Tag: Amartya Sen

  • Dworkin on Sen

    Thomas Gregersen quotes Ronald Dworkin on Amartya Sen: It is not helpful, in the world of real politics, only to call for due consideration of a large variety of factors that everyone concedes relevant without also offering some overall scheme to suggest how these different factors should be weighted in a practical decision about a…

  • Inequality of What? Socioeconomic Status and Amartya Sen’s Entitlements Approach

    Responding to the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Socioeconomic Status, Peter Levine discusses some of the difficulties in measuring socioeconomic status: To take another example: you need wealth and family connections to be admitted to certain snobby clubs. But having wealth and family connections might hurt your chances of hanging out with the cool kids…

  • Interference, Coercion, Domination, & Powerlessness

    [What follows is some dissertation-writing that I think is accessible to my blog readers. I had begun to amend it for SPEP before I gave up on the dual-submission idea, but it was close enough to the blog format that I thought I’d keep going and see what happens. Though I acknowledge this is a…

  • The Problem with Too Much Cleverness

    According to Phil Agre’s “How to be a leader in your field,” the first step to disciplinary domination is to “Pick an issue.” This, it turns out, is so very hard that he devotes the majority of his paper to this important decision. One of many issue-spotting techniques is this: (m) Ask yourself, what is…