Armatya Sen Armatya Sen was born in India in 1933. A student of Joan Robinson's at Cambridge, Sen is one of the few modern academics that has commanded much respect and recognition from all corners of the intellectual spectrum. A perennial Nobel Prize candidate, he has been winning straw polls among economists for several years running - he finally won it in 1998. Breaking the barrier between mathematized "high theory" and "real-world" economics, Sen asserts that the peasants and rural households which he studied have economic modes of behavior which often contradict the postulates of the "rational hedonist" that dominate economic theory. In particular, certain collective enterprises (e.g. during harvest season) often contradict individual rationality. In this line, Sen exploited game-theoretic notions to account for such collective behavior. In 1972, Sen co-authored a famous UN guideline for development project evalution which has proven invaluable for many organizations. His work on poverty, which has included innumerable theoretical insights, has also proved fruitful in application. Amartya Sen is a professor at Trinity College. | |||
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