At 23, Amartya Sen finished the work for his PhD in one year and then set up an economics department An excerpt from the Nobel Laureate’s memoir, ‘Home in the World’. Amartya Sen receiving the Nobel Prize from Swedish King Carl Gustaf in 1998. | Peter Mueller / Reuters By June 1956, at the end of my first year as a research student, I had a set of chapters that looked as if they could form a dissertation. A substantial number of economists at various universities were work ing then on different ways of choosing between techniques of production. Some were particularly focused on maximising the total value of the output produced, whereas others wanted to maximise the surplus that was generated, and there were also some profit maximisers.