(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Amartya Sen: Development as Freedom [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-14 We have seen Milton Friedman’s delusional notions of negative freedom for the privileged. Now we can contrast Amartya Sen’s notions of positive freedom for all the rest of the world. Friedman saw almost all government activities as impinging on personal freedom, and thus leading to tyranny. Sen saw how necessary government is to preventing or correcting market failures, including famine, plagues, poverty, and oppression, where the means of saving and bettering lives exist but are unavailable to those who need them most unless government lends a hand. We live in a world of unprecedented opulence,…And yet we also live in a world with remarkable deprivation, destitution and oppression…We have to recognize, it is argued here, the role of freedoms of different kinds in countering these afflictions…To counter the problems that we face, we have to see individual freedom as a social commitment. We also get to contrast Sen’s data-driven approach with Friedman’s handwaving suppositions. This work outlines the need for an integrated analysis of economic, social and political activities, involving a variety of institutions and many interconnections between certain crucial instrumental freedoms, including economic opportunities, political freedoms, social facilities, transparency guarantees, and protective security. It should be obvious that this is a topic far too broad to cover in a DK Story such as this one. Indeed, it is far too broad for Sen’s book, which had to be content with asking the essential questions, pointing out blind alleys, and leaving it to others to some answers. Sen was greatly influenced by Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values, which we will come to soon. However, he did his graduate work in an academic environment hostile to such ideas, and chose as the topic of his Ph. D. dissertation a disastrous notion of keeping wages constant and putting all of the national surplus into raising the rate of growth of that surplus. In the US we know this abysmally failed doctrine as Reaganomics. He then did important technical work on the limits of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem, which shows that no ranked-order voting system can simultaneously satisfy all of the most desirable criteria for choice. We’ll get to that, too, because Arrow covered the theorem in his book. Then Sen wrote Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), a book in which he argued that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food. Sen also argued that the Bengal famine was caused by an urban economic boom that raised food prices, thereby causing millions of rural workers to starve to death when their wages did not keep up.[20] In 1999 he wrote, "no famine has ever taken place ... in a functioning democracy".[21] What, in concrete terms, are Sen’s “crucial instrumental freedoms”, and why does he tell us that they are necessary for development? Wrong question. They ARE development. Development can be seen, it is argued here, as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. 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. Five distinct types of freedom, seen in an "instrumental" perspective, are particularly investigated in the empirical studies that follow. These include political freedoms economic facilities social opportunities transparency guarantees protective secu rity More particularly, Sen discusses Life Health Food Housing Education Employment Access to information Voting Women’s rights Family planning Justice Reducing economic inequality Say! Do you recognize Bidenomics here? The difference that is made by seeing freedom as the principal ends of development can be illustrated with a few simple examples. it is often asked whether certain political or social freedoms, such as the liberty of political participation and dissent, or opportunities to receive basic education, are or are not "conducive to development." The point is often made that African Americans in the United States are relatively poor compared with American whites, though much richer than people in the third world. It is, however, important to recognize that African Americans have an absolutely lower chance of reaching mature ages than do people of many third world societies. These frequent questions and points are morally and economically perverse Dog Whistles to justify Wrong-Wingers in their hostility to those in need. They are in some ways akin to the doctrine of “building Socialism” for the far distant future, rather than implementing civil and economic rights in the here and now, in the Soviet Union and other “Communist” countries. The rest of the book then elaborates on those examples, and the mechanisms by which various essential freedoms interlink and support each other. Sen’s empirical data are now decades out of date, and we discuss the current versions widely here on DK and in the wider societies of the nation and the world every day. The principles still stand up better than ever. We can even add new freedoms from time to time, such as infrastructure, mobile phones, broadband, and renewable electricity. Disclosure: See my early Diary The Constitution as Catch-22. I maintain that the zeroth principle of Constitutional law, indeed all law, is Catch-22: We have a right to do anything you can't prevent us from doing. The zeroth question thus becomes, "How can we prevent them from violating our rights, or punish them for doing so?" In other words, what remedies do we have? Sen is all about such remedies. Note: I had planned to write about Pareto optima today, but then I found out something about Pareto’s complicated political history. I want to learn more before I write about his contributions to economics. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/14/2199213/-Amartya-Sen-Development-as-Freedom?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/