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Amartya Kumar Sen (; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian American economist and philosopher. Sen has taught and worked in England and the United States since 1972. In 1998, Sen received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics. He has also made major scholarly contributions to social choice theory, Economic justice and social justice, economic theories of , decision theory, development economics, public health, and the measures of well-being of countries.
Sen is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University. He previously served as Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. In 1999, he received India's highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna, for his contribution to welfare economics. The German Publishers and Booksellers Association awarded him the 2020 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for his pioneering scholarship addressing issues of global justice and combating social inequality in education and healthcare.
Sen began his school education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka in 1940. In the fall of 1941, he was admitted to Patha Bhavana, Santiniketan, where he completed his school education. The school had many progressive features, such as distaste for examinations or competitive testing. In addition, the school stressed cultural diversity, and embraced cultural influences from the rest of the world. In 1951, he went to Presidency College, Calcutta, where he earned a BA in economics with First in the First Class, with a minor in Mathematics, as a graduating student of the University of Calcutta. While at Presidency, Sen was diagnosed with oral cancer, and given a 15 per cent chance of living five years. With radiation treatment, he survived, and in 1953 he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a second BA in economics in 1955 with a first class, topping the list as well. At this time, he was elected President of the Cambridge Majlis. While Sen was officially a PhD student at Cambridge (though he had finished his research in 1955–56), he was offered the position of First-Professor and First-Head of the Economics Department of the newly created Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Appointed to the position at age 22, he is still the youngest chairman to have headed the Department of Economics. He served in that position, starting the new Economics Department, from 1956 to 1958.
Meanwhile, 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. Sen explained: "The broadening of my studies into philosophy was important for me not just because some of my main areas of interest in economics relate quite closely to philosophical disciplines (for example, social choice theory makes intense use of mathematical logic and also draws on moral philosophy, and so does the study of inequality and deprivation), but also because I found philosophical studies very rewarding on their own." His interest in philosophy, however, dates back to his college days at Presidency, where he read books on philosophy and debated philosophical themes. One of the books he was most interested in was Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values.
In Cambridge, there were major debates between supporters of Keynesian economics, and the neo-classical economists who were sceptical of Keynes. Because of a lack of enthusiasm for social choice theory in both Trinity and Cambridge, Sen chose a different subject for his PhD thesis, which was on "The Choice of Techniques" in 1959. The work had been completed earlier, except for advice from his adjunct supervisor in India, A. K. Dasgupta, given to Sen while teaching and revising his work at Jadavpur, under the supervision of the "brilliant but vigorously intolerant" post-Keynesian Joan Robinson. Quentin Skinner notes that Sen was a member of the secret society Cambridge Apostles during his time at Cambridge.
During 1960–61, Amartya Sen visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on leave from Trinity College.
In addition to his important work on the causes of famines, Sen's work in the field of development economics has had considerable influence in the formulation of the "Human Development Report", (2025). 9780230284456, United Nations Development Programme. ISBN 9780230284456 Pdf version. published by the United Nations Development Programme. Draft This annual publication that ranks countries on a variety of economic and social indicators owes much to the contributions by Sen among other social choice theorists in the area of economic measurement of poverty and inequality.
Sen was inspired by violent acts he had witnessed as a child leading up to the Partition of India in 1947. On one morning, a Muslim daily labourer named Kader Mia stumbled through the rear gate of Sen's family home, bleeding from a knife wound in his back. Because of his extreme poverty, he had come to Sen's primarily Hindu neighbourhood searching for work; his choices were the starvation of his family or the risk of death in coming to the neighbourhood. The price of Kader Mia's economic unfreedom was his death. Kader Mia need not have come to a hostile area in search of income in those troubled times if his family could have managed without it. This experience led Sen to begin thinking about economic unfreedom from a young age.
In Development as Freedom, Sen outlined five specific types of freedoms: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security. Political freedoms refer to the ability of the people to have a voice in government and to be able to scrutinise the authorities. Economic facilities concern both the resources within the market and the market mechanism itself. Any focus on income and wealth in the country would serve to increase the economic facilities for the people. Social opportunities deal with the establishments that provide benefits like healthcare or education for the populace, allowing individuals to live better lives. Transparency guarantees allow individuals to interact with some degree of trust and knowledge of the interaction. Protective security is the system of social safety nets that prevent a group affected by poverty being subjected to terrible misery. Development encompassing non-economic areas, Sen argues, renders the notion of a dichotomy between "freedom" and "development," as implied by the concept of Asian values, meaningless and disingenuous.
Before Sen's work, these had been viewed as only the ends of development; luxuries afforded to countries that focus on increasing income. However, Sen argued that the increase in real freedoms should be both the ends and the means of development. He elaborates upon this by illustrating the closely interconnected natures of the five main freedoms as he believes that expansion of one of those freedoms can lead to expansion in another one as well. In this regard, he discussed the correlation between social opportunities of education and health and how both of these complement economic and political freedoms as a healthy and well-educated person is better suited to make informed economic decisions and be involved in fruitful political demonstrations, etc. A comparison is also drawn between China and India to illustrate this interdependence of freedoms. Sen noted that both countries had been working towards developing their economies—China since 1979 and India since 1991.
During this time Sen was also a frequent visitor to various other premiere Indian economic schools and centres of excellence, such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Indian Statistical Institute, the Centre for Development Studies, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, and the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences. He was a companion of distinguished economists like Manmohan Singh (ex-Prime Minister of India and a veteran economist responsible for liberalising the Indian economy), K. N. Raj (advisor to various prime ministers and a veteran economist who was the founder of the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, which is one of India's premier think tanks and schools), and Jagdish Bhagwati (who is known to be one of the greatest Indian economists in the field of international trade and currently teaches at Columbia University). This is a period considered to be a Golden Period in the history of the DSE. In 1971, he joined the London School of Economics as a professor of economics, and taught there until 1977. From 1977 to 1988, he taught at the University of Oxford, where he was first a professor of economics and fellow of Nuffield College, and then from 1980 the Drummond Professor of Political Economy and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
In 1985, Sen co-founded the Eva Colorni Trust at the former London Guildhall University in memory of his deceased wife. In 1987, Sen joined Harvard as the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor of Economics. In 1998 he was appointed as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, becoming the first Asian head of an Oxbridge college. In January 2004, Sen returned to Harvard.
In May 2007, he was appointed chairman of Nalanda Mentor Group to plan the establishment of Nalanda University. The university was intended to be a revival of Nalanda mahavihara, an ancient educational centre.
He chaired the Social Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2009 to 2011, and the Humanities jury from 2012 to 2018.
On 19 July 2012, Sen was named the first chancellor of the proposed Nalanda University (NU). Sen was criticised as the project suffered due to inordinate delays, mismanagement, and lack of presence of faculty on ground. Finally teaching began in August 2014. On 20 February 2015, Sen withdrew his candidature for a second term.
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. However, he denies the comparison to Mother Teresa, saying that he has never tried to follow a lifestyle of dedicated self-sacrifice. Amartya Sen also added his voice to the campaign against the anti-gay Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.
Sen has served as Honorary Chairman of Oxfam, the UK based international development charity, and is now its Honorary Advisor.
Sen is also a member of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council.
Sen is an Honorary Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge.
He is also one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders.
A 2001 portrait of Sen by Annabel Cullen is in Trinity College's collection. A 2003 portrait of Sen hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
In 2011, he was present at the Rabindra Utsab ceremony at Bangabandhu International Conference Centre (BICC), Bangladesh. He 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.
Max Roser said that it was the work of Sen that made him create Our World in Data.
In August 2019, during the clampdown and curfew in Kashmir for more than two weeks after the Indian revocation of Jammu and Kashmir's special status, Sen criticised the government and said "As an Indian, I am not proud of the fact that India, after having done so much to achieve a democratic norm in the world – where India was the first non-Western country to go for democracy – that we lose that reputation on the grounds of action that have been taken". "Not Proud As An Indian...": Amartya Sen's Critique Of Kashmir Move, NDTV, 19 August 2019. Kashmir without democracy not acceptable: Amartya , New Nation, 19 August 2019. He 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. J&K Detentions "A Classic Colonial Excuse": Amartya Sen, NDTV, 19 August 2019.
Sen has spent much of his later life as a political writer and activist. He has been outspoken about Narendra Modi's leadership in India. In an interview with The New York Times, he claimed that Modi's fearmongering among the Indian people was anti-democratic. "The big thing that we know from John Stuart Mill is that democracy is government by discussion, and, if you make discussion fearful, you are not going to get a democracy, no matter how you count the votes." He disagreed with Modi's ideology of Hindu nationalism, and advocated for a more integrated and diverse ideology that reflects the heterogeneity of India.Chotiner, Isaac, and Eliza Griswold. "Amartya Sen's Hopes and Fears for Indian Democracy." The New Yorker, 6 October 2019.
Sen also wrote an article for The New York Times in 2013 documenting the reasons why India trailed behind China in economic development. He advocated for healthcare reform, because low-income people in India have to deal with exploitative and inadequate private healthcare. He recommended that India implement the same education policies that Japan did in the late 19th century. However, he conceded that there is a tradeoff between democracy and progress in Asia because democracy is a near reality in India and not in China. "Why India Trails China." New York Times, 20 June 2013.
In a 1999 article in The Atlantic, Sen recommended for India a middle path between the "hard-knocks" development policy that creates wealth at the expense of civil liberties, and radical progressivism that only seeks to protect civil liberties at the expense of development. Rather than create an entirely new theory for ethical development in Asia, Sen sought to reform the current development model.
The Sens have a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is the base from which they teach during the academic year. They also have a home in Cambridge, England, where Sen is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Rothschild is a Fellow of Magdalene College. He 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. Asked how he relaxes, he replies: "I read a lot and like arguing with people."
Sen is an atheist. In an interview, he noted:
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