ABSTRACT
Amartya Sen, author of Inequality Reexamined, was born in West Bengal, India (now Bangladesh) in 1933. He was born into a family of intellectuals: his maternal grandfather was a prominent Sanskrit writer and his mother was also a writer; his father was a professor of chemistry. When he took up his studies for a BA in Economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, Sen found himself surrounded by hotly contested debates between Keynesian economics, "neo-classical" economics, and Marxist theory. It was here that Sen became further interested in working on Social Choice Theory and Philosophy. Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998 for his contribution to welfare economics; the core arguments of this work are set out in Inequality Reexamined. Sen's case for capabilities as a way to understand equality underpins what is known as the Capability Approach.
