ABSTRACT
Inequality Reexamined by Amartya Sen is a seminal text on welfare economics and development. The text sets out the ideas fundamental to Amartya Sen's Capability Approach-ideas that have been widely adopted in development economics and the field of human development. Sen argues that development should be examined not only in terms of economic deprivation (not having enough economic resources to fulfill people's basic needs), but also examine development as an expansion of human freedoms. By focusing only on a particular resource of, say, liberty or economic resources, it wasn't clear how a person could transfer such a resource into a gain. Diverse social, political, and physical environments influenced the writing of Inequality Reexamined. During his youth, Sen was witness to between two and three million people starving to death in the Bengal famine of 1943. Such personal experiences also contributed to Sen's lifetime's work that would focus on examining and understanding inequality, poverty and development.
