in New Delhi
Social choice theory Sen's work on 'Choice of Techniques' complemented that of
Maurice Dobb. In a developing country, the Dobb-Sen strategy relied on maximising investible surpluses, maintaining constant real wages, and using the entire increase in labour productivity, due to technological change, to raise the rate of accumulation. In other words, workers were expected to demand no improvement in their standard of living despite having become more productive. Sen's papers in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped develop the theory of
social choice, which first came to prominence in the work by the American economist
Kenneth Arrow. Arrow had most famously shown that when voters have three or more distinct alternatives (options), any
ranked order voting system will, in at least some situations, inevitably conflict with what many assume to be basic democratic norms. Sen's contribution to the literature was to show under what conditions
Arrow's impossibility theorem applied, as well as to extend and enrich the theory of social choice, informed by his interests in the
history of economic thought and philosophy.
Liberal Paradox In 1970, Sen published his paper "The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal," which introduced the "
liberal paradox", also sometimes referred to as "Sen's paradox." This paradox shows that no means of aggregating individual preferences into a single, social choice, can simultaneously fulfill the following, seemingly mild conditions: unrestricted domain, the weak Pareto principle, and a minimal requirement of individual rights. Pareto efficiency dictates that if every individual in a society prefers option A to option B, the society as a whole should also prefer A. Minimal liberalism suggests that individuals should have the decisive right to make choices in purely personal matters, such as what to read or how to dress. Sen illustrated the result using a hypothetical example involving two individuals ("Lewd" and "Prude") and three social states: one person reading a particular book, the other reading, or neither reading. Prude thinks that the book is indecent and that it should be disposed of, unread. However, if someone must read it, Prude would prefer to read it rather than Lewd since Prude thinks it would be even worse for someone to read and enjoy the book rather than read it in disgust. Given these preferences of the two individuals in the society, a social planner must decide what to do. Should the planner force Lewd to read the book, force Prude to read the book, or let it go unread? Under this decisiveness assignment, society would generate cyclic collective preferences, violating acyclicity (or transitivity) of social ordering. This paradox, now known as the "liberal paradox," demonstrates a conflict between individual rights and social efficiency: ensuring minimal individual liberty may force the violation of Pareto-style aggregation consistency.
Poverty and Famines (1981) In 1981, Sen published
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), a book in which he argued that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. Sen also argued that the Bengal famine was caused by an urban economic boom that raised
food prices, thereby causing millions of rural workers to starve to death when their wages did not keep up. In 1999 he wrote, "No famine has ever taken place ... in a functioning democracy". In addition to his important work on the causes of famines, Sen's work in the field of development economics has had considerable influence on 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. He argues that governments should be measured against the concrete capabilities of their citizens. This is because 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?). For instance, in the United States, citizens have a right to vote. To Sen, this concept is fairly empty. For citizens to have a capacity to vote, they first must have "functionings". These "functionings" 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.
"More than 100 Million Women Are Missing" (1990) He wrote a controversial article in
The New York Review of Books entitled "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing" (see
Missing women of Asia), analysing the mortality impact of unequal rights between the genders in the developing world, particularly Asia. Other studies, including one by
Emily Oster, had argued that this is an overestimation, though Oster has since then recanted her conclusions.
Development as Freedom (1999) In 1999, Sen further advanced and redefined the capability approach in his book
Development as Freedom. Sen argued that development should be viewed as an effort to advance the real freedoms that individuals enjoy, rather than simply focusing on metrics such as GDP or income-per-capita. Sen was inspired by violent acts he had witnessed as a child leading up to the Partition of India in 1947. 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 prevents a group affected by poverty from 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.
The Idea of Justice (2009) In 2009, Sen published a book called
The Idea of Justice. Based on his previous work in welfare economics and social choice theory, but also on his philosophical thoughts, Sen presented his own theory of justice that he meant to be an alternative to the influential modern theories of justice of
John Rawls or
John Harsanyi. In opposition to Rawls but also earlier justice theoreticians
Immanuel Kant,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau or
David Hume, and inspired by the philosophical works of
Adam Smith and
Mary Wollstonecraft, Sen developed a theory that is both comparative and realisations-oriented (instead of being transcendental and institutional). However, he still regards institutions and processes as being equally important. As an alternative to Rawls's
veil of ignorance, Sen chose the
thought experiment of an impartial spectator as the basis of his theory of justice. He also stressed the importance of public discussion (understanding democracy in the sense of
John Stuart Mill) and a focus on people's capabilities (an
approach that he had co-developed), including the notion of universal human rights, in evaluating various states with regard to justice. ==Career==