By Hope Green

With the world in the midst of an economic boom, it might be easy to forget that 13 million people a year die of hunger, and millions more lack the right to an education, adequate health care, or a voice in their government.

"Despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence," Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen observes in his 1999 book Development as Freedom, "the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers -- perhaps even the majority -- of people."

Amartya Sen

Sen goes on to advocate a new definition of the word development, which implies not just the creation of wealth, but an increase in the quality of life and in individual opportunities.

Similarly, on April 13 Sen will offer a new framework for describing equality, when he delivers a lecture at BU entitled Freedom v. Equality: Really? His theory refutes the claim of many conservative and libertarian writers, particularly the earlier Nobel Laureate Friederich von Hayek, that efforts to secure equality inevitably erode liberty, as has occurred in many socialist countries.

"I will argue that rather than there being a conflict between equality and freedom," he says, "you need to judge equality in terms of freedom -- economic, social, political, and cultural. So freedom and equality are very complementary, rather than conflicting, ideas."

Sen and Columbia University economist Charles Tilly, scheduled to speak on April 6, are the final guests in this year's John Templeton Lectures on Freedom, Markets, and Economic Justice, presented by BU's Institute on Race and Social Division (IRSD).

An Indian citizen, Sen is a professor emeritus of economics and philosophy at Harvard University and master of Trinity College, Cambridge University. He is also honorary president of Oxfam International, the human rights and anitipoverty organization.

Presenting him with the 1998 Nobel prize for economic science, the prize committee observed that Sen had "restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of economic problems" and "opened up new fields of study for subsequent generations of researchers."

Charles Tilly

Tilly is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia, where he teaches both sociology and political science. An internationally recognized authority on European political change since 1500, he has authored or coauthored more than 20 books, the most recent of which is Durable Inequality.

In his lecture, Past and Future Inequalities, Tilly draws on lessons of the past to predict the causes of inequality in the year 2050, paying close attention to hierarchies of power that divide along the lines of race, gender, and other social distinctions.

Leaders of developing countries would do well to study the work of Tilly and Sen, says Glenn Loury, IRSD director and CAS professor of economics. "Fifty years ago," he says, "it would have been possible for a progressive-minded person to argue that socialism could be an alternative to capitalism as a means of ordering society. I think that's a less credible claim now, given the experience of the last half-century, particularly in light of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the practical defeat of the idea of a perfectly equal society. We know that idea is a sham.

"But if you look at the developing countries of Asia and Africa, they are having to make important choices in terms of shaping their institutions and their people. The ideal of equality is going to have practical importance in these societies only if they are able to conceive of other arrangements than the old communist model. I think the work of professors Tilly and Sen will have some value in thinking about what those arrangements might be."

Charles Tilly presents his Templeton Lecture at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 6, at the School of Management. Amartya Sen will speak at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 13, in the School of Law auditorium. Both lectures are free and open to the public.