Amartya Sen and the Popular Imagination-In the Wake of the Prize

In the Wake of the Prize Kaushik Basu One of the most common assertions has been that Amartya Sen has been given the Nobel Prize for his humanitarianism or for showing how famines can occur during times of plenty or how famines are unlikely in a democracy or for his work in development economics. The exception is the official Nobel citation released by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which states that Sen has been given the Prize "for his contributions to welfare economics''. This is the work reported in his classic book Collective Choice and Social Welfare, a work of immense elegance that combines format logic, welfare economics and moral philosophy.