Social Exclusion: Concept, Application, and Scrutiny

by Amartya Sen

54 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2000

About the author

Amartya Kumar Sen is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members.

Sen was best known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food. 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 and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he previously served as Master from the years 1998 to 2004. He is the first Asian and the first Indian academic to head an Oxbridge college.

Amartya Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages. 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".

Reviews

[rafael · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first Sen. A primer of sorts on the concept of social exclusion, this was written as a working paper for the ADB at the turn of the century. Sen situates social exclusion in the broader conception of poverty as capability deprivation. Though it may be tempting to engage in linguistic gymnastics--using the concept liberally for any type of deprivation--the work done to embed social exclusion in a broader Aristotelian framework certainly helps. Sen has outlined here a general way of proceeding for critically examining the concept and subsequently operationalizing it for policy analysis and implementation. This was a very readable essay and one could do much worse when trying to delve into the literature for the first time.