Prominent development economist Amartya Sen (formerly of Cambridge, now at Harvard) attended President Obama´s state dinner in honor of Manmohan Singh, with third wife, Emma Rothschild (of the banking family of the Rothschilds).

Sen is best known for offering a Human Development index as a counterpoint to the World Bank´s GDP calculations. Once considered fluffy, the index is now increasingly influential. Here´s a  profile of Sen in 2001 from the socialist UK paper Guardian :

“Richard Jolly, while being an enormous admirer, says: “On the issue of liberalisation and the opening up of economies, Amartya has been rather mainstream. He hasn’t raised very deep questions about the whole process and of globalisation in general….

.…TN Srinavasan, economics professor at Yale and a long-time colleague, says: “Many of us were trained in the 50s to believe that states should be active in planning the economy. Sen did not give up that idea until later than some others. He still hasn’t added his voice to the call for more privatisation of the Indian economy and the removal of the old Gandhian protection of small-scale producers.”

…He [Sen] supports the “themes” raised by anti-capitalist and environmental protesters at Seattle, Prague and Davos, but not their “theses”, which he finds too simple. He says the problem is not free trade, but the inequality of global power. He strongly welcomes the rise of the NGO movement, which combines with media coverage to produce the beginning of some “countervailing power” to the larger corporations and the traditional policies of first world governments.

But he also attaches blame to many third-world governments for not undertaking domestic reform. He argues that the United Nations has to be saved from insolvency and given a greater leadership role [my emphasis] which escapes from the asymmetry caused by the veto power of the five richest and/or largest countries. “There needs to be a watchdog institution which is concerned with inequality and fair trade, asks why the USA and Europe are so restrictive to products from the third world, and raises questions about the pricing policy of the drug companies,” he says.

For the past 10 years, Sen has been married to the economic historian, Emma Rothschild, an expert on Adam Smith and Fellow of King’s…”

Rothschild, for her part, looks for a new deal that will go beyond cap-and-trade and transform the automotive industry, the urban landscape, and public transportation,according to this piece in the New York Review of
Books:

“A new deal in which the bailout of the automobile industry was one component of a program of investment in the transformation of the auto-industrial society would connect economic, environmental, and energy policies. It would be a commitment to current as well as capital expenditures; to a Transportation Security Agency, for example, composed not only of people who search passengers in airports but of people who drive electric buses in inner cities. Like the “Economic Security” programs of the New Deal of the 1930s, a new New Deal would be an effort to change the distant future of the United States—in this case the future use of space—by government expenditure and more open regulation.^[31]