Amartya Sen (1933–)

This chapter takes up Amartya Sen's ideas on social choice and welfare economics, capabilities and entitlements in development, development as freedom, gender disparities and women's empowerment, the role of markets and the state, and the role of democracy. Sen is a great believer in democracy, even for developing countries, and hates authoritarianism of both the Left and Right. While China's dictatorship was responsible for millions of famine deaths, in independent India free press and multiparty democracy prevented famines. Sen is against any general pro or anti market stances and recommends that each case be decided on its merits. Sen strongly bats for human development or interventions aimed at ensuring acceptable levels of entitlements in the form of education, health, nutrition, gender equalities and civic freedoms. In his opinion, it is better to cut down military expenditures rather than cutting down on education or healthcare (or teachers and nurses). Sen believes in an incrementalist approach to economics as social choice theory and welfare economics (for which he got the Nobel Prize) are themselves based on incrementalism. He neither believes in the Schumpeterian idea of abrupt creative destruction nor in the Marxian idea that capitalism will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. He believes that capitalism can be reformed through conscious social choices in a participatory democracy.