- Lived:
- born 3 November 1933 on the Santiniketan campus, Bengal — a life threaded through Dhaka, Calcutta, Cambridge, Delhi, Oxford and Harvard, with every argument routed back through India (living, as of September 2026)
- Field:
- economics and philosophy — social choice theory, welfare economics, development; father of the capability approach
- The Big Idea:
- Famines are not caused by there being too little food but by people losing their claim on the food that exists; and a country's progress should be measured by what its people are actually able to do and be, not by income alone.
- In their words:
- development is "a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy" (Development as Freedom, 1999; as of September 2026)
- If you remember one thing:
- A nine-year-old watched people starve to death in a province full of rice, grew up to prove that they died of lost entitlement rather than missing food — and then rebuilt the world's definition of progress around human freedom.