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Poverty and Famines
Sen's 1981 empirical demolition of the Malthusian view of famine — the book that established that <em>famines typically occur amid adequate food supply</em>, caused by entitlement failure rather than scarcity.
Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation is Amartya Sen's 1981 book that transformed the study of famines. Drawing on meticulous empirical analysis of the Bengal famine of 1943, the Ethiopian famine of 1973, the Sahel famines, and the Bangladesh famine of 1974, Sen demonstrated that famines typically occur not when food supply collapses but when the institutional mechanisms — entitlements — that determine who has access to available food fail. The book shifted the analytical frame of famine studies from agricultural economics to institutional economics, and its entitlement framework has since been applied to capability deprivation beyond food.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's central empirical finding was that Bengal in 1943 had approximately the same food supply as in non-famine years. Food supply per capita was not significantly lower. What had changed was the entitlement structure — the economic and institutional mechanisms by which specific categories of people accessed food. Wartime inflation destroyed the purchasing power of rural laborers.
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