Bernardino M.

Pimentel DPA 304

BOOK REVIEW: DEVELOPMENT AS FREEDOM BY AMARTYA SEN

Over the centuries, there have been very many theories of

development. According to 1998 Nobel prize winner, Amartya Sen, freedom is both the
primary objective of development, and the principal means of development. The human
being is an engine of change.

It is of course nice to hear an economist discussing such issues, rather than

reciting equations. But let’s first have a look at Sen’s views. He is both the first Indian
and the first Asian to win the Nobel prize for economics. In winning the Nobel prize, Sen
was praised by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences "for his contributions to welfare
economics" and for restoring "an ethical dimension" to the discussion of vital economic
problems.

According to Sen, development is enhanced by democracy and the protection of

human rights. Such rights, especially freedom of the press, speech, assembly, and so
forth increase the likelihood of honest, clean, good government.

He claims that “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a
functioning democracy”. This is because democratic governments “have to win elections
and face public criticism and have strong incentive to undertake measures to avert
famines and other catastrophes”.

Development is the process of expanding human freedom. It is “the enhancement

of freedoms that allow people to lead lives that they have reason to live”. Hence
“development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as
tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systemic social deprivation, neglect of
public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states”.

Sen argues that there are five types of interrelated freedoms, namely, political
freedom, economic facilities, social opportunities, transparency and security. The state
has a role in supporting freedoms by providing public education, health care, social safety
nets, good macroeconomic policies, productivity and protecting the environment.

Freedom implies not just to do something, but the capabilities to make it

happen. What people can achieve (their capabilities) is influenced by “economic
opportunities, political liberties, social powers, and the enabling condition of good health,
basic education, and the encouragement and cultivation of initiatives”. Sen calculates
that if women in Asia and North Africa were given the same health care and attention, the
world would have 100 million more women.

For Sen, “capability deprivation” is a better measure of poverty than low

income. While higher GDP does produce improvements in most measures of the quality
of life, but there are exceptions. Some places with low GDP/capita like Sri Lanka, China
and the India state of Kerala have higher life expectancies and literacy rates than richer
countries like Brazil, South Africa and Namibia. And Afro-Americans have a lower life
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expectancy than males in China and parts of India, although their average real income is
far higher.

Some see freedom as a potential disturbance to political stability and

development. They recommend repressive interventions of the state in stifling liberty,
initiative and enterprise, and in crippling the working of the individual agency and
cooperative action. Sen attacks Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and his theories of Asian
values which are used to justify political repression. For Sen there is no such thing as
Asian values in a continent with vastly disparate populations and traditions and containing
60 per cent of the world’s population. And as Dani Rodrik said, the economic
performance of authoritarian regimes is either very good or very bad – and usually very
bad. Most democracies occupy the middle ground.

So how did the dynamic economies of East Asia develop so rapidly? Sen
highlights “social opportunities” provided by government in the form of schooling, basic
health care, basic land reform, and microcredit. These economies were riding on the
success of the individual entering the market. While many of these economies were not
democratic, some like Korea, Taiwan, Thailand became more democratic.

Sen has been instrumental in the thinking of the United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) on human development, including the creation of the human
development index (HDI) which is a composite index that measures the average
achievement in a country in three basic dimensions of human development: a long and
healthy life, as measured by life expectancy at birth; knowledge, as measured by the adult
literacy rate and the combined gross enrolment ration for primary, secondary and tertiary
schools; and a decent standard of living, as measured by GDP per capita in purchasing
power parity US dollars. While the concept of human development is much broader than
any single composite index can measure, the HDI offers a powerful alternative to income
as a summary measure of human well-being.

Sen worked closely with the UNDP on its Human Development Report 2004,
“Cultural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World”. This report argues that an essential element
of human development is cultural freedom, namely the freedom to choose one’s identity
and to exercise that choice without facing discrimination or disadvantage.

Cultural freedoms should be embraced as basic human rights and as necessities

for the development of the increasingly diverse societies of the 21 st century. All people
should have the right to maintain their ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities. The
adoption of policies that recognize and protect these identities is the only sustainable
approach to development in diverse societies. Economic globalization cannot succeed
unless cultural freedoms are also respected and protected, and the xenophobic
resistance to cultural diversity should be addressed and overcome.

Very few people would quibble with what Sen has to say. In fact, many observers find
his views somewhat trite. But the real challenge is how to transform a state that does not
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accord freedom to its citizens into state that does so. Sen has very little advice for us
here.

Moreover, freedom deficits still exist in so-called developed countries, and the
situation may be moving backwards. Political freedoms are compromised by vested
interest politics in the US, and oligarchic powers in Japan and much of
Europe. Protectionism of large enterprises, especially in Europe and Japan, limit the
economic freedom of small and medium size enterprises. Social opportunities are
constrained in most countries as the rich have much better access than the poor to health
and education services. Sen does us all a good service in raising the issue of cultural
freedoms. The more these issues are discussed the better. But progress will require
massive changes in attitudes.

More fundamentally, Sen does not address the issue of how individual freedoms
should be nested into society, where we all have to forego some freedom in order to live
together peacefully.