Collective Choice and Social Welfare

Amartya Sen's first great book, out of print for many years, now reissued in a fully revised and expanded second edition'Can the values which individual members of society attach to different alternatives be aggregated into values for society as a whole, in a way that is both fair and theoretically sound? Is the majority principle a workable rule for making decisions? How should income inequality be measured? When and how can we compare the distribution of welfare in different societies?' So reads the 1998 Nobel citation by the Swedish Academy, acknowledging Amartya Sen's important contributions in welfare economics and particularly his work in Collective Choice and Social Welfare.Originally published in 1970, this classic study has been recognized for its ground-breaking role in integrating economics and ethics, and for its influence in opening up new areas of research in social choice. This expanded edition preserves the text of the original while presenting eleven new chapters of fresh arguments and results. Both the new and original chapters alternate between non-mathematical treatments of Sen's subjects accessible to all, and mathematical arguments and proofs. A new introduction gives a far-reaching, up-to-date overview of the subject of social choice.

“With his masterly prose, ease of erudition and ironic humour, Sen is one of the few great world intellectuals on whom we may rely to make sense out of our existential confusion”

-- Nadime Gordimer
Amartya Sen occupies a unique position among modern economists. He is an outstanding economic theorist, a world authority on social choice and welfare economics. He is a leading figure in development economics, carrying out path-breaking work on appraising the effectiveness of investment in poor countries -- Anthony B. Atkinson New York Review of Books
The first edition in 1970 of this fine book was of immense importance and at the core of Amartya Sen's Nobel Prize. His contributions since, to our conceptions of rights, liberty, justice, identity, poverty, inequality and development, have been of still greater significance to our understanding of the fundamental challenges we face as individuals and societies in thinking about who we are and how we should act. The substantive and profound additions in this edition delve even deeper into the arguments of the original and relate them to the central questions and issues of his subsequent research and writing. Sen is one of the great minds of both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We owe him a huge debt -- Nicholas Stern

Amartya Sen is one of the world's leading public intellectuals. He is Professor of Economics and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1998 to 2004, and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998. His many celebrated books include Development as Freedom (1999), The Argumentative Indian (2005) and The Idea of Justice (2010). They have been translated into more than 30 languages. In 2020 he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.

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