Given what can be achieved through intelligent and humane intervention, it is amazing how inactive and smug most societies are about the prevalence o… - Amartya Sen

Even though in the approach presented here principles of justice will not be defined in terms of institutions, but rather in terms of the lives and freedoms of the people involved, institutions cannot but play a significant instrumental role in the pursuit of justice.

I saw the first signs of famine in April 1943 - the so called "Great Bengal Famine" which would kill between 2 to 3 million people. Food prices had started rising quite sharply during 1942, the year before the famine. (pg. 114)

The position of welfare economics in modern economic theory has been a rather precarious one. In classical political economy there were no sharp boundaries drawn between welfare economic analysis and other types of economic investigation. But as the suspicion of the use of ethics in economics has grown, welfare economics has appeared to be increasingly dubious, It has been put into an arbitrarily narrow box, separated from the rest of economics.