In
“The Concept of Development,” Amartya Sen looks as economics as being
closely related to development economics For Sen, these founders were
motivated by development, as is he. The economic concern is “judged
ultimately in terms of what it does to the lives of human beings” (Sen
11). The whole point of studying economics is to look at how to improve
people’s lives.
The
question then becomes how we improve people’s lives. It is one thing to
talk about improvement in the abstract, but there are real concrete
things that we can do, quantifications of things we can measure in terms
of well-being, that show that we have moved people from a state of x to
a state of x +1. The simplest of these is looking at the GDP or GNP in
country specific terms. But just growing the gross output is not
enough — as Sen states, “The relationship between GNP and living
conditions is far from simple” (12). Sen moves beyond this structure
noting the importance to look at “the nature of the life that people
succeed in living” (Sen 15). To do this, one issue that Sen emphasizes
is the “Freedom to Choose”. In this freedom, he defines as having
“significant options,” so that “Being able to freely chose to lead a
particular life may be a point of richer descriptions of the life we
lead, including the choices we are able to make” (Sen 17). And the
capability then is the set of alternatives with which a person must
choose from.
In
making this distinction, Sen looks at the difference from negative and
positive freedoms. He notes that the freedom to be able to fast is much
different from the freedom from starvation (18). In laying out the
options, we have these broad possibilities of what could happen. I feel
there is a bit of a problem with this approach in terms of how other
people view it and how you craft it as a narrative in order to sell
development to different audience.
Sen
himself recognizes the problem with using a function and capabilities
framework in that it “specifies a space in which evaluation is to take
place, rather than proposing one particular formula for evaluation”
(18), as well as calling for a “great deal of empirical as well as
theoretical work” (19) to be done if this approach is taken. I fell that
the problem is that we might not be ready for it. Already in terms of
reading about the different metrics we have for looking at development
and access to resources and how that is spread in a country there are a
multiplicity of them. And these are metrics that have been taken and
organized and made available on the World Bank website and then it hides
there, waiting for enthuastic amateurs and trained professionals to
access.
The
problem is that though we have these numbers available, we tend to
think in stories. I’m thinking of being a citizen in the developed west
and feeling that there is a moral obligation to make sure that people in
developing countries have access to running water and chlorine and
mosquito nets and freedom from sexual violence. These are things that I
would assume that most people would support in the abstract. We get to
an issue when we then we must sell outside investment through the
international organizations to taxpayers and politicians in the
developed world. We have a world where when polled people will say that
25% of the US budget goes to foreign aid, when it is less than one
percent. People’s perceptions are very narrow and parochial, so that
though I can appreciate Sen’s approach, it’s too broad.
In
“Mismeasuring Our Lives”, Sen and co-authors argue for a dashboard
approach instead of just relying on GDP as the singular measure of
well-being. The problem with that, as well as the functions and
capabilities approach to development is that Americans thrive on stories
and simplicity and not nuance. For example, recently with the large
stock market moves in December, people had a hard time understanding
that with the large absolute point moves making headlines, in percentage
terms of the entire market, they are smaller than many other comparable
declines. And that was with the one thing that stays on people’s mind
as a fair proxy for how “the economy” is doing. Overall, we need more
simplicity because we must sell external development to a reluctant
public that has other things eating away at their attention. In this
manner, perhaps a composite index like the HDI or the I-AHDI is a better
choice because it boils down things to one metric. The other
alternative here would be to have democratically unaccountable
technocrats in charge of the external development issues in the already
developed countries.
Works Cited
Cypher, J. M. (2014). The process of economic development. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Sen, Amartya K. (1988). “The Concept of Development” in H. Chenery and T. N. Srinivasan (eds.), Handbook of Development Economics, Vol. 1, Amsterdam: North — Holland, pp. 9–26.
Stiglitz,
J. E., Sen, A., & Fitoussi, J. (2010). Mismeasuring our lives: Why
GDP doesn’t add up: The report. New York: New Press.
