Poverty Scholar Wins Nobel in Economics

Amartya K. Sen, who as a boy witnessed famine in his native India and went on to research poverty in a way that stretched the limits of economics, on Wednesday was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Sen, 64, is a well-liked academic who left Harvard University this year to take the helm of Trinity College at Cambridge University in England. He is regarded in his field as something of a renaissance man with expertise in human welfare, poverty and economic development.

Although Sen long was considered a leading candidate for the Nobel in economics, his selection marks a departure from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ general pattern of opting for economists specializing in theoretical topics with far less impact on social conditions.

The choice of Sen “recognizes that economic problems cannot always be solved with only econometric models and scientific approaches,” said Dimitri Papadimitriou, executive director of the Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., where Sen was awarded an honorary doctorate last year.

Papadimitriou said Sen “has brought in the ethical and philosophic dimensions to economics” to deal “with questions of hunger, famine and the general welfare of individuals.”

Sen received the news of his prize in a 5:15 a.m. telephone call from Stockholm to his hotel room in New York, where he is visiting the United Nations.

At an afternoon U.N. news conference, he said, “My initial thought [at that hour] was that something terrible must have happened, some accident, having four children in different parts of the world and an aged mother, but happily it turned out to be good news.”

Sen added that he was “particularly happy” that the award, worth about $960,000 at current exchange rates, cited his work in explaining the causes of famine and poverty.

“The fact that economics is also concerned with the poor, the downtrodden, the underdogs of society is something that’s very close to my heart. And, indeed, I’ve spent most of my life working on the downside of economics, and it’s pleasing that they focused on that.”

Sen, who handed out rice to starving refugees during the Bengal famine of 1943, which led to the death of 3 million people, went on to become a leading authority on famines. In his 1981 work “Poverty and Famine”--one of his more than 15 books--he argued that famine was not just a consequence of nature but also a man-made disaster resulting from inadequate political and economic responses.

His research found that India’s food supplies during the Bengal famine were not unusually low. Rather, the famine resulted from a run-up in food prices spurred by, among other things, wartime panic and manipulative speculation.

‘Famines Are Easy to Prevent’

Partly as a result of Sen’s findings, governments have put less emphasis on directly distributing food to the poor and instead have focused more attention on restoring personal incomes through such programs as public works projects.

Although no one in Sen’s circle of family or friends was hit by the famine, he said during Wednesday’s news conference that “it touched me personally in that as a 9 1/2-year-old boy, you suddenly find emaciated people arriving from nowhere and dying in the thousands. It is a very shaking experience. . . . It made me think specifically about what causes famine, and when I took on the famine work in a formal way 30 years later, I was still quite haunted by the memories of that period.

“Famines are easy to prevent, but very often governments don’t have any interest in preventing them,” Sen said. “That’s because while famines may kill millions, typically it doesn’t affect the rulers. . . . What democracy does is make the rulers pay a cost, because once a famine comes, then you’ll be criticized in the press if there’s a free press, you’ll be attacked by other political parties if other political parties are tolerated, you will be chastised in parliament if there is a parliament, and you will lose the next election if there are elections. So a democratic government immediately has an incentive not to have a famine.”

Sen has been a pioneer as well in developing new measures of poverty and inequality. He once determined that the lesser amounts of food and medical care that women in poor countries receive than men led to 100 million “missing” women--women who died as a result of being disadvantaged.

In recent years, Sen also has focused on economic development. He came to believe that “improvements in development were not simply to have more things, but more choice in how to live your life,” said Frances Stewart, head of Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University’s development studies center.

Stewart, who worked with Sen on a U.N. human development report in 1990, said his thinking challenged “the World Bank view, which concentrated on debts. He emphasized the human side of development.”

To the extent there is criticism of the amiable Sen, it’s largely that he may have spread himself too thin to make a deep, continuing impact in any one area.

Still, Sen’s admirers welcomed the news of his award, formally known as the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Howard Glennester, who teaches social policy at the London School of Economics and heads its Suntory Toyota Research Center, said he was encouraged that “an area of economics that has to do with justice, equality and social issues is being taken seriously.

“It is a major shift and shows recognition of equity as something we can discuss,” Glennester said. “For so long, economists have been told that equity is not for us . . . [that] you can’t talk about it. Amartya Sen said, ‘Yes, we can.’ This bridges a gap between economics and social policy.”

Sen is in New York to participate in a memorial service today for Mahbub ul-Haq, a Pakistani economist and anti-poverty activist. Mahbub and Sen developed an alternative way to measure national prosperity for the U.N. Development Program, the world body’s leading provider of economic assistance to poor countries.

The index developed by the two includes such factors as access to health care and education, infant mortality and social equality, rather than just per-capita income.

“Professor Sen’s work . . . goes beyond looking at economic growth as the sole indicator of a nation’s progress and looks also at the expansion of people’s choices and their capacity to live long, healthy, knowledgeable and satisfying lives,” said James Gustav Speth, the administrator of the U.N. Development Program.

Sen, who was born in 1933 in Santiniketan, India, graduated from Presidency College at Calcutta University and earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Trinity College. Before returning to Trinity in January, he spent a decade teaching economics and philosophy at Harvard.

He also has taught at Jadavpur University in Calcutta, the Delhi School of Economics, the London School of Economics and Trinity.

Robert Nozick, a Harvard philosophy professor who co-taught classes with Sen, said his former colleague “has broadened the scope of economics. He’s made technical contributions in economics that also are of general intellectual interest and philosophic interest.”

Nozick also described Sen as “convivial, social and [he] has a great sense of humor.”

Sen is married to Emma Rothschild, director of the Center for History and Economics at King’s College at Cambridge.

Silverstein reported from Los Angeles and Miller reported from London. Times staff writer Craig Turner in New York contributed to this report.