‘Did you really deserve the Nobel prize?’ I ask Amartya Sen. ‘Why do you think you won?’
When you’re sitting opposite the world’s most respected living economist, at a time when the dismal science is under intense scrutiny, an opening question should be punchy.
Thankfully, Sen, an 83-year-old Harvard professor, has a sense of humour. ‘You can’t ask me that,’ he says with a grin. ‘I have absolutely no idea why I won.’
He then composes himself. ‘Like any researcher, I’m happy if my work interests others,’ he says carefully. ‘But it would be a pretty bad way to conduct one’s life, thinking about how to win prizes, rather than being listened to.’
Sen has achieved both. Born in British India in the early 1930s — in Mankiganj, now part of Bangladesh — he witnessed famine and religious conflict as a boy, before coming to Cambridge to study economics. Fired by injustice, he has since used the subject to promote practical policies, mainly across the developing world, focused on poverty–alleviation, health, education and the functioning of democratic institutions.
Sen won his 1998 Nobel prize in economics, the judges’ committee said, for a body of academic work that ‘integrated economics and ethics … breaking new ground in social choice theory’.
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