Amartya Sen and the popular imagination - In the wake of the brize

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 occu r 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 cita tion released by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which states that S en has been given the Prize "for his contributions to welfare economics". T his is the work reported in his classic book Collective Choice and Social W elfare, a work of immense elegance that combines formal logic, welfare econ omics and moral philosophy. A large part of Sen's recent work is that of a person with a cause and this Sen II must be evaluated differently from Sen I. While the former may not add to the scientific worth of Sen I, it does not detract from that either.