Economist

The Amartya Sen Framework

Capabilities & Development as Freedom

IncludedNative Claude Skill + plain .md for ChatGPT, Gemini & every LLM
4.9 rating·1894 downloads

Amartya Sen represents one of the most distinctive thinking patterns in their field. Amartya Sen's approach — captured in this framework as mental models, decision heuristics, and the signature questions they would ask. The capabilities & development as freedom framework distils Amartya Sen's documented approach into a .md skill file you can load into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM in seconds. Where most AI personas generate generic output, this framework is grounded in real documented work: interviews, writing, published frameworks, and the specific decisions Amartya Sen made when it mattered. Use it for decision-making, writing, strategy, or any situation where you want your AI to think with Amartya Sen's distinctive patterns rather than a default model voice.

Inside the framework

A glimpse of Amartya Sen's thinking.

Core Philosophy

Development is not the accumulation of wealth or the growth of GDP — it is the expansion of substantive freedoms: the real ability of people to live lives they have reason to value. Poverty is not merely low income; it is capability deprivation — the removal of a person's power to be educated, healthy, politically heard, or socially dignified. Justice cannot be evaluated by examining institutional arrangements alone; it must be assessed by looking at the actual lives people are able to lead, and the comparative injustices that persist within any given system.

Five Mental Models
  1. 01
  2. 02
  3. 03
  4. 04
  5. 05

Five specific models, each named and explained with concrete examples — unlocked with purchase.

A Signature Question · sample

"What are people in this situation actually *able* to do and to be — not what do they have, but what real freedoms do they possess?"

4 more questions in Amartya Sen's voice are unlocked with purchase.

What Amartya Sen Would NOT Do · sample
**Would not treat economic growth as a proxy for development.** Sen spent decades demonstrating that high-growth economies (e.g., parts of 1980s South Asia) could simultaneously produce mass illiteracy, high infant mortality, and gender exclusion. Citing GDP improvement as evidence that people's lives are improving, without examining capability distribution, is a category error he explicitly and repeatedly refuted.

Full list of anti-patterns unlocked with purchase.

Continue reading

The full framework adds: detailed explanations of all five mental models with real-world examples, the decision heuristics Amartya Sen actually used, remaining signature questions, the complete list of anti-patterns, a copy-paste activation prompt, and a worked example.

Unlocked the moment you purchase. ~2,000 words total. Delivered as a Claude Skill and plain .md within 60 seconds of checkout.

What's inside
  • Core philosophy — 2–3 sentences grounded in Amartya Sen's documented worldview
  • Five signature mental models — each named, with concrete examples from their work
  • Decision heuristics — the concrete rules they actually used
  • Signature questions — five questions that sound like Amartya Sen, not a generic MBA
  • What they would NOT do — the anti-patterns this framework rejects
  • Copy-paste activation prompt — drop straight into Claude or ChatGPT
  • Worked example — the framework applied to a realistic scenario
Delivered in two formats
  • amartya-sen.zip — a native Claude Skill. Upload to Settings → Skills in Claude, or unzip to ~/.claude/skills/
  • amartya-sen-framework.md — plain markdown. Works in ChatGPT Custom GPTs, Gemini, Claude Projects, agent system prompts — anywhere
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Works as a Claude Skill (.zip) and as a plain .md for ChatGPT, Gemini & every LLM
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Inspired by the documented thinking of Amartya Sen. A mental-model toolkit, not a literal representation. Delivered as a .md file compatible with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and any LLM.

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