- Lived:
- Born 1933, Santiniketan, Bengal, India · still living, writing, and lecturing as this book goes to press
- Tradition:
- Welfare economics and political philosophy; the capability approach — the re-marriage of ethics and economics
- The Big Idea:
- The right measure of a society is not its total wealth, nor even its happiness, but the real freedoms its people have to live lives they have reason to value.
- If you remember one thing:
- A nine-year-old who watched millions starve in a land full of food grew up to rebuild economics around the question it had forgotten to ask — not "how much does this country produce?" but "what can its people actually do and be?"