IHEU's Highest Honor

The International Humanist Award 2002

Awarded to Nobel Laureate Professor
Amartya Sen

 

Award Presentation Speech Given by Roy Brown, IHEU Vice President

I am honoured to have been asked to announce the winner of the International Humanist Award for 2002.

If we look back at the last 50 years - the post-colonial era - we see many brave attempts to lift the poorest nations out of their poverty. Over a trillion dollars have been spent by the rich countries of the north on assistance to the developing world. Massive investment has been made in infrastructure - in dams, roads, railways, power plants, coal mines - in an attempt to lift the economies of the poorest countries. The underlying belief was that what these countries needed was capital investment. Almost all of the foreign aid provided by the west has been used for capital investment of one kind or another. A large part of this has unfortunately been spent on military equipment. The life styles of a small minority - the ruling classes - have been considerably enhanced. Very little of the investment has filtered down to improving the lives of ordinary people. And when the developing countries ran into difficulties servicing their burden of debt it was the social programs that were cut back first in so-called Structural Adjustment Programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund. Today there are more people - over 1 ½ billion people - living in absolute poverty than ever before in history. Clearly something has gone terribly wrong. Amartya Sen, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics, is one of those rare individuals who have changed the way we view the world. He asked a simple question "What is the purpose of development?" His answer is that the real purpose of development is to enhance individual freedom: to increase the choices available to ordinary people.

One of the problems has been the way we measure development. Everyone is familiar with the idea of GNP (Gross National Product) as a measure of a nation's economic strength. The problem is that this figure hides a multitude of sins not the least of which is inequality. A great friend of Amartya Sen, the late Mabub ul Haq of the United Nations Development Program proposed a new way of measuring development: the Human Development Index. This index takes account not just of a nation's wealth but also of average life expectancy (which is obviously heavily influenced by infant mortality), education levels, and gender equity. This index is now published yearly in the Human Development Report prepared by the UNDP. It is instructive to compare the GDP and HDI rankings for many countries. Saudi Arabia, for example has a far higher GDP than say Sri Lanka but ranks far lower in terms of human development. This measure can also be applied to regions and sectors of society with some astonishing results. The people of Kerala for example, one of the poorest states in India, have a higher HDI than black Americans living in the richest nation on earth. In his now classic book "Development as Freedom" Sen argues not simply for investment in human development, but in particular for investment in the health and education of women and girls. But for me, one of his real insights is that we must stop thinking of women as the objects of development but as the agents of change themselves. In parallel with investment in people we must promote greater democratic freedom and improve the oppressive social structures that maintain and reinforce inequality. The wealth of nations is not all that matters - its distribution is crucially important. And one of the greatest influences on equality of distribution is democracy.

Among Professor Sen's other wide-ranging interests is the question of identity. An Indian by birth he now lives in England. He tells a story of arriving at Heathrow Airport and presenting his form to the immigration official. On the form he had given his address as The Master's Lodging, Trinity College, Cambridge. The official asked him whether he was a friend of the Master of Trinity. He thought so long about his answer that the official became suspicious. We all have numerous identities: we have a nationality, we are members of a belief community, we are members of a family, we have a trade, skill or profession, we share a particular political persuasion, we are male or female, we share a number of physical characteristics with other people. These classifications may unite us but can divide us from others. Social pressures can lead us to conform to the norms of the group - for good or evil - and can equally persuade us that the members of another group are the enemy. Amartya Sen has shown that the one identity that we all share is our common humanity.

It is with great pleasure that I announce the winner of the International Humanist Award for 2002: Professor Amartya Sen.

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