Amartya Sen

Amartya Sen is an Indian economist and philosopher, widely considered one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, awarded the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His work — from Collective Choice and Social Welfare to Development as Freedom — reshaped welfare economics, emphasising that development means expanding human capabilities rather than merely raising incomes.

A Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a professor at Harvard, Oxford and Delhi, Sen has been called the "conscience of economics" for his writings on poverty, famine, justice and democracy, and his memoir Home in the World records the Bengali world that shaped his thought. His classic studies The Idea of Justice and Identity and Violence extended his influence far beyond the discipline.