Amartya K. Sen, 1933-

It may be a slight exaggeration to claim that "Welfare Economics" is but a synonym for Amartya Sen, but few economists have taken that field as far, as seriously and as profoundly as Sen. A perennial Nobel Prize candidate (he has been winning straw polls among economists for several years running - and finally won the Nobel in 1998), Sen is one of the few modern academics that has commanded much respect and recognition from all corners of the intellectual spectrum.

A student of Joan Robinson's at Cambridge, Sen nonetheless transcended his roots to simultaneously embrace social choice theory and economic development - breaking the barrier between mathematized "high theory" and "real-world" economics. It was a logical marriage for Sen: the peasants and rural households which he studied have economic modes of behavior which often contradict the postulates of the "rational hedonist" that dominate economic theory. In particular, certain collective enterprises (e.g. during harvest season) often contradict individual rationality. In this line, Sen exploited game-theoretic notions to account for such collective behavior.

Nonetheless, the problem Sen identified through his research is the common assumption in welfare economics of incomparable interpersonal utilities. His famous 1970 treatise, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, finds that this is indeed the keystone in the famous "Arrow Impossibility Theorem". Without it, Sen argued, the theorem can fall; with it, the theorem is vacuous.

In another famous work (1970), Sen turned his methological sights on the the Pareto-Optimality criteria - arguing that the assumption of Pareto-optimality in welfare theory was not value-neutral but rather contradicted the old J.S. Mill notion of "liberalism" as the Paretian criteria has no safeguards for "personal space".

Sen was no detached thinker, however: in 1972, he co-authored a famous UN guideline for development project evalution which has proven invaluable for many organizations. His work on poverty, which has included innumerable theoretical insights, has also proved fruitful in application.

Major works of Amartya K. Sen

• "On Optimizing the Rate of Saving", 1961, EJ
• "Distribution, Transitivity and LIttle's Welfare Criterion", 1963, EJ.
• "Preferences, Votes and the Transitivity of Majority Decisions", 1964, RES
• "A Possibility Theorem on Majority Decisions", 1966, Econometrica.
• "Labour Allocation in a Cooperative Enterprise", 1966, RES
• "Peasants and Dualism with or without Surplus Labor", 1966, JPE.
• "Hume's Law and Hare's rule", Philosophy
• "Isolation, Assurance and the Social Rate of Discount", 1967, QJE.
• "Quasi-Transitivity, Rational Choice and Collective Decision", 1969, RES
• "Necessary and Sufficient Condition for Rational Choice Under Majority Decision", with P.K. Pattanaik, 1969, JET
• Collective Choice and Social Welfare, 1970.
• "The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal", 1970, JPE
• "Interpersonal Aggregation and Partial Comparability", 1970, Econometrica.
• Guidelines for Project Evaluation with P.Dasgupta and S. Marglin, 1972.
• "Behavior and the Concept of Preference", 1973, Economica.
• On Economic Inequality, 1973.
• "Informational Bases of Alternative Welfare Approaches", 1974, JPubE
• "Liberty, Unanimity and Rights", 1976, Economica.
• "Welfare Inequalities and Rawlsian Axiomatics", 1976, Theory and Decision.
• "Poverty: An ordinal approach to measurement", 1976, Econometrica,
• "Social Choice Theory: A re-examination", 1976, Econometrica
• "Real National income", 1976, RES
• "On Weights and Measures: Informational constraints in social welfare analysis", 1977, Econometrica.
• "Rational Fools: A critique of the behavioral foundations of economic theory", 1977, Philosophy and Public Affairs.
• "Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility", 1979, in Boskin, editor, Economics and Human Welfare.
• "Personal Utilities and Public Judgments: Or what's wrong with welfare economics", 1979, EJ
• "Utilitarianism and Welfare", 1979, J of Philosophy
• "The Welfare Basis of Real Income Comparisons", 1979, JEL.
• "The Sexual Division of Labor and the Working Class Family", 1980, RRPE.
• Poverty and Famines: An essay on entitlement and depression, 1981.
• Choice, Welfare and Measurement, 1982.
• Editor, Utilitarianism and Beyond, with B. Williams, 1982.
• "Review of Bauer's Equality"
• "Liberty and Social Choice", 1983, Journal of Philosophy.
• Resources, Values and Development, 1984.
• "The Moral Standing of the Market", 1985, in Paul, Paul and Miller, editors, Ethics and Economics
• Commodities and Capabilities, 1985.
• "Social Choice Theory", 1986, in Arrow and Intiligator, editors, Handbook of Mathematical Economics, Vol. III. - intro
• The Standard of Living, 1987.
• On Ethics and Economics, 1987.
• "Justice: Means versus Resources", 1990, Philos and Public Affairs
• "Markets and Freedom", 1993, Oxford EP
• Inequality Re-examined, 1995.
• "East and West: The Reach of Reason", 2000, New York Review of Books

Resources on A.K. Sen

• A.K. Sen's C.V. - PDF
• 1998 Nobel Prize background - PDF
• "Portrait: Amartya Sen" by Meghnad Desai, 2000, Prospect
• Profile of Sen
• Page at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
• Nobel Lecture and Page at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
• Amartya Sen Page at Notre Dame - lots of links.
• A.K. Sen Guestbook
• Audio of Sen's Speech at Indian-American Conference.
• Receipt of Catalonia Prize - (1), (2)
• Book Review of Sen's Inequality Reexamined
• Article in India Today
• K.J. Arrow's review of Sen's 1981 book. 
• Ian Hacking's review of Sen's 1995 book
• Sen Page at LSE History