Amartya Sen and His Understanding of Inequality

In this chapter, I focus on Amartya Sen’s contributions to our understanding and measurement of inequality. In short, Sen advances our understanding beyond mainstream views of inequality and its measurement both within economics and philosophy by means of his novel focus on individuals’ capabilities. The inequalities about which we are most concerned, Sen argues, are not ultimately about income or primary goods or resources but about the power or means to transform income (or primary goods or resources) into functioning or living without deprivations. The deprivations associated with inequality (amongst other forms) are conceived by Sen in terms of deprivations across a range of powers to choose a life an individual has reason to value. This is the basis of his famous capability approach. As I show in here, his focus on how best to overcome the deprivations associated with various kinds of inequalities—class, gender, group, and so on—lead him ultimately to propose an alternative framework and metric for understanding inequality and equality: capability. I end with a broad overview of some shortcomings with this alternative means of understanding and overcoming inequality.