I found this book fascinating in terms of its explanation of different types of freedoms and their importance in development. Though the first two chapters are fairly easy, it gets really hi-fi in terms of using economic concepts after that. If you do not have an MBA or a degree in economics, it kind of gets tricky.
But if you are from India, you will get answers for many questions that bothered me:
1) Why did China progress a lot faster than India ?2) How come Kerala has a high life expectancy and yet poor development (the answer is not given directly)3) What should be the key priorities for public policy in India (the answer is not direct)4) Why are free markets important in India... And what is the role of institutional structures in this new capitalist environment of post-1991 ?
Have fun...
This is a very hard book to rate on some kind of star system. Being a longtime fan of Armatya Sen, this remains one of my favorite books, and it contains a good deal of worthwhile information and is an excellent general discussion of development.
The problem with the whole book arises out of a very open and rather immediate consequence of Sen's reasoning. Simply put, development is not freedom, it is development. "Freedom to", or the "positive freedoms" are nothing of the kind- freedom to something is simply a trick phrase used by academics in general as a rather conscious attempt to subvert the meaning of the word.
I call this approach the 'trigger word problem'. Politics likes to use certain emotional and somewhat vague words to its advantage. The political left has not for a long time been able to use the word freedom in a political context to its advantage for the simple reason that they're not for it, but consequently do not want to be seen as the enemies of freedom.
Consequently the diversion of the idea of "positive freedoms" has come about, and is one of the central lies of this exccellent book.
Development is not freedom, it is development. Being "free" to have something may indeed be a good thing, but it remains an entitlement, not a freedom. The term is only honestly used when it is used in the negative sense.
Arguments may be made for any number of Sen's points. Certainly freedom in a political sense enhances the possibility of advancement in wealth and health. And there is a vaguely defined but nevertheless certain truth that people who have advanced economies will have a tendancy toward general freedom- these points are as obvious as they are important to understanding development. The problem is freedom is not a number of dollars on one's pocket. One does not describe a man with enough money to buy a limousine with a driver as a man with an important freedom. People can be poor and free or rich and not free.
Development as freedom rests on a linguistic trick of the word "freedom" arising from the need of a political left not to be on the recieving end of the political rights attacks. Whatever one thinks of the actual issues involved, Sen and his cohorts in political thinking (Isiah Berlin) have created a false sense of a basic political word, an Orwellian attempt to deform language for simple political ends. No one is "fifty dollars freer" than they were before payday.
Freedom is freedom. Development is development. They are interrelated subjects the same way economics and politics are related, but they are also different in the same way politics and economics are words with seperate meanings. This book is a clear attempt to benefit from the good will that comes from a valued word and deposit the good feelings on to certain political ends.
This is an excellent book. I highly suggest it to everyone. It is, however, a consciously produced intellectual lie by a superb sophist. This book would have been much better had it not decided to explain development as freedom. The book could have stood well on its own by discussing the relationship developed economies have with freedom. It IS interesting and relevant that political freedom aids development and that development aids in freedom. Had Sen merely noted the relationship as coinciding together, he could have made one of the best arguments the left has in rational choice philosophical modelling. As it is, Sen has besmirched one of the few good works of the left by wrapping his politics in the glory of a word. Lies do not deserve credit.
This book has in it the workings of a dozen good conversations. That makes the dissapointment worse. Word tricks do not add to debate.
Amaryta Sen rebuilds the ability to argue with laissez-faire for he demonstrates how to introduce notions of human equality and fair play. But Sen doesn't get trapped into arguing for fair play and equality as such.
The turn of the century philosopher G. E. Moore tried to establish that "the good" in ethics is a given and came close to arguing for a laundry list of good and beautiful notions. As such, Moore was the spiritual father of the "Cambridge Apostles", a group of Englishmen whose left-liberal world-view grandfathered the American liberal consensus of the post-war period.
The 1960s *reductio* of this consensus, inspired by the media, destroyed it and created an opening for laissez-faire. It took the permissiveness of liberalism to imply that a selfish world was one of the views sanctioned by liberalism and this was a real contradiction that destroyed liberalism.
This means that appeals to selfishness have great rhetorical force in American domestic politics, and their force is amplified in international economics: for example, many Americans believe that the United States gives billions of dollars away in foreign aid, and should not, whereas the reality is that about 1% of the budget is earmarked for such aid, and the United States is a deadbeat dad with regards to an institution it helped to parent, the United Nations, and behind in its dues.
We therefore need conceptual tools to counter lazy laissez-faire. The technique should neither be, in the matter of G. E. Moore, to merely claim the primacy of the good, nor to try to construct elaborate "proofs" in the manner of mathematics that it is better to be nice and good (for note that "it is better to be good" is equivalent to "it is good to be good", and this is a tautology, and Moore noticed it, and one sometimes wonder if philosophers are up to anything worth while, at all.)
Instead, Sen demonstrates the worth of international economic solidarity by means of the facts and by building a structure that is logically coherent, and which coherence tracks its sustainability. Pure laissez-faire self-destructs because there is no way of curbing the appetites of the bigger players, and preventing them from using force and fraud. Their force and fraud is met with desparate resistance which amplifies the process leading to a non-sustainable situation.
Sen shows mechanisms, both economic and conceptual, which lead both to logical coherence and sustainability. He suggests replacing econometrics which more complicated measures of the quality of life, but Sen does not fall into a sort of Stalinist trap. This is to REPLACE the measures agreed on in the current consensus (notably income per capita) with another simple-minded measure, perhaps compounded in a fashion more or less arbitrary out of sub measures.
The economists fetishize and reify measures and do not see, for example, the results of inequality which are concealed by average income per capita. If there are two men on an island (Robinson Crusoe and Friday) and one of them enjoys an income of ALL the breadfruit on the island and the other (guess who) enjoys the status of slave, with right to zero breadfruit trees, then the average income is one-half the breadfruit trees. This presents that old harlot, and mother of harlots, Rosy Scenario, to the economist, blinded as he is by spreadsheets.
But Sen does not fall into the trap of replacing spreadsheets by sob stories, although he presents some sob stories about real misery in countries that present Rosy Scenarios to development economists. His narratives INCLUDE and do not include the numbers.
But they use the numbers in a less simple-minded way. Even a laissez-faire American businessman would be ill-advised to run his company by looking at one number and one number alone. The businessman who looked ONLY at quarterly net profit would not see how his employees were running down equipment in order to meet his singular target, resulting in later failure to meet the chosen target.
For note that if we feed the numbers (such as the higher rate of loan repayment by poor women) into narratives informed by an unquestioned committment to equality and justice, this automatically prevents both our being blinded by injustices hidden by single, utilitarian, numbers, and it also has the side-benefit of preventing some forms of fraud, as the fraudulent numbers fail to cohere with the honest numbers, and the honest narratives.
The cynicism of laissez-faire economics hides a naivety which has been regularly exposed, in the international debt arena, by the fraudulent misappropropriation of loans for consumption instead of development. For example, American economists went naively into the former Soviet Union believing in capitalism as a sort of god that would magically bring prosperity to that country. Like farm boys, like hicks, like yokels, they were taken for a ride by the former Communist *nomenklatura*, which simply appears to have grabbed the money and used it to empty the Black Sea of caviar. They were supposed to invest it in a new infrastructure to replace the presumably out-of-date Communist rust belt. They said they were gonna and did not.
This is causing an unprecedented phenomenon: the reversion of a developed country to Third World status. This was caused by the imposition of a development model.
Economists are often wrong: for example, Sen points out just how wrong Malthus was. Condorcet's prediction, that better living conditions would bring the benefits of Enlightenment to the poor, causing them to refrain from irrationally having large families, has, as Sen points out, been proven right by recent developments. But Malthus is accounted as one of the "worldly philosophers" and his spirit, if not his exact ideas, pervades much Yuppie thinking in America. It is a nasty and narrow spirit; read Sen for a set of tools to argue for the better way.
Amartya Sen would ask us to view development in the frame of freedoms. The ends of development, he argues, are not wealth or productivity, though these can be instruments to achieve certain freedoms. To see the increase of the well being of others comprehensively, we must understand how "well being" is achieved and focus on increasing the freedoms of people. These freedoms include political, social, and economic freedoms and they tend to reinforce each other. Making people better off requires that policy makers keep these goals in mind.
Sen's book is an articulate, fully developed argument. It is a mixture of economics and philosophy and it is written for a layman, without condescension. That is, it may still be a little difficult to read if you aren't used to academic writing. Those who finish this book, however, may end up seeing development, freedom, and social justice in a fresh and hopeful way.
But what is freedom's value, to Sen? Not only does it have normative and intrinsic importance as a social good, but it also has an instrumental or "consequential" role that provides political incentives for economic security (thus helping the operation of the market and leading to economic development), as well as having a constructive role in the "genesis of values and priorities," which is the kind of substantive, social development that Sen sees as an essential companion to economic growth. This development is conceptualized as the five benefits of freedom: political freedoms, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security.
As an economist, Sen does not, of course, neglect the role of the economy in the freedom/development causal process. On the contrary, Sen makes use of Adam Smith for his own purposes, though admittedly giving Smith a more "social" spin than most neoclassical economists by focusing on Smith's views of education, political freedoms, and the social context of the market. Sen accuses Smith's followers of myopically focusing on technocratic economic incentives for "development" and therefore being blind to the kind of "political incentives" that freedom can provide to a developing nation. Deftly using the Asian examples often touted by his foes, Sen argues that Japan, South Korea, etc. made large investments in social opportunity freedoms like literacy and health care before their economies boomed. In other words, sociopolitical development precedes economic development, and not the other way around.
Theoretically, Sen formulates a kind of modified, "deepened" rational choice theory, arguing that a truly rational social choice depends on an adequate "informational base" in society, which only his five benefits of freedom can provide. This use of the incentive-based rational language of orthodox economics makes Sen's critique of authoritarianism all the stronger, showing why a lack of freedoms might impede the workings of the market (by limiting the information available to rational choosers), despite the best-intentioned, purely economic incentives that might be given to an unfree population.
The bulk of Sen's evidence comes from political theory, economics and personal knowledge. Much of his causal process-tracing lacks step-by-step empirical illustrations for each link, being that this is not exclusively a work of social science, but the book as a whole is inconsistently rich with empirical justification. Indeed, it cites liberally from a large body of literature, and also draws upon a great deal of quantitative indicators for development, tracing such factors as life expectancy, GDP, infant mortality, gender disparities, and literacy rates.
The easiest critique of Sen's work is that it is nothing more than a nobly futile plea to the development policymakers and corporate players; a plea that will most likely cause them to nod their heads, say "yes, he's right, that sounds great . . . that's the way it should be," but then to push ahead anyway with their technocratic, economics-based sidestepping of the role of freedom in development. Indeed, when one discovers that "Development as Freedom" has been lauded by such influential figures as the World Bank President and "Business Week" Magazine, then one immediately suspects that something is wrong. If the World Bank and global corporate elites agree with Sen, then why aren't they pushing his recommendations more aggressively? The answer is that most development players have an interest in keeping Sen's freedoms at bay. Sen might argue that these players need to read his book and realize that their objective, long-term interests actually lie in pushing freedoms (longer life, healthcare, education, etc.), but the immediate pursuit of such freedoms is a hard sell to the struggling factory owner or the finance minister under pressure from the IMF. Long-term interests have rarely figured into the real, ground-level process of market-driven development, and there's no reason to expect that this unfortunate state can be changed anytime soon. Development is driven by multinational corporations who favor a "liberal" investment climate made up of fiscal restraint, a restraint that tends (in practice) to divert resources and attention from the kinds of freedoms that Sen proposes.