PERSON
Amartya Sen
Indian economist and philosopher (b. 1933), Nobel laureate, whose capability approach provides the analytical foundation Coyle applies to AI-era wellbeing measurement — the framework that evaluates economies by what people are able to do and be rather than by what they produce or consume.
Amartya Sen's capability approach, developed across six decades of economic and philosophical scholarship, provides the analytical architecture for every attempt to measure wellbeing beyond GDP. Coyle's engagement with Sen runs through her entire career — from The Soulful Science through The Economics of Enough to The Measure of Progress. The capability framework asks a simple question: what can people actually do and be? Not what they own, not what they consume, not what they produce — but what options are substantively available to them. The question reframes economic measurement from a question about outputs to a question about freedoms.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Sen's insight, developed in Development as Freedom (1999) and earlier work, was that economic development should be evaluated not by what people produce or consume but by what they are able to do and be — their capabilities in the broadest sense. A