the views and interests of the individuals who make up the society or the group. Some challenges and foundational problems faced by social choice theory as a discipline are discussed. Social c...

En éste artículo se propone un nuevo indicador de pobreza que evita algunas deficiencias de los indicadores que hoy se utilizan. Para deducir el indicador se utiliza un enfoque axiomático. La concepción de bienestar que se utiliza para establecer el conjunto de axiomas es ordinal. La información requerida para el nuevo indicador es bastante limitad...

En éste artículo se examina las relaciones y las diferencias entre el concepto de "capital humano" y el concepto de "capacidad humana". El concepto de capital humano es más limitado puesto que sólo concibe las cualidades humanas en su relación con el crecimiento económico, mientras que el conccepto de capacidades da énfasis a la expansión de la lib...

Since World War II the subject of social choice has grown in many and surprising ways. The impossibility theorems have suggested many directions: mathematical characterisations of voting structures satisfying various sets of conditions, the consequences of restricting choice to certain domaines, the relation to competitive equilibrium and the core,...

Since World War II the subject of social choice has grown in many and surprising ways. The impossibility theorems have suggested many directions: mathematical characterisations of voting structures satisfying various sets of conditions, the consequences of restricting choice to certain domaines, the relation to competitive equilibrium and the core,...

This paper investigates how information affect voting behaviour. There exist a large literature suggesting that uninformed voters can use informational shortcuts or cues to vote as if they were informed. This paper tests this hypothesis using unique Swedish individual survey data on the preferences of both politicians and voters. I find that uninfo...

Recent developments in social choice theory are critically surveyed in the light of a categorization of interpersonal aggregation problems into four distinct types that seem to require varying treatment but typically do not receive it. Informational inadequacy of the usual social choice framework is discussed in this context. A fairly thorough expl...

Regularity conditions in social welfare analysis can be seen as ways of making specific types of information "inadmissible" in welfare judgements: the evaluation is made invariant with respect to information of those types. In this sense, these conditions--often reflecting "principles" of judgement--serve also as informational constraints. In this...

En este artículo, Amartya Sen pone en escena una de las discusiones más candentes en el debate económico de los años sesenta y setenta -la controversia sobre la teoría de capital entre las escuelas de Cambridge, la inglesa y la norteamericana- a través de dos personajes: Buda y Subhuti, éste último un antiguo discípulo suyo que debido a algunos des...