via the Global Sociology blog, there is a remarkable profile in The New Statesman of Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, which is well worth reading for a little inspiration*.

Derbyshire writes:

One afternoon in the mid-1940s, a man staggered into the family compound bleeding profusely. It turned out that he was an unemployed Muslim labourer named Kader Mia, who had come into a predominantly Hindu area to look for work. He had been attacked by a hostile mob and later died. The experience was "devastating" for Sen, but it also taught him an important political and moral lesson that would inform his life's work: which was that "economic unfreedom, in the form of extreme poverty, can make a person a helpless prey in the violation of other kinds of freedom". Mia's murder may have been the "ultimate violation of his negative freedom", but the reason he was in the neighbourhood in the first place was that poverty had robbed him of the "positive" freedom to do the things he wanted to do.

This episode informs Sen's philosophy.

Sen's theoretical and political commitments, which he freely concedes were shaped by the fate of Kader Mia, fuse in a deep and enduring pre occupation with the forms that injustice takes. One of the main arguments of the new book is that the social contract tradition in moral and political theory is concerned with arriving at the fundamental rules and principles governing ideally just institutions, at the expense of examining the multiple injustices of the lives human beings actually lead.

----------------

* since a lot of us are feeling a bit let down by that other Nobel economist recently.