Showing papers by "Amartya Sen published in 2006"

Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny

Abstract: In this brilliant short book, Amartya Sen argues that most of the conflicts in the contemporary world arise from individuals' notions of who they are, and which groups they belong to local, national, religious - which define themselves in opposition to others. Our identification with these groups determines, for example, which side we belong to in a war, and whether we are an object of hatred by others or a member of a privileged caste. If we are to overcome and resolve conflicts in our increasingly globalised world, we need to recognise that we all have multiple identities and that we share most of those identities with others than our differences make us distinct from them.

The argumentative Indian : writings on Indian history, culture and identity

Abstract: From Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, "The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian Culture, History and Identity" brings together an illuminating selection of writings on contemporary India. India is an immensely diverse country with many distinct pursuits, vastly different convictions, widely divergent customs and a veritable feast of viewpoints. Out of these conflicting views spring a rich tradition of skeptical argument and cultural achievement which is critically important, argues Amartya Sen, for the success of India's democracy, the defence of its secular politics, the removal of inequalities related to class, caste, gender and community, and the pursuit of sub-continental peace. "Profound and stimulating ...the product of a great mind at the peak of its power". (William Dalrymple, "Sunday Times"). "One of the most influential public thinkers of our times...This is a book that needed to have been written...It would be no surprise if it were to become as defining and as influential as work as Edward Said's Orientalism". (Soumya Bhattacharya, "Observer"). "The winner of the 1998 Nobel prize in economics is a star in India ...he deserves the recognition ...shows that the argumentative gene is not just a part of India's make-up that can easily be wished away". ("The Economist"). Amartya Sen is Lamont University Professor at Harvard. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge 1998-2004. His most recent books are "The Idea of Justice", "Identity and Violence" and "Development as Freedom". His books have been translated into thirty languages.

Poverty and inequality

Abstract: Contents @toc4:Contributors iii Preface and Acknowledgments iii @toc2:Chapter One. Introduction: The Conceptual Foundations of Poverty and Inequality Measurement 1 @tocca:David B. Grusky and Ravi Kanbur @toc2:Chapter Two. Conceptualizing and Measuring Poverty 000 @tocca:Amartya Sen @toc2:Chapter Three. Poverty and Human Functioning: Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements 000 @tocca:Martha C. Nussbaum @toc2:Chapter Four. From Income to Endowments: The Difficult Task of Expanding the Income Poverty Paradigm 000 @toca:Franois Bourguignon @toc2:Chapter Five. Social Theory and the Concept "Underclass" 000 @tocca:William J. Wilson @toc2:Chapter Six. Race, Class, and Markets: Social Policy in the 21st Century 000 @tocca:Douglas S. Massey @toc2:Chapter Seven. Dependency and Social Debt 000 @tocca:Martha A. Fineman @toc4:Notes 000 References 000 Index 000

The Political Economy of Targeting

Abstract: The use of the term “targeting” in eradicating poverty is based on an analogy–a target is something fired at. It is not altogether clear whether it is an appropriate analogy. The problem is not so much that the word “target” has combative association. This it does of course have, and the relationship it implies certainly seems more adversarial than supportive. But it is possible to change the association of ideas, and in fact, to some extent, the usage has already shifted in a permissive direction. The more serious problem lies elsewhere–in the fact that the analogy of a target does not at all suggest that the recipient is an active person, functioning on her own, acting and doing things. The image is one of a passive receiver rather than of an active agent. To see the objects of targeting as patients rather than as agents can undermine the exercise of poverty removal in many different ways. The people affected by such policies can be very active agents indeed, rather than languid recipients waiting for their handouts. Not to focus on the fact that they think, choose, act, and respond is to miss something terribly crucial to the entire exercise. This is not just a terminological problem. The approach of what is called targeting often has this substantive feature of taking a passive view of the beneficiaries, and this can be a major source of allocational distortion. There is something to be gained from taking, instead, a more activity-centered view of poverty removal. Let us begin with the central case–the core argument–in favor of targeting. The theoretical point in favor of targeting in antipoverty policy is clear enough: the more accurate a subsidy in fact is in reaching the poor, the less the wastage, and the less it costs to achieve the desired objective. It is a matter of cost-effectiveness in securing a particular benefit. Or, to see it another way, it is one of maximizing the poverty-

Conceptualizing and Measuring Poverty

Abstract: The period of intense exploration of conceptual foundations of normative measurement that Tony Atkinson’s (1970) classic paper on the evaluation of inequality initiated seems to have given way to a relative neglect of conceptual issues, replaced by greater involvement with actual measurement and estimation, applying well-established approaches and measures. It is not that these empirical exercises have not been worthwhile. Certainly, we know a great deal more about the state of inequality and poverty in the world than used to be the case. But there is room for more conceptual questioning and greater foundational scrutiny at this time, both for reexamining old problems (they rarely go away) and for addressing new questions that have emerged in the contemporary world. Indeed, the practical world is a constant source of conceptual challenge, and it is right that we should try to reassess our concepts and ideas in the light of the manifest problems that empirical work identifies. Let me illustrate with the recent factual debates on the state of inequality and poverty in China—a subject that has engaged much high-powered attention in the last few years. Over the last two decades China has had an altogether exceptional record of rapid economic growth, which has boosted the country’s average income faster than anywhere else in the world. The impact of China’s fast economic growth can be seen also in the swift reduction in China of the number of poor people—the population below what is agreed to be the minimally acceptable income level. Although the exact estimates of the extent of the decline of poverty in China remain an important

Reason, Freedom and Well-being

Abstract: I am embarrassed at being placed in the dizzying company of one of the truly great thinkers in the world. The similarities between Mill's ideas and mine partly reflect, of course, his influence on my thinking. But I also discuss some difficulties in taking Mill's whole theory without modification, since there are internal tensions within it. In a paper I published in 1967, I tried to discuss how Mill's willingness to hold on to some contrary positions depended on the nature of his empirical reading of the world. I draw on that diagnosis in commenting on some of the articles here. There are some serious issues of misinterpretation in one of the articles, which I try to clarify. I also comment on Arrow's interpretation of what is involved in the idea of autonomy and on his own way of assessing freedom, and acknowledge the seriousness of the questions he raises about the value of freedom in normative political philosophy.

Adam Smith’s Economics

Abstract: A PRACTICAL AND POPULAR MANNER Adam Smith's writings on economic subjects - to adapt the title that his closest friends gave to his posthumously published Essays on Philosophical Subjects - are diverse, discursive, and interspersed with almost everything else that he wrote. Economic life, for Smith, was intricately interconnected with the rest of life, or with the life of politics, sentiment, and imagination. Economic thought was interconnected with the rest of thought, or with legal, philosophical, and moral reflection. In the speculative thought of philosophers, as in the plans and projects of merchants, the economic and the political were virtually impossible to distinguish. “I have begun to write a book in order to pass away the time,” Smith wrote to David Hume from Toulouse, in 1764. He devoted some 12 years of his life to the composition of The Wealth of Nations , which was eventually published in 1776 (“finish your Work before Autumn; go to London; print it,” Hume had written sternly in 1772) (Corr., pp. 102, 166). But The Wealth of Nations is not concerned only with wealth, and Smith's other writings and lectures were concerned in part with wealth, as well as with the emotional or moral lives of individuals ( The Theory of Moral Sentiments ), or with legal institutions (the lectures on jurisprudence). In The Wealth of Nations , individuals seek amusement, attention, and conversation; they think about fear and oppression; they reflect on ontology; and they are interested in equity. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments , they desire trinkets and tweezer cases, they have theories about wealth and poverty, and they reflect on the commerce with China and on the precariousness of life. Smith says almost nothing about self-love in The Wealth of Nations ; it is a principal theme of The Theory of Moral Sentiments . “[I]t is chiefly from this regard to the sentiments of mankind, that we pursue riches and avoid poverty,” Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (I.iii.2.1), of the desire to be attended to, and taken notice of.

Human Rights and the Limits of the Law

Abstract: In a sentence that sounds oddly conservative—even reactionary— Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in 1790: “on what principle Mr. Burke could defend American independence, I cannot conceive.” This was in the first of Wollstonecraft’s two books on what we would now call “human rights,” the one entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. What could she be talking about? Mary Wollstonecraft was talking, in fact, of the inadequacy of any defense of the liberty of non-slave population in the British colony in North America without addressing, at the same time, the rights of human beings who happened to be enslaved. Wollstonecraft went on to say: [T]he whole tenor of [Burke’s] plausible arguments settles slavery on an everlasting foundation. Allowing his servile reverence for antiquity, and prudent attention to self-interest, to have the force which he insists on, the slave trade ought never to be abolished; and, because our ignorant forefathers, not understanding the native dignity of man, sanctioned a traffic that outrages every suggestion of reason and religion, we are to submit to the inhuman custom, and terms an atrocious insult to humanity the love of our country, and a proper submission to the laws by which our property is secured.1 Edmund Burke was very much against the French revolution, but entirely in favor of the American war of independence; Mary Wollstonecraft was in favor of both. The point she is making here, as she does elsewhere as well, is that it is hard to justify the defense of freedom of human beings that separate out some people, whose liberties matter, from others not to be included in that select category. Two

The Man Without a Plan

Abstract: "Be thine own palace," wrote John Donne, "or the world's thy jail." William Easterly does not invoke this particular metaphor in The White Man's Burden, but this exciting -and excited -book is about the imprisonment of the world's poor in the trap of international aid, where "planners" have incarcerated the wretched of the earth. The poor may not have a "palace" to fall back on, battered as they are by grinding privation, massive illiteracy, and the scourge of epidemics. But Easterly -a former World Bank economist who now teaches at New York University -nevertheless argues that in the fight against global poverty, "the right plan is to have no plan."

Normative Evaluation and Legal Analogues

Abstract: Norms have an impact on the actual rules of operation in a society in at least two distinct ways. First, the conduct and behavior of people are influenced, to varying extents, by the established norms in a society. Norms can impose obligations and constraints which work like law, and this is perhaps the most direct manifestation of norms as "unwritten law" to which Charles Davenant referred. At the very least, norms can supplement legal rules (the "written law," as it were) that are in force.

Democracy Isn’t “Western”

Abstract: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." Culture too, like our stars, is often blamed for our failures. Attempts to build a better world capsize, it is alleged, in the high sea of cultural resistance. The determinism of culture is increasingly used in contemporary global discussions to generate pessimism about the feasibility of a democratic state, or of a flourishing economy, or of a tolerant society, wherever these conditions do not already obtain.

Propiedad y hambre

Abstract: Los argumentos politicos y sociales a menudo recurren a reivindicaciones morales basadas en derechos intrinsecamente valiosos. Hace ya muchisimo tiempo que se invocan los derechos relacionados con la propiedad. Pero existen tambien otrostipos de derechos que han sido considerados como "innatos e inalienables", y la Declaracion de Independencia de los Estados Unidos se refiere a "ciertos derechos inalienables", entre los cuales se cuentan "vida, libertad y la prosecucion de lafelicidad". La Constitucion de la India llega hasta mencionar el "derecho a los medios adecuados de vida". El "derecho a no sufrir hambre" ha sido invocado a menudo en discusiones recientes sobre la obligacion de ayuda a los hambrientos.El derecho a poseer, usar y legar la propiedad que se haya adquirido legalmente es considerado a menudo como valioso intrinsecamente. De hecho, sin embargo, muchas de las defensas que de el se hacen parecen ser realmente de tipo instrumental; searguye, por ejemplo, que los derechos de propiedad hacen que la gente sea mas libre para elegir una clase de vida mas bien que otra.