Arguments for a Better World ─ Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen: Society, Institutions, and Development

Amartya Sen has made deep and lasting contributions to the academic disciplines of economics, philosophy, and the social sciences more broadly. He has engaged in policy dialogue and public debate, advancing the cause of a human development focused policy agenda, and a tolerant and democratic polity. This argumentative Indian has made the case for the poorest of the poor, and for plurality in cultural perspective. It is not surprising that he has won the highest awards, ranging from the Nobel Prize in Economics to the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor. This public recognition has gone hand in hand with the affection and admiration that Amartya's friends and students hold for him.

This volume of essays, written in honor of his 75th birthday by his students and peers, covers the range of contributions that Sen has made to knowledge. They are written by some of the world's leading economists, philosophers and social scientists, and address topics such as ethics, welfare economics, poverty, gender, human development, society and politics. The second volume covers the topics of Human Development and Capabilities; Gender and Household; Growth, Poverty and Policy; and Society, Politics and History. It is a fitting tribute to Sen's own contributions to the discourse on Society, Institutions and Development.

Contributors include: Bina Agarwal, Isher Ahluwalia, Montek S Ahluwalia, Ingela Alger, Muhammad Asali, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Pranab Bardhan, Lourdes Benería, Sugata Bose, Lincoln C. Chen, Martha Alter Chen, Kanchan Chopra, Simon Dietz, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Jonathan Glover, Cameron Hepburn, Jane Humphries, Rizwanul Islam, Ayesha Jalal, Mary Kaldor, Sunil Khilnani, Stephan Klasen, Jocelyn Kynch, Enrica Chiappero Martinetti, Kirsty McNay, Martha C. Nussbaum, Elinor Ostrom, Gustav Ranis, Sanjay G. Reddy, Emma Samman, Rehman Sobhan, Robert M. Solow, Nicholas Stern, Frances Stewart, Ashutosh Varshney, Sujata Visaria, and Jörgen W. Weibull.

Kaushik Basu is Professor of Economics and the C. Marks Professor of International Studies, Department of Economics, and Director, Center for Analytic Economics, Cornell University. He has held visiting positions at CORE (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and the London School of Economics. He has been Visiting Professor at Harvard University, Princeton University, and M.I.T. In 1992 he founded the Centre for Development Economics in Delhi and was its first Executive Director. He is also a founding member of the Madras School of Economics.
Ravi Kanbur is T. H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He has taught at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Essex, Warwick, Princeton and Columbia and has served on the staff of the World Bank in several capacities, including as Director of the World Bank's World Development Report.