Follow the Authors

Amartya Kumar Sen

Amartya Sen

Rationality and Freedom Hardcover – January 1, 2002

by Amartya Sen (Author)

4.4 10 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Hardcover

"Please retry"

—

$37.25

—

Paperback

"Please retry"

$36.00

$10.07

Language

English
Publisher

Oxford University Press
Publication date

January 1, 2002
ISBN-10

0195665287
ISBN-13

978-0195665284
See all details

Amartya Sen
416
Hardcover
$35.49
Get it as soon as Tuesday, Oct 24
$12.69 shipping
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
Amartya Sen
626
Paperback
$19.00
$10.58 shipping
Amartya Sen
86
Paperback
$23.00
$11.83 shipping
Only 19 left in stock (more on the way).
Sen Amartya
62
Paperback
$22.46
$9.61 shipping
Only 5 left in stock (more on the way).
Daron Acemoglu
8,141
Paperback
$16.19
$10.83 shipping
Abhijit V. Banerjee
4,167
Paperback
$11.99
$10.23 shipping

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

10 global ratings

5 star
4 star
3 star 0% (0%)		0%
2 star
1 star

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

rdf

Reducing assumptions about rational choice

Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2005

Verified Purchase

I found this book refreshing and insightful, it shares Sen's thoughts on how to value freedom as an aspect of choice in and of itself: If I would choose x anyhow, how much does it matter that I also am offered y & z as options.

Additionally he discusses plausible scenarios in which a selection is dependent upon the menu of choices offered e.g., given options of {x,y} I choose x, given options of {x,y,a,b} I choose y.

That said this book is a compendium of papers with the attendant repetition and overlap. The introduction is the best part.

20 people found this helpful

Helpful

gabe

Wonderful Book

Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2011

Verified Purchase

Sen presents a compelling position on the use of rationality in economics and how it intersects with freedom. Both an accessible yet thought-provoking piece of work. Its foundations in the econmics literature makes it authoritative, while the introduction and use of philosophy makes it compelling. Overall a great read!

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Antonio Gargano

Real Philosophy or Social choice?!?!

Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2005

Yes it's true. The book of Sen it`s too much focused on the "theory of social choice" and it never makes an analysis of freedom and rationality by a pure philosophical point of view, but always by the point of view of the "social choice".

And it's also true that this kind of analysis is often related to the impossibility theorem of Arrow, as all the social choice theory could be reducted to that theorem

I think the title of the book does not say the essence of it, People philosophically intrested in these two concepts should read something else...

14 people found this helpful

Helpful

Pankaj Saxena

Designed to Confuse

Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2009

Like every other book of Amartya Sen, this book is designed to confuse. Sen professes himself to be speaking for the poor and the downtrodden, but his books are rarely decipherable even for the University educated students, let alone the layman.

A standard feature of every of Amartya Sen's book is that the entire book is a totally unnecessary expansion of the Introduction. Whatever little Sen had to say in this tome of more than seven hundred pages, he had said in Introduction. Still he put the reader under the extreme torture of plying through this unreadable book.

Without ever acknowledging the unique talents of Indian people he goes on to compare them to Western society and tells us that how are they not 'free', that they are incapable to take a decision for themselves. After plying through hundreds of meaningless phrases, unnecessary adjectives and torturous circumlocutions the reader is left exasperated at last, when he finds nothing meaningful related to either Economics or Society in Sen's book.

There are some writers like Richard Pipes and Bernard Lewis who say tomes in a few pages. There are economists like Steven Levitt who make special subjects accessible to the layman. There are writers like V S Naipaul who explain chapters in just one single incisive line.

But then... there are writers who take the base of nothing, mix it with honey and pepper of meaningless phrases and unnecessary adjectives and expand it into many hundreds of pages. Amartya Sen is one of those writers.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Andy Blunden

Never have so many words been written about so little

Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2004

I read through the 700 pages of this book, including the mathematics, hoping at some point that the Nobel Prize-winning Sen would have something to say about Rationality and Freedom. Alas! I was disappointed. About 500 pages are devoted to an almost entirely vacuous "social choice theory" and in particular Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. I was thinking maybe that Sen was doing a "reductio ad absurdum" and at the end, he would offer an alternative approach. Unfortunately not. The salaries of the thousands of academics who are paid to do this stuff should be collected and distributed to poor people in developing countries. A far better use of the money.

25 people found this helpful

Helpful

Image Unavailable

Follow the Authors

Rationality and Freedom Hardcover – January 1, 2002

Similar items that may deliver to you quickly

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Sorry, there was a problem.

Follow the Authors

Rationality and Freedom Hardcover – January 1, 2002

Similar items that may deliver to you quickly

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.