Amartya Sen won a Nobel Prize for his work in welfare economics. He also is a past winner of the National Humanities Medal, and he writes often for The New York Review of Books. In the current issue, Sen has a piece on the status of women in India, in which he wonders why the ratio of women to men is markedly higher in the southern and eastern parts of the country than it is in the west (see the map above).
I'm linking Sen's article here because the Glenn Fellows are beginning to refine their policy paper research projects, and it seems to me that Sen does an exemplary job of marshaling quantitative data to explore the relationship between his two variables, culture and sex-selective abortion. Sen says he doesn't know of "any convincing clear-cut answer" to the question that he poses, but one wonders if it has something to do with Muslim attitudes toward women. (There are many fewer Muslims in eastern and southern states, which are predominantly Hindu.) Yes, I know that it is politically incorrect to suggest such a thing.
The point is that quantitative data can be extremely useful in policy analysis, and one doesn't have to do anything fancy with the numbers to explore their meaning. Sen's article strikes me as in many ways a much more transparent, and therefore better, "specimen" of policy analysis than the one that appears in Bardach's Appendix A.
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