Pseudoblog: Notes on Sen’s Development as Freedom

Research / Theory

Reflections on Freedom as Development (sen1999development?)

Freedom in development is both constitutive and instrumental

• Freedom is the goal of development (i.e. constitutive of development), and it also begets more freedom, making it instrumental for achieving development.
• Modern, though not traditional, economics focuses primarily on instrumental, rather than constitutive.
• Over-simplification: growth must precede social services: Sen argues that many social services are labor intensive, meaning they can be relatively cheaply provided prior to (or at early stages of) GNP growth.
• Social services, especially education, may also provide a foundation and launchpad for rapid growth. This may explain the ‘east asian miracle’, where Japan and China had long invested in education prior to market-based growth. Because of widespread (noneconomic) capabilities, their economic growth was explosive by historical standards.
  • Empirically, he points to studies which indicate that it is not GNP per se that provides important social benefits, but rather the investment of that growth into social protection and healthcare. In cross-country regression, the relationship between GNP and life expectancy largely disappeared once investment in social services was controlled for. Adding GNP atop explained very additional.
  • Gabon is the unfortunate example with relatively high GNP (to Kerala for instance). This may also be related to the resources curse.
• Political rights are a luxury: He points to the powerful statistic that a democracy, no matter how poor, has never experienced a famine. This is because famine are relatively cheap to avoid if a government is motivated.

Does Sen Take a Strong Positive Liberty Stance?

• Sen takes a sharp stand against appeals to traditional norms if they limit the ability for people to participate. That is, any traditional value which limits the enabling factors for people to take political action – such as education, free communication/speech, or political voice – cannot be defended via appeal to freedom.
• That is, you cannot make the circular argument that people are free to select unfreedom for others, at least not structurally. Of course, any individual can chose to bar themselves from these freedoms.
  • This is somewhat related to John Christman‘s argument that positive freedom requires people are able to select their desires via rationality, rather than social pressure or indoctrination. More explicitly: Sen would say that, if a group (e.g. women) were denied education or indoctrinated to not desire some rights, they cannot truly ’freely’ select this desire.

Information basis, and conceptions of justice

• Sen opens with a wonderful mini-puzzle. If an employer can only employ one person, all poor. Who should she employ:
  • The absolute poorest (poorest in terms of money)
    • Reducing absolute poorest defined as income
  • The one who is experiencing most disutility (poorest in terms of utility)
    • Reducing absolute poorest defined by utility
  • The one who would gain the most marginal utility (highest utility value in return for work)
    • Maximizing utility (there is another version of this where it solves a income trap and maximizes total money)

Heterogeneity in capability to ‘convert’ commodities into utility

Money has different impacts depending on individual characteristics: 1. Personal heterogeneities: physical, mental, etc. 2. Environmental: climate, including temperature, weather, disease, and access to land types. 3. Social climate: culture, social services, social networks (capital), law/order, institutions, and religion. 4. Relational perspectives, inter-social: Variation on relative status — e.g., what one needs to “appear in public without shame” (pp. 72). 5. Distribution intra-family: Rules and norms for distribution of goods within the family.

Sen vs. Rawls on Primary Goods

• Rawls has a concept of primary goods, which are distinguishable from income:
  • Rights, liberties, opportunities, income/wealth, and social bases for self-respect.
    • These primary goods are related to individuals’ ability to pursue their conception of the good.
    • Having the same basket of primary goods is the basis of justice, as individuals take responsibility for their own preferences.
• Sen moderately disagrees. He notes that the same basket of goods (whether primary or not) does not contain the capabilities to convert these into utility (see 98 Timestamps/Daily notes/2024/12-December/22-Sunday#Heterogeneity in capability to ‘convert’ commodities into utility)

Sen & Democracy

• Common argument: the poor want economic development before democracy, and empirically, these two as in tension (Lee Kuan Yew thesis).
  • Sen argues these premises are wrong:
    • Poor people do want democracy. Example: Indira Gandhi overwhelmingly lost an election on this point.
    • Statistically, no evidence shows authoritarianism out-develops democracies (Acemoglu et al. argue the opposite).
    • Sen rejects the claim that democracy is a “Western” value.

Democracy has three roles in developement

• Democracy has 3 roles in development:
  1. Direct (constitutive) role: Democracy is an end of development.
  2. Instrumental role: Democracy is a means of development.
  3. Constructive role: Democracy constructs the conceptual needs and wants that people pursue.
     This is a process role that defines the ends.

Constructive Role

• Debate and discussion shape what people have a reason to want.
• Groups cannot collectively decide what they want without deliberation.
• Choices must be informed and reflected through:
  • Debate, discussion, criticism, and dissent.
• Preferences depend on these processes.
• Many preferences are integral to development: Example: fertility rates.
• Discussion induces a social response to wants, values, or needs: Example: universal education or food access.

Democracy and its dependence on ‘exercise’

• A powerful point made by Sen is that democracy’s capability potential is not self-actualizing. It requires people to deploy that freedom in pursuit of greater. This is in comparison to a vaccine, in which the cause is mechanically actualized by providing the formula (and meeting certain conditions, e.g. cold chain).
• Democracy (and freedoms generally) cannot guarantee any specific outcome but, it has the most potential for improving capabilities.
  • Avoids famines (even if not malnutrition).
  • Undervotes exist even in mature democracies (e.g., the U.S.).
• Democracy does not work mechanically as a universal remedy.
• Must be positively guarded:
  • “This is a basic feature of freedoms generally—much depends on how they are exercised.”
• Opposition political groups may greatly influence governance without gaining power:
  • By inducing the leading party to compete in providing services.
  • This also operates in non-democratic contexts.

Theory of animosity towards minority ethnics (Courtin et al. 2023)

• Courtin, Nellis, and Weaver (2023) use an original dataset from Myanmar 2017 (shortly before the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya) to identify the drivers of genocide by connecting this to later administrative and event data.
• They find poverty is closely related to anti-Muslim attitudes, and that this is most associated with scapegoating, rather than resources competition.
  • Control for education levels of individual and township level characteristics.
  • Difference between wealthiest and poorest anti-Muslim sentiment is 14.5 to 24.6 percentage point, for ‘wholly intolerant’ on a question battery.
  • Anti-Muslim sentiment does not increase for more mixed communities, going against resource competition.