วันจันทร์ที่ 5 สิงหาคม พ.ศ. 2556

อมรรตยะ เสน (Amartya Kumar Sen)


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.


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