Development as Freedom

by Sen, Amartya

  23. Mamta Murthi, Anne-Catherine Guio and Jean Drèze, “Mortality, Fertility, and Gender Bias in India: A District Level Analysis,” Population and Development Review 21 (December 1995), and Jean Drèze and Mamta Murthi, “Female Literacy and Fertility: Recent Census Evidence from India,” mimeographed, Centre for History and Economics, King’s College, Cambridge, 1999.

  24. See particularly an important collection of papers edited by Roger Jeffery and Alaka Malwade Basu, Girls’ Schooling, Women’s Autonomy and Fertility Change in South Asia (New Delhi: Sage, 1997).

  25. A literate community can undergo value changes that one literate family surrounded by other (illiterate) families may not be able to achieve. The issue of choice of “unit” for statistical analysis is extremely important, and in this case may favor larger groups (such as regions or districts) over smaller ones (such as families).

  26. See World Bank, World Development Report 1997 and World Development Report 1998–1999.

  27. Patrick E. Tyler, “Birth Control in China: Coercion and Evasion,” New York Times, June 25, 1995.

  28. On the general subject of reproductive freedom and its relation to the population problem, see Gita Sen, Adrienne Germain, and Lincoln Chen, Population Policies Reconsidered (1994); see also Gita Sen and Carmen Barroso, “After Cairo: Challenges to Women’s Organizations” in A Commitment to the World’s Women: Perspectives for Development for Beijing and Beyond, edited by Noeleen Heyzer (New York: UNIFEM, 1995).

  29. International Herald Tribune, February 15, 1995, p. 4.

  30. Kerala is not, of course, a country, but a state within one. However, with its population of 29 million, as I have mentioned, it would have been one of the larger countries in the world—rather larger than Canada—had it been a country on its own. So its experience is not negligible.

  31. On these and related general issues, see my “Population: Delusion and Reality,” New York Review of Books, September 22, 1994. See also Robin Jeffrey, Politics, Women, and Well-Being: How Kerala Became a “Model” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and V. K. Ramachandran, “Kerala’s Development Achievements,” in Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives, edited by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  32. Kerala has a higher adult female literacy rate—86 percent—than China (68 percent). In fact, the female literacy rate is higher in Kerala than in every single province in China. Also, in comparison with male and female life expectancies at birth in China of sixty-eight and seventy-one years, the 1991 figures for Kerala’s life expectancy are sixty-nine and seventy-four years, respectively. For analyses of causal influences underlying Kerala’s reduction of fertility rates, see T. N. Krishhan, “Demographic Transition in Kerala: Facts and Factors,” Economic and Political Weekly 11 (1976), and P. N. Mari Bhat and S. L. Rajan, “Demographic Transition in Kerala Revisited,” Economic and Political Weekly 25 (1990).

  33. For sources of these data and some further analysis, see Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995).

  34. Decline in fertility can be observed to some extent in these northern states as well, though it is far less fast than in the southern states. In their paper “Intensified Gender Bias in India: A Consequence of Fertility Decline” (Working Paper 95.02, Harvard Center for Population and Development, 1995), Monica Das Gupta and P. N. Mari Bhat have drawn attention to another aspect of the problem of fertility reduction, to wit, its tendency to accentuate gender bias in sex selection, in terms of sex-specific abortion as well as child mortality through neglect (both phenomena are much observed in China). In India, this seems to be much more pronounced in the northern states than in the south, and it is indeed plausible to argue that a fertility reduction through coercive means makes this more likely (as was discussed in contrasting the situation in China vis-à-vis that in Kerala).

  35. On this see Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995), and the literature cited there.

  36. Aside from the imperative need to reject coercive methods, it is also important to promote the quality and diversity of noncoercive means of family planning. As things stand, family planning in India is overwhelmingly dominated by female sterilization, even in the southern states. To illustrate, while nearly 40 percent of currently married women aged thirteen to forty-nine in southern India are sterilized, only 14 percent of these women have ever used a nonterminal, modern contraception method. Even the knowledge of modern methods of family planning other than sterilization is extraordinarily limited in India. Only half of rural married women aged thirteen to forty-nine, for instance, seem to know what a condom or an IUD is. On this see Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995).

  37. On this see the references cited in Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995). See also Gita Sen and Carmen Barroso, “After Cairo: Challenges to women’s Organizations.”

  38. On this see Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995), pp. 168–71.

  39. On this see the demographic and sociological literature cited in Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (1995).

  40. On this see my “Population and Reasoned Agency: Food, Fertility and Economic Development,” in Lindahl-Kiessling and Landberg, Population, Economic Development, and the Environment (1994); “Population, Delusion, and Reality,” New York Review of Books, September 22, 1994; and “Fertility and Coercion” (1996).

  Chapter 10: Culture and Human Rights

  1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788), translated by L. W. Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956).

  2. “Culture Is Destiny: A Conversation with Lee Kuan Yew,” by Fareed Zakaria, Foreign Affairs 73 (March/April 1994), p. 113. See also the rebuttal of this position by a pro-democracy Asian leader, Kim Dae Jung, now the president of the Republic of Korea, “Is Culture Destiny? The Myth of Asia’s Anti-Democratic Values—A Response to Lee Kuan Yew,” Foreign Affairs 73 (1994).

  3. Information Please Almanac 1993 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), p. 213.

  4. On this see Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. xl. This diagnosis has been disputed by Orlando Patterson in Freedom, volume 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991). His arguments do indeed point to the political freedom in Western classical thought (especially in ancient Greece and Rome), but similar components can also be found in Asian classics, to which Patterson does not give much attention. On this see my Morgenthau Memorial Lecture, “Human Rights and Asian Values” (New York: Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 1997), published in a shortened form in The New Republic, July 14 & 21, 1997.

  5. See The Analects of Confucius, translated by Simon Leys (New York: Norton, 1997), and E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks, The Original Analects: Sayings of Confucius and His Successors (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

  6. See the commentaries of Brooks and Brooks, The Original Analects (1998). See also Wm. Theodore de Bary, Asian Values and Human Rights: A Confucian Communitarian Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  7. Leys, The Analects of Confucius 14.22, p. 70.

  8. Leys, The Analects of Confucius 14.3, p. 66.

  9. Leys, The Analects of Confucius 13.18, p. 63.

  10. Translation in Vincent A. Smith, Asoka (Delhi: S. Chand, 1964), pp. 170–1.

  11. On this see Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 3–4, 123.

  12. Kautilya’s Arthashastra, translated by R. Shama Sastry, 8th edition (Mysore: Mysore Printing and Publishing House, 1967), p. 47.

  13. See R. P. Kangle, The Kautilya Arthashastra (Bombay: University of Bombay, 1972), part 2, chapter 13, section 65, pp. 235–9.

  14. Translation from Vincent A. Smith, Akbar: The Great Mogul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), p. 257.

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nbsp; 15. In the analysis here, I draw on a paper I prepared for UNESCO, “Culture and Development: Global Perspectives and Constructive Scepticism,” mimeographed, 1997.

  16. Some scrutiny of the Darwinian concept of progress is provided in my “On the Darwinian View of Progress,” London Review of Books 14 (November 5, 1992); republished in Population and Development Review (1993).

  17. If the crusty old guard is offended at the popularity of MTV, or of Kentucky Fried Chicken, even after people have had a chance to consider the choices, there is not much comfort we can offer to the resenters, but the opportunity of examination and choice is quite a central right that each citizen should have.

  18. From Rabindranath Tagore, Letters to a Friend (London: Allen & Unwin, 1928).

  19. On this see my “Our Culture, Their Culture,” New Republic, April 1, 1996.

  20. Howard Eves, An Introduction to the History of Mathematics, 6th edition (New York: Saunders College Publishing House, 1990), p. 237.

  21. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859; republished, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974).

  22. See the letter of Edward Jayne in The New Republic, September 8 & 15, 1997; my reply appeared on October 13, 1997.

  23. A quick introduction to this literature can be found in A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy, edited by S. Radhakrishnan and C. A. Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), in the section “The Heterodox Systems,” pp. 227–346.

  24. English translation from H. P. Shastri, The Ramayana of Valmiki (London: Shanti Sadan, 1952), p. 389.

  25. Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 2.4, 12.

  26. See also Chris Patten, East and West (London: Macmillan, 1998).

  27. See Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, eds., On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Henry Steiner and Philip Alston, International Human Rights in Context: Law, Politics and Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Peter Van Ness, ed., Debating Human Rights (London: Routledge, 1999).

  28. See Irene Bloom, J. Paul Martin and Wayne L. Proudfoot, eds., Religious Diversity and Human Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

  29. See Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, “Internal Criticism and Indian ‘Rationalist Tradition,’ ” in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), and Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

  30. Joanne R. Bauer and Daniel A. Bell, eds., The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  Chapter 11: Social Choice and Individual Behavior

  1. Both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics of Aristotle take up the task of examining the kinds of reasoning that can be sensibly used.

  2. Kenneth Arrow, Individual Values and Social Choice (New York: Wiley, 1951; 2d edition, 1963).

  3. See particularly Friedrich Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 96–105, and also the references cited there.

  4. This line of reasoning is more fully presented in my Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1970; republished, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1979), and Choice, Welfare and Measurement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982; republished, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), which examine the interpretational issues as well as the constructive possibilities that exist. See also the critical survey of the literature in my “Social Choice Theory,” in K. J. Arrow and M. Intriligator, Handbook of Mathematical Economics (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1986), and the references cited there.

  5. I have elaborated this argument further in my Nobel lecture, “The Possibility of Social Choice,” American Economic Review 89 (1999).

  6. These connections are examined in my presidential address to the American Economic Association, “Rationality and Social Choice,” American Economic Review 85 (1995). Pioneering attention was focused in this area in the work done by James Buchanan, “Social Choice, Democracy and Free Markets,” Journal of Political Economy 62 (1954), and “Individual Choice in Voting and the Market,” Journal of Political Economy 62 (1954). See also Cass Sunstein, Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

  7. Indeed, technically speaking, even “maximization” does not require a complete ordering, since a partial ordering permits us to separate out a “maximal” set of alternatives that are no worse than any of the available options. On the analytics of maximization, see my “Maximization and the Act of Choice,” Econometrica 65 (July 1997).

  8. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; revised edition, 1790), republished, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 184.

  9. 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), pp. 26–7.

  10. Smith, Wealth of Nations (in the 1976 edition), pp. 453–71. On the interpretation and role of the “invisible hand” in Smith’s reasoning, see Emma Rothschild, “Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand,” American Economic Review 84, Papers and Proceedings (May 1994).

  11. See Hayek, Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (1967), pp. 96–105.

  12. I have argued elsewhere that there is perhaps more insight in Albert Hirschman’s points about the importance of intended consequences that are not realized. See my foreword to the twentieth-anniversary edition of his The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977; twentieth-anniversary edition, 1997). See also Judith Tendler, Good Government in the Tropics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

  13. On this see my joint book with Jean Drèze, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).

  14. On this see Drèze and Sen, India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity, chapter 4.

  15. I have discussed the issues involved fairly extensively in Choice, Welfare and Measurement (1982; 1997); On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); and “Maximization and the Act of Choice” (1977).

  16. The classic characterization of the competitive market by Kenneth Arrow, Gerard Debreu and Lionel McKenzie has provided much insight despite the parsimonious nature of its structural assumptions. See Kenneth J. Arrow, “An Extension of the Basic Theorems of Classical Welfare Economics,” in Proceedings of the Second Berkeley Symposium of Mathematical Statistics, edited by J. Neyman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951); Gerard Debreu, Theory of Value (New York: Wiley, 1959); Lionel McKenzie, “On the Existence of General Equilibrium for a Competitive Market,” Econometrica 27 (1959).

  17. See Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (1977; twentieth-anniversary edition 1997). See also Samuel Brittan, Capitalism with a Human Face (Aldershot: Elgar, 1995).

  18. These connections are explored in my essay “Economic Wealth and Moral Sentiments” (Zurich: Bank Hoffman, 1994). See also Samuel Brittan and Alan Hamlin, eds., Market Capitalism and Moral Values (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1995), and International Business Ethics, edited by Georges Enderle (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).

  19. Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels), The German Ideology (1846; English translation, New York: International Publishers, 1947); Richard Henry Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: Murray, 1926); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930).

  20. A central issue is the importance of what Bruno Frey has called “intrinsic motivation”: tertium dater. See his “Tertium Dater: Pricing, Regulating and Intrinsic Motivation,” Kyklos 45 (1992).

  21. Adam Smith, “History of Astronomy,” in his Essays on Philosophical Subjects (London: Cadell & Davies, 1795); republished, edited by W.P.D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 34.

  22. Michio Morishima,
Why Has Japan ‘Succeeded’? Western Technology and the Japanese Ethos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

  23. Ronald Dore, “Goodwill and the Spirit of Market Capitalism,” British Journal of Sociology 36 (1983), and Taking Japan Seriously: A Confucian Perspective on Leading Economic Issues (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). See also Robert Wade, Governing the Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

  24. Masahiko Aoki, Information, Incentives, and Bargaining in the Japanese Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  25. Kotaro Suzumura, Competition, Commitment, and Welfare (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1995).

  26. Eiko Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

  27. Wall Street Journal, January 30, 1989, p. 1.

  28. See the proceedings of the conference on “Economics and Criminality” in Rome in May 1993, organized by the Italian Parliament’s Anti-Mafia Commission, chaired by Luciano Violante, Economica e criminalità (Roma: Camera dei deputati, 1993). The text of my contribution, “On Corruption and Organized Crime,” analyzes, with particular reference to the Italian situation, some of the issues briefly touched on here.

  29. See Stefano Zamagni, ed., Mercati illegali e Mafie (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993). See also Stefano Zamagni, ed., The Economics of Altruism (Aldershot: Elgar, 1995), especially his introduction to the volume; Daniel Hausman and Michael S. McPherson, Economic Analysis and Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Avner Ben-Ner and Louis Putterman, eds., Economics, Values and Organization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).