Home in the World: A Memoir

"Sen is a really important and inspirational thinker. He is known for advocating the capabilities approach in economics. Conventional economics is based on the idea that people maximize their utility or maximize their profits. It’s one dimensional. Sen has advocated this much richer capabilities approach, where you try to take account of the many different kinds of things or dimensions that would affect people’s well-being. It’s been incredibly influential in development economics and, increasingly, in other areas of the subject, because of a new appreciation of the importance of the environment or of unpaid care, for example. This memoir is really fascinating. It’s beautifully written, a really good read. It’s all about his intellectual formation, growing up in Bengal in British India—which became part of Bangladesh—in a school established by Rabindranath Tagore and the philosophy of education that instilled in him. I suppose the fact that he received such a different intellectual formation, from such a different background, made it possible for him to challenge the conventional approach to economics that he would later be taught. He was a poet and creative writer, but also a philosopher, statesman, and a very influential thinker. As an account of someone’s intellectual formation, I think it’s an absolutely fascinating book. The questions Sen raises are of growing importance in how we think about what it is that economics is supposed to be all about. If you think of a person giving policy advice on the basis of economics and asking, ‘What am I doing to make things better?’ you really ought to be interrogating what you mean by ‘making things better’—for whom and in what ways. Like all conventional economists I’ve been trained in a very uni-dimensional social-planner way of thinking about doing things, so I really enjoyed reading the book. It was a bit more complicated. The book goes up to the period where he has been a student at Cambridge and he’s got his first job in academia, in the United States. He was obviously an incredibly able student in terms of conventional economics. But one interesting thing about his background is the way that the mode of education in his school was to question. So there are passages in the Cambridge section where he talks about how much he enjoyed the conversations he had with senior figures, but also the disagreements he had with them. I don’t think he was being a rebel, particularly. It was just this ingrained habit, through his early education, of questioning."