[Nobel Economics Prize: What a difference a year makes--from pricing options to preventing famine.]
"Economist Wins Nobel Prize for Work on Famines and
Poverty"
By SYLVIA NASAR
Amartya Sen won the Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economic Science on Wednesday for work on human
rights,
poverty and inequality that has changed the way
governments deal with famines and for what the Royal
Swedish Academy of Sciences said had "restored an
ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economics
problems."
Sen, 64, whose given name means "one who deserves
immortality" in Bengali, is master of Trinity College
in Cambridge, England, and professor emeritus at
Harvard University. He was president of the American
Economics Association in 1994, still teaches part-time
at Harvard and is finishing a book on democracy and
capitalism that will be published by Knopf next year.
Just a decade ago, a member of the economics prize
committee of the Swedish academy confidently predicted
that "Sen will never get the prize." His unfashionable
concerns with values and his equally unfashionable
style (highly influential, but wide-ranging, diffuse,
lacking a single killer theorem) seemed out of step
with the value-free, specialized approach that the
economics profession places emphasis on.
But times have changed, including inside the secretive
Swedish academy that administers the economics prize.
The economics prize was created in 1969 and has grown
increasingly controversial within the academy, which is
dominated by hard scientists.
In a seismic yet unannounced shift three years ago, the
Academy, reacting to internal criticism over the
quality of past and prospective recipients, essentially
broadened the economics prize into a social science
prize encompassing contributions to political science,
psychology and sociology. At the same time, in a
sweeping rule change, the academy also purged the prize
committee of the generation that had controlled the
prize since its inception and demanded that
non-economists be included in the seven-member
committee.
A wide-ranging scholar who has sometimes been
criticized for spreading himself too thin, Sen has
always responded by decrying the narrowness of modern
economics and by asserting that juggling many balls
badly is better than displaying virtuosity with one
ball.
Sen's contributions to welfare economics, the basic
theory of how societies make choices that are both fair
and efficient, have become part of every graduate
student's training in economic theory. And his
critiques of economic concepts that were once taken for
granted are among the most quoted in economics,
including his essay "Rational Fools" in which he takes
on the classical presumption that people are motivated
primarily by self-interest.
But Sen is best known for his work on the causes of
famine, on inequality and on the measurement of
poverty, work that many believe has saved many lives.
His 1981 book "Poverty and Famine" (Oxford University
Press) influenced the way international organizations
and governments deal with food crises. He showed that
famine was not just a consequence of nature, but also
an avoidable economic and political catastrophe.
Drought and flood often precede starvation, but
declines in food production rarely account for it.
Typically, even if many thousands die, there is enough
food in the country to go around or enough money to
import it.
Disaster strikes, Sen found, when the poorest people
can no longer afford to buy food because they lose
their jobs or because food prices soar. In the great
Bengal famine, in which three million perished, India's
food supplies were not unusually low. Colonial rulers,
immune to democratic pressures, simply stood by.
Partly because of Sen's finding, governments now focus
less on direct distribution of food and more on
replacing the lost income of the poor, through, for
example, public works projects.
Sen's theoretical work on inequality shows that all
commonly accepted measures of inequality involve
hidden, sometimes surprising value judgments. One of
the most dramatic insights to grow out of his research
was the devastating consequence of inequality between
men and women.
Demographers have long been aware that there were fewer
women than men in some poor countries, instead of more
as in most of the developed world. And economists,
including Sen, have documented that girls and women got
less food and medical care than men and boys.
But nobody had calculated how many more women would
have been alive if the ratio of men and women more
closely resembled that of other countries. Sen came up
with the startling figure of 100 million "missing"
women, most of them in India and China, killed as it
were by discrimination.
The questions that Sen has asked in the course of his
career, listed by the academy in its press announcement
and often posed in dense, mathematically demanding
treatises, convey the flavor of his work. How can
societies make majority decisions without infringing
the rights of dissenting minorities? What measures of
inequality are meaningful? How can we decide whether
poverty is declining or increasing? What causes
famines?
The questions go back a long way. As a child, during
the Bengal famine of 1943, Sen handed out cigarette
tins of rice to starving refugees as they passed his
grandfather's house. The grandfather, a scholar and
author of a book on Hinduism, engaged the boy in hours
of serious discussion on his beliefs about life. As a
teen-ager, Sen considered becoming a Buddhist but
turned to economics, mathematics and philosophy
instead.
A student at Cambridge in the 1950s of the economist
Joan Robinson, who urged him to forget all that "ethics
rubbish," he did the opposite.
"Amartya has thought more deeply than anyone about the
nature of the judgments we make about economic
welfare," said the Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, a
lifelong friend. "What do we mean when we say that some
group is better off."
A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books,
Sen has long communicated with an audience beyond his
fellow economists and often about his native India --
he keeps his citizenship there despite many years in
the United States and Britain.
Sen was in New York to attend a memorial service for a
friend on Wednesday and was frightened when he was
awakened at his hotel by a 5:30 a.m. phone call (from
Stockholm, not home, as it turned out). After being
told the good news about the prize, he confessed, he
was "very touched." He said that he was especially
pleased that the academy had highlighted the issues of
welfare, inequality and poverty in its press release.
"I'm very keen to emphasize the importance of these
issues," he said.
For all his moral and intellectual concerns, Sen is
remarkably down to earth. His wife, Emma Rothschild, an
Oxford economic historian who has just completed a book
on 19th century economic thought, talks about his
"great big laugh," his fondness for good wine and
conversation, and his devotion to his friends and
family, including his four children.
Sen will receive his prize, which includes a check of
about $964,000 in Stockholm on Dec. 10.
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company |
