In reply to the critiques of Professor Hillinger and Lapham on Amartya Sen's original article.

Two distinct but interrelated issues are investigated here. The first concerns Sraffa's critical role in contemporary philosophy through his pivotal influence on Wittgenstein. The intellectual origins of this profound influence can be traced to the philosophical interests of the activist political circle in Italy (clustered around the journal L'Ordine Nuovo) to which both Sraffa and Antonio Gramsci belonged. The second inquiry concerns the influence of Sraffa's philosophical views on his economics. Sraffa's economic contributions can be much better understood by paying attention to the way Sraffa changed the nature of the questions asked, rather than seeking different answers to already established questions.

IN PRESENTING his estimates of la richesse territoriale de France, Antoine Lavoisier [100, 1791] pointed out that the object of such estimation is to furnish a veritable thermometer of national prosperity.' That certainly has provided the motivation behind much work on national income estimation and comparison. Lavoisier was an optimist, and he felt that there need be little room for dispute if the problem were correctly posed and pursued:

Journal Article Real National Income Get access Amartya Sen Amartya Sen London School of Economics Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 43, Issue 1, February 1976, Pages 19–39, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296597 Published: 01 February 1976 Article history Received: 01 October 1974 Accepted: 01 May 1975 Published: 01 February 1976

Famines often take place in situations of moderate to good food availability, without any significant decline of food supply per head. The paper presents an alternative approach to famines, which does not concentrate on availability, but on people's ability to command food through legal means available in the society (including the use of production possibilities, trade opportunities, entitlements vis-à-vis the state, etc.). The approach is explained, focusing on exchange entitlement mappings, fluctuations in which can lead to big shifts in the intergroup distribution of food command. The approach is then applied to the Bengal famine of 1943, the Ethiopian famine in Wollo in 1973, and the Bangladesh famine in 1974, and some general conclusions are drawn about the nature and classes of famines.

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