จากวิกิพีเดีย
สารานุกรมเสรี
อมรรตยะ เสน
อมรรตยะ กุมาร เสน (อังกฤษ: Amartya Kumar Sen; เบงกาลี: অমর্ত্য কুমার সেন Ômorto Kumar Shen) นักเศรษฐศาสตร์ ได้รับรางวัลโนเบลสาขาเศรษฐศาสตร์
เมื่อ พ.ศ. 2541
ประวัติ
เป็นชาวอินเดีย เกิดเมื่อวันที่ 3 พฤศจิกายน พ.ศ. ๒๔76 ที่เมืองศานตินิเกตัน และได้เข้าศึกษาใน วิทยาลัยเพรสซิเดนซี อินเดีย จากนั้นศึกษาต่อด้านเศรษฐศาสตร์-ปรัชญาในระดับปริญญาโทและปริญญาเอกที่มหาวิทยาลัยเคมบริดจ์ ประเทศอังกฤษ
และเคยดำรงตำแหน่งเป็นศาสตราจารย์ในมหาวิทยาลัยหลายแห่ง อาทิ มหาวิทยาลัยฮาร์วาร์ด ประเทศสหรัฐอเมริกา
มหาวิทยาลัยออกซ์ฟอร์ด มหาวิทยาลัยเคมบริดจ์
โรงเรียนเศรษฐศาสตร์และการบริหารรัฐกิจแห่งลอนดอน
(London School of Economics and Political Science) ประเทศอังกฤษ
ผลงาน
อมรรตยะ เสน
เป็นผู้คิดทฤษฎีด้านการเลือกทางสังคมและความเสมอภาค และผลงานของเขาหลายเรื่องได้เน้นวิเคราะห์ความสัมพันธ์ของการพัฒนาคุณภาพชีวิตและการพัฒนาด้านเศรษฐกิจควบคู่กันไป
ทำให้ได้รับการยอมรับว่าเป็นผู้เชี่ยวชาญด้านเศรษฐศาสตร์การพัฒนาคนหนึ่งของโลก
เขาเสนอวิธีการมองปัญหา
และแก้ปัญหาความอับจนที่ครอบคลุม
โดยเสนอว่าการมีรายได้เพิ่มเป็นเพียงองค์ประกอบหนึ่ง ของการแก้ปัญหาความยากจน ที่สำคัญกว่าคือ ทำอย่างไรจึงจะช่วยสร้างความสามารถให้แก่ผู้คนโดยตรง
เพื่อให้เขามีเสรีภาพที่จะเลือกชีวิตที่เขาต้องการ
เขาเป็นหนึ่งในนักวิชาการที่มีส่วนสำคัญในการทำโครงร่างรายงานการพัฒนาคน
จัดทำโดยโครงการพัฒนาแห่งสหประชาชาติ ซึ่งเสนอแนวคิดด้านเศรษฐศาสตร์และสังคม
เพื่อเป็นมาตรวัดปัญหาความยากจนและความไม่เท่าเทียมกันในสังคม ผลงานโดดเด่นและสามารถนำมาประยุกต์ปฏิบัติเพื่อช่วยเหลือและพัฒนาสังคมได้
จริง กระทั่งอมรรตยะ เสน ได้รับรางวัลโนเบลสาขาเศรษฐศาสตร์
ใน พ.ศ. ๒๕๔๑
Amartya Kumar Sen,
(born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist.
He
has made contributions to welfare
economics, social choice theory, economic and social
justice, economic theories of famines, and indexes of the measure of well-being
of citizens of developing countries. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic
Sciences in 1998.
He
is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and
Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow
at the Harvard Society of Fellows, distinguished
fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he
previously served as Master from 1998 to 2004. Sen is a member of the Advisory
Board of Incentives for Global Health, the not-for-profit behind the Health Impact Fund. He is the first Indian and
the first Asian academic to head an Oxbridge
college. He also serves as the first Chancellor of the proposed Nalanda International University.
Sen's
books have been translated into more than thirty languages over a period of
forty years. He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security.
In 2006, Time magazine listed him under "60 years
of Asian Heroes" and in 2010 included him in their "100 most
influential persons in the world".[9]
New Statesman
listed him in their 2010 edition of "World's 50 Most Influential People
Who Matter".Sen was one of the 20 Nobel Laureates who signed the
"Stockholm Memorandum" at the third Nobel Laureate Symposium on
Global Sustainability in Stockholm, Sweden on 18 May 2011.
Early life and education
Sen was born in Santiniketan,
West Bengal, India, to Ashutosh Sen and his wife Amita. Rabindranath Tagore is said to have given
Amartya Sen his name ("Amartya" meaning "immortal"). Sen's
family was originally from Wari, Dhaka, in present-day Bangladesh,
and both of his parents were born in Manikganj, Dhaka. His father Ashutosh Sen was a
professor of chemistry at Dhaka
University who moved with his family to West Bengal
during the Partition of India and worked at various
educational institutions, eventually becoming Chairman of the West Bengal
Public Service Commission. Sen's mother Amita Sen was the daughter of Kshiti Mohan
Sen, a scholar and close associate of Rabindranath Tagore who became
the second Vice Chancellor of Visva-Bharati University. She was also
first cousin (through her father) of Sukumar Sen, ICS the First-Chief Election Commissioner of India,
Ashoke Kumar
Sen, M.P. and sometime Union Law Minister, and
Amiya Sen, a distinguished Barrister.
Sen began his high-school education at St Gregory's School in Dhaka in 1941.
After his family moved to West Bengal following the partition of the country in
1947, he studied at Visva-Bharati University school and then at Presidency College, Kolkata, where he
earned a First Class First in his B.A. (Honours) in Economics (awarded by the University of Calcutta). The same year,
1953, he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he
earned a First Class (Starred First) BA (Honours) in 1956. He was elected
President of the Cambridge Majlis. While still an undergraduate student of
Trinity, he met the economist Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, the
principal architect of India's (later much reviled) economic policy based on
the soviet model of nationalized heavy industry. Mahalanobis, who was much
impressed with Sen, returned to Calcutta and immediately recommended the brilliant Cambridge
undergraduate to Triguna Sen, the then Education Minister of West Bengal, who had been
instrumental in turning the National Council into the new Jadavpur University.
After Sen completed his Tripos examination and
enrolled for a PhD in Economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, he returned to
India on a two-year leave. Triguna Sen immediately appointed him Professor and
founding Head of Department of Economics at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, something quite
extraordinary because Sen had hardly even begun his PhD studies at Trinity and
was 23 years of age. This still remains the youngest age at which anybody has
been appointed to a professorship or a head of departmentship in India. During
his tenure at Jadavpur University, Sen had economic methodologist A. K. Dasgupta,
who was then teaching at Benares Hindu University, as his
supervisor. After two full years of full-time teaching in Jadavpur, Sen
returned to Cambridge in 1959 to complete his PhD.
Subsequently, Sen won a Prize Fellowship at Trinity
College, which gave him four years of freedom to do anything he liked. He took
the radical decision of studying philosophy. That proved to be of immense help
to his later research. Sen related the importance of studying philosophy thus:
"The broadening of my studies into philosophy was important for me not
just because some of my main areas of interest in economics relate quite
closely to philosophical disciplines (for example, social choice theory makes
intense use of mathematical logic and also draws on moral
philosophy, and so does the study of inequality and deprivation),
but also because I found philosophical studies very rewarding on their
own." However, his deep interest in philosophy can be dated back to his
college days in Presidency, when he both read books on philosophy and debated
philosophical themes.
To Sen, Cambridge was like a battlefield. There were
major debates between supporters of Keynesian economics on the one hand, and the
"neo-classical" economists skeptical of Keynes, on the other. Sen was
lucky to have close relations with economists on both sides of the divide.
Meanwhile, thanks to its good "practice" of democratic and tolerant
social choice, Sen's own college, Trinity College, was an oasis very much
removed from the discord. However, because of a lack of enthusiasm for social
choice theory whether in Trinity or Cambridge, Sen had to choose a quite
different subject for his Ph.D. thesis, after completing his B.A. He
submitted his thesis on "The Choice of Techniques" in 1959
under the supervision of the "brilliant but vigorously intolerant" neo-Keynesian,
Joan Robinson
According to Quentin Skinner, Sen was a member of the secret
society Cambridge Apostles during his time at
Cambridge.
Research
Sen's papers in the late 1960s and early 1970s helped develop the theory of social
choice, which first came to prominence in the work by the American
economist Kenneth Arrow, who, while working at the RAND
Corporation, had most famously showed that all voting rules, be they majority
rule or two thirds-majority or status quo, must inevitably
conflict with some basic democratic norm. Sen's contribution to the literature
was to show under what conditions Arrow's impossibility theorem[20]
would indeed come to pass as well as to extend and enrich the theory of social
choice, informed by his interests in history of economic thought and
philosophy.
In 1981, Sen published Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and
Deprivation (1981), a book in which he argued that famine occurs not only
from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for
distributing food. Sen also argued that the Bengal famine was caused by an
urban economic boom that raised food prices, thereby causing millions of rural
workers to starve to death when their wages did not keep up.[21]
Sen's interest in famine stemmed from personal experience. As a
nine-year-old boy, he witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million
people perished. This staggering loss of life was unnecessary, Sen later
concluded. He presents data that there was an adequate food supply in Bengal at
the time, but particular groups of people including rural landless labourers
and urban service providers like haircutters did not have the monetary means to
acquire food as its price rose rapidly due to factors that include British
military acquisition, panic buying, hoarding, and price
gouging, all connected to the war in the region. In Poverty and Famines,
Sen revealed that in many cases of famine, food supplies were not significantly
reduced. In Bengal, for example, food production, while down on the previous
year, was higher than in previous non-famine years. Thus, Sen points to a
number of social and economic factors, such as declining wages, unemployment,
rising food prices, and poor food-distribution systems. These issues led to
starvation among certain groups in society. His capabilities approach focuses on positive
freedom, a person's actual ability to be or do something, rather than on negative
freedom approaches, which are common in economics and simply focuses on
non-interference. In the Bengal famine, rural laborers' negative freedom to buy
food was not affected. However, they still starved because they were not
positively free to do anything, they did not have the functioning of
nourishment, nor the capability to escape morbidity.
In addition to his important work on the causes of famines, Sen's work in
the field of development economics has had considerable influence in the
formulation of the Human Development Report,[22]
published by the United Nations Development
Programme.[23]
This annual publication that ranks countries on a variety of economic and
social indicators owes much to the contributions by Sen among other social
choice theorists in the area of economic measurement of poverty and inequality.
Sen's revolutionary contribution to development economics and social
indicators is the concept of 'capability' developed in his article
"Equality of What".[24] He
argues that governments should be measured against the concrete capabilities of
their citizens. This is because top-down development will always trump human
rights as long as the definition of terms remains in doubt (is a 'right'
something that must be provided or something that simply cannot be taken
away?). For instance, in the United States citizens have a hypothetical
"right" to vote. To Sen, this concept is fairly empty. In order for
citizens to have a capacity to vote, they first must have "functionings."
These "functionings" can range from the very broad, such as the
availability of education, to the very specific, such as transportation to the polls.
Only when such barriers are removed can the citizen truly be said to act out of
personal choice. It is up to the individual society to make the list of minimum
capabilities guaranteed by that society. For an example of the
"capabilities approach" in practice, see Martha
Nussbaum's Women and Human Development.[25]
He wrote a controversial article in The New York Review of Books
entitled "More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing" (see Missing women of Asia), analyzing the
mortality impact of unequal rights between the genders in the developing world,
particularly Asia. Other studies, such as one by Emily Oster,
have argued that this is an overestimation, though Oster has recanted some of
her conclusions.[26]
Welfare economics seeks to evaluate economic policies in terms of their
effects on the well-being of the community. Sen, who devoted his career to such
issues, was called the "conscience of his profession." His
influential monograph Collective Choice and Social Welfare (1970), which
addressed problems related to individual rights (including formulation of the liberal
paradox), justice and equity, majority rule, and the availability of
information about individual conditions, inspired researchers to turn their
attention to issues of basic welfare. Sen devised methods of measuring poverty
that yielded useful information for improving economic conditions for the poor.
For instance, his theoretical work on inequality provided an explanation for why
there are fewer women than men in India[27] and
China despite the fact that in the West and in poor but medically unbiased
countries, women have lower mortality
rates at all ages, live longer, and make a slight majority of the
population. Sen claimed that this skewed ratio results from the better health
treatment and childhood opportunities afforded boys in those countries, as well
as sex-specific abortion.
Governments and international organizations handling food crises were
influenced by Sen's work. His views encouraged policy makers to pay attention
not only to alleviating immediate suffering but also to finding ways to replace
the lost income of the poor, as, for example, through public-works projects,
and to maintain stable prices for food. A vigorous defender of political
freedom, Sen believed that famines do not occur in functioning democracies because
their leaders must be more responsive to the demands of the citizens. In order
for economic growth to be achieved, he argued, social reforms, such as
improvements in education and public health, must precede economic reform.
In 2009, a new book by Sen was published, The Idea of Justice.[28][29] Based
on his previous work in welfare economics and social choice theory, but also on
his philosophical thoughts, he presented his own theory of justice that he
meant to be an alternative to the influential modern theories of justice of John Rawls
or John
Harsanyi. In opposition to Rawls but also earlier justice theoreticians Immanuel
Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau or David Hume,
and inspired by the philosophical works of Adam Smith
and Mary Wollstonecraft, Sen developed a theory
that is both comparative and realizations-oriented (instead of being
trancendental and institutional). However, he still regards institutions and
processes as being important. As an alternative to Rawls's veil
of ignorance, Sen chose the thought experiment of an impartial spectator as
the basis of his theory of justice. He also stressed the importance of public
discussion (understanding democracy in the sense of John
Stuart Mill) and a focus on people's capabilities (an approach that he had co-developed), including
the notion of universal human rights, in evaluating various states with regard
to justice.
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น