What I like about Amartya Sen, a fellow Bengali and this year's Nobel Prize winner for economics, is his conviction that information is the panacea for the world's ills. Many celebrities seek strategic alliances with journalists; Sen invests journalism with a political purpose, unfashionable in this age of media triumphalism and trivialization, and believes that the craft has significant social and economic responsibilities. Of course, this reflects his perception of his own work: whereas previous Nobel laureates were high priests of markets and monetarism, Sen has given economics a human face.

He is convinced that democracies, which famously do not go to war with each other, do not let their poor starve either. It follows that there can be no democracy without a free press. These factors, taken together, make famine impossible. Sen even ropes in Mao Zedong to support his thesis, claiming in a 1994 New Republic article that after the Great Leap Forward collapsed and perhaps 30 million people died, China's leader acknowledged "the informational role of democracy" and warned Communist Party cadres that "without democracy, you have no understanding of what is happening down below."

China, though ahead of India in socioeconomic development, was a closed society and thus unable to prevent the famine. "This could not have happened in a country that goes to the polls regularly and has an independent press," wrote Sen, blaming the absence of pressure from newspapers, which were controlled, or from opposition parties, which were non-existent. "The lack of a free system of news distribution even misled the government itself. It believed its own propaganda and the rosy reports of local party officials competing for credit in Beijing." China's profoundly misinformed rulers thought they had a food surplus of 100 million tons.

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