by Sen, Amartya
Indeed, in arguing with David Hume, Adam Smith had the occasion to emphasize that to see human beings only in terms of their productive use is to slight the nature of humanity:
… it seems impossible that the approbation of virtue should be of the same kind with that by which we approve of a convenient or a well-contrived building, or that we should have no other reason for praising a man than that for which we commend a chest of drawers.27
Despite the usefulness of the concept of human capital, it is important to see human beings in a broader perspective (breaking the analogy with “a chest of drawers”). We must go beyond the notion of human capital, after acknowledging its relevance and reach. The broadening that is needed is additional and inclusive, rather than, in any sense, an alternative to the “human capital” perspective.
It is important to take note also of the instrumental role of capability expansion in bringing about social change (going well beyond economic change). Indeed, the role of human beings even as instruments of change can go much beyond economic production (to which the perspective of “human capital” standardly points), and include social and political development. For example, as was discussed earlier, expansion of female education may reduce gender inequality in intrafamily distribution and also help to reduce fertility rates as well as child mortality rates. Expansion of basic education may also improve the quality of public debates. These instrumental achievements may be ultimately quite important—taking us well beyond the production of conventionally defined commodities.
In looking for a fuller understanding of the role of human capabilities, we have to take note of:
1) their direct relevance to the well-being and freedom of people;
2) their indirect role through influencing social change; and
3) their indirect role through influencing economic production.
The relevance of the capability perspective incorporates each of these contributions. In contrast, in the standard literature human capital is seen primarily in terms of the third of the three roles. There is a clear overlap of coverage, and it is indeed an important overlap. But there is also a strong need to go well beyond that rather limited and circumscribed role of human capital in understanding development as freedom.
A FINAL REMARK
In this book I have tried to present, analyze and defend a particular approach to development, seen as a process of expanding substantive freedoms that people have. The perspective of freedom has been used both in the evaluative analysis for assessing change, and in the descriptive and predictive analysis in seeing freedom as a causally effective factor in generating rapid change.
I have also discussed the implications of this approach for policy analysis as well as for the understanding of general economic, political and social connections. A variety of social institutions—related to the operation of markets, administrations, legislatures, political parties, nongovernmental organizations, the judiciary, the media and the community in general—contribute to the process of development precisely through their effects on enhancing and sustaining individual freedoms. Analysis of development calls for an integrated understanding of the respective roles of these different institutions and their interactions. The formation of values and the emergence and evolution of social ethics are also part of the process of development that needs attention, along with the working of markets and other institutions. This study has been an attempt to understand and investigate this interrelated structure, and to draw lessons for development in that broad perspective.
It is a characteristic of freedom that it has diverse aspects that relate to a variety of activities and institutions. It cannot yield a view of development that translates readily into some simple “formula” of accumulation of capital, or opening up of markets, or having efficient economic planning (though each of these particular features fits into the broader picture). The organizing principle that places all the different bits and pieces into an integrated whole is the overarching concern with the process of enhancing individual freedoms and the social commitment to help to bring that about. That unity is important, but at the same time we cannot lose sight of the fact that freedom is an inherently diverse concept, which involves—as was discussed extensively—considerations of processes as well as substantive opportunities.
This diversity is not, however, a matter of regret. As William Cowper puts it:
Freedom has a thousand charms to show,
That slaves, howe’er contented, never know.
Development is indeed a momentous engagement with freedom’s possibilities.
NOTES
Chapter 1: The Perspective of Freedom
1. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.4, 2–3.
2. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, translated by D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, revised edition, 1980), book 1, section 5, p. 7.
3. I have discussed, in earlier publications, different aspects of a freedom-centered view of social evaluation; on this see my “Equality of What?” in Tanner Lectures on Human Values, volume 1, edited by S. McMurrin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Blackwell; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982; republished, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Resources, Values and Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984); “Well-Being, Agency and Freedom: The Dewey Lectures 1984,” Journal of Philosophy 82 (April 1985); Inequality Reexamined (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). See also Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, eds., The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
4. In my Kenneth Arrow Lectures, included in Freedom, Rationality and Social Choice: Arrow Lectures and Other Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, forthcoming). A number of technical issues in the assessment and evaluation of freedom are also examined in that analysis.
5. The evaluative and the operational reasons have been explored more fully in my “Rights and Agency,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982), reprinted in Consequentialism and Its Critics, edited by Samuel Scheffler; “Well-Being, Agency and Freedom”; On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).
6. The components correspond respectively to (1) the process aspect and (2) the opportunity aspect of freedom, which are analyzed in my Kenneth Arrow Lectures, included in Freedom, Rationality and Social Choice, cited earlier.
7. I have tried to discuss the issue of “targeting” in “The Political Economy of Targeting,” keynote address to the 1992 Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics, published in Public Spending and the Poor: Theory and Evidence, edited by Dominique van de Walle and Kimberly Nead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). The issue of political freedom as a part of development is addressed in my “Freedoms and Needs,” New Republic, January 10 and 17, 1994.
8. I have discussed this issue in “Missing Women,” British Medical Journal 304 (1992).
9. These and other such comparisons are presented in my “The Economics of Life and Death,” Scientific American 266 (April 1993), and “Demography and Welfare Economics,” Empirica 22 (1995).
10. On this see my “Economics of Life and Death,” and also the medical literature cited there. See also Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). On this general issue, see also M. F. Perutz, “Long Live the Queen’s Subjects,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 352 (1997).
11. This can be worked out from the background data used to make life expectancy calculations (for 1990), as presented in C.J.L. Murray, C. M. Michaud, M. T. McKenna and J. S. Marks, U.S. Patterns of Mortality by County and Race: 1965–1994 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, 1998). See especially table 6d.
12. See Colin McCord and Harold P. Freeman, “Excess Mortality in Harlem,” New England Journal of Medicine 322 (January 18, 1990); see also M. W. Owen, S. M. Teutsch, D. F. Williamson and J. S. Marks, “The Effects of Known Risk Factors on the Excess Mortalit
y of Black Adults in the United States,” Journal of the American Medical Association 263, no. 6 (February 9, 1990).
13. See Nussbaum and Sen, eds., The Quality of Life (1993).
14. See Martha Nussbaum, “Nature, Function and Capability: Aristotle on Political Distribution,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (1988; supplementary volume); see also Nussbaum and Sen, eds., The Quality of Life (1993).
15. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), republished, edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), volume 2, book 5, chapter 2 (section on “Taxes upon Consumable Commodities”), pp. 469–71.
16. These issues are discussed in my Tanner Lectures at Cambridge in 1985, published in The Standard of Living, edited by Geoffrey Hawthorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
17. Lagrange thus presented in the late eighteenth century what was probably the first analysis of what came to be known in our times as “the new view of consumption” (Kevin J. Lancaster, “A New Approach to Consumer Theory,” Journal of Political Economy 74 [1996], and W. M. Gorman, “A Possible Procedure for Analysing Quality Differentials in the Egg Market,” Review of Economic Studies 47 [1980]). These and related matters are discussed in my The Standard of Living (1987).
18. A distinguished exception is Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
19. This was mainly in the context of Adam Smith’s support for legislation against “usury,” and the need to control the turmoil that follows from the overindulgence of speculative investment by those whom Adam Smith called “prodigals and projectors.” See Smith, Wealth of Nations, volume 1, book 2, chapter 4, paragraphs 14–15, in the edition of Campbell and Skinner (1976), pp. 356–7. The term “projector” is used by Smith not in the neutral sense of “one who forms a project,” but in the pejorative sense, apparently common from 1616 (according to The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary), meaning, among other things, “a promoter of bubble companies; a speculator; a cheat.” Giorgio Basevi has drawn my attention to some interesting parallels between Smith’s criticism and Jonathan Swift’s unflattering portrayal of “projectors” in Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726, half a century before Wealth of Nations.
20. The importance of the distinction between “comprehensive outcomes” and “culmination outcomes,” in various different contexts, is discussed in my “Maximization and the Act of Choice,” Econometrica 65 (July 1997). For the relevance of the distinction in the specific case of the market mechanism and its alternatives, see my “Markets and Freedoms,” Oxford Economic Papers 45 (1993), and “Markets and the Freedom to Choose,” in The Ethical Foundations of the Market Economy, edited by Horst Siebert (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1994). See also chapter 4 of the present work.
21. J. R. Hicks, Wealth and Welfare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 138.
22. Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), pp. 125–6.
23. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross (1974), pp. 237–8.
24. Different aspects of this momentous issue have been examined in Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Capitalismo e Escravidão no Brasil Meridionel: O negro na sociadade escravocrata do Rio Grande do Sul (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1977); Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London and New York: Verso, 1988); Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden, eds., Free and Unfree Labour (Berne: European Academic Publishers, 1997); Stanley L. Engerman, ed., Terms of Labor: Slavery, Serfdom and Free Labor (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
25. Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1 (London: Sonnenschein, 1887), chapter 10, section 3, p. 240. See also his Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973).
26. V. K. Ramachandran, Wage Labour and Unfreedom in Agriculture: An Indian Case Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 1–2.
27. An important empirical study of this aspect of bondage and unfreedom, among others, can be found in Sudipto Mundle, Backwardness and Bondage: Agrarian Relations in a South Bihar District (New Delhi: Indian Institute of Public Administration, 1979).
28. On this see Decent Work: The Report of the Director-General of the ILO (Geneva: ILO, 1999). This is one of the special emphases in the program of the new director-general, Juan Somavia.
29. This point of view is forcefully developed in Stephen M. Marglin and Frederique Appfel Marglin, eds., Dominating Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). On related anthropological insights, see also Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Chapter 2: The Ends and the Means of Development
1. I have discussed this contrast in an earlier paper, “Development Thinking at the Beginning of the 21st Century,” in Economic and Social Development into the XXI Century, edited by Louis Emmerij (Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank, distributed by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). See also my “Economic Policy and Equity: An Overview,” in Economic Policy and Equity, edited by Vito Tanzi, Ke-young Chu and Sanjeev Gupta (Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1999).
2. This chapter served as the basis of a keynote address given at the World Bank Symposium on Global Finance and Development in Tokyo, March 1–2, 1999.
3. On this see Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
4. On this see World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also Vito Tanzi et al., Economic Policy and Equity (1999).
5. See Hiromitsu Ishi, “Trends in the Allocation of Public Expenditure in Light of Human Resource Development—Overview in Japan,” mimeographed, Asian Development Bank, Manila, 1995. See also Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
6. On this see Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), and the Probe Team, Public Report on Basic Education in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).
7. Sudhir Anand and Martin Ravallion, “Human Development in Poor Countries: On the Role of Private Incomes and Public Services,” Journal of Economics Perspectives 7 (1993).
8. On this issue see my joint book with Jean Drèze, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995).
9. Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989); see particularly chapter 10.
10. Even though Kerala is merely a state rather than a country, nevertheless, with its population close to thirty million, it is larger than the majority of countries in the world (including, for example, Canada).
11. On this see my “From Income Inequality to Economic Inequality,” Distinguished Guest Lecture to the Southern Economic Association, published in Southern Economic Journal 64 (October 1997), and “Mortality as an Indicator of Economic Success and Failure,” first Innocenti Lecture to UNICEF (Florence: UNICEF, 1995), also published in Economic Journal 108 (January 1998).
12. See also Richard A. Easterlin, “How Beneficent Is the Market? A Look at the Modern History of Mortality,” mimeographed, University of Southern California, 1997.
13. This issue is discussed in Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989).
14. I shall return to this question later on; see also Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995).
15. The need for supplementing and supporting market-friendly policies for economic growth with a rapid expansion of the social infrastructure (such as public health care and basic education) is discussed in some detail, in the context of the Indian economy, in my joint book with Jean Drèze, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995).
16. See Robert W. Fogel, “Nutrition and the Decline in Mortality since 1700: Some Additional Preliminary Findings,” working paper 1802, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1986;
Samuel H. Preston, “Changing Relations between Mortality and Level of Economic Development,” Population Studies 29 (1975), and “American Longevity: Past, Present and Future,” Policy Brief no. 7, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, 1996. See also Lincoln C. Chen, Arthur Kleinman and Norma C. Ware, eds., Advancing Health in Developing Countries (New York: Auburn House, 1992); Richard G. Wilkinson, Unhealthy Societies: The Afflictions of Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1996); Richard A. Easterlin, “How Beneficent Is the Market?” (1997).
17. See J. M. Winter, The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan, 1986).
18. See R. M. Titmuss, History of the Second World War: Problems of Social Policy (London: HMSO, 1950).
19. On this see R. J. Hammond, History of the Second World War: Food (London: HMSO, 1951). See also Titmuss, History of the Second World War: Problems of Social Policy (1950).
20. See Winter, Great War and the British People (1986).
21. The data relate to England and Wales, since the aggregate British figures could not be found. However, since England and Wales form such an overwhelmingly big part of the United Kingdom, not a great deal is lost by this restriction of coverage.
22. See the works of R. J. Hammond, R. M. Titmuss, and J. M. Winter, cited earlier, and the other works to which they refer, and also the discussion and the references in Drèze and Sen, Hunger and Public Action (1989), chapter 10.
23. I have discussed this in “Development: Which Way Now?” Economic Journal 92 (December 1982) and Resources, Values and Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), and jointly with Jean Drèze in Hunger and Public Action (1989).
Chapter 3: Freedom and the Foundations of Justice