Events & Calendars Amartya Sen: "Globalism and Its Discontents: Point/Counterpoint with Ilan Stavans"

Join us as Professor Stavans speaks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen.

The "Globalism and Its Discontents: Point/Counterpoint" conversation series features Amherst College professor, and host of NEPR's In Contrast, Ilan Stavans and a guest engaging in thoughtful discussion and attempting to bridge the ideological divide growing in our nation.

The rise of populism worldwide today, personified by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, is a fierce reaction to globalism policies of the past few decades. Anti-immigration movements in Europe and the United States; assaults on free speech; racial profiling; polarized politics; intolerance for gender, economic and linguistic diversity; the building of walls and the renegotiation of international trade treaties; the tension between rural and urban communities; and the questioning of the basic tenets of pluralism are some of the symptoms. Democracy itself might be at peril.

Amartya Sen (born Nov. 3, 1933, in Santiniketan, India) is an economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members. Sen is best known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food.

Sen was educated at Presidency College in Calcutta (now Kolkata). He went on to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received a B.A. (1955), an M.A. (1959) and a Ph.D. (1959). He taught economics at a number of universities in India and England, including the Universities of Jadavpur (1956–58) and Delhi (1963–71), the London School of Economics, the University of London (1971–77) and the University of Oxford (1977–88), before moving to Harvard University (1988–98), where he was professor of economics and philosophy. In 1998 he was appointed master of Trinity College, Cambridge—a position he held until 2004, when he returned to Harvard as Lamont University Professor.

This event is free and open to the public.

"Point/Counterpoint" is co-sponsored by NEPR’s In Contrast and by a generous gift from 36 members of the 50th Reunion Class of 1970.

Find more information about the other speakers in the series here.

Interviews with previous guests, and others, are available through Ilan Stavans' NEPR show In Contrast. Have a listen!