Culture The feminist Gloria Steinem, Princess of Asturias Award for Humanities
The Indian economist of Bengali origin
Amartya Sen
, promoter of what is known as the economics of well-being and his focus on famine, its conditions and its solutions, has been awarded this year's Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences.
This is the second grand prize in his prestigious career, since in 1998 he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Economics,
with which he founded the
Pratichi Trust
foundation
, with the aim of investing in literacy, basic health and gender equality in India and Bangladesh
This development theorist, born in 1933, studied at
Trinity College, Cambridge
and was appointed professor and founder of the department of economics at
Jadavpur University in Calcutta, India
when he was only 23 years old
.
After two years he returned to Oxford to complete his doctorate in 1959, under the supervision of economist Joan Robinson.
Later, he studied philosophy, a discipline that, as Sen has recognized on numerous occasions, was the germ of his future research on the theory of social selection, in which aspects of
mathematical logic
and moral philosophy
are combined
, as well as inequality and deprivation.
Among his great contributions is his work carried out as a result of his experience in the International Labor Organization of the UN entitled
Poverty and famine: an essay on rights and deprivation
, with which he demonstrated that famine does not only result from lack of food but, also, of inequalities that exist within the system of its distribution, the first time that the causes of poverty were analyzed in detail.
Sen had been deeply marked by the famine he
lived through as a child in 1943 in Bengal
, where thousands of deaths were found.
Factors such as food price increases beyond the reach of landless peasants and the poorest urban dwellers were to blame for the tragedy.
Later, he was appointed professor at the
London School of Economics
(LSE), where he stayed until 1977 and at the University of Oxford, until 1987, first as a professor at Nuffield College and then at All Souls College.
Subsequently, he went to Harvard University as a professor.
In the 1990s his academic works focused on public health and social equality.
In this edition of the award, conditioned by the pandemic, the awards in the categories of Arts and Communication and Humanities have been failed, which went respectively to the Serbian artist Marina Abramovic, the greatest exponent of performance, and to the journalist and American writer Gloria Steinem, considered an icon of modern feminism for her fight for equality.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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Princess of Asturias Awards
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ArteMarina Abramovic, 2021 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts
CultureThe feminist Gloria Steinem, Princess of Asturias Award for Humanities
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