What strikes me about Sen is that he is an economist who has a fine understanding of philosophical issues. He is rightly critical of many of the key presuppositions of welfare theory including the impossibility of making interpersonal comparisons of utility. We can't say a dollar spent on a starving person for food is of greater utility than that of a dollar spent by Bill Gates to light someone's cigar. While this is nonsense, many economists agree to it as part of their initiation into the club of welfare theorists. To be part of the club you must swallow a number of such pieces of nonsense. Welfare economists are faced with the necessity of "discounting" certain preferences such as those of pedophiles and mass murderers but it is not clear how they could ever consistently do this without making HORROR OF HORRORS, Value Judgments. Common sense must be left outside the field. Sen also points out many of the problems of trying to calculate group welfare in terms of individual preferences and the incompatibility of Paretian welfare principles with rights. Contrast this with the Coase's cluelessness on these issues and yet Coase received the prize-- partly for "THe PRoblem of Social COst" no doubt. Sen has my vote, independently of anything he may have written on development economics. He is amazingly prolific as well. Cheers, Ken Hanly
