[PEN-L:521] Sen

[Colin Danby <danbyc@xxxxxxx>]

Rob asks about Sen.  Here's a start.

2 web resources are the official "Nobel" site, dry
but extensive:

http://www.nobel.se/announcement-98/economics98.html

and the relevant page from the excellent History of
Economic Thought site, which provides references.

http://www.econ.jhu.edu/People/Fonseca/HET/sen.htm

Sen has tried to push out the boundaries of the
neoclassical paradigm, especially in providing a
basis for interpersonal comparisons.  However his
framework of "entitlements" (different sources of
income or support), "capabilities,"
(abilities/freedoms to get what you want,) and
"functionings," (actual desired results like being
well-nourished), can be useful even for
non-neoclassicals.  Famines are associated with
collapses of people's entitlement bundles, in
particular when a lot of people are reduced to the
sole entitlement of selling their labor, deprived
of entitlements based in access to individual or
common land, family support, government support,
and so forth.  Then a drop in the wage relative to
food prices leads to widespread starvation even if
there's lots of food.  The framework has also been
useful in understanding women's poverty; I use this
material as a staple in my development courses.
There are other pen-l participants who have a much
more nuanced sense of the whole of his work and its
relevance to heterodox paradigms.

Best, Colin
danbyc@xxxxxxx
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~danby/