Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today, we're opening
a file on a figure who is, I mean, technically
classified as an economist, but that label, it
just feels a little too small, maybe too rigid
for the ground he covers. It really does. We
are talking about Amartya Sen. Exactly. And the
reason we've pulled this, well, this massive
stack of research, we've got his biography, Poverty
and Famines, Development as Freedom, the idea
of justice. It's because Sen didn't just, you
know. add a few formulas to the field, he essentially
rewired its moral circuitry. That's a really
good way to put it. Usually when we talk about
economics, especially the classical kind, we're
talking about the how. Right. How do we get growth?
How do we move resources around efficiently?
How do we balance supply and demand? All of that.
Sen stepped back from the whole machine and asked
a much simpler but much bigger question. Why?
What's the point? What is the point of all this
growth? I mean, if a country is rich in terms
of its GDP, but its people aren't free. or they're
dying from things we know how to prevent, does
the money actually matter? It feels like the
difference between being a mechanic, you know,
tinkering with the engine, and being the architect
who's actually designing the whole vehicle and
deciding where it's even supposed to go. That's
a perfect analogy. And to really understand the
architecture he built, you have to look at the
ground he stood on. Because his insights on famine,
on gender inequality, on the very definition
of poverty, they didn't come from a sterile textbook.
No. They came from witnessing the very worst
of what humanity can do to itself and then deciding
that, well, that mathematics and rigorous logic
could actually offer a solution. So that's our
mission for this deep dive. We're going to trace
that arc. We're going to look at how a boy raised
in what was, frankly, a progressive bubble in
Bengal ended up winning a Nobel Prize for proving,
and I mean mathematically proving, that starvation
is almost never about a lack of food. And we'll
get into the liberal paradox, which is a real
brain melter of a logic puzzle that challenges
our basic ideas of freedom. And we'll also discuss
why he thinks GDP is just a terrible, terrible
way to measure a human life. We should probably
address the nickname he got early on, the one
you hear a lot in the media. He's often called
the Mother Teresa of economics. Which, on the
surface, sounds like this huge compliment. It
implies, you know, compassion, maybe even sainthood,
this deep care for the poor. Oh, it's definitely
meant to be a compliment. It highlights his focus
on poverty and inequality, which, believe me,
was not the trendy topic in economics when he
started his career. But Sen himself. He kind
of chafes at it. He doesn't like it. No. He's
the first to tell you he doesn't follow a lifestyle
of dedicated self -sacrifice. He's not an ascetic.
He enjoys a good glass of wine. He loves a really
heated debate. He lives a very secular, very
active life. So he's not a saint. He's a scholar.
Precisely. And he believes that rigorous thinking,
clear logic, does more for the poor in the long
run than charity does. He's also been called
the conscience of the profession. And I think
that one fits a lot better. That feels more accurate.
It is. He basically forced the entire profession
to look up from their graphs and acknowledge
the human reality behind the curves. OK, so let's
start with that scholar part, because his origin
story is famously intellectual. He was born in
1933 in a place called Santiniketan in Bengal,
which was then British India. And when you say
born in Santiniketan, that carries a very specific
weight in Indian history. It's something that
might be lost on, say, a Western audience. It's
not just a pin on a map? Not at all. Santiniketan
wasn't just a town. It was an experiment. It
was a university town. And it was established
by Rabindranath Tagore. The poet. The first non
-European to win the Nobel Prize in literature.
The very same. Tagore was this massive looming
figure in Sen's life. From day one. I mean, literally
from day one. Tagore actually named him. He named
him? Yes. He gave him the name Amartya, which
in Bengali means immortal or heavenly. Wow. That
is a tremendous amount of pressure to put on
an infant. Here's your name, kid. Try to live
up to a mortal. Right. But the pressure there
wasn't academic in the way we think of it now,
which is really the key to understanding Sen's
mind. Sen went to Tagore's school. It was called
Patha Bhavana. This school was, well... It was
radically different from the British colonial
education system that dominated India at the
time. So the British system was all about being
rigid, focused on rote memorization, incredibly
competitive. Standardized testing, memorizing
dates and names, that sort of thing. Exactly.
Tagore's school despised all that. They hated
exams. Aided them. The whole philosophy was that
competitive testing kills curiosity. It makes
you learn for the test, not for the love of knowledge.
So they focused on cultural diversity. They held
classes outdoors under the trees. And they taught
students to see India not as an isolated colony,
but as part of this larger global tapestry. So
it's that foundation that gave him the. the flexibility
to think outside the box later on. Sen credits
it directly. He wasn't trained to just tick boxes.
He was trained to ask if the boxes were even
the right shape to begin with. He was taught
to question the premise. It sounds like a liberal
arts dream. But he did eventually pivot pretty
hard into, you know, the hard sciences, math,
economics. He did. But he carried that foundational
flexibility with him. He was taught from a young
age to look for the connections between disciplines,
between math and philosophy, between ethics and
history. Rather than just staying in one single
silo. So he has this almost idyllic free -thinking
foundation. But then, as it always does, the
real world intrudes. And it intrudes in a pretty
violent way. Two specific traumas seem to define
his early life and really set him on his path.
The first one is intensely personal. His health.
Yes. This is when he's about 18 years old. He's
a student at Presidency College in Calcutta.
He's brilliant. He's young. He has a whole world
ahead of him. And then he finds a lump in his
mouth. And it wasn't just nothing. No, it was
oral cancer. And you have to remember, this is
the early 1950s. Cancer treatment wasn't anything
like what it is today. The doctors gave him a
truly grim prognosis. What were the odds? A 15
% chance of living another five years. 15 %?
I mean, that's essentially a death sentence for
a teenager. How did he even handle that? I think
most people, regardless of how smart they are,
would just shut down or panic. Sin went to the
library. Of course he did. It's a recurring thing
with him. He didn't just passively accept what
the doctors told him. He read up on the pathology
of his specific carcinoma. He went through the
medical texts himself. And he realized that the
radiation treatment the doctors were kind of
hesitant about was actually his only statistical
shot at survival. So he advocated for his own
treatment based on his own research to his own
doctors as a teenager. He did. And you have to
remember. Radiation back then was a very blunt
instrument. It was risky. It was damaging. But
he calculated the odds. He looked at it rationally.
He realized that doing nothing was a guarantee
of death and the radiation was a gamble. He took
the gamble. That's just incredible agency for
an 18 -year -old. It's almost like he treated
his own life as an economic problem to be solved,
weighing risks and probabilities and outcomes.
It really shows his temperament, rationality
over fear. And he survived, obviously. But that
experience, that ticking clock. It just lit a
fire under him. He went to Cambridge Trinity
College and just tore through the curriculum.
He was a prodigy. Absolutely. He finished his
Ph .D. work so quickly that he was offered a
department chairmanship back in India before
he'd even technically graduated. This is the
stat that always, always blows my mind. He was
appointed to head the new economics department
at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. How old was
he at this point? He was 23. 23 years old. He
was probably teaching students who were older
than him. Almost certainly. And he was managing
professors who were his seniors by decades. But
there was this undeniable brilliance that people
just recognized. He wasn't just reciting what
was in the textbook. He was already pushing the
boundaries of the entire field. Okay, so that's
the first trauma. The brush with death. The prodigy.
But then there's the second trauma. And this
one seems to be the absolute key that unlocks
his work on famine. It's the story of a man named
Kedar Mia. This is. This is the rosebud moment
for Amartya Sen. It happened a bit earlier, during
the partition of India in 1947. Sen was just
a boy, maybe 10 or 11, playing in the garden
of his family home in Dhaka. And just for context,
partition was the chaotic, incredibly bloody
division of British India into India and Pakistan.
It was a bloodbath. Communal violence between
Hindus and Muslims was just... Rampant. I mean,
people who had lived side by side for generations
as neighbors were suddenly killing each other
in the streets. A truly horrific time. Horrific.
Sin's family was Hindu, living in a largely Inju
neighborhood. So inside their compound walls,
it was relatively safe. Relative being the key
word there. Very much so. Suddenly the garden
gate bursts open and a man stumbles in. He's
bleeding profusely. He has been stabbed in the
back with a knife. Oh my God. man was Kudair
Mia, a Muslim day laborer. He had come into this
hostile Hindu neighborhood knowing the risk.
He had to. Sin's father rushed the man to the
hospital, and the young Amartya Sen sat with
him, gave him water. And even as a child, Sin
had the presence of mind to ask him, why? Why
did you come here? You knew the riots were happening.
You knew this was a death trap for a Muslim man.
And what did Kudair Mia say? As he was dying,
he told the boy, I had no choice. My children
had no food. That's haunting. It changed Sin's
life forever. In that moment, he realized that
Katermia didn't die simply because of religious
hatred. That was the weapon, yes. The thug who
stabbed him was driven by communal violence.
But the cause, the fundamental reason Katermia
was in that specific street at that specific
moment was poverty. Because if he had had money,
he could have stayed home where it was safe.
Exactly. If Katermia had had a savings account,
or even just a few days' worth of food in the
pantry for his family, he could have stayed indoors.
He would have been safe. Sen later gave this
a name. He called it economic unfreedom. Economic
unfreedom. That's a powerful phrase. The lack
of economic freedom, that extreme poverty. Yeah.
It forced him to trade his physical safety for
the mere chance of earning a wage to feed his
kids. And Sen realized right then that you cannot
separate economics from ethics or from sociology
or from basic human safety. Poverty isn't just
a lack of money. It's a lack of freedom to survive.
It strips you of the agency to make safe choices.
Which leads us directly to 1981. This is the
year Sen publishes Poverty and Famines, an essay
on entitlement and deprivation. This is where
he takes that gut -wrenching childhood realization
and turns it into a rigorous mathematical economic
proof. And he targets a very specific, very common
sense idea. It's called the Food Availability
Decline Hypothesis, or FAD for short. The FAD
hypothesis, it sounds fancy, but as you said,
it's just a common sense assumption most of us
have. People are starving, therefore there must
not be enough food. Seems logical, right? If
I open my fridge and it's empty, I go hungry.
So if a country's pantry is empty, the whole
country goes hungry. Makes perfect sense. But
Sen says it's wrong. He says it's dangerously
simplistic. A country isn't a fridge. He went
back and looked at the data from the Great Bengal
Famine of 1943, a famine that killed between
two and three million people. He had witnessed
this as a child. He saw people dying on the roads
of Calcutta. So he went back to the archives,
to the records. He looked at the crop yields.
He looked at the numbers. And what he found was
stunning. He found that in 1943, the year of
the famine, the total food supply in Bengal was
only about 5 % lower than the previous five -year
average. Only 5 %? That doesn't sound like enough
to cause millions of deaths. It's not. But here
is the real kicker. The food supply in 1943 was
actually higher than it was in 1941. Wait, say
that again? There was more food available in
total during the famine year than there was two
years prior in 1941. And there was no famine
in 1941. So how is that possible? There was more
food, but millions of people starved to death.
That breaks the simple supply and demand logic.
It shatters it. It proves that the problem wasn't
a lack of supply. The food was physically there.
So Sen introduced a new concept to explain why
people couldn't get to it. He called it the entitlement
approach. OK, we need to define that carefully
because entitlement means something very different
in modern political discourse. Very different.
In Sen's economic terms, your entitlement is
the set of all the different combinations of
goods and services you can legally acquire. It's
based on two things. What you own. He calls this
your endowment, like your land or more likely
just your ability to work and what the market
will give you in exchange for that. So my labor
is my endowment and my wage is what the market
gives me for it. Exactly. And he says starvation
happens when your entitlement set collapses.
It's when you can no longer legally acquire enough
food to live, regardless of how much food is
actually sitting in the warehouses of the country.
So how did that play out in the Bengal famine?
If the rice was there, why couldn't people get
it? It was what Sen called a boom famine. This
is counterintuitive. World War II was raging.
The British government was pouring money into
Calcutta to fund the war effort. There was this
massive industrial boom to support the military.
So factories are humming. There's a lot of money
in the city. A ton of money. Urban wages shot
up. People in the city, factory workers, soldiers,
government clerks, they had money. And they started
buying rice, hoarding rice. So the demand in
the city skyrocketed, driving prices way up.
Exactly. But the rural landless laborers, the
people like Catermia, the people who didn't own
farms but just worked for a daily wage, their
wages were fixed. They didn't get a raise. They
were completely disconnected from this urban
boom. So the price of their staple food goes
up, but their income stays completely flat. And
not just a little. The price of rice doubled,
then tripled, then quadrupled in a very short
time. Suddenly, a full day's labor, which used
to buy your family two bowls of rice, now bought
you a handful. Their purchasing power just evaporated.
They didn't starve because the rest disappeared.
They starved because the market mechanism literally
priced them out of existence. That's it. Their
entitlement to the food that was right there
in their own country collapsed. That is a chilling,
chilling realization. The market, in a sense,
worked perfectly. It allocated the scarce resource
rice to those with the most money. It just so
happened that the result of that perfect allocation
was mass death. And that is Sen's fundamental
critique. You cannot just look at the total pile
of food, the aggregate supply. You have to look
at the mechanisms of distribution. Who has the
entitlement to eat? Who has the economic power
to command food in the market? That's the only
question that matters. He took this a step further,
though. He moved from pure economics to politics
with a statement that is probably his most famous
quote. I mean, I have seen this cited everywhere.
Oh, yeah, this is the big one. No famine has
ever taken place in the history of the world
in a functioning democracy. It's an incredibly
bold claim. The word never is a very strong word
for a historian or an economist to use. It is.
He's essentially daring historians to find a
counterexample. Yeah. And so far it holds up
remarkably well. He points to India before independence,
regular devastating famines under British colonial
rule. After India became a democracy in 1947,
not one major famine. But why? Is there something
magical about putting a ballot in a box that
makes corn grow? It's not magic. It's about incentives
and information. Sin argues that famines, technically
speaking, are actually very easy to prevent.
We know how to move food from one place to another.
We know how to set up public works programs to
give people cash to buy food. The problem is
never technical. It's always a lack of political
will. The government has to want to stop it.
It has to be forced to want to stop it. In a
democracy, you have an opposition party, you
have newspapers, you have a free press. If people
start dying in the streets from starvation, what's
going to happen? It's going to be front page
news. The opposition is going to scream about
it in Parliament. The newspapers will run photos
of starving children. The government will be
hammered in the press and they will be summarily
voted out in the next election. It's political
suicide to ignore a famine. So the government
has a selfish institutional survival instinct
to stop the famine. They don't want to lose their
jobs. Precisely. The fear of losing power forces
them to act. Now, contrast that with an authoritarian
regime. Take Mao's China during the Great Leap
Forward. Where tens of millions of people died
of starvation. Estimates go from 30 to 45 million.
It's one of the worst famines in human history.
Sen points out that the Chinese government didn't
change its disastrous agricultural policies for
three full years while people were dying. Why?
Because they didn't have to. They didn't have
to. Mao didn't face elections. There was no free
press to report on the starvation. In fact, it
was the opposite. Local officials were so terrified
of the central government that they lied and
reported record harvests to please the party.
So there was no feedback loop, no truth telling
mechanism. Mao could let 30 million of his own
people die and still wake up the next morning
as chairman of the Communist Party. He was completely
insulated from the consequences of his own catastrophic
failure. So things like free speech and a free
press, they aren't just abstract civil liberties
or, you know, nice things to have for political
scientists to talk about. In Sen's view, they
are literal insurance policies against mass starvation.
That is the absolute core of his philosophy.
Political rights are economic rights. You cannot
separate them. You can't follow the model that
says, let's fix the economy first and then we'll
worry about democracy later. The democracy is
the tool that fixes the economy when it breaks
for the poorest people. This brings us perfectly
to what he calls the capability approach. This
is the intellectual framework he built to replace,
or at the very least, to supplement GDP as our
main measure of progress. Right. Because if you
accept that you can have a rich country with
a famine if the distribution is bad, then it
immediately follows that GDP is a terrible, terrible
scoreboard for human success. So standard economics
looks at things like utility or income. Do you
have a dollar in your pocket? Does it make you
happy? Those are the traditional questions. Sen
says those are the wrong questions. We shouldn't
be asking what people have. We should be asking
what are people capable of doing and being. Okay,
so he makes this key distinction between functionings
and capabilities. These sound like academic jargon,
so let's really break them down into plain English.
Let's do it. Think of functionings as the outcomes,
the things you actually achieve in your life.
Are you well -fed? Are you literate? Do you participate
in your community? Are you healthy? Those are
all functionings. They are states of being and
doing. Okay. The end result, what you actually
are. Right. Capabilities, on the other hand,
are the freedoms you have to achieve those outcomes.
It is the set of real, genuine opportunities
you have to choose from. It's about choice. The
classic example he uses to explain this is the
difference between fasting and starving. Yes.
And it's the perfect illustration. It's so clear.
Imagine two people. Person A is a wealthy person
who is fasting for religious reasons or maybe
they're on a hunger strike for a political cause.
OK. Person B is a destitute person who is starving
because they have no money to buy food. Now,
if we just look at them from a purely nutritional
standpoint, if we measure their functioning of
being nourished. They are identical. Both are
hungry. Both are consuming zero calories. If
your doctor just looks at the chart, it's the
same. Their functioning is identical, but their
capability is totally different. The person who
was fasting chose not to eat. They had the option.
They had the capability to eat. The food was
available. They had the money. But they freely
chose not to exercise that capability. The starving
person had no such choice. Their capability set
with respect to food was empty. So true freedom,
true development isn't just about the outcome.
It's about having the choice. Exactly. And for
Sen. Development is the process of expanding
those choices. It's not just about raising the
average income. It's about removing the unfreedoms
that restrict our choices. Things like illiteracy,
lack of health care, lack of public transportation
or a lack of basic civil rights. And it's interesting
how he applies this to the so -called first world,
too. It's not just a theory about poor countries.
You can be rich in terms of income, but very
poor in capabilities. Absolutely. He famously
did this comparison of mortality rates. He looked
at. African -American men in certain inner city
areas in the U .S., like Harlem, and compared
them to men in, say, Kerala, India, or in Bangladesh.
And what did he find? He found that the men in
Harlem, despite having a much, much higher income
per capita than a peasant in Bangladesh, actually
had lower life expectancies at certain ages.
They were less likely to survive to age 40 or
50. So they had more cash in their pockets, but
less actual life. Less capability to live a long
and healthy life. Because of the high risk of
violence, the lack of access to quality health
care, the chronic stress of systemic racism,
all these things restricted their real freedom
to flourish. So in terms of that specific capability,
the ability to live a long, healthy life, the
man in Kerala who was monetarily much poorer
was actually richer. That completely reframes
the whole developed versus developing world narrative.
It stops being just about who has the most factories
or the highest stock market. It completely changes
the game. And it's why he was so instrumental
in helping to create the Human Development Index,
the HDI, for the United Nations. Right. That
was with Mahbub Halek. Yes, the Pakistani economist
who really spearheaded the HDI. He was a close
friend of Sen. And Haque famously told Sen, we
need a number that is just as vulgar as GDP,
but stands for something better. As vulgar as
GDP? I love that. He wanted a single, simple
number that would force politicians to look at
health and education, not just industrial output.
And that's what the HDI does. It combines income
with life expectancy and literacy rates. It's
a direct application of the capability approach.
OK, I want to pivot here to something of a bit.
Well, a bit naughtier. We've talked about famine
and freedom, which are big, tangible, gut -level
concepts. But Sen is also a philosopher and a
logician. He spent a lot of his career deep in
the weeds of something called social choice theory.
This is the stuff that gives economics graduate
students nightmares. It really goes back to his
time at Cambridge and his deep engagement with
the work of people like Kenneth Arrow. So the
basic question of social choice theory is what?
How do we decide what society wants? I mean,
we know what you want and we know what I want.
But how do we aggregate all those individual
preferences into a single coherent social choice?
It sounds simple on the surface, right? Just
take a vote. Majority rules. What's the problem?
But Kenneth Arrow, in his famous impossibility
theorem, proved that it's mathematically impossible
to create a perfect voting system that satisfies
just a few very basic common sense. fairness
conditions. So you can't have a perfect system.
I can't. And Sen took this already mind -bending
idea and broke it even further with something
called the liberal paradox, or sometimes just
Sen's paradox. Okay, walk us through this slowly,
the liberal paradox. All right. Sen proved mathematically
that you cannot have a society that simultaneously
respects two things we all think are good, minimal
liberalism and Pareto efficiency. They are, in
some cases, fundamentally incompatible. That
sounds bad. Because we want both of those things.
We want individual rights and we want socially
efficient outcomes. We absolutely do. So let's
define them clearly. Minimal liberalism just
means that there is a personal sphere where an
individual should get to decide, period. I get
to decide what color shirt I wear. You get to
decide what book you want to read in the privacy
of your own home. Society shouldn't get a vote
on my private matters. Seems completely reasonable.
A basic right. And Pareto efficiency is also
very simple. It just means that if everyone in
society prefers option A to option B, then society
as a whole should choose option A. Also seems
totally reasonable. If every single person likes
ice cream better than eating broken glass, society
should definitely choose ice cream. Hard to argue
with that. So these two principles both seem
obviously good. Where does it all break down?
This is where the example comes in. Right. Setney
uses this brilliant little story. It's called
the Luden Prude example. Imagine there's a single
copy of a controversial book. Let's use the classic
example. Lady Chatterley's Lover. And we have
just two people in our society. Mr. Prude and
Mr. Lude. Okay. Mr. Prude, I'm guessing, hates
the book. He thinks it's filth. It's morally
corrupting. His number one absolute first choice
is that no one reads it. But, and this is the
key, he thinks that if someone has to read it,
he would rather read it himself. Why? To save
Mr. Lude's soul from corruption. He sees it as
a noble sacrifice. He doesn't want Lude to be
exposed to this filth and enjoy it. So Prude's
personal ranking of the three possible outcomes
is, first, no one reads the book second prude
reads the book third and worst of all lewd reads
the book okay i follow that logic now what about
mr lewd mr lewd as his name suggests is very
keen to read the book but he's also a bit of
a troll he thinks the idea of the uptight mr
prude being forced to read this book is absolutely
hilarious the thought of shocking him is just
too delicious so lewd's personal ranking is first
prude reads the book second lewd reads the book
and third No one reads the book. All right, we
have the rankings. Now let's apply our principles.
Let's start with minimal liberalism. Minimal
liberalism says there's a private sphere. So
whether or not Mr. Lewd reads the book should
be up to him. Let's compare the options Lewd
reads and no one reads. Which does lewd prefer?
He prefers to read it. So liberalism says society
should prefer lewd reads over no one reads. Correct.
Now let's look at Mr. Prude. Whether he reads
it or not should be his business. Let's compare
prude reads and no one reads. Which does prude
prefer? He prefers that no one reads it. That's
his number one choice. So liberalism says society
should prefer no one reads. over prude reads.
Exactly. So we have two liberal preferences.
Lewd reads is better than no one, and no one
is better than prude reads. Okay, but now comes
Pareto efficiency, the if everyone agrees rule.
Right. Let's look at the rankings again, and
let's compare two specific outcomes, prude reads
versus lewd reads. Okay. Mr. Prude prefers prude
reads over lewd reads. That's his second choice
versus his third. And what about Mr. Lewd? He
also prefers prude reads over lewd reads. It's
his first choice versus his second. They both
agree. They both want prude to read the book
more than they want lewd to read it. Everyone
agrees. So our principle of Pareto efficiency
says that society must choose prude reads over
lewd reads. But wait, we're trapped. You see
it. We have a logical loop. Liberalism says lewd
reads is better than no one reads. And no one
reads is better than prude reads. So by logic,
lewd reads must be better than prude reads. But
Pareto says prude reads is better than lewd reads.
It's a contradiction, a paradox. It's a perfect
mathematical proof that mind your own business
and do what's best for the group can sometimes
be direct enemies. It shattered this utopian
idea that we can design a perfect social system
that satisfies all our ethical intuitions at
once. So what's the takeaway? That freedom is
bad? No, not at all. Senster's point is that
we have to make value judgments. We have to choose
which rights and principles matter more in which
context. Math won't save us from making hard
ethical choices. It forces us to have a public
debate and admit that we can't have it all, all
the time. Speaking of ethics and hard numbers,
let's talk about his work on gender inequality.
In 1990, he dropped an absolute bomb on the academic
and policy world with an article in the New York
Review of Books. The title alone was a shock.
It was called More Than 100 Million Women Are
Missing. This was a seismic shift in how we talked
about this issue. Before this article, gender
inequality was usually discussed in terms of
the wage gap or education levels or the glass
ceiling in corporations. Sen made it about life
and death. How did he even arrive at that number,
100 million? It was actually a pretty straightforward
but brilliant piece of demographic analysis.
He looked at the ratio of women to men in different
parts of the world. In Europe and North America,
there are typically more women than men. The
ratio is about 1 .05 women for every man. Why
is that? Women just tend to be biologically hardier,
they have survival advantage, they survive infancy
at higher rates, and on average live longer than
men. So that 1 .05 to 1 ratio is kind of the
biological baseline in a neutral environment
where both sexes get equal care. Okay, so that's
what should happen. That's the biological norm.
But when Sen looked at the population data for
China, India and large parts of West Asia and
North Africa, the ratio was inverted. There were
significantly fewer women than men. In some places,
it was as low as 0 .94 to 1. So he just calculated
the difference. He calculated the gap between
the expected number of women in those populations
based on the Western ratio and the actual number
of women that the census recorded. The shortfall
was over 100 million. That is the combined population
of the U .K. and France. Gone. Missing. Gone.
He argued that these women were missing due to
what he called the mortality impact of unequal
rights. It wasn't just about birth rates, though
that was part of it. It was about selective abortion
of female fetuses, which was becoming possible
with ultrasound technology. It was about female
infanticide in some areas, but mostly it was
about simple, grinding neglect. Neglect in what
way? It's the accumulation of thousands of small,
devastating decisions. Feeding the son first
when food is scarce, taking the boy to the doctor
right away when he has a fever, but waiting a
day or two with the girl to see if she gets better
on her own. Those small biases, multiplied over
millions and millions of families, added up to
a massive silent death toll. Now, this theory
was challenged, right? Because that's how science
works. I remember an economist, Emily Oster,
offered a biological rebuttal some years later.
Yes, and it was a very serious challenge. Emily
Oster, who is a fantastic economist, published
research arguing that high rates of hepatitis
B in these same regions could explain the skewed
sex ratio. Her argument was that women who carry
hepatitis B are, for biological reasons, statistically
more likely to give birth to boys. So for a while,
it looked like Sen might have been wrong. That
it was a virus, not sexism. It did. It was a
major debate. But the story didn't end there.
And this is a great example of science working
as it should. To her immense credit, Oster continued
her research. She gathered new and better data
from China and other places. And she eventually
realized that the prevalence of hepatitis B just
wasn't high enough to explain the sheer magnitude
of the gender gap. So she changed her mind. She
publicly recanted her original conclusion. She
wrote a follow -up explaining that her initial
theory was wrong and that Sen's original point
about social inequality and neglect was, in fact,
largely correct. That takes a lot of intellectual
integrity. It does. And in the end, it just reinforced
the tragedy of Sen's finding. The women were
missing because of how society valued them. or
rather didn't value them. It goes right back
to that capability idea we were talking about.
If you are born a girl in some of these regions,
your fundamental capability to simply exist is
compromised from day one just because of your
gender. And Sen is always quick to emphasize
that this hurts everyone. It's not just a women's
issue. It creates bride shortages. It fuels human
trafficking. It distorts the labor market. It
destabilizes society in profound ways. His point
is always that freedom is interconnected. You
can't suppress the rights and the very existence
of half the population and expect the country
as a whole to flourish. Let's zoom out a bit
to his broader worldview on justice itself. In
2009, he published a huge book called The Idea
of Justice. And in it, he sort of picks a fight
with another giant of 20th century political
philosophy, John Rawls. He does. And taking on
Rawls is no small thing. John Rawls is the veil
of ignorance guy. His idea was a thought experiment.
If you wanted to design a perfectly fair and
just society, you should imagine that you're
behind a veil of ignorance. You don't know where
you'll land in that society. You don't know if
you'll be rich or poor, male or female, smart
or not so smart, healthy or sick. And because
you don't know your own position, you'll design
rules that are fair for everyone because you
might end up at the very bottom of the pile.
Exactly. It's a search for the perfect setup.
The ideally just institutions. Sen has a name
for this approach. He calls it... Transcendental
institutionalism. And he thinks it's basically
a waste of time. Waste of time. Who doesn't want
perfection? Because, he argues, we can never
actually agree on what perfect is. Is a perfect
society libertarian? Is it socialist? Is it something
else? We'll argue about it forever. And more
importantly, we don't live in a philosophical
classroom. We live in the real world with real
injustices happening right now. So what's his
alternative? He argues for what he calls a comparative
approach. He says we shouldn't be asking what
is the perfect society. We should be asking a
much more practical question. Is this policy
better than that policy? Does this action reduce
injustice or does it increase it? So don't worry
about designing utopia from scratch. Worry about
whether raising the minimum wage or eliminating
a specific discriminatory law makes our current
society more just today than it was yesterday.
Precisely. He borrows a concept from Adam Smith,
the impartial spectator. It's about standing
outside a specific situation and judging its
fairness in a specific context, not trying to
design a perfect machine from scratch. It's radical
pragmatism. Sin wants to reduce injustice now,
not wait for some theoretical consensus on the
ultimate nature of the good. This pragmatism
and his willingness to engage in very public
debate seems to get him into hot water in the
real world of politics. We can't really ignore
his current standing in his home country of India.
He has been very, very vocal about the current
government. Yes, and we should report this carefully,
just laying out the facts of the dispute. But
the friction is undeniable. Sen has been a consistent
and vocal critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's
government. He has argued that the government
has encouraged what he calls fear -mongering.
And he brings it back to that core idea of his
government by discussion. He always does. He
says democracy isn't just about casting a vote
every five years. That's just one small part
of it. True democracy is the ability to discuss,
to argue, to dissent without fear every single
day. And he argues that if people are afraid
to speak their minds or if the government labels
any form of dissent as anti -national, then you
don't really have a democracy anymore. You just
have an election machine. He was also highly
critical of the government's decision to revoke
the special autonomous status of Kashmir. He
was. He called the detention of local political
leaders there a classic colonial excuse. His
argument is that you cannot impose development
or integration on a people at gunpoint. It has
to be a democratic process that involves their
consent and their participation. And the government
and its supporters have pushed back pretty hard.
There was the whole controversy surrounding the
Lund University. Nalanda was a real passion project
for Sen. The goal was to revive an ancient Indian
center of learning, one of the world's first
true universities, which had been destroyed centuries
ago. Sen was appointed the first chancellor of
the revived institution. But he didn't serve
a second term. No. He withdrew his candidacy
for a second term in 2015. He wrote a public
letter to the board saying it was clear that
the government wasn't enthusiastic about him
continuing in the role. He felt the political
pressure was making his position untenable. It's
a sad irony, really. The man who wrote the book
on the argumentative Indian finds himself being
pushed out of the argument by the state. It's
a profound irony, yes. So let's close by humanizing
the man a little. We've talked about the brain,
the theories, the Nobel Prize. But what about
the person? He's in his 90s now and still going.
And still working, still writing. He's a fascinating
character. He's an explicit atheist, but one
who deeply identifies with these skeptical, argumentative
traditions within Hinduism. He's been married
three times. His first wife was a very famous
Bengali writer, Nabini Tadev Sen. His second
wife was Eva Colorni, an Italian economist who
tragically died of cancer at a young age. And
he's currently married to Emma Rothschild, who
is herself a very distinguished historian. And
isn't one of his daughters a Bollywood actress?
Yes, Nandana Sen. He's a man who has always lived
in the world, not just in an academic library.
He used to be famous for just cycling all around
the town of Santa Nicotan, just peddling through
the village, talking to people. His hobbies,
he once said, were I read a lot and I like arguing
with people. That sounds about right. So as we
wrap up this deep dive, what is the one single
idea that the listener should carry with them?
We've covered so much ground from Bengal to Cambridge,
from starvation to the liberal paradox. I think
it's the redefinition of success. Sen's entire
life's work teaches us that a successful life
or a successful country isn't about the pile
of stuff you possess. It's not about your income.
It's about what you can do. It's about what you
are free to be. Freedom is the ultimate metric.
If you have money but you have no voice, you
aren't developed. If you have plenty of food
in the country but no security that you'll be
able to access it, you aren't safe. Everything
is connected. The interconnectedness of freedoms,
political freedom, economic facilities, social
opportunities, they aren't separate items on
a checklist. They're all one single knot. And
if you pull too hard on one string, if you decide
to suppress free speech, for example, in the
name of economic growth, the whole knot tightens,
the circulation gets cut off, and eventually
the entire system fails. That brings me to our
final provocative thought for everyone to mull
over. Sen defines democracy not as voting, but
as... Government by discussion. And we are living
in the noisiest, most information saturated era
in human history. We have social media, 24 hour
news, comment sections everywhere. We have more
speech than ever. But are we discussing? That
is the question, isn't it? Are we using our capability
to reason with each other, to persuade, to listen?
Or are we just shouting into our own echo chambers?
Because if Sen is right, the moment we stop listening
to the other side, the moment we lose the ability
to argue, we aren't just being rude, we are actively
dismantling the safety net that keeps us all
alive. Something to think about the next time
you're doom -scrolling. Thanks for joining us
on the Deep Dive. Thank you. Keep arguing.