Amartya Sen

Capability and Well-Being

Amartya Sen (1933–) was born and educated in India before completing his doctorate in economics at Cambridge University. He has taught in India, England, and the United States and is currently the Lamont University Professor at Harvard University. He is one of the most widely read and influential living economists. His books have been translated into more than thirty languages. In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Price in Economics for his work on welfare economics, poverty and famines, and human development. He has also made major contributions to contemporary political philosophy. In this essay, he proposes that alternatives be appraised by looking to the capabilities they provide for individuals rather than only by individual utilities, incomes, or resources (as in commonly used theories). Introduction Capability is not an awfully attractive word. It has a technocratic sound, and to some it might even suggest the image of nuclear war strategists rubbing their hands in pleasure over some contingent plan of heroic barbarity. The term is not much redeemed by the historical Capability Brown praising particular pieces of land – not human beings – on the solid real-estate ground that they ‘had capabilities’. Perhaps a nicer word could have been chosen when some years ago I tried to explore a particular approach to well-being and advantage in terms of a persons ability to do valuable acts or reach valuable states of being.

Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement

The primary aim of this paper is to propose a new measure of poverty, which should avoid some of the shortcomings of the measures currently in use. An axiomatic approach is used to derive the measure. The conception of welfare in the axiom set is ordinal. The information requirement for the new measure is quite limited, permitting practical use.

The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal

The purpose of this paper is to present an impossibility result that seems to have some disturbing consequences for principles of social choice. A common objection to the method of majority decision is that it is illiberal. The argument takes the following form: Given other things in the society, if you prefer to have pink walls rather than white, then society should permit you to have this, even if a majority of the community would like to see your walls white. Similarly, whether you should sleep on your back or on your belly is a matter in which the society should permit you absolute freedom, even if a majority of the community is nosey enough to feel that you must sleep on your back. We formalize this concept of individual liberty in an extremely weak form and examine its consequences.

Human Rights and Capabilities

The two concepts — human rights and capabilities — go well with each other, so long as we do not try to subsume either concept entirely within the territory of the other. There are many human rights that can be seen as rights to particular capabilities. However, human rights to important process freedoms cannot be adequately analysed within the capability framework. Furthermore, both human rights and capabilities have to depend on the process of public reasoning. The methodology of public scrutiny draws on Rawlsian understanding of ‘objectivity’ in ethics, but the impartiality that is needed cannot be confined within the borders of a nation. Public reasoning without territorial confinement is important for both.

Utilitarianism and Beyond

Preface Introduction: utilitarianism and beyond Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams 1. Ethical theory and utilitarianism R. M. Hare 2. Morality and the theory of rational behaviour John C. Harsanyi 3. The economic uses of utilitarianism J. A. Mirrlees 4. Utilitarianism, uncertainty and information Peter J. Hammond 5. Contractualism and utilitarianism T. M. Scanlon 6. The diversity of goods Charles Taylor 7. Morality and convention Stuart Hampshire 8. Social unity and primary goods John Rawls 9. On some difficulties of the utilitarian economist Frank Hahn 10. Utilitarianism, information and rights Partha Dasgupta 11. Sour grapes - utilitarianism and the genesis of wants Jon Elster 12. Liberty and welfare Isaac Levi 13. Under which descriptions? Frederic Schick 14. Whats the use of going to school? Amy Gutmann Bibliography.

The concept of development

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the concept of development. It is not hard to see why the concept of development is so essential to economics in general. Economic problems involve logistic issues, and a lot of it is undoubtedly “engineering” of one kind or another. On the other hand, the success of all this has to be judged ultimately in terms of what it does to the lives of human beings. The enhancement of living conditions must clearly be an essential,if not the essential object of the entire economic exercise and that enhancement is an integral part of the concept of development. Even though the logistic and engineering problems involved in enhancing living conditions in the poor, developing countries might well be very different from those in the rich, developed ones, there is much in common in the respective exercises on the two sides of the divide. The close link between economic development and economic growth is simultaneously a matter of importance as well as a source of considerable confusion. The importance of “growth” must depend on the nature of the variable the expansion of which is considered and seen as “growth.” The chapter discusses a number of different sources of contrast that have to be clearly distinguished from each other, while drawing a distinction between development and growth. The well-being of a person can be seen as an evaluation of the functionings achieved by that person. This approach has been implicitly used by Adam Smith and Karl Marx in particular. The concept of development is by no meansunproblematic. The different problems underlying the concept have become clearer over the years based on conceptual discussions as well as from insights emerging from empirical work.

Health: perception versus observation

Critical scrutiny of public health care and medical strategy depends, among other things, on how individual states of health and illness are assessed. One of the complications in evaluating health states arises from the fact that a persons own understanding of his or her health may not accord with the appraisal of medical experts. More generally, there is a conceptual contrast between “internal” views of health (based on the patients own perceptions) and “external” views (based on the observations of doctors or pathologists). Although the two views can certainly be combined (a good practitioner would be interested in both), major tension often exists between evaluations based respectively on the two perspectives. The external view has come under considerable criticism recently, particularly from anthropological perspectives, for taking a distanced and less sensitive view of illness and health. 1 2 It has also been argued that public health decisions are quite often inadequately responsive to the patients own understanding …

Maximization and the Act of Choice

The act of choosing can influence maximizing behaviour for at least two distinct reasons: 1) process significance and 2) decisional inescapability. The constructive programme of the paper is combined with critical appraisal of the implications of these concerns for rational decisions about actions and strategies, and their relevance for empirical studies of economic, social and political behaviour.

Human Development and Economic Sustainability

Abstract This paper attempts to integrate the concern for human development in the present with that in the future. In arguing for sustainable human development, it appeals to the notion of ethical “universalism”—an elementary demand for impartiality of claims—applied within and between generations. Economic sustainability is often seen as a matter of intergenerational equity, but the specification of what is to be sustained is not always straightforward. The addendum explores the relationship between distributional equity, sustainable development, optimal growth, and pure time preference.

Peasants and Dualism with or without Surplus Labor

AMARTYA K. SEN * University of Delhi T HIS paper has four objects. In the first section the economic equilibrium of a peasant family is studied. In the second section we discuss the theory of surplus labor and disguised unemployment and, more generally, the response of peasant output to a withdrawal of the working population. The third section goes into an analysis of a dual equilibrium of a partly peasant, partly capitalist agriculture. In the last section some observations are made on the efficiency of resource allocation in peasant agriculture and in share-cropping. Illustrations on the working of peasant agriculture come mostly from India, though the general framework might be of somewhat wider interest.