Amartya Sen

It's done so in the past.

And so if famine, as Amartya Sen says, is a distributional problem rather than a deficit of calories being produced, I have really big questions about what it should imply for redistribution of food aid around the world in an anticipatory way such that you mitigate any kind of famine-induced losses in different parts of Southern Africa or even in East Africa, where there's going to be an experience of considerable floods and loss of life associated with this.

And so these are the kinds of things I'm interested in from the climate side.

I think what it implies for markets and things like that, I have no doubt that savvy financiers are going to find ways to price in this risk and perhaps even reduce their downside and or make a profit from this El Nino based on bets they take.

So we'll come back to that question of how you manage that tension, the fact that, as you say, people have different capacities in labor.

The other great vision, modern vision of egalitarianism is a kind of needs-based, you know, the famous from Marx to each according to their needs, which I think has a very good sort of modern take in the form of Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, the capabilities approach, which is saying that essentially equality means making sure that everybody has their basic needs met, that everybody is able to fully participate in social life.

This is in some ways in tension with the resources equality, because to some extent, because of people's different capacities, some people are going to need more of society's resources than others.

Some people are going to be able to work less than others.

And real estate.

There is a paper from a few years back by Lisa Detling, who's with the Federal Reserve Board, and Melissa Carney, who's one of my favorite economists.

She's at the University of Maryland.

She does a lot of work on fertility and family formation.

You and I have done extensive work in the past, Jim, on measuring quality of life and the dozens of indicators that you can use to capture quality of life as a concept.

And we very quickly in that research came across, it was Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, brilliant guy, who wrote books about this subject.

And he said, well, if you want to simplify the whole quality of life debate, one indicator captures all of these other indicators somewhat imperfectly.

But if you want one single indicator to say quality of life, which will tell you that their diet, their education, and all the other indicators of quality are there, are present without actually having going... to have to measure them.

History proves this again and again.

Economist Amartya Sen famously noted that democratic countries with a free press and active opposition do not suffer from major famines.

Why? Because public suffering gets politicized.

It becomes a threat to the government's survival, which then forces them to act and move food.

I'm going to start this wine business.

And at that stage, he was reading the works of a philosopher called Amartya Sen.

And Amartya Sen said the best way to empower people is to give them choice.

So he went back to the colleagues and he said, OK, well, listen.

Let me give you the choice.