Article: Sen-sational EXACTLY 200 years after Thomas Malthus predicted starvation caused by overpopulation and scarce food, Amartya Sen has won a Nobel prize for economics partly for proving that Malthus was wrong. The Indian economist, who this year became Master of Trinity College,Cambridge, was officially awarded the prize for his work on welfare economics. Called "the conscience of the profession" by another Nobel laureate, Robert Solow, Mr Sen has merged philosophy witheconomics.

In his 1981 book "Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation", Mr Sen challenged the prevailing wisdom that declining food supply is the most important cause of famine. Why, Mr Sen asked, has famine often occurred in countries where the supply of food per head is no lower than in previous years? He concluded that there are social and economic factors at work that limit the economic opportunities of certain groups and so cause starvation.

In addition to his work in development economics, Mr Sen earned a reputation in the 1970s for significantly advancing the field of social-choice theory. Building on work done previously by another economist, ...

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