Capability Famine

The Bengal famine of 1943 killed between two and three million people despite the fact that Bengal's food supply in that year was not significantly lower than in previous, non-famine years. Amartya Sen's analysis demonstrated that people starved surrounded by food—not because the resource was absent, but because the entitlement structures that should have translated the food's existence into access had collapsed: wartime inflation had destroyed purchasing power, speculative hoarding had removed rice from the market, and the colonial government had prioritized military logistics over civilian distribution. Capability famine extends this analytical structure from food to cognitive capability. AI capability in 2026 is not scarce. Frontier models are available through subscription. The knowledge embedded in these systems represents a concentration of cognitive capability without historical precedent. But access is not entitlement, and entitlement is not capability. The conversion factors that translate AI access into expanded substantive freedom—reliable infrastructure, educational