Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen

Volume I: Ethics, Welfare, and Measurement

Edited by Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur

Celebrates the scope and influence of Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen's work
Includes contributions from leading figures across the social sciences
Contributions discuss Sen's ideas and further extend the influence of his work

Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen

Volume I: Ethics, Welfare, and Measurement

Edited by Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur

Description

Amartya Sen has made deep and lasting contributions to the academic disciplines of economics, philosophy, and the social sciences more broadly. He has engaged in policy dialogue and public debate, advancing the cause of a human development focused policy agenda, and a tolerant and democratic polity. This argumentative Indian has made the case for the poorest of the poor, and for plurality in cultural perspective. It is not surprising that he has won the highest awards, ranging from the Nobel Prize in Economics to the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor. This public recognition has gone hand in hand with the affection and admiration that Amartya's friends and students hold for him.

This volume of essays, written in honor of his 75th birthday by his students and peers, covers the range of contributions that Sen has made to knowledge. They are written by some of the world's leading economists, philosophers and social scientists, and address topics such as ethics, welfare economics, poverty, gender, human development, society and politics. The second volume covers the topics of Human Development and Capabilities; Gender and Household; Growth, Poverty and Policy; and Society, Politics and History. It is a fitting tribute to Sen's own contributions to the discourse on Society, Institutions and Development.

Contributors include: Bina Agarwal, Isher Ahluwalia, Montek S Ahluwalia, Ingela Alger, Muhammad Asali, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Pranab Bardhan, Lourdes Benería, Sugata Bose, Lincoln C. Chen, Martha Alter Chen, Kanchan Chopra, Simon Dietz, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Jonathan Glover, Cameron Hepburn, Jane Humphries, Rizwanul Islam, Ayesha Jalal, Mary Kaldor, Sunil Khilnani, Stephan Klasen, Jocelyn Kynch, Enrica Chiappero Martinetti, Kirsty McNay, Martha C. Nussbaum, Elinor Ostrom, Gustav Ranis, Sanjay G. Reddy, Emma Samman, Rehman Sobhan, Robert M. Solow, Nicholas Stern, Frances Stewart, Ashutosh Varshney, Sujata Visaria, and Jörgen W. Weibull.

Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen

Volume I: Ethics, Welfare, and Measurement

Edited by Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur

Part I Ethics, Normative Economics and Welfare
1. Why Economics Needs Ethical Theory, John Broome
2. The Sen System of Social Evaluation, S. R. Osmani
3. The Good Life and the Good Economy: The Humanist Perspective of Aristotle, the Pragmatists and Vitalists, and the Economic Justice of John Rawls, Edmund S. Phelps
4. The Adaptation Problem, Evolution and Normative Economics, Mozaffar Qizilbash
5. Rights and Interests, T. M. Scanlon
6. Elements of a Theory of the Right to Development, Arjun Sengupta
Part II Agency, Aggregation and Social Choice
7. Rational Choice on General Domains, Walter Bossert and Kotaro Suzumura
8. Some Remarks on the Ranking of Infinite Utility Streams, Bhaskar Dutta
9. Individual Choices in a Non-Consequentialist Framework: A Procedural Approach, Wulf Gaertner and Yongsheng Xu
10. The Method of Majority Decision and Rationality Conditions, Satish K. Jain
11. Convexity and Separability in Representing Consensus, Isaac Levi
12. Rights, Individual Preferences, and Collective Rationality, Prasanta K. Pattanaik
13. Irrelevant Alternatives, Kevin Roberts
14. Limited Rights and Social Choice Rules, Maurice Salles
15. Dominance Criteria for Critical-Level Generalized Utilitarianism, Alain Trannoy and John A. Weymark
Part III Poverty, Capabilities and Measurement
16. The Measurement of Capabilities, Paul Anand, Cristina Santos, and Ron Smith
17. On UltraPoverty, Sudhir Anand, Christopher Harris, and Oliver Linton
18. Multidimensional Poverty Orderings: Theory and Applications, Francois Bourguignon and Satya R. Chakravarty
19. External Capabilities, James E. Foster and Christopher Handy
20. On the Welfarist Rationale for Relative Poverty Lines, Martin Ravallion
21. Justice as Fairness and the Capability Approach, Ingrid Robeyns
22. Ungrouping Income Distributions: Synthesising Samples for Inequality and Poverty Analysis, Anthony Shorrocks and Guanghua Wan
23. A Practical Proposal for Simplifying the Measurement of Income Poverty, S. Subramanian
Part IV Identity, Collective Action and Public Economics
24. Concepts and Measures of Agency, Sabina Alkire
25. Sen's Identities, Kwame Anthony Appiah
26. Welfare Economics and Giving for Development, A. B. Atkinson
27. Justice, Equity and Sharing the Cost of a Public Project, Rajat Deb, Indranil K. Ghosh, and Tae Kun Seo
28. Isolation, Assurance and Rules: Can Rational Folly Supplant Foolish Rationality?, Peter Hammond
29. Simple Formulae for Optimal Income Taxation and the Measurement of Inequality: An Essay in Honor of Amartya Sen, Joseph E. Stiglitz

Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen

Volume I: Ethics, Welfare, and Measurement

Edited by Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur

Author Information

Kaushik Basu is Professor of Economics and the C. Marks Professor of International Studies, Department of Economics, and Director, Center for Analytic Economics, Cornell University. He has held visiting positions at CORE (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the London School of Economics, where he was Distinguished Visitor in 1993. He has been Visiting Professor at Harvard University, Princeton University, and M.I.T. In 1992 he founded the Centre for Development Economics in Delhi and was its first Executive Director. He is also a founding member of the Madras School of Economics. A Fellow of the Econometric Society and a recipient of the Mahalanobis Memorial Memorial Award for contributions to economics, Kaushik Basu has published widely in the areas of Development Economics, Industrial Organization, Game Theory and Welfare Economics. Ravi Kanbur is T. H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Cambridge and a doctorate in economics from the University of Oxford. He has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Essex, Warwick, Princeton and Columbia.

Ravi Kanbur has served on the staff of the World Bank, as Economic Adviser, Senior Economic Adviser, Resident Representative in Ghana, Chief Economist of the African Region of the World Bank, and Principal Adviser to the Chief Economist of the World Bank. He has also served as Director of the World Bank's World Development Report.

Professor Kanbur's main areas of interest are public economics and development economics. His work spans conceptual, empirical, and policy analysis. He is particularly interested in bridging the worlds of rigorous analysis and practical policy making.