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Top 10 Surprising Facts about Amartya Sen

Born on  November 3, 1933 to his parents

At some point he spent a lot of time as a child with his maternal grandparents in Shantiniketan. This was during the war between India and Japan. Actually, he studied there from the age of 7 to the age of 17.

His paternal grandparents were also professional. For example his paternal grandfather was a lawyer and a judge. 

Amartya therefore,  is an Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economic and social justice.

Further, his contribution as an economic theories of famines, decision theory, development economics, public health measures are major in the well-being of different countries in the world.

At the moment, he s Professor at Thomas W. Lamont University, a professorship he gained from Harvard University in the department of Economics.

Earlier, he served as Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 and India’s Bharat Ratna in 1999 for his work in the welfare economics.

The German Publishers and Booksellers Association awarded him the 2020 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade for his pioneering scholarship addressing issues of global justice and combating social inequality in education and healthcare.

1. His passion to Alleviate Famine

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At the age of nine, a man who had not eaten for around 40 days visited his school. While many children harassed him, Sen interacted with him and from then developed a desire to end hunger in the world.

2. Cambridge homes

Interestingly, Sen has houses in both Massachusetts Cambridge and England Cambridge.

However, he spends his winter holidays in his Shantiniketan home in West Bengal, India. He enjoys bike rides in this home until recently when he could no longer have rides.

3. He Married three times

The most interesting part about Sen is that he has been married three times. His first wife, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, an Indian writer and scholar. Together they had two gifted daughters. 

One of the daughters Antara is a journalist and publisher while the other Nandana is a Bollywood actress. Their marriage did not last as they broke up immediately they moved to London in 1971. 

However, he married Eva Colorni in 1978. This time he married an Italian economist and daughter to Eugenio Colorni and Ursula Hirschmann, niece to Albert O. Hirschman.

His marriage to Eva got him two children, a daughter Indrani, a known journalist in New York and a son Kabir, a hip hop artist, MC and a music teacher at Shady Hill School. Unfortunately, Eva died of cancer in 1985.

In 1991, Sen married Emma Georgina Rothschild, a Jeremy and Jane Knowles Professor of History at Harvard University. Emma is a family member of an eminent Rothschild banking family in England.

4. Nobel Prize Winner in 1998 

In 1998, Sen received the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his theoretical, field, and ethics work in welfare economics.

In addition, the prize was in recognition for his research advancing the understanding of social-choice theory, poverty, and the measurement of welfare.

5. He Won Other Great Awards

He has received top civilian honors around the world, including France鈥檚 L茅gion d鈥橦onneur (2012) and India鈥檚 Bharat Ratna (1999), as well as more than 100 honorary degrees from institutions on five continents.

Sen received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Harvard Law School in 2000 and is a senior fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard.

6. Diverse Economic Disciplines

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At age 19, Amartya was offered a prize fellowship at Trinity College in Cambridge. He took up economics while he was there. The university promoted coexistence amidst diversity and this philosophy found his way into his studies as well.

He felt free to refer to a range of economists, including communist Karl Marx and moralist Adam Smith. Among literary authors, he read the works of John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, Lord Bryan and George Bernand Shaw.

7. A Lecturer at 87 Years Old

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At 87, Sen, who lives near Harvard with his wife, Emma Rothschild,  has no interest in resting on his considerable laurels. In addition to teaching one course each semester, either in economics, history or philosophy.

8. He is Sharp

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Sen is a sharp, frequent critic of contemporary Indian politics. He recently completed a new book, 鈥淗ome in the World: A Memoir鈥� set for release in the United Kingdom and the United States.

He is a Professor and was The Chancellor of Nalanda University. During this time, he had an opportunity to meet with President Shri Pranab Mukherjee. The meeting was at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi. 

Very interesting indeed!.

9. His Father was a Progressive Scientist

His background is known to be that of academic achievers. For instance the father was a professor of chemistry in Dhaka University, the capital city of Bangladesh.

However, the mother had a mixture of professions. She was quite a successful dancer once, but she was also an editor of a magazine that she edited for about 30 years.

His maternal side was interesting. The grandfather was a very famous professor of Sanskrit at Visva-Bharati University established in Shantiniketan,  a small town about 100 miles from Calcutta.

10. A Successful Researcher

Sen’s work on ‘Choice of Techniques’ complemented that of Maurice Dobb. In a developing country, the Dobb-Sen strategy relied on maximizing investible surpluses maintaining constant real wages and using the entire increase in labor productivity, due to technological change, to raise the rate of accumulation.

In other words, workers were expected to demand no improvement in their standard of living despite having become more productive.

Sen’s papers in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped develop the theory of social choice. This came first to prominence in the work by the American economist Kenneth Arrow.

The common factor about this research was very interesting.  Arrow had most famously shown that when voters have three or more distinct alternatives 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 applied, as well as to extend and enrich the theory of social choice, informed by his interests in history of economic thoughts and philosophy.

In conclusion Amartya Sen is a man who made history in his contribution in the academic field of economics and worth being remembered.