"Amartya Sen [1933–] is [Thomas W.] Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy, at Harvard University and was until recently the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 for his work in welfare economics. He has served as President of the Econometric Society, the Indian Economic Association, the American Economic Association and the International Economic Association. He was formerly Honorary President of OXFAM and is now its Honorary Advisor. Born in Santiniketan, India, Amartya Sen studied at Presidency College in Calcutta, India, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is an Indian citizen. He was Lamont University Professor at Harvard also earlier, from 1988 – 1998, and previous to that he was the Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University and a Fellow of All Souls College. Prior to that he was Professor of Economics at Delhi University and at the London School of Economics.

Amartya Sen’s books have been translated into more than thirty languages, and include Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), On Economic Inequality (1973, 1997), Poverty and Famines (1981), Choice, Welfare and Measurement (1982), Resources, Values and Development (1984), On Ethics and Economics (1987), The Standard of Living (1987), Inequality Reexamined (1992), Development as Freedom (1999), and Rationality and Freedom (2002), among others. His research has ranged over a number of fields in economics, philosophy, and decision theory, including social choice theory, welfare economics, theory of measurement, development economics, moral and political philosophy, and the economics of peace and war. His book The Argumentative Indian was published in 2005 by Penguin Books in London. His most recent book, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destin, was published in 2006 by W. W. Norton. (information from Amartya Sen's Harvard webpage)

"...Sen's seminal papers in the late sixties and early seventies helped develop the theory of social choice, which first came to prominence in the work by the American economist Kenneth Arrow, who, while working in the fifties at the RAND Corporation, famously proved that all voting rules, be they majority voting or two thirds-majority or status quo, must inevitably conflict some basic democratic norm. Sen's contribution to the literature was to show under what conditions Arrow's Impossibility Theorem would indeed come to pass as well as to extend and enrich the theory of social choice, informed by his interests in history of economic thought and philosophy.

Sen's best-known work is his 1981 volume Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, in which he demonstrated that famine occurs not from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. 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, published by the United Nations Development Programme. 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's revolutionary contribution to development economics and social indicators is the concept of 'capability.' Realizing that top-down development will always trump human rights as long as the definition of terms remains in doubt (is a 'right' something that must be provided or something that simply cannot be taken away?), Sen argues that governments should be measured against the concrete capabilities of their citizens. For instance, in the United States citizens have a hypothetical "right" to vote. To Sen, this concept is fairly empty. He would ask whether all the requisite conditions are met so that the citizen has the capability to vote. These conditions can range from the very broad, such as the availability of education, to the very specific, such as transportation to the polls. Only when such barriers are removed can the citizen truly be said to act out of personal choice. It is up to the individual society to make the list of minimum capabilities guaranteed by that society. For an example of the 'capabilities approach' in practice, see Martha Nussbaum's Women and Human Development....

...Sen was a ground-breaker among late twentieth-century economists in his insistence on asking questions of value, long removed from 'serious' economic consideration. He mounted one of the few major challenges to the economic model that posited self-interest as the prime motivating factor of human activity. While his line of thinking remains peripheral, there is no question that his work helped to re-prioritize a significant sector of economists and development workers, even the policies of the United Nations...." (from Wikipedia.com)