Marginal Revolution
Subscribe

*Home in the World: A Memoir*

TC

Marginal Revolution

31 Jul 2021

That is the new Amartya Sen autobiography, and it is well…a biography. You learn that he loves Sichuan duck and “hilsha fish” (if done properly with the mustard), his thoughts of enduring military service, Sen’s study of Sanskrit, his self-description as a hypochondriac, his bout with mouth cancer at a young age, and that Calcutta (!) is a great walking city, at least when Sen lived there in the 1950s, among other matters. The readers definitely gets his or her “biography money’s worth.

”But should you care?

The name “Tagore” appears so many times in the text that it takes up 3/4 of a page in the index. This is very much a Bengali memoir.

I learned that Sen’s family lived for a few years with him in Burma, he is sympathetic to Buddhism, he was ten at the time of the Great Famine and it had a major impact on his thinking, and that Sen was greatly influenced by Maurice Dobb and thought Marx was unjustly excluded from the economics curriculum. Piero Sraffa was his Director of Studies at Cambridge, and introduced Sen to the wonders of ristretto. Sen also stresses the import of Sraffa for converting the early Wittgenstein into the later Wittgenstein. He has great praise for P.T. Bauer, both as a thinker and as an instructor. He describes Buchanan as a “…very agreeable but rather conservative economist” who got him thinking about whether the notion of collective preference made sense at all.

This doesn’t have enough coherence to be a great book, but there is enough in here of interest to satisfy anyone curious about Sen.

You can pre-order here, I got my copy from the UK.

Subscribe for free to Marginal Revolution
By subscribing, you agree to share your email address with Marginal Revolution to receive their original content, including promotions. Unsubscribe at any time. Meta will also use your information subject to the Bulletin Terms and Policies

More from Marginal Revolution
See all

And yet more assorted links

TC
26 May

How polarized are Americans?

TC
25 May

Did the NYT get Haiti right?

TC
25 May
Comments
Subscribe with Facebook to comment

0 comments

Share quoteSelect how you’d like to share below
Share on Facebook
Share to Twitter
Send in WhatsApp
Share on LinkedIn
Privacy  ·  Terms  ·  Cookies
© Meta 2022
Discover fresh voices. Tune into new conversations. Browse all publications