Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen won the Nobel in economics for work that began with the question of why people starve when there is food. He was nine during the Bengal famine of 1943, which killed perhaps three million people, and he noticed as a child that his own family and their neighbours were unaffected. His book Poverty and Famines in 1981 established the argument he is most identified with: famines are usually not caused by an absence of food but by a collapse in some group's ability to command it - wages against prices, the exchange entitlement - and Bengal in 1943 had more rice than in several years without famine. From that follows his other well-known claim, that no substantial famine has occurred in a functioning democracy with a free press, because governments that face elections and criticism act. He also rebuilt social choice theory after Arrow's impossibility result, worked on the measurement of inequality, and with Mahbub ul Haq designed the Human Development Index so that development would be measured by what people are able to do rather than by output alone. The capability approach that underlies it is now standard in development policy. He has held chairs at Delhi, the London School of Economics, Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge, where he was master of Trinity. He gave much of the Nobel money to a trust working on literacy and health in India and Bangladesh. His later books argue against the idea that people have a single defining identity, which he treats as the intellectual error underlying communal violence - a subject he approaches partly through having watched a Muslim day-labourer die in his family's garden during the Hindu- Muslim riots of 1944, when he was eleven. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour, in 1999. His public arguments with successive Indian governments over hunger and schooling have continued into his nineties.

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