Amartya Sen received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics. He is a renowned scholar of social choice theory, economic and social justice, economic theories of famines, decision theory, development economics, public health, and the measures of well-being of countries. Sen is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He previously served as Master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. In 1999, he received India’s highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna, for his contribution to welfare economics.
Q: What is your view of “development as freedom”?
A: I discuss, in particular, five different kinds of freedom. The first is internal freedom, or the freedom to be creative, to reason and think… For that the important policy issues are education, communication with others and the openness of society. …
The second is participatory freedom. Here the principal issues are democracy and political liberty, but particularly a society that is based on public debate and discussion. There is some connection here with the ideas that have been emphasised on the one side by Habermas and on the other side, in the public choice literature, by James Buchanan. …
There is then the question of transactional freedom. This is where markets enter and where one part of Adam Smith’s writings are very important. The freedom to participate and exchange and to deal with each other…. The fourth is procedural freedom, which includes absence of discrimination and inequality of treatment… Finally, there is protective freedom. Even though we may want chance and circumstance to be dominated by human will, there will be situations in which things go wrong and when they do, there must be social safety nets to prevent people from falling down under.
Read the full interview here.