We need to ask the moral questions: Do I have a right to be rich? And do I have a right to be content living in a world with so much poverty and inequality? These questions motivate us to view the issue of inequality as central to human living.
Empowering women is key to building a future we want.
The themes that the anti-globalization protesters bring to the discussion are of extraordinary importance. However, the theses that they often bring to it, sometimes in the form of slogans, are often oversimple.
The lack of economic freedom could be a very major reason for loss of liberty, liberty of life.
The market economy succeeds not because some people’s interests are suppressed and other people are kept out of the market, but because people gain individual advantage from it.
It was incredible to me that members of one community could kill members of another not for anything personal that they did but simply based on their identity.
I remain instinctively hostile to communitarian philosophy and communitarian politics.
We live in a world where there is a need for pluralistic institutions and for recognizing different types of freedom, economic, social, cultural, and political, which are interrelated.
To say that the whole of the industrial experience of Europe and America just shows the rewards of exploiting the Third World is a gross simplification.
To say that certainly America was very lucky to get a large amount of land, and the native Indians were extremely unlucky to have white men coming over here, is one thing. But to say that the whole of the American prosperity was based on exploiting the indigenous population would be a great mistake.
I think that so many of our abilities to do things depend on interaction with each other.
In all kinds of ways there are different freedoms that effect our lives and you can assess what our lives are like by looking at the various freedoms that we have.
From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines.
The student community of Presidency College was also politically most active.
I left Delhi, in 1971, shortly after Collective Choice and Social Welfare was published in 1970.
I was born in a University campus and seem to have lived all my life in one campus or another.
I was told Indian women don’t think like that about equality. But I would like to argue that if they don’t think like that they should be given a real opportunity to think like that.
I have not had any serious non-academic job.
When the Nobel award came my way, it also gave me an opportunity to do something immediate and practical about my old obsessions, including literacy, basic health care and gender equity, aimed specifically at India and Bangladesh.
But the idea that I should be a teacher and a researcher of some sort did not vary over the years.
People’s identities as Indians, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way – quite suddenly – to sectarian identification with Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh communities.