Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economics last month, but his brand of economics puts as much, if not more, emphasis on health as it does more conventional economic measures, such as per capita gross national product. Sen also has strong ties to the School's Center for Population and Development Studies. Although he is now a Harvard professor emeritus, Sen will be using a second-floor office in the Center's building at 9 Bow Street in Cambridge several months a year during vacation breaks from his master's post at Trinity College in Cambridge, England. He has also written several articles with the Center's acting director, Sudhir Anand. In November, Sen was slated to be one of the featured participants in a two-day meeting at the Center for Anand's far-reaching Global Health Equity Initiative, an ambitious, multidimensional effort aimed at defining, measuring, and analyzing health equity around the world. Anand said the goal of the meeting to which Sen was invited was to lay a philosophical basis for health equity.

News accounts of Sen's Nobel Prize credited his work on the problems of the poor, welfare economics, and inequality. Most commentators said Sen was an unorthodox choice for the prize because it has tended to go to economists who work on a highly abstract, supposedly value-free level whereas as Sen has a reputation for being the conscience of the field. The 64-year-old economist is probably best known for his 1981 book Poverty and Famine, which argued that the principal cause of famine was not food shortages but economic and political factors that result in maldistribution of food.

Anand says Sen's ideas have inspired economic development scholars, analysts, and program officials to treat health as an end in itself, rather than just as a piece of the human capital equation that may drive economic output up or down. This elevation of health stems from Sen's theory of human capabilities, which unleashes economic development and human welfare from per capita GNP and other such metrics and recasts them as issues of how much choice and opportunity people have in their lives.

Anand says the addition of development scholarship to the Center's traditional focus on population paved the way for Sen, who is, after all, an economist, to get involved in the Center. "It allowed him to more easily integrate into what we are doing." Yet Sen's work, especially in inequality, has also shaped population research. Sen has shown, for example, that discrimination against girls and women in India and China translates into a skewed population that can only be accounted for by millions of "missing" girls and women.