Daily Inspiration Quote by Amartya Sen

Sen’s phrasing is almost aggressively modest: “I also started work.” No trumpet, no manifesto. But tucked inside that calm clause is a pivot that helped rewire how the world talks about mass starvation. By pinning his timeline to the mid-1970s, he’s quietly pointing to a historical trigger: the Bangladesh famine of 1974 and the broader postcolonial reality where newly independent states were being judged, often brutally, by their ability to keep people alive. Sen steps into that moment not as a disaster chronicler, but as a theorist of responsibility.

“Causation and prevention” is the tell. He’s refusing the comforting story that famines are simply “natural” events - drought plus bad luck. The subtext is an indictment of political systems that treat hunger as a technical glitch rather than a democratic failure. Sen’s later “entitlement” approach, arguing that people starve not only when food is scarce but when they lose access to it through wages, prices, land rights, and state neglect, turns famine into something closer to a policy crime than an act of God.

The intent, then, is double-edged: to claim a research agenda and to normalize prevention as the standard, not the miracle. Prevention implies agency; agency implies culpability. In one understated sentence, Sen signals a moral shift: famine isn’t merely to be studied after bodies pile up, but to be designed out of society through institutions, accountability, and rights. That’s philosophy as public health, with political teeth.