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Amartya K Sen

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Amartya K. Sen

Amartya K. Sen was born and raised in Santiniketan, India, on November 3rd 1933. His father Ashutosh Sen was a professor of chemistry at Dhaka University and his mother Amita Sen was the daughter of Kshiti Mohan of Kshiti Mohan Sen, A scholar and close associate of Rabindranath Tagore who became the second Vice Chancellor of Visva-Bharati University. Amartya K. Sen came from a well of family in which he received some of the best educations. In high school, he began his education at St. Gregory’ School, Dhaka, in 1941. As for University, he received a B.A. in Economics with a minor in Mathematics in 1953 from Presidency College, Kolkata. He then moved to Cambridge in which he attended Trinity College and received a second B.A. in Economics in 1956 and then a Ph.D. in 1959. During the time of working on his Ph.D. there was an occasion in which he had to return to India on a two year. In India, he become a professor and taught at Jadavpur University. However, after a few years he returned to Cambridge to finish off his Ph.D. From there forward he maintain being a professor for various university such as: Jadavapur University, Kolkata, Cambridge University, University of Delhi, London School of Economics, Oxford University and Harvard University. As a professor, Amartya K. Sen raised various questions about welfare theories and how market prices can be taken as reflections of welfare indicators. He chose a path different from your typical economist. His research consist of gathering information on the values of individuals in a society in which he reference different alternative to different values for society as a whole. Amartya K. Sen made use of available statistics for a number of economic and social appraisals: measurement of economic equality, judgment of poverty, evaluation of projects, analysis of unemployment, investigation of the principles and implications of liberty and rights, assessment of gender inequality, evaluation of real national income and so on. Using his welfare theoretic approach, he used a method of measuring poverty that yielded useful information for improving economic conditions of the poor. Amartya K. Sen argued that neither the utility nor the wealth approach comes close to the issue of measuring standard of living. The living standard is determined by the opportunity set of basic capabilities to function. He further argued that the freedom to choose from the opportunity set is an important ingredient of the standard living. Looking at this perspective, poverty is a problem of capability failure. Based on Sen’s ideas, a human development index was suggested in terms of functioning achievements. It gathers the functioning levels of three attributes: life expectancy, per capita real GDP and educational attainment rate. Sen also analyze shortage with this theoretical approach to welfare measurement. He argued that shortage could occur even when the supply of food is not significantly lower. In his view, lack of opportunities and capabilities are responsible for poverty and shortage. Welfare economics seeks to evaluate economic policies in term of their effects on the well being of the community. Sen, who devoted his career to such issues, was called “the conscience of his profession” or “the conscience and the Mother Teresa of Economics”. All his work concentrated on shortage, human development theory, welfare economics, the underlying mechanisms of poverty, gender inequality and political liberalism. In which overall, he won a Nobel Prize in 1998 for his contributions to “welfare economics”. The contributions of Amartya Sen described so far belong to the realm of and analytic methods – even if his formulation of welfare indexes do have direct applications But Sen has also done applied research, primarily in development economics. In fact almost all of Sen’s works are devoted to development economics, as they are often concerned with the welfare of the poorest people in society. Amartya K. Sen applications of his theoretical approach have enhanced our understanding of the economic mechanisms underlying starvation and poverty.

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