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Food for thought

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As a child, he was deeply affected by an encounter with famine victims. Now an Oxbridge academic and Nobel prize winner, he has spent a lifetime fighting poverty with analysis rather than activism. Known in his native India as the Mother Teresa of economics, his ideas have had a global impact. Jonathan Steele reports

Amartya Sen went to a school in Bengal which promoted curiosity rather than exam results, and he has never forgotten how one of his teachers summed up a classmate: "She is quite a serious thinker even though her grades are very good." In Sen's own case, the epigram needs re-phrasing. Even though he is high up in the world league of serious thinkers - a Nobel laureate in economics who could also have won the prize for philosophy if the committee recognised the subject - he has achieved something.

Sen is a rare example of an intellectual who has had a major effect on politics. His work on the causes of famine changed public perceptions by showing why thousands might starve even when a country's food production has not diminished, and his analysis of poverty has been enormously influential. Arguing that simple measures of GNP were not enough to assess the standard of living, he helped to create the United Nations' Human Development Index, which has become the most authoritative international source of welfare comparisons between countries.

As Master of Trinity College, Cambridge since January 1998, and the first Asian to head an Oxbridge college, Sen is also deeply immersed in the debate over globalisation. He has given lectures to senior executives of the World Bank but has also shown his commitment to reform from below by becoming honorary president of Oxfam. Most recently, he courted controversy by criticising the Runnymede report on multi-ethnicity in Britain, chaired by fellow-Asian Lord Parekh, for saying that Britain should be seen as a loose federation of cultures held together by common bonds of interest. Though this was meant to be a modern liberal vision, Sen feels it devalues individual identity, risks lumping people into "communities" they may not want to be part of, and interferes with a person's freedom to make her own choices. (Among his many contributions to development economics, Sen has produced pioneering studies of gender inequality, so he always takes care to write "her" rather than "his" when referring to an abstract person).

He also jumped into the argument over human rights and "Asian values", taking strong issue with Singapore's former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, for claiming that liberalism was a Western export unsuited to Asia. But Sen's line was not the conventional view that individual liberty is a western invention which needs to have universal application. Rather, he argued that "the championing of democracy and political freedom in the modern sense cannot be found in the pre-enlightenment tradition in any part of the world, west or east". However, separate components of this progressive idea - from religious tolerance to egalitarianism and support for a climate of debate - have come and gone in many different cultures at various historical times.

As he sits in the bay window of his elegant rooms looking out over Trinity's Great Court, dressed in baggy corduroys and a well worn tweed jacket, he looks the part of a man who is completely captivated by the seductive mix of social comfort, institutional prestige and intellectual challenge which academia at its best can provide. His carefully qualified answers and detailed recall of the themes and sub-themes of his books and articles, as well as their exact publication dates, reveal a mind and memory as sharp as his manner is gentle.

The strongest features of his work, joining his economics and philosophy together, are ethics and a sense of common humanity. "He's very concerned about justice", says Sudhir Anand, professor of economics at Oxford. "He's made major contributions not only in measuring poverty but understanding it. To him, poverty is the lack of capability to function, so reducing it is related to positive freedom. What's important to people is to be able to do and be."

Sen's fellow economists love the way he has given the subject a friendlier image ,yet he was not awarded the Nobel prize for his more accessible work in development economics, but for "social choice theory", the philosophical foundation backed by mathematics which supports all his writings.

The only surprise with his Nobel prize was that it came so late. "It was only political reasons which prevented him getting it earlier," says his old friend, the historian Eric Hobsbawm. "Ever since the mid-70s the Swedish committee has been strongly committed to free-market theory, until it took a real punch in the midriff in 97/98 with the Asian crisis."

Though he has strong political views, Sen has generally avoided political statements in public. He is primarily an academic who wants his ideas to cascade through the institutions by virtue of their intellectual force, and then flow into general circulation as the new wisdom. "He's peculiarly shy about talking politics publicly. It's a kind of self-denial," says Meghnad Desai, director of the centre for the study of global governance at the LSE. "It's also a generational thing. Good economists, when he started out, didn't get into politics. So he prefers to be subversive in a technical way."

This abstinence, as well as his soft-spoken manner, are the main reasons why Sen is relatively little-known outside the academic arena in Britain and the United States, the two countries where he has spent most of his time. Only in his native India is he a star, and when he won the Nobel prize in 1998 he was dubbed the Mother Theresa of Economics as crowds followed him around - "wanting to touch his fountain pen," in Hobsbawm's words. "The fact that he had made it in Britain gave him tremendous cachet in India, particularly among the 200,000 or so English-speakers who still run the country," he adds.

Among academics Sen's reputation is almost unrivalled. He has served as a full-time or visiting professor at a dozen of the world's most prestigious universities, and must hold the record for the highest number of honorary degrees (53 according to his CV). He conscientiously turns up to receive each one and is usually asked to give a speech, winning himself the family nickname: Amartya Commencement Sen.

"He has a mind like a searchlight, yet he works at Mozartian speed. His output is staggering in its volume," comments Robert Cassen, an economist at the LSE.

"Sen has made fundamental contributions to at least four fields: social choice theory, welfare economics, economic measurement, and development economics," says Sudhir Anand. "The pre-eminence that he has achieved in each of these different fields is remarkable for any scholar: that he has achieved pre-eminence in so many is utterly extraordinary. He is held in enormously high respect by theoretical, empirical and policy economists alike - to say nothing of philosophers and political theorists."

Sen has spent almost his entire adult life on various university campuses, and was even born on one. His father taught chemistry at Dhaka University (now in Bangladesh) but Amartya came into the world in 1933 at Santiniketan, just north of Calcutta, on the campus of a small, progressive co-ed school and college founded by the writer, philosopher and poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore was a close friend of Sen's maternal grandfather who taught Sanskrit at Santiniketan. Tagore helped to choose the baby's name, which means "immortal" in Sanskrit. Sen's mother was a writer who performed in many of the dance-dramas which Tagore wrote. She still edits a literary magazine in Bengal.

"Tagore founded Santiniketan with the idea of creating something different from the English-language Raj kind of school," says Sen. "It also differed from the Indian nationalist school. The teaching language was Bengali, and the place was very self-consciously international, with a sense of global culture. The existence of a Europe outside Britain was more easily conceded in Santiniketan than happened in the rest of the Raj."

But the school was not for the poor, and when Sen was still only nine, he underwent a profound experience. "One day a chap came wandering in, very obviously deranged. Some of the nastier boys were being unpleasant to him and some of us felt we had to do something to help. I got chatting to the man and it became quite clear he hadn't eaten for about 40 days. But then one, 10, it seemed like about 100,000 people came walking through the campus on the way to Calcutta to find some charities which might help them."

Until this shock Sen was blissfully unaware of suffering. No one in his family, which he calls lower middle-class, nor any of his friends' families, were affected by the famine. "I was upset by what I saw. My grandfather gave me a small cigarette tin, and said I could fill it with rice and give it to the starving, but only one tinful per family," he explains. The famine was clearly class-dependent. Only people on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, such as landless rural labourers, were hungry, and the memory stayed with Sen, prompting him several decades later to do his study of that famine and several others in the Sahel, Ethiopia and China.

The opening lines of his study are typical of his lapidary style: "Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat." After examining the records, he found that overall food output in Bengal in 1943 was not lower than in 1941, when there was no famine. The real problem was that the wages paid to farm labourers in 1942 had not kept up with the rising price of food caused by inflation in Calcutta, which was going through a boom as the Raj put money into war production. This resulted in what Sen called a shift in "entitlements": labourers had suffered a reduction in their ability to command power over food.

As he was entering his teens, Sen had what he calls another "devastating" political experience. The "idea of India", with its rich cultural heterogeneity, which he had learned at Santiniketan, collapsed into a welter of sectarian identities when people started to define themselves as Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs, and went on killing sprees. One afternoon at the family home in Dhaka a man rushed through the gate, screaming and bleeding. Sen's father took him to hospital. The man was a Muslim labourer who had been set upon by Hindu thugs after looking for work in a Hindu area because his family was short of food. The episode turned him against the idea of prioritising communal identity, and gave him another graphic lesson in the way economic unfreedom can make people prey to serious violations of their rights.

By then Sen was already bent on an academic career. He knew he wanted to be a teacher or researcher of some sort, though his interests wavered. "I seriously flirted in turn with Sanskrit, mathematics and physics, before settling on the eccentric charms of economics," he says.

He went to the Presidency College in Calcutta and was soon thrown into the hotbed of political coffee-house debate. His family belonged to the Bengali intellectual elite, and Bengal itself was the most vibrant and politically active city in India. Most of its luminaries were well to the left of Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru. One of Sen's uncles, who belonged to the Congress Socialist Party, was put into preventive detention by the British and spent six years in prison without trial. Another cousin, in the Communist party, was also in gaol.

Although Sen eagerly joined in the arguments, he says: "I could not develop enough enthusiasm to join any political party." It was an early sign of his detachment from collective action, as well as the pragmatic caution which have stayed with him, in spite of his moral engagement and intellectual boldness. In the early 60s, when he was at Trinity College, Cambridge, as director of studies, his then wife, Nabaneeta Dev, went on the Aldermaston ban-the-bomb marches led by Bertrand Russell. Sen did not. It was partly pressure of work, he says, but "I had also developed more scepticism of what could be achieved by activism without necessarily weakening on the importance of the cause".

Sen still calls himself a person of the left, but he says he felt something disturbing about the standard leftwing politics of his student days. Most of his friends were Stalinists. He liked their egalitarian commitment but felt they were not open to political pluralism and that they even saw political tolerance as a "weakness of will". "I thought it was a major defect of the Stalinist left not to recognise that establishing democracy in India had been an enormous step forward. There was a temptation to call this sham or bourgeois democracy. The left didn't take seriously enough the disastrous lack of democracy in Communist countries," he recalls.

This point was to stay with him in his famine studies, when he enunciated the view that no famine has ever occurred in a country with a free press and regular elections. He compared China and India. Although by most indicators, from life expectancy to literacy, Mao's China was ahead of Nehru's India, China had had a catastrophic famine between 1958 and 1961 in which up to 30m people starved to death. There was no free press or alternative political parties to give early warning. In democratic India, free from the Raj, this could not have happened.

But Sen did not go overboard in his praise of democracy. He pointed out in his 1984 book, Resources, Values, and Democracy, that while there was no famine in India, a third of the population went to bed hungry every night. "The quiet presence of non-acute, endemic hunger leads to no newspaper turmoil, no political agitation, no riots in the Indian parliament. The system takes it in his stride," he wrote.

When Sen arrived in Cambridge at the age of 19 to study economics at Trinity, he found the college "a bit of an oasis". The major debates in political economy in the university were raging between neo-classicists and followers of Keynes. Trinity was an unusual model of tolerance ,with the Marxist, Maurice Dobb, doing joint seminars with the conservative, Dennis Robertson. Sen found that this suited his style. He has always rejected any simplistic labelling of people, and his work is constantly peppered with references to earlier economists whom he respects for their views, regardless of the ideological camps which form around them. He takes examples from Adam Smith, as well as Marx, without being a Smithian or a Marxist.

In 1960, Sen married Nabaneeta Dev, whom he first got to know when she was a student of comparative literature and he was a young professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. He met her off the boat train when she came to England in 1959. He proposed soon afterwards and they had two daughters. Antara, 37, became a journalist and edits a political, cultural, and literary magazine, called The Little Magazine, in Delhi. Nandana, 33, is an actress and film director, and lives in New York and Bombay.

In 1970, S en's path-breaking book, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, attempted to rescue welfare economics from the pessimism of free-marketeers, who argued that there was no point in government intervention, and that individuals should be left to choose whatever the market made available in response to their choices, and statists, who concluded that authoritarian choices had to be made by governments on other people's behalf. Sen argued that perfection in social decision-mak ing is unnecessary. Partial comparisons between people can help and majority decisions do carry weight, as long as the interests of the less assertive citizens are not ignored.

His own life, meanwhile, had its periods of turmoil and tragedy. While an undergraduate, he developed cancer of the mouth and he was treated with massive doses of radiation. It whittled away his palate and could have proved fatal: he was unable to eat solid food for three months and doctors said he only had a 15% chance of survival. In 1971 there were fears that the cancer had recurred but, after a while, the diagnosis proved wrong.

That same year, Sen left Dev. She had followed him around the various campuses where his work took him, and developed her own academic career in a very different intellectual area. (By the time of the divorce, she was well-known in Bengal as a a writer and professor of literature, and the separation caused a storm there.) He describes her generously "as one of the best-known literary names in Bengal, a leading poet and novelist". She has described him as "a good economist but a bad money manager", and "a clumsy father until the children grew old enough to be his students".

Sen later started to go out with Eva Colorni, a brilliant Italian economist from a distinguished anti-fascist family, whom he had met some years earlier. The couple married in 1978, but Colorni died of cancer in 1985, leaving Sen with a 10-year-old daughter, Indrani, and eight-year-old son, Kabir.

Partly in search of a change of scene, and partly because he needed a higher salary as a single father of two young children, he left Britain for Harvard. (His first two children stayed with Dev.) In the United States he renewed contact with an old student friend, the brilliant Pakistani economist, Mahbub ul Haq, who persuaded him to join in elaborating the Human Development Index as a rival to the World Bank's system of ranking countries by classical macroeconomic criteria such as savings rates and GNP.

"Amartya gave it intellectual depth and credibility. Before that people thought it was just flaky, feelgood stuff," says Richard Jolly, who worked for the United Nations Children's Fund and is writing a history of the UN. "I'm struck by the way he has made so many contributions to the UN over the last three decades."

Despite his advice for the UN, Sen has been coy about working for individual governments. He turned down numerous invitations to advise the Indian government. In Britain he has given a talk at one of Gordon Brown's regular economic seminars at 11 Downing Street, but he politely avoids any public comment on New Labour and the Third Way.

Sen's empirical work has occasionally been criticised on points of detail, or for not going far enough. Alex de Waal, the author of Famine Crimes, a book which looked at how democracy prevents famine, says the mere fact of democracy is not enough. He also says the main cause of famine is epidemic disease rather than starvation. But he describes Sen's work as "seminal".

An article Sen wrote in the British Medical Journal, which appeared in the New York Review of Books with the headline, "More than a Hundred Million Women are Missing", was picked apart by some demographers. Sen had examined the disturbing fact that while female mortality is generally lower than male mortality at all age-groups in most cultures, this is not the case in India. Because of massive gender inequality, girls have less food and are taken to doctors less than boys. Sen accepts that that criticism of his "ballpark figure" was legitimate, but says his main point about inequality cannot be challenged.

More substantial criticisms revolve round his role in the current globalisation debate. Richard Jolly, while being an enormous admirer, says: "On the issue of liberalisation and the opening up of economies, Amartya has been rather mainstream. He hasn't raised very deep questions about the whole process and of globalisation in general. He's more of a mainstream economist than many people realise."

Meghnad Desai sees a double problem. One is the issue of accessibility. Desai cites Sen's latest book, Development as Freedom, which is based on a set of lectures he gave the World Bank in 1996. Desai describes it as written for the converted, as well as being too dense. (Even though advertised as the work of a Nobel laureate, the book sold less than 3,000 copies in hardback.) "Amartya won't admit it but he's very badly hurt if he's criticised . . . He can't let go of this armour of the technical thing. He can't write a tract, or doesn't want to," he says.

Desai also feels Sen has failed to come clean on a major change of mind. "He used to be anti-market and very sympathetic to the Nehru line. Then he found a clever way round it. During the past 20 years he's finally made his peace with the market, though on his own terms and without going all-out for a free market. It's a higher form of reconciliation," he argues.

TN Srinavasan, economics professor at Yale and a long-time colleague, says: "Many of us were trained in the 50s to believe that states should be active in planning the economy. Sen did not give up that idea until later than some others. He still hasn't added his voice to the call for more privatisation of the Indian economy and the removal of the old Gandhian protection of small-scale producers."

Sen gets quite heated by the suggestion that he has changed his line on the market. "Nothing I've ever written was anti-market. Being against the market is like being against conversation. It's a form of exchange," he snaps. "But I was just as hostile in the past to giving any privileges to the market as I am now. Besides, those who are great advocates of the market don't always make it easier for people to have access to the market through basic education, credit or whatever."

He is also stung by the charge that he is middle of the road. "That depends on how you define the road. There is a road which you can define in which I am in the middle, but part of my problem is to argue that people should be on a different road. I'm really trying to change the road. My frustration is that I have not being very successful in changing the focus of the debate," he says.

Even in trying to change the road, Sen's line on globalisation is relatively soft. "Opponents may see globalisation as a new folly, but it is neither particularly new or a folly," he says. He supports the "themes" raised by anti-capitalist and environmental protesters at Seattle, Prague and Davos, but not their "theses", which he finds too simple. He says the problem is not free trade, but the inequality of global power. He strongly welcomes the rise of the NGO movement, which combines with media coverage to produce the beginning of some "countervailing power" to the larger corporations and the traditional policies of first world governments.

But he also attaches blame to many third-world governments for not undertaking domestic reform. He argues that the United Nations has to be saved from insolvency and given a greater leadership role which escapes from the asymmetry caused by the veto power of the five richest and/or largest countries. "There needs to be a watchdog institution which is concerned with inequality and fair trade, asks why the USA and Europe are so restrictive to products from the third world, and raises questions about the pricing policy of the drug companies," he says.

For the past 10 years, Sen has been married to the economic historian, Emma Rothschild, an expert on Adam Smith and Fellow of King's. The two children he brought up on his own have done well. Indrani is a journalist in New York and Kabir teaches music at a school in Boston, and has a rock band called Uncle Trouble.

Sen usually spends the winter holidays in India, where he likes to go on long bike rides, and maintains a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he and Emma spend the spring and long vacations. Asked how he relaxes, he replies: "I read a lot and like arguing with people."

As well as his global interests, he has taken up one local goal. He wants to raise the proportion of state school pupils getting into Trinity. There has been progress, and for the first time last year, the college made more than half (53%) of its offers to state-school pupils. Sen, however, acknowledges there is still a gap, since nationally 65% of students with three A-levels are from state schools.

"This is not a personal initiative," he insists. "The council was already doing it before my time, and the undergraduates on the access committee who visit sixth forms are very keen to explain we are not unfriendly to state schools. My reputation would be mud if I seemed to be trying to take the credit." A lifelong believer in equality, in this, as in all his other contributions, he feels the main thing is to reach the correct analysis. He is not a crusader. Others must implement the solutions.

Life at a glance: Amartya Kumar Sen

Born: Santiniketan, Bengal, November 3 1933

Education: Presidency College, Calcutta; Trinity College, Cambridge

Married: Nabaneeta Dev, 1960-71, (two daughters, Antara and Nandana); Eva Colorni, 1978 (died 1985), a daughter, Indrani, and son, Kabir; Emma Rothschild,1991.

Some books: Choice of Techniques, 1960; Collective Choice and Social Welfare, 1970; On Economic Inequality, 1973; Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, 1981; Hunger and Public Action, jointly edited with Jean Dreze, 1989; India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, with Jean Dreze, 1995; Development as Freedom, 1999.

Awards: Indira Gandhi Gold Medal Award of the Asiatic Society, 1994; Nobel prize for economics, 1998; Eisenhower Medal, USA, 2000; Honorary Companion of Honour, UK, 2000.

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