Amartya K. Sen, an economist and philosopher, was born in Bengal in 1933. The memory of the Bengal famine of 1943, in which more than 2 million people died, drew him to work on economics and ethics. He studied economics at Presidency College, Calcutta, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received a doctorate in economics in 1959. After he taught at the Delhi School of Economics, the London School of Economics, he held the posts of Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University (also Fellow of All Souls College), and then Lamont University Professor and professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University. His contributions to economics lie in the areas of social choice theory, theory of choice, development economics, labor economics, cost-benefit analysis, and the measurement of inequality and poverty. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his contributions to...