Edward Luce’s exceptional interview with Amartya Sen (“Citizen of everywhere”, Life & Arts, FT Weekend, July 3) leaves the reader begging for more. I was fortunate to attend Professor Sen’s lectures at the London School of Economics when he discussed poverty and famines — at a time when he was already a legend for students of development economics, but long before he was awarded the Nobel Prize. The simplicity and elegance of his arguments were powerful. But his career is also a lesson in how slow the world can be to accept new ideas. I recall Sen sharing an anecdote about the BBC — which was scheduled to interview him about how governments might respond to a famine — and he said they could do worse than drop helicopter-loads of money on affected areas. The BBC worried that such a policy would cause hyperinflation and, ultimately, never ran the interview! I am left wondering if the current generation of central bankers have drawn on insights by development economists, particularly as they employ “helicopter money” in the face of exogenous economic shocks, and whether this gives them greater confidence in the likelihood that inflation will be transitory. I would also have loved to learn what Sen feels about the tendency of so many to revel in ideas of building walls rather than breaking down barriers and, in particular, what he thinks about Brexit and how it may have impacted not just the UK’s development, but also Europe’s development. Rajiv Dadlani San Francisco, CA, US