Understanding the Concept of Failure of Entitlements

The question asks about the origin of the concept known as "failure of entitlements". This concept is fundamental in understanding the causes of famine and starvation, moving beyond simple notions of food shortage.

What is the Failure of Entitlements?

The concept of entitlement refers to the set of all possible commodity bundles that a person can acquire through legal means in a society. These legal means include:

• Owning land and producing food from it.
• Working and earning wages to buy food.
• Producing goods and selling them to buy food.
• Inheriting or receiving transfers (like state welfare or gifts).

A "failure of entitlements" occurs when a person's entitlements collapse, meaning they lose the ability to acquire enough food or other necessities, even if food is available in the market or the country as a whole has sufficient supply. This failure can happen due to various reasons:

• Loss of employment (no wages).
• Drop in the price of goods produced (cannot buy food).
• Loss of land or inability to farm (no production).
• Failure of state welfare or social support.
• Sudden increase in food prices relative to income.

The failure of entitlements highlights that starvation can result from people not having the economic means to access food, rather than just a total lack of food availability.

Identifying the Proponent of Failure of Entitlements

This significant concept, the "failure of entitlements", was introduced and extensively developed by a renowned economist who studied poverty, famine, and welfare economics.

Let's consider the options provided:

• Amartya Sen: Amartya Sen is a Nobel laureate economist known for his work on welfare economics, social choice theory, famine, development economics, and the capabilities approach. His research on famines, particularly his book "Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation" (1981), introduced and popularized the entitlement approach to explain the causes of starvation, arguing that famines occur not just because of a lack of food, but because people lose their entitlement to food.
• Emile Durkheim: Emile Durkheim was a foundational sociologist. His work focused on social integration, social facts, and the study of suicide, but not primarily on economic concepts like entitlements related to famine.
• Abhijit Banerjee: Abhijit Banerjee is a contemporary economist, also a Nobel laureate, known for his work on poverty alleviation using randomized controlled trials (RCTs). While his work relates to poverty, the specific concept of "failure of entitlements" is attributed to earlier work.
• Thomas Robert Malthus: Thomas Robert Malthus was an 18th/19th-century economist and demographer best known for his theories on population growth. The Malthusian theory of famine attributes starvation to population growing faster than food supply. Sen's entitlement approach offered an alternative explanation that challenged the Malthusian view.

Based on the significant contributions to the study of famines and the explicit development of the entitlement theory, the concept of "failure of entitlements" is definitively associated with Amartya Sen.

Conclusion

The concept of "failure of entitlements", crucial for understanding the economic causes of starvation and famine, was given by Amartya Sen.

Revision Table: Key Thinkers & Concepts

Additional Information on Amartya Sen's Entitlement Theory

Amartya Sen's work on entitlements provided a paradigm shift in how famines were analyzed. Before his work, it was often assumed that famines were simply a result of a sharp decline in food production or availability (the Food Availability Decline - FAD approach). Sen showed, using historical examples like the Bengal Famine of 1943, that famines could occur even when food was available in the region or country, but people lacked the economic power (entitlements) to access it.

His analysis emphasized the distribution of food rights and the economic processes that determine who can acquire food. This perspective highlighted the importance of economic policies, social safety nets, and political factors in preventing famines, in addition to agricultural production.