Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher whose work on social choice, welfare, poverty, and human development earned the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Welfare economics: The branch of economics that evaluates how economic arrangements affect social well-being. Sen broadened its account of welfare beyond income and utility.
Sen's liberal paradox: A social-choice result showing a conflict between minimal individual liberty and Pareto efficiency under specified conditions. It demonstrates how respecting even limited personal rights can make collective rankings inconsistent.
Human Development Index: A composite measure of national development based on life expectancy, education, and income. Sen’s work helped inspire a measure that looks beyond economic output.
Kenneth Arrow: An American economist whose work established influential results in social choice theory. Arrow’s impossibility theorem provided a central problem for Sen’s early research.
Capability approach: A framework that assesses well-being through people’s real opportunities to achieve valuable ways of living. The approach became a major alternative to income- and utility-centered measures of well-being.
Utility: A representation of preference or well-being used in economic analysis. Sen questioned whether utility alone captures what people have reason to value.
Informational basis of welfare judgments: The information about people and outcomes admitted when comparing social states. Sen argued that welfare conclusions depend on which features of lives a theory counts.
Mahbub ul Haq: A Pakistani economist who developed the Human Development Report and Human Development Index. Haq worked with Sen’s ideas to bring human development into international measurement.
John Rawls: An American political philosopher who developed a theory of justice based on equal basic liberties and fair institutions. Sen challenged whether a focus on ideal institutions adequately addresses actual injustice.
Social choice theory: The study of how individual preferences can be combined into collective decisions or rankings. Sen’s results widened the field’s concerns to include rights and informational limits.

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