The Road From Serfdom: Amartya Sen Argues that Growth Is Not Enough

A perusal of professional economics journals today would make it difficult to appreciate the long and rich connection between economic discourse and moral philosophy. Adam Smith is usually credited with founding the discipline of economics in his remarkable Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. The book persuasively sketched the general equilibrium characteristics of a market economy, showing that pursuit of private gain can be socially productive under conditions of competition. But Smith was also a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University whose publications included The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In fact, most of the celebrated nineteenth-century economists, from Thomas Malthus through John Stuart Mill to Francis Edgeworth and Alfred Marshall, took moral considerations seriously and made important contributions to the subject.

Most economists these days eschew moral philosophy -- namely, the consideration of social justice -- because they consider it too "soft" for rigorous analytical treatment. But Amartya Sen harks back to the older and richer tradition of evaluating the considerations of economic efficiency -- which dominate most modern economic analyses -- with respect to their general social consequences. Such judgments require an ethical framework.

Sen was born in 1933 in Bengal, then part of British India, and studied there until he went to Cambridge University for postgraduate work. After teaching in India, he held various posts at Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and Oxford University. He went to Harvard University in 1989, where he held joint appointments in economics and philosophy before heading back to Cambridge in 1998 to become Master of Trinity College. That same year he won the Nobel Prize for his cumulative contributions to welfare economics -- especially his technical work on aggregating individual preferences into collective choices and assessing theoretically appropriate measures of poverty -- as well as his empirical work on the causes of famines, especially in South Asia and Africa.

Development as Freedom attempts to map out Sen's thoughts on economic development for a broad, nonspecialist audience, drawing extensively on his more technical work as well as that of others. Although the book avoids jargon, it is closely argued and requires attentive reading, despite the many repetitions and recapitulations. Its central idea is relatively straightforward, even though it radically recasts how concerned individuals should think about economic development -- not only professional economists but also development planners, public officials in developing countries, aid agency workers, international civil servants, and members of the general public, insofar as they think about economic development at all.

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Over the past 50 years, "development" has generally been defined in terms of industrialization. Most economists define it as growth in real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) output on a per capita basis -- perhaps with a nod, especially in the 1990s, to the need for some legal and institutional development, particularly to protect property rights and settle disputes. Sen, in contrast, argues that such conceptions of development are far too narrow. While not denying the importance of raising output and per capita income, especially in very poor countries, he argues for a broader goal for development: increasing the capability of all human beings to achieve those things that they most value. Higher income, of course, increases such capabilities in important ways, so it is a significant component of development. But it is not the only part. It does not assure good health, adequate education, greater longevity, the ability to influence the political decisions that affect one's life, or the freedom to choose alternative lifestyles -- or even goods and services beyond those that are immediately on offer. One can concede that all these valuable attributes are more likely to be accessible to people with higher incomes while still insisting, as Sen does, that higher income is not sufficient to assure development -- only necessary.

This point may seem obvious. Indeed, the entire tone of the book is so modest and unassuming that Sen's arguments generally seem obvious once he has made them. Nonetheless, his thesis has radical implications. Development should be seen, Sen begins, "as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy." Hence, "development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states."

The remainder of the book expands on and elaborates this simple thesis: development is not merely an economic process but a political one as well. It therefore ultimately requires a "democratization" of political communities to give citizens a voice in important decisions made for the community. To fail in this regard, Sen argues, is to limit human freedom -- and, by extension, the possibility for full human development.

This perspective leads Sen to place special emphasis on basic health care, especially for children, and basic education, especially for women. Not only are these factors desirable for their instrumental value in helping to achieve higher income and (in the case of women's education) control fertility; they are also beneficial in their own right. People cannot develop their capabilities if they are chronically ill or woefully ignorant.