Sen seems to be popping up everywhere these days. He was mentioned by a couple of speakers at the recent Roundhouse Critical Theory conference and his latest book The Idea of Justice will be the discussion topic at the BSA Theory study group at the forthcoming BSA conference in April. So I had a quick look at his 1987 book On Ethics and Economics. This is a detailed critique of the narrow impoverishment of modern economics focused as it is on producing logistic and predictive models of markets based upon the notion of a purely self interested rational actor. “… there is nevertheless something quite extraordinary in the fact that economics has in fact evolved in this way, characterizing human motivation in such spectacularly narrow terms”. Sen claims in its origins modern economics had both a practical ‘engineering’ aspect and one concerned with human behaviour in the round and ethical considerations of what a good life should be. Both these aspects are fully present in Adam Smith for instance, but modern economics has expunged the ethical, normative aspects to produce a distorted orthodox “Smithian” view. To the extent Smith was at all sociological, this has been erased.
While looking for information about Sen on the web I coincidently found a blog entitled Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy (by-line “In 2009, we again saw why Adam Smith’s invisible hand often appeared invisible: it is not there.” Professor Joseph Stiglitz, 31 December 2009. The blog post I found was Amartya Sen’s Two Brilliant Essays on the Relevance of Adam Smith Today. I shall be looking at these soon. Thanks to Gavin Kennedy for bringing my attention to these, albeit via the beneficence of Google.