Sen still teaches a mini-course in economics each year during the break in Cambridge's schedule.

Uniting Ethics and Economics

Sen's work has primarily been in the application of social choice theory to economics and in considering how political inequality may affect economics, especially in extreme conditions of poverty and famine.

In the commendation for his Nobel prize, which Sen received in 1998, the committee wrote Sen "has improved the theoretical foundation for comparing different distributions of society's welfare and defined new, and more satisfactory, indexes of poverty."

And the Nobel Prize committee is not alone in its praise.

"Amartya Sen is one the most creative and inspiring minds in economics today," says Maier Professor Benjamin M. Friedman '66.

"He is interested in extremely important, real-world problems," Friedman says. "All this has made a great deal of difference for economics, and it has opened the way for an enormous number of followers to implement... some of the new conceptual frameworks that Sen has developed."

One of Sen's most influential findings is that famines seem not to occur in democracies--freedom of the press puts too much pressure on the government to act before death tolls rise. Sen has also examined how democracy can best address gender imbalances among the impoverished.

"He has the rare capacity to think analytically like an economist but go beyond economists' frequent assumptions--for example, that people act primarily from self-interested motives," says Adams Professor Jane J. Mansbridge, at the Kennedy School.

"As a woman, I thank Sen for drawing economists' and planners' attention to female infanticide and, more broadly, to the ethical consequences of gender inequality," she says.

More than any specific discovery, however, Sen is known for how he approaches economics. "He's known for presenting economics with a human face and for being interested in things that a lot of economists do not stress," says Furer Professor Oliver D. Hart, the incoming chair of the economics department.

"Sen has people at the center of his economics," says Williams Professor Roderick L. MacFarquhar, chair of the government department. "Certainly he is a towering figure."

James E. Foster, a professor of economics at Vanderbilt University who sees Sen as his mentor and has recently collaborated with him on an appendix to Sen's 1973 work On Economic Inequality, says he and Sen "often argued into the wee hours about points in the book." Foster says, "He is very enthusiastic about his work. I wondered how we could do it."

The Dabbler

Sen sees himself, however, as much more of a dabbler and says he feels intellectually bored if he is indefinitely confined to one topic.

"I feel somewhat apologetic that my interests are so diverse," Sen says. "I'm so peripatetic, after a year or two I tend to move to something else."

Sen says Harvard has been especially good at "indulging" him and "allowing [him] to move from one subject to another."