Poverty And Famines An Essay On Entitlement

This isn’t to criticise Sen’s perspective – which is a powerful corrective to the official line on the famine’s causes.(“The Famine Commission’s view that the primary cause of the famine was ‘a serious shortage in the total supply of rice available for consumption in Bengal’ provides the standard explanation of the famine.” (pgs 57-8.) Sen definitively refutes this idea.) Nonetheless, I think Sen’s approach can provide only one aspect of a more comprehensive analysis of the causes of famine and deprivation.

This isn’t to criticise Sen’s perspective – which is a powerful corrective to the official line on the famine’s causes.(“The Famine Commission’s view that the primary cause of the famine was ‘a serious shortage in the total supply of rice available for consumption in Bengal’ provides the standard explanation of the famine.” (pgs 57-8.) Sen definitively refutes this idea.) Nonetheless, I think Sen’s approach can provide only one aspect of a more comprehensive analysis of the causes of famine and deprivation.

“If one person in eight starves regularly in the world, this is…

the result of his inability to establish entitlement to enough food; the question of the physical availability of the food is not directly involved.” (p. Sen is on the side of the angels – we need more economists like him.

Professeur à l'Université d'Oxford, l'économiste indien Amartya Sen présente une importante étude sur la pauvreté et la famine préparée dans le cadre du programme mondial de l'emploi du bit.

Le thème de base porte sur l'explication et l'analyse de la famine dont les causes sont loin de ne dépendre que d'un manque de nourriture, d'une chute des récoltes.

But I worry that Sen is restricting the scope of his analysis because he is writing for a community of professional economists.

It can be painful to watch Sen deploy all his brilliance and erudition in refuting positions that not even a child would take seriously.Here he is at the very start of the book: ”An entitlement relation applied to ownership connects one set of ownerships to another through certain rules of legitimacy. Why is my ownership of the bamboo umbrella accepted? Sen is frank about the limits of his approach – but I worry he underestimates their importance.It is a recursive relation and the process of connecting can be repeated. Because I made it with my own labour using some bamboo from my land. “[W]hile entitlement relations concentrate on rights within the given legal structure in that society, some transfers involved violation of these rights, such as looting or brigandage.But his approach necessarily ignores the extent which ‘law and order’ can be an active method of resource appropriation.‘Law and order’ is here implicitly seen as nothing more than the framework within which distribution takes place.When such extra-entitlement transfers are important, the entitlement approach to famines will be defective.On the other hand, most recent famines seem to have taken place in societies with ‘law and order’, without anything ‘illegal’ about the processes leading to starvation. 49) Those scare quotes indicate Sen’s scepticism about the phrases he deploys.Starvation deaths can reflect legality with a vengeance.” (p.166) But Sen’s entitlement approach gives him no way to incorporate this attitude into his formal analyses.I’ve just finished (the main text of) Amartya Sen’s ‘Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation’.Sen (famously) argues that, contrary to conventional belief, most famines aren’t created by food shortages.