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AMARTYA SEN ON ENEQUALITY, CAPABILITES AND NEEDS(1)
The great themes of inequality, poverty, needs and (more recently) capabilities have sounded repeatedly in much of the work of Amartya Sen's life to this date. Now Inequality Reexamined* provides what G. A. Cohen has justly called "an exhilarating tour d'horizon of ideas developed at greater ease elsewhere" (Cohen, 1994, 117). This slim volume leads the reader through all those parts of Sen's truly vast output that develop the themes with which it is concerned. It goes back to his first book on inequality (Sen, 1973); it introduces the reader to the relevant parts of his work on economic theory, on philosophy, and on the empirical study of poverty, famine and persistent deprivation. It uses no explicit mathematics, while referring the reader to those parts of Sen's mathematical work which have made deeply significant and critical contributions to the theory of social choice and welfare and to the measurement of inequality and poverty.
From his earliest writings on inequality to the present, the concept of distribution according to needs has been a major preoccupation of Sen's thought. In his first book on inequality he had written that "it would be a mistake to think that deserts took priority over needs in the Marxian analysis of distribution, or that Marx was not clear on the distinction. In fact he made the distinction very sharply and accepted the ultimate superiority of the needs principle" (Sen, 1973, 87-88). The concept of needs has remained a preoccupation of Sen's, and is equally prominent in his recent book, where he notes that "productivity differences constituted only one of Marx's concerns. He also focused attention on the necessity to address our manifold diversities, including differences in needs" (Sen, 1992, 120).
The diversity of human needs leads naturally to the idea that inequality is far more complex than merely a matter of income, wealth, or utility, and that well-being depends on the capability to achieve valuable functionings. This concept of capabilities Sen finds already present in Aristotle and developed by Smith and Marx (Sen, 1987a, 46, n. 16). In his Tanner Lecture, given in 1979 and first published in Sen (1980), he launches his interpretation of needs in terms of his concept of capabilities to...