Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen: Volume I: Ethics, Welfare, and Measurement and Volume II: Development, Society, and Institutions

by Kaushik Basu (editor), Ravi Kanbur (Editor)

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.

Contributors Bina Agarwal, Isher Ahluwalia, Montek S Ahluwalia, Ingela Alger, Sabina Alkire, Paul Anand, Sudhir Anand, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Muhammad Asali, Department of Economics, A. B. Atkinson, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Pranab Bardhan, Lourdes Benería, Francois Bourguignon, Sugata Bose, Walter Bossert, John Broome, Satya R. Chakravarty, Lincoln C. Chen, Martha Alter Chen, Kanchan Chopra, Rajat Deb, Simon Dietz, Bhaskar Dutta, James E. Foster, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Wulf Gaertner, Indranil K. Ghosh, Jonathan Glover, Peter Hammond, Christopher Handy, Christopher Harris, Cameron Hepburn, Jane Humphries, Rizwanul Islam, Satish K. Jain, Ayesha Jalal, Mary Kaldor, Sunil Khilnani, Stephan Klasen, Jocelyn Kynch, Isaac Levi, Oliver Linton, Enrica Chiappero Martinetti, Kirsty McNay, Martha C. Nussbaum, Siddiqur R. Osmani, Elinor Ostrom, Prasanta K. Pattanaik, Edmund S. Phelps, Mozaffar Qizilbash, Gustav Ranis, Martin Ravallion, Sanjay G. Reddy, Kevin Roberts, Ingrid Robeyns, Maurice Salles,
Emma Samman, Cristina Santos, Thomas. M. Scanlon, Arjun Sengupta, Tae Kun Seo, Anthony Shorrocks, Ronald Smith, Rehman Sobhan, Robert M. Solow, Nicholas Stern, Frances Stewart, Joseph E. Stiglitz, S. Subramanian, Kotaro Suzumura, Alain Trannoy, Ashutosh Varshney, Sujata Visaria, Guanghua Wan, Jörgen W. Weibull, John A. Weymark, and Yongsheng Xu.

Genres: Economics

1312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2008

About the author

Kaushik Basu (born 9 January 1952) is an Indian economist who is currently the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India and is also the C. Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics and, till recently, he was Chairman of the Department of Economics and Director, Center for Analytic Economics at Cornell University.


He is Editor of Social Choice and Welfare, Associate Editor of Japanese Economic Review and is on the Board of Editors of the World Bank Economic Review. In 2008, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan, one of the country's highest civil honors.

Reviews

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 3 out of 5]

More than anything else this collection of essays and papers is a tribute to the sheer range and scope of Amartya Sen’s work. Each author picks up a theme from Sen’s voluminous writings and elaborates on it, usually with a summary of further work done on the theme following Sen’s lead.

The papers deserve credit for how they stick to the core principles of Sen’s writings even when disagreeing with him, but are too dry and overly mathematical in comparison to most of Sen’s works. It would be a far more pleasant experience to just stick to reading the original. I will be giving volume two a miss.

[Leonardo]

Citado en el artículo de Alkire en Capabilities and Happiness.