Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 "Do we get enough of a diagnosis of individual in poverty by comparing the individual's income with a socially given poverty-line income? What about the person with an income well above the poverty line who suffers from an expensive illness (requiring, say, kidney dialysis)? Is deprivation not ultimately a lack of opportunity to lead a minimally acceptable life, which can be influenced by a number of considerations, including of course personal income, but also physical and environmental characteristics and other variables...?" That is from Amartya Sen's New Introduction (2017) to the expanded edition of his classic COLLECTIVE CHOICE AND SOCIAL WELFARE. The original edition of this work is dated 1970.  The point Sen is making in that quote is in a sense a trivial one. OF COURSE, you might want to say, the mere numerical fact of an income level, contrasted with some arbitrary poverty-line number does not give us a full picture of the condition of any particular "...

Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat.   -- Amartya Sen. Starvation is a problem, then, not of  inevitable scarcities, or earthly infertility, but of defective social and political arrangements.  Sen was born in Bengal (northeastern India and the country now known as Bengla-desh was all once "Bengal") in November 1933.  Of course this means that he was born a subject of King Edward VIII, about a month before that King would abdicate in order to be free to marry Wallis Simpson. It also means that Sen was old enough to have a general sense of what was going on when the Japanese troops were at his country's door, knocking, in 1942-44.  So if we understand anything about the horrific Bengali famine of 1943, we know that he knows of what he speaks when he writes of starvation.   The Bengali famine came about because Bengal had been importing most...