There is nothing to panic about growth: Amartya Sen. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen , who has just written An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions with Jean Dreze , tells Mihir S Sharma that he doesn’t understand why his book has received an angry reaction, or why he is being called anti- growth and pro-redistribution.
Is it startling to discover that you are being called a licence Raj socialist? It is very strange indeed. Perhaps some of this reaction is because of anxiety over growth, but there is nothing to panic about, really. Brazil and South Africa are doing less than 1%; we have fallen in growth terms exactly as much as China has. The rising economy is Indonesia – but that is relevant to our story because they are benefiting from a much better education and healthcare base than we have. Was the nature of India’s high growth in the 2000s problematic? Your book says India’s real wages have been stagnant. Well, remember that the educational base has suddenly been expanded a great deal in the past nine years. Interview - 99.12.15. Sen's new book, Development as Freedom (reviewed in the December issue of The Atlantic), is a broad-ranging, often ruminative work, and a good introduction to the multitude of interests that have defined his career.
Although Sen is probably best known for his research on famines, his work on women -- the attention he has drawn to their unequal status in the developing world, and his calls for gender-specific aid programs -- is just as important. A former professor of both philosophy and economics at Harvard, he is also a gifted mathematician -- a skill that has earned him legitimacy among mainstream economists and allowed him to propagate his unorthodox views. Sen has written on such diverse topics as objectivity, liberalism, and agency. In 1998 he was appointed the first non-British master of Trinity College, Cambridge -- considered by many the most prestigious academic post in the United Kingdom.
Akash Kapur recently interviewed Sen for Atlantic Unbound. That's right. When was this? Human Rights and Asian Values. Amartya Sen, "Human Rights and Asian Values," The New Republic, July 14-July 21, 1997 In 1776, just when the Declaration of Independence was being adopted in this country, Thomas Paine complained, in Common Sense, that Asia had "long expelled" freedom.
In this lament, Paine saw Asia in company with much of the rest of the world (America, he hoped, would be different): "Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her as a stranger and England hath given her warning to depart. " For Paine, political freedom and democracy were valuable anywhere, though they were being violated nearly everywhere. The violation of freedom and democracy in different parts of the world continues today, if not as comprehensively as in Paine's time. Cultural differences and value differences between Asia and the West were stressed by several official delegations at the World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna in 1993. The emperor converted to Buddhism. Amartya Sen - Autobiography. I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.
My family is from Dhaka - now the capital of Bangladesh. My ancestral home in Wari in "old Dhaka" is not far from the University campus in Ramna. My father Ashutosh Sen taught chemistry at Dhaka University. I was, however, born in Santiniketan, on the campus of Rabindranath Tagore's Visva-Bharati (both a school and a college), where my maternal grandfather (Kshiti Mohan Sen) used to teach Sanskrit as well as ancient and medieval Indian culture, and where my mother (Amita Sen), like me later, had been a student. After Santiniketan, I studied at Presidency College in Calcutta and then at Trinity College in Cambridge, and I have taught at universities in both these cities, and also at Delhi University, the London School of Economics, Oxford University, and Harvard University, and on a visiting basis, at M.I.T., Stanford, Berkeley, and Cornell.
I was at Presidency College during 1951 to 1953.