Development As Freedom

Sen tells a story from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, an ancient Indian scripture, in which a woman sadly concludes that having all the wealth in the world would not help her achieve the immortality she desires. In the Western tradition, Aristotle also taught that wealth is not a good in itself but rather a means to achieve something else. Wealth is a convenient tool that enables us to achieve goods such as longer life, freedom from hunger, and opportunities to act as we desire. However, these goods also depend on other influences on our lives that wealth cannot control. Furthermore, the amount of money needed to obtain goods will also vary according to society and circumstance. Therefore, measuring income—while important—does not truly measure how successfully a society gives its members an opportunity for a good life.

“Unfreedoms”—situations that deprive a person of a freedom—take many forms, including poverty, famine, lack of healthcare, gender inequality, and infringements on civil rights. While the “Lee thesis” argues that a harsh political system can lead to economic gains, the evidence for it is weak. Democratic leaders have to respond to public unhappiness with a poor economy while autocrats are insulated from this. Furthermore, political liberty is an important goal in itself. Freedom and unfreedom consist of both “processes” and “opportunities.” “Processes” refer to the systems and laws in place, such as having or not having voting rights. “Opportunities” refer to the actual ability people have to make choices in their particular circumstances or to avoid threats to their freedoms, including freedom from want. For instance, the lack of adequate healthcare in a region would be an unfreedom, based on lack of opportunity. Both processes and opportunities are important, but there must be an actual opportunity to exercise freedom for it to count as substantial or concrete.

Freedom, in this analysis, specifically means the freedom of individual people. Enhancing their “capabilities” (having free agency and opportunity to pursue what they value as goods) is both the goal of development and a key means of obtaining it. It is a two-way relationship. Top-down models of development—in which the government or an agency delivers goods and services to a passive population—misunderstand the purpose of development and fail to unlock the creative potential of people’s own agency. This is an issue of effectiveness.

Freedom also should be the evaluative measure of success, as Sen will analyze in detail in Chapter 3. Other common evaluative schemes fall short. Economic focus on income, utilitarian concern with mental satisfaction, and libertarian concern with the processes of freedom without attention to results all identify important aspects of successful development, but they miss the overarching goal of full freedom. Freedom also includes the ability to freely enter into contracts or sell one’s labor in the market—and this is a good in itself, even if the evidence is not strongly in favor of the economic outcomes of free markets. Even Karl Marx thought the transition from enslavement to free market labor at the end of the American Civil War was a good thing.

The mortality rates of African Americans in the United States (especially males) illustrate the problem of how to evaluate development. While their income is higher than that of comparable populations in China or Indian states like Kerala, they die younger on average than their Chinese or Indian counterparts. Clearly, measuring development based solely on income misses key aspects of their experience and the basic freedom of not dying prematurely. In contrast, the focus on freedom offers a comprehensive picture similar to the concern for “quality of life” or a “good life” that has deep roots in the history of social and economic thought. Freedom-based thinking also offers a solution to debates about whether economic development harms a people by disrupting their cultural traditions. The criterion of freedoms suggests that preserving those traditions can be a legitimate goal if, and only if, the people in that society as a whole (and not just the cultural or social elites) freely choose to value those traditions. If those traditions intrinsically deny a group of people the right to make choices (such as women in Taliban Afghanistan), then a freedom-based perspective will question those old norms. Debates on what constitutes true freedom will certainly occur, but that is a far healthier process than bracketing these fundamental questions in favor of mere GNP.

Some development theorists argue for a tough, austere approach; they view things like democracy or social safety nets for the very poor as distractions from what is key to growth or as luxuries to come later. However, Sen’s theory of freedom as being both the primary goal and means of development falls on the other side of the spectrum of opinions. While Chapter 1 focused primarily on freedom as an intrinsic good, this chapter details how it is also an effective instrument for positive development.

These instrumental freedoms can be grouped into five interlocking categories. First, political freedoms include the ability to choose political leaders, influence government policies, exercise free speech (including criticizing the authorities), and other civil rights. Second, economic facilities refer to the opportunities people have to access economic resources (food, money, etc.) for consumption, production, and exchange, including access to financial credit. If a nation’s economy is booming but a substantial minority is excluded, then economic unfreedom is still a problem. Third, social opportunities encompass opportunities that directly affect quality of life, primarily via healthcare and education. Fourth, transparency guarantees (disclosures, identity verification, and similar policies) enable trust in social and economic interactions while preventing corruption and fraud. Finally, people require protective security, which means a social safety net that guarantees food and financial resources to those who find themselves destitute.

Sen says that all these areas of freedom are interconnected, and the idea that only economic facilities matter is a myth. For example, Japan, China, and other East Asian countries had robust systems of education and public health before engaging in industrialization that alleviated economic poverty with impressive speed. In contrast, India lacked those social investments, and its attempts to modernize at the same time as China was noticeably slower. India, however, has democracy. Since independence in 1947, it has avoided major famines, while Communist China endured the most devastating famine in history as a direct result of the “Great Leap Forward” policies imposed by Mao Zedong. A sample of modern countries, from Sri Lanka to Brazil, demonstrates that countries can have success in increasing life expectancy with little success in growing GNP per capita, and vice versa.

GNP and social outcomes are linked, but one does not automatically follow the other. One recent study suggests that increased GNP only significantly increases longevity if it includes improved income for the poor and leads to increased public health spending. Sen advocates for a “support-led” process with early investments in healthcare and education, rather than assuming they will automatically appear later as “growth-mediated” theories assert. It is possible to find resources for education and healthcare improvements in poorer countries because the initial costs for those improvements are primarily labor and are therefore inexpensive. Britain, ironically, made its greatest strides toward improved health during the two world wars, during which malnourishment actually declined even as food became scarcer—this was due to new government policies and social attitudes toward sharing resources. Here, political freedom becomes important. Sen asserts that no modern democracy has endured a famine, however poor it might be.