Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom

Abstract

The set of contemporary economists whose writings consistently display an admirable ability to combine the insights of economics, philosophy, and political science is indeed very small. Amartya Sen is one of the preeminent members of this small set. Beginning with Collective Choice and Social Welfare in 1970, Sen has repeatedly demonstrated an uncanny ability to analyze social problems from a multi-faceted perspective that eschews narrow, self-interest based explanations. Development as Freedom is no different. Sen uses the twelve chapters of this book to provide a rather compelling, human freedom based account of the nature of contemporary economic development. In my review, I shall first focus on five of the book’s twelve chapters and then conclude with some general comments about this book. Chapter 1 begins the proceedings by pointing out that any meaningful conception of development must go well beyond “the accumulation of wealth and the growth of gross national product and other income-related variables” (p. 14). This is salient not only because wealth is a means to an end, but also because the process of development is really all about removing what Sen calls “the unfreedoms” from which the members of a society may suffer. The relationship between freedom and justice is the subject of chapter 3. In this chapter, Sen perspicuously points out that when evaluating a particular state of affairs, it is very important to pay attention to the “informational bases” of the principles that are used to conduct the underlying evaluation. This point has been an abiding theme in much of Sen’s work; indeed, Sen afficionados will note that it has been stressed recently in his 1998 Nobel lecture. Here, the author develops this point by discussing the pros and cons of three specific evaluative approaches, namely, utilitarianism, libertarianism, and Rawlsian justice. This discussion leads Sen to note that his “capability approach . . . [allows] evaluative