The Amartya Sen
Framework
Capabilities & Development as Freedom
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.
A glimpse of Amartya Sen's thinking.
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.
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Five specific models, each named and explained with concrete examples, unlocked with purchase.
"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.
Full list of anti-patterns unlocked with purchase.
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.
- ✦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
- →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
What it does with a real question.
A founder is deciding whether to take a large but difficult client.
Take the client only if the contract is built to protect what the company can do. The revenue figure is the least informative part of this decision. What matters is what the deal converts into for the people inside your company, and for the founder's own ability to steer.
A large, difficult client is a commodity, and its value depends on what your team can actually do with it. If this account demands unpredictable hours, scope creep, and rapid responses, the cash it brings may convert into very little: burnout for your best people, delayed work for smaller customers, and a founder whose days belong to one buyer. Those costs fall unevenly. The senior engineer who absorbs the midnight requests loses real freedom, while the founder who signs the contract mostly gains it. So ask who will carry the difficulty, and whether they have any say in accepting it.
My position is that the deal is justified only if the difficulty is bounded. Compare it against the realistic alternative of two or three mid-sized clients, not against some perfect customer who does not exist. If the big account would exceed roughly a third of revenue, you are trading resilience for size, and a single renewal conversation then holds your payroll hostage.
Next move: before answering the client, sit down with the two or three people who would serve them and ask what terms would make this workable. Then negotiate those into the contract: defined scope, a change-order process, and response-time limits.
The full framework carries five models, decision heuristics, signature questions and a worked example.
Written by claude-sonnet-5-5 with this framework loaded, 2026-10-11. Checked automatically for length and for copied framework text.
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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.