Amartya Kumar Sen (Bengali pronunciation: [ˈɔmortːo ˈʃen]; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher.

The first Asian to win a Nobel Prize,[15] the polymath and writer Rabindranath Tagore, gave Amartya Sen his name (Bengali: অমর্ত্য, romanized: ômorto, lit.

His father, Ashutosh Sen, was a Professor of Chemistry at Dhaka University, then the Development Commissioner in Delhi and then Chairman of the West Bengal Public Service Commission.

[20] With radiation treatment, he survived, and in 1953 he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he earned a second BA in economics in 1955 with a first class, topping the list as well.

[21] While Sen was officially a PhD student at Cambridge (though he had finished his research in 1955–56), he was offered the position of First-Professor and First-Head of the Economics Department of the newly created Jadavpur University in Calcutta.

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.

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[28] applied, as well as to extend and enrich the theory of social choice, informed by his interests in history of economic thought and philosophy.

[37] 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.

On 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.

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.

Protective security is the system of social safety nets that prevent a group affected by poverty being subjected to terrible misery.

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).

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.

Between 1960 and 1961, Sen was a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, where he got to know Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Franco Modigliani, and Norbert Wiener.

[citation needed] In 1985, Sen co-founded the Eva Colorni Trust at the former London Guildhall University in memory of his deceased wife.

[49] Sen was criticised as the project suffered due to inordinate delays, mismanagement, and lack of presence of faculty on ground.

He serves as the honorary director of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Human and Economic Development Studies at Peking University in China.

He unveiled the cover of Sruti Gitobitan, a Rabindrasangeet album comprising all the 2222 Tagore songs, brought out by Rezwana Chowdhury Bannya, principal of Shurer Dhara School of Music.

[51] In August 2019, during the clampdown and curfew in Kashmir for more than two weeks after the Indian revocation of Jammu and Kashmir's special status, Sen criticised the government and said "As an Indian, I am not proud of the fact that India, after having done so much to achieve a democratic norm in the world – where India was the first non-Western country to go for democracy – that we lose that reputation on the grounds of action that have been taken".

[75] Sen also wrote an article for The New York Times in 2013 documenting the reasons why India trailed behind China in economic development.

His first wife was Nabaneeta Dev Sen, an Indian writer and scholar, with whom he had two daughters: Antara, a journalist and publisher, and Nandana, a Bollywood actress.

The couple had two children, a daughter Indrani, who is a journalist in New York, and a son Kabir, a hip hop artist, MC, and music teacher at Shady Hill School.

[53] In 1991, Sen married Emma Georgina Rothschild, who serves as the Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University.

He usually spends his winter holidays at his home in Shantiniketan in West Bengal, India, where he used to go on long bike rides until recently.

That gave a leg up to the religious interpretation of India, despite the fact that Sanskrit had a larger atheistic literature than exists in any other classical language.

Madhava Acharya, the remarkable 14th century philosopher,[80] wrote this rather great book called Sarvadarshansamgraha, which discussed all the religious schools of thought within the Hindu structure.

[82] A list of Persian translations of Amartya Sen's work is available here Archived 20 December 2016 at the Wayback Machine