58 pages • 1 hour read
Amartya SenDevelopment As Freedom
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Sen opens with a parable in which a woman asks whom she should employ: the poorest person, the unhappiest person, or the one for whom the job would result in the greatest improvement in quality of life. These three options encapsulate how creating “different informational bases” (85)—or asking different questions—can lead to changes in policy actions. The choice of what to do with that knowledge depends on a person’s ethical stance. This chapter evaluates the ethical theories of utilitarianism, libertarianism, and Rawlsian theory of justice for development economics and how they depend on these informational bases.
Jeremy Bentham’s theory of utilitarianism defines utility as happiness or pleasure, which he asserts can be at least approximately measured. Utilitarianism focuses solely on results (consequentialism), judges solely on increased happiness (welfarism), and considers only total happiness for a population rather than individual effects (sum-ranking). Injustice denotes a decrease in aggregate happiness. Given the difficulties in measuring the intensity of happiness, some modern utilitarian thinkers focus on “choice-based accounting” instead of pleasure: That is, they say utility has increased if people can opt for a new good or opportunity and choose it over the previous status quo. The advantage of utilitarianism is that it forces people to focus on the resulting wellbeing of people. A strict insistence on property rights, for example, might harm the poor; a utilitarian calculus forces that their wellbeing is considered. The short-term harm should be balanced against the long-term good of the incentives to economic growth created by protecting property rights, but this argument for property rights is itself utilitarian.
However, utilitarianism poses problems because it ignores the idea of fundamental rights. Its accounting process has flaws. Its sum-ranking ignores inequalities in the distribution of goods, and its focus on choice ignores the way that social norms or other influences might warp individual decision-making. The poor might also become habituated to a lack of options, so deprivation does less harm to their potential pleasure; but it does not make their situation fair and does not adequately encompass the happiness they could obtain. Sen also questions whether people can measure utility from choice-based accounting, in part since two people having the same preference may have dramatically different levels of desire—or even survival requirements—for the same option. (For example, a person with a parasitic intestinal worm requires more food.) Society, climate, family, and other differences affect what a person needs for genuine quality of life.
In contrast to utilitarianism, libertarianism gives absolute precedence to protecting rights and liberties, regardless of social outcomes. John Rawls’s influential “priority of liberty” approach limits this consideration to a smaller set of rights (63), mainly consisting of personal liberties and civil rights, compared to the more extreme economic and social libertarianism of others like Robert Nozick. Since social and economic inequalities can literally kill, giving liberty absolute priority over actual results makes little sense to libertarianism’s critics. Sen believes it is sensible to give a set of key liberties (like Rawls’s set) equal weight to actual results. Safeguarding personal rights is key to preserving personal advantages or capabilities to make free choices, as discussed in the previous chapter. Rawls describes these rights alongside wealth and other opportunities that allow us to achieve our preferred ends as “primary goods.”
Sen argues that income, though easily measurable, fails to adequately describe poverty on its own. Rawlsian primary goods better capture people’s actual opportunities and limitations but are hard to measure. Instead, examining the actual quality of life achieved (in light of different societies’ expectations) offers the best measure of development—it is one that has been suggested by Aristotle and Adam Smith. Substantive freedoms (also termed capabilities) to choose one’s preferred life defines this quality. People’s use of their capabilities gives concrete, observable results or “functionings.” The ability to choose, as well as the results, are both important. Improvements in these functionings can mostly be analyzed mathematically as vectors; therefore, they can be compared more easily between different individuals than subjective pleasure can be. This analysis is not simple, and policymakers may rationally weigh the variety (or heterogeneity) of goods differently. Full mathematical analysis and ranking of values in this capabilities approach may, in practice, be too complex to implement. If that direct approach is impractical, then policymakers can still consider non-income capabilities (such as access to healthcare) informally as a supplementary approach. Some economists have alternatively used that information to create adjusted incomes to compare the capabilities of people at different wealth levels across societies, though the continued focus on income can be misleading.
Chapter 4 Summary
Poverty is best defined as the deprivation of capabilities, which are the freedoms to lead a life that a person values. Low income plays an enormous role in depriving a person of such a life, but it is not the sole culprit. Different conditions, like age, gender, illness, disability, social stigma, violence, crime rates, local cost of living, and environmental challenges, change what two people can achieve with the same income. Men and women, even in the same family, may benefit differently from the same household income due to expectations that women do more unpaid labor in the home, or a “boy preference” that gives food, education, or other resources to boys over girls. In Asia and North Africa, this has led to noticeably fewer women than men, a phenomenon called “missing women;” this is largely from lack of care for female children as well as decisions like sex-selective abortion.
In some societies, the stigma of being unemployed leads to well-documented psychological, social, and health issues, even if government assistance provides an equivalent income to what a person would earn in a job. In this way, European states with double-digit unemployment struggle with poverty even if generous income assistance alleviates immediate concerns related to housing or food. In the United States, Black men have superior incomes to most people in the developing world, but they frequently have worse mortality rates in addition to facing racial prejudice. So, true poverty—not just relative amounts of wealth—exists even in wealthy nations.
South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have the highest levels of extreme poverty; Sen, in cooperation with the economist Jean Drèze, has focused his own recent research on these regions. In 1991, these regions contained 46 of the world’s 52 countries that have a life expectancy of less than 60 years. Different countries and states within these regions vary dramatically in terms of life expectancy, undernourishment, and illiteracy. Indian regions, for example, tend to have better life expectancy than African regions, but they have worse problems with undernourishment. Many economists, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to modern thinkers like A. B. Atkinson, have been concerned about inequality, but this is often overshadowed by concerns such as efficiency. Part of the problem lies in thinking only of income inequality. A capabilities approach allows consideration of a more holistic sense of inequality and potential solutions.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
These chapters continue Sen’s argument concerning The Need for Holistic Measurements of Development. The last part of Chapter 4 reiterates some of the arguments from the first two chapters concerning the failure of GNP per capita to predict other key indicators of development and quality of life, such as literacy and life expectancy. The main thrust of these two chapters, however, is to argue for Sen’s capabilities approach, which he frames as a positive and more efficient approach to evaluating development.
Since Sen has rejected purely economic criteria for human wellbeing, he turns to his philosophy background to ask what constitutes a good life. While he acknowledges early thinkers such as Aristotle or the anonymous creators of the Indian Upanishads to establish the long-term desires that drive humanity, he primarily focuses on three modern philosophical traditions that are common among economists who consider ethics in development economics. Sen finds flaws in all three. He points out that utilitarianism ignores rights and inequalities, while libertarianism ignores actual consequences. Rawlsian liberalism, while milder than libertarianism, still gives too much precedence to justice over concrete outcomes, and it places too much emphasis on public institutions versus individual capabilities and functionings.
Since Sen writes this book for a general readership, he skips over technical discussions on how capabilities can be measured. Mathematical terminology relating to vectors and parameters hint at the kind of analysis he and his peers perform in their academic work, but here, Sen gives mostly the broad outlines of his holistic capabilities approach. His approach is pragmatic. While he values rights—especially Rawlsian liberty and primary goods—he spurns absolute principles. Instead, he urges public discussion—including people from different perspectives and featuring a broad informational base—as a way to make decisions.
In short, Sen’s capability approach focuses “directly on the substantive freedoms of the individuals involved” (85). It “identified a general approach that concentrates on the capabilities of people to do things—and the freedom to lead lives—that they have reason to value” (85). Liberties and rights have intrinsic value in protecting people’s freedoms to live the life they choose, and they are given equal weight to the substantive freedoms individuals have. “Substantive” means that this is not just a theoretical liberty but one that individuals can actually exercise. Kader Mia, the murdered worker from Sen’s introduction, in theory had the freedom to sell his labor wherever he wanted; however, practical circumstances—avoiding starvation, in his case—denied him choices and pushed him into taking work he knew to be dangerous. In Chapter 4, Sen says that the freedom to starve is not a true freedom; it is an unfreedom and the denial of capacities to the poor.
Sen’s capability approach significantly points out that it focuses on the freedoms of “individuals.” A system that gives freedom and happiness to the majority can still fail according to the capabilities approach if it denies the legal or substantive freedoms of the minority. The capability approach’s concern for both individuals and society considers individual civil rights as well as information about inequality. Chapter 4 gives concrete examples of the range of capabilities that ought to be considered in evaluating development, and it also focuses on the different balances that democratic governments strike. Sen does not argue that there is a perfect solution that fits every country; however, he does urge that public policy weigh this full breadth of experiences and consider information about how different groups find their substantive freedoms reduced, either intentionally or unintentionally.
