Amartya Sen defines development as a process of expanding the real freedoms that humans enjoy. I believe that development is a sort of ecosystem of freedoms that compliment each other and work together to elevate the wellbeing of a population. Some of the most important freedoms include the freedom to enter markets and freedom of speech. Development depends on things such as social and economic arrangements as well as political and civil rights. Other aspects like industrialization, technological process, and social modernization are also key to development, assisting in overcoming famine, tyranny, poverty, and many other repressive sources of unfreedom.
This definition of development is a more expansive view of development. The author emphasizes that a broader approach permits simultaneous appreciation of vital roles in the process of development, such as opportunities of open dialogue and debate, governments and local authorities, political parties and other civic institutions, educational arrangements, and including markets and market-related organizations. Shared norms play a big role in influencing things such as gender inequities, the treatment of the environment, etc. Even though some countries with a high GNP prosper economically, the life expectancy of some wealthier countries tend to be shorter than expected because they focus almost strictly on one freedom.
The author explores the fact that development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty, tyranny, poor economic opportunities, systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities, and intolerance or overactivity of repressive states. The author goes into further detail about how unfreedoms can poorly affect other, seemingly unrelated, freedoms. Sen goes in depth about how economic freedom has a basic role in social living, exploring the tragic story of Kader Mia. Mia was forced to go into dangerous, off limits territory to find work to provide for his family and was stabbed in said territory. Economic unfreedom, in the form of extreme poverty, often makes one helpless in the violation of other kinds of freedom.
There are two distinct reasons freedom is central to the process of development, the evaluative reason and the effectiveness reason. The effectiveness reason for freedom is the achievement of development dependent on the free agency of people. Free agency itself is a constitutive part of development that also contributes to free agencies of other kinds. The exercises of people’s freedoms plays an important role in the constitutive connection of what people can positively achieve through economic opportunities, social powers, political liberties, basic education, the enabling conditions of good health, and the encouragement and cultivation of initiatives. For example, when people have a broad access to diverse jobs, it increases the opportunity of individual development.
Sen states that to be generically against markets would be almost as odd as being generically against conversations of people. The freedom to exchange things such as words, gifts, and goods are simply a part of the way human beings interact and live in society. It has been widely acknowledged that the market mechanism contributes to high economic growth and to the overall economic process. Adam Smith himself noted that freedom of exchange and transaction is itself part and parcel of the basic liberties that people have reason to value.
Kader Mia was a man who lived in Bangladesh during the communal riots which had great disputes between Hindus and Muslims. Mia was a Muslim daily laborer who was desperate to search for work, as his family had nothing to eat. Mia went into a territory he knew to be hostile towards muslims in search of work so he could provide for his family. Mia was knifed in the back and died later in the same day because of his desperation to provide for his family. This tragic story proves that economic unfreedom can lead to social unfreedom, and that social and political unfreedom also breeds economic unfreedom.
Condorcet was an eighteenth-century rationalist who expected fertility rates to go down with ‘the progress of reason, expecting that greater security, more education, and more freedom would restrain population growth. Malthus, on the other hand, was a influential economist who argued that “there is no reason whatever to suppose that anything beside the difficulty of procuring in adequate plenty the necessities of life should either indispose this greater number of persons to marry early, or disable them from rearing in health the largest families.” This debate of reasoned freedom and economic compulsion is still debated today and can be explored in the Lee theory.
Maitreyee was a woman from the Sanskrit text Brihadaranyaka Upanishad who questioned the strong desire for wealth so many people hold. Her whole point is that no matter how wealthy one is, they cannot become immortal. This is important because it brought about a perspective that was a broader focus on the life one can lead rather than the exclusive concentration on economic wealth. Aristotle noted that “[wealth is] merely useful and for the sake of something else”. This approach emphasizes that economic growth is not the final answer and that people should focus more on enhancing the freedoms in their lives.
Wealth is a tool useful to help one achieve substantive freedoms. Some forms of unfreedoms are famine and being denied political liberty and basic civil rights. Democratic unfreedom is a huge factor when it comes to famine as the working of democracy and political rights can help prevent famines and other economic disasters. No famine has ever occurred in a democratic country-no matter how poor. This is because famines are extremely easy to prevent if a government tries to prevent them.
The per capita income of African Americans in the United States is considerably lower than that of the white population, but African Americans are many times richer in terms of income than the people in China and India. Despite this, men in China and Kerala decisively outlive African American men and white men in America have the highest survival rate. And if you look at African American men in cities like New York City, the gap between the survival rate of African American men and the other groups is much greater. The same comparison is true for the women populations of the same ethnicity, although the survival rates of women are higher overall. This is because African AMerican men in the United states are relatively deprived in terms of income per head and also absolutely more deprived in terms of living to older ages.
The American Civil war holds great context in the process of modern development, as it was a product of the unfreedom of bound labor. The freedom to enter markets, no matter the market mechanism, is incredibly important to promoting development as it promotes economic growth and industrialization. As Sen puts it, the freedom to participate in economic interchange has a basic role in social living.
The “fierce” and “friendly” approach are two general attitudes of the process of development that are important in professional economic analysis and public discussions. The “fierce” approach is built off of “blood, sweat, and tears” and sees the world as a place in which wisdom demands toughness. This method emphasizes risking temptations such as safety nets for the poor, social services for the public, and more since the belief is that these things can be supported later on after the development process has borne enough fruit. The “friendly” approach emphasizes the importance of mutually beneficial exchanges, of which Adam Smith praised, and promotes social safety nets, political liberties, and social development.
Sen explains that the expansion of freedom is viewed as the primary end and the principal means of development, the “constitutive role” and “instrumental role” respectively. The ‘constitutive” role of freedom can alter development analysis. For example, political participation and dissent are constitutive parts of development itself, and development in terms of enhancement of freedoms has to include removing deprivations of such freedoms. The relevance of the deprivations of such basic freedoms doesn’t have to be established through their indirect endowment to other features of development. These freedoms are an essential component of enriching the process of development.
Sen compared the success in development of China from 1979-2001 and India from 1991-2001. China found a lot more success in development when they entered the market economy than India did. This was because China had a friendly approach rather than India’s fierce approach. China focused on basic education and widely shared healthcare before marketization in 1979 whereas India had a half-illiterate adult population when they turned to marketization in 1991.China’s pre-reform social commitment led to great economic growth and social opportunities and the social elitism of India left the country poorly prepared for economic expansion.
Despite China’s growth, however, they were subject to more deprivation than India because of their unfreedom of government. Following the Great Leap Forward, China had the largest recorded famine in history due to their handicap in the lack of democratic freedom.
Life expectancy has a significantly positive correlation with GNP per head. This is mainly seen through the impact GNP has on (1) the incomes specifically of the poor and (2) public expenditure particularly in health care. Life expectancy is not directly enhanced by the growth of GNP per head, but the connection works through public expenditure on health care and the success of poverty removal. This shows that economic growth depends on how the fruits of economic growth are used.
In Hunger and Public Action, Jean Dreze and Sen distinguish between two types of success in the rapid reduction of mortality: Growth-mediated and support-led. Growth-mediated success works through and depends on fast economic growth whereas support-led success works through a program of skillful social support of health care and basic education. The support-led process is greatly displayed by the experiences of the economies of Sri Lanka, pre-reform China, Costa Rica, and Kerala, which have all had incredibly rapid reductions in mortality rates and enhancements of living conditions without much economic growth. The growth-mediated process was shown off in England’s improvement of expected life expectancy the past century because of the rapid economic growth due to wartime.
Support-led success is incredibly dependent on the unique aspects of the advancement of healthcare and education. These social services are very labor intensive which makes them relatively cheap in low-wage economies. This exhibits how important relative prices are in determining what a country can afford. From the previous example, Kerala is especially a great “model” case for this process due to their great leaps in public health yet their struggles economically.
Over the last century, Britain had a life expectancy at birth rate lower than the average low-income country today despite being the leading capitalist economy, however, longevity has risen rapidly over the past century due to strategies of social programs. The two World Wars were responsible for the remarkably fast expansion of support-oriented policies. During both World War One and World War Two, sharing public policies and social arrangements led to a great improvement of British life expectancy. This exemplifies growth-mediated development, as England’s fast growing economy during wartime allowed for such advancements to happen.