The Bottom Billion

In our interconnected world, if we want to be safe, we need to protect those most vulnerable among us.

The family of economist Amartya Sen befriended the great literary Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore. It was precisely Tagore who gave the newborn Sen the name Amartya, which means “immortal” in Bengali, not knowing that he was witnessing the birth of another Bengali Nobel laureate. Leaving India and working at Cambridge and Harvard universities, Amartya Sen became an expert on issues of social assistance to the poor and economic and social justice. He worked out ways to assess the status of the poor, who made up half the world’s population a mere three decades ago. He was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics for his contribution to welfare economics.

In his work “Development as Freedom,” Sen recognised five different types of freedoms. Political freedoms included the participation of the people in government; economic, the existence of a free market; social, access to healthcare and education; the freedoms he called “guarantees of transparency” included trust and mutual understanding of the interactions between people; and security, preventing any unwanted or tragic consequences for the poor. An important insight of Amartya Sen’s is that the five freedoms mentioned should not be just distant goals, but the most effective means of developing poor countries. Therefore, they should be built into the beginning of all reforms, and not merely expected as the result of them.