Nobel Prize Economist, Influential
Thinker on Poverty, Famine and Social
Change Will Speak at UC San Diego Oct. 5

September 27, 2006

By Barry Jagoda

Amartya Sen, holder of the Lamont University Professorship and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University, and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics, will speak at UCSD on Oct. 5 at 5:30 p.m. In its award citation the Nobel committee said Sen had “restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems.” His lecture, titled “Illusion of Identity,” is free and open to the public.

In his 1981 book, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation,” Sen argued that famine occurs not from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into its distribution. As a 9-year-old boy Sen had witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943 in which three million people died. The 1981 book cited many cases of famine where food supplies were not significantly reduced but such factors as declining wages, unemployment, rising food prices, and poor food-distribution systems led to starvation among certain groups in society.

Sen has published seminal works on gender inequality, ways of measuring poverty and inequality and how how economic policies affect the well being of a community, or of a nation, as a whole. As the globe’s top authority on “welfare economics” and by focusing on questions of “social choice,” Sen has stood apart from many of the economists of the late 20th and early 21 st century, where the mainstream of the profession has emphasized “self-interest” as the primary human motivator.

Sen is a former president of the American Economic Association, the Indian Economic Association, the International Economics Association and of the Econometrics Society. He also served as head of Trinity College at England’s Cambridge University.

Among Sen’s other recent books are: Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Issues of Our Time), Rationality and Freedom, Inequality Reexamined, and Development As Freedom. The Oct. 5 address will be presented at the Institute of the Americas, Hojel Auditorium, on the UCSD campus, from 5:30 to 7 p.m., followed by a reception. For more information visit http://humctr.ucsd.edu

Media contact: Barry Jagoda, (858) 534-8567