Lamont and Harvard

Some years ago, when Amartya Sen, then Lamont University Professor at Harvard University, was on a lecture tour abroad, a journalistic write-up listing his many achievements noted that he taught at two famous American universities, Lamont and Harvard. It must have seemed a shocking mistake to all those who knew Amartya Sen or Harvard University (I cannot tell what it seemed to those who knew Lamont University). But over the last few months, ever since won the Nobel Prize in economics, reading the popular press prodigiously interpreting Sen's work and why he won the Nobel Prize makes one realize that errors of this kind, while disturbing, are the least of it. The more significant mistakes are the ones made in interpreting his work.

One source of many such mistakes is Sen himself. He has comfortably straddled two worlds, that of academic, technical economics; and that of policy and pamphleteering. Since the laity and ordinary journalist have some familiarity with the latter, it has been easy for them to jump to the conclusion that it is for the latter that Sen won the Nobel Prize. A mistake of this kind could not have occurred, for instance, with Gerard Debreu, also a Nobel laureate, because journalists would not understand any of his papers.