Swarna Srinivasan's List: Books and arts

• for saying that Britain should be seen as a loose federation of cultures held together by common bonds of interest
• Among his many contributions to development economics, Sen has produced pioneering studies of gender inequality, so he always takes care to write "her" rather than "his" when referring to an abstract person
• He also jumped into the argument over human rights and "Asian values", taking strong issue with Singapore's former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, for claiming that liberalism was a Western export unsuited to Asia
• the championing of democracy and political freedom in the modern sense cannot be found in the pre-enlightenment tradition in any part of the world, west or east". However, separate components of this progressive idea - from religious tolerance to egalitarianism and support for a climate of debate - have come and gone in many different cultures at various historical times.
• As he sits in the bay window of his elegant rooms looking out over Trinity's Great Court, dressed in baggy corduroys and a well worn tweed jacket, he looks the part of a man who is completely captivated by the seductive mix of social comfort, institutional prestige and intellectual challenge which academia at its best can provide. His carefully qualified answers and detailed recall of the themes and sub-themes of his books and articles, as well as their exact publication dates, reveal a mind and memory as sharp as his manner is gentle.
• he was not awarded the Nobel prize for his more accessible work in development economics, but for "social choice theory", the philosophical foundation backed by mathematics which supports all his writings.
• Ever since the mid-70s the Swedish committee has been strongly committed to free-market theory, until it took a real punch in the midriff in 97/98 with the Asian crisis."
• He conscientiously turns up to receive each one and is usually asked to give a speech, winning himself the family nickname: Amartya Commencement Sen.
• Sen has made fundamental contributions to at least four fields: social choice theory, welfare economics, economic measurement, and development economics,
• Tagore helped to choose the baby's name, which means "immortal" in Sanskrit. Sen's mother was a writer who performed in many of the dance-dramas which Tagore wrote. She still edits a literary magazine in Bengal.
• He liked their egalitarian commitment but felt they were not open to political pluralism and that they even saw political tolerance as a "weakness of will". "I thought it was a major defect of the Stalinist left not to recognise that establishing democracy in India had been an enormous step forward.
• hen he enunciated the view that no famine has ever occurred in a country with a free press and regular elections. He compared China and India. Although by most indicators, from life expectancy to literacy, Mao's China was ahead of Nehru's India, China had had a catastrophic famine between 1958 and 1961 in which up to 30m people starved to death. There was no free press or alternative political parties to give early warning. In democratic India, free from the Raj, this could not have happened.
• The quiet presence of non-acute, endemic hunger leads to no newspaper turmoil, no political agitation, no riots in the Indian parliament. The system takes it in his stride
• He has always rejected any simplistic labelling of people, and his work is constantly peppered with references to earlier economists whom he respects for their views, regardless of the ideological camps which form around them.
• Collective Choice and Social Welfare, attempted to rescue welfare economics from the pessimism of free-marketeers, who argued that there was no point in government intervention, and that individuals should be left to choose whatever the market made available in response to their choices, and statists, who concluded that authoritarian choices had to be made by governments on other people's behalf. Sen argued that perfection in social decision-mak ing is unnecessary. Partial comparisons between people can help and majority decisions do carry weight, as long as the interests of the less assertive citizens are not ignored.
• who persuaded him to join in elaborating the Human Development Index as a rival to the World Bank's system of ranking countries by classical macroeconomic criteria such as savings rates and GNP
• He turned down numerous invitations to advise the Indian government
• Alex de Waal, the author of Famine Crimes, a book which looked at how democracy prevents famine, says the mere fact of democracy is not enough. He also says the main cause of famine is epidemic disease rather than starvation. But he describes Sen's work as "seminal".
• More than a Hundred Million Women are Missing
• Sen had examined the disturbing fact that while female mortality is generally lower than male mortality at all age-groups in most cultures, this is not the case in India. Because of massive gender inequality, girls have less food and are taken to doctors less than boys
• Development as Freedom
• Many of us were trained in the 50s to believe that states should be active in planning the economy. Sen did not give up that idea until later than some others. He still hasn't added his voice to the call for more privatisation of the Indian economy and the removal of the old Gandhian protection of small-scale producers
• Nothing I've ever written was anti-market. Being against the market is like being against conversation. It's a form of exchange," he snaps. "But I was just as hostile in the past to giving any privileges to the market as I am now. Besides, those who are great advocates of the market don't always make it easier for people to have access to the market through basic education, credit or whatever."
• He supports the "themes" raised by anti-capitalist and environmental protesters at Seattle, Prague and Davos, but not their "theses", which he finds too simple. He says the problem is not free trade, but the inequality of global power. He strongly welcomes the rise of the NGO movement, which combines with media coverage to produce the beginning of some "countervailing power" to the larger corporations and the traditional policies of first world governments.
• the United Nations has to be saved from insolvency and given a greater leadership role which escapes from the asymmetry caused by the veto power of the five richest and/or largest countries
• He wants to raise the proportion of state school pupils getting into Trinity. There has been progress, and for the first time last year, the college made more than half (53%) of its offers to state-school pupils. Sen, however, acknowledges there is still a gap, since nationally 65% of students with three A-levels are from state schools.

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• James Mill, The History of British India, 6 vols. [1817]