IS FREEDOM WEALTH?

Development as
Freedom
Amartya Sen
Alfred A. Knopf, $27.50, 366 pp.

For many years I have taught courses on economic development. In my classes this subject is fundamentally concerned with the causes and consequences of technological change. The basic story I tell is that a profound gap in levels of economic development exists among nations in the contemporary world. The fundamental determinant of where a country ranks in development is the extent to which its businesses and people have mastered the application of advanced technology to production. The greater the degree of this mastery, the higher the level of economic development. The utilization of advanced technology results in an enhanced ability to produce goods and services and that, in turn, tends to result in improved living conditions.

In my discussion I take care, however, to distinguish between achieving economic development and building what I call a "good society." The latter I describe as one in which members of a country's population possess roughly equal life opportunities and where there is the ability to participate equally in decision making. I note that unfortunately there is no necessary connection between a developed and a good society. Neither historically nor at the present time can it be said that economic development either originates in good societies or necessarily produces them. In the United States, for example, the process of economic development was initiated in an era when slavery was a thriving institution, and today dramatic technological changes are occurring while the distribution of income and wealth in the country becomes increasingly uneven. While I myself do not believe that a good society is possible without taking advantage of advanced technology, it is clear that the latter alone is not enough to ensure a society of justice.

It is this way of presenting development, shared by many economists, that is fundamentally challenged by Amartya Sen in his book Development as Freedom. Sen, a Nobel Prize winner, acknowledges that the growth of the gross national product per person, the measure that draws the attention of the economics profession, is important in development. But he is not satisfied with that as a measure of the process. For Sen, the criterion of development used by the economists is unacceptable because it is too narrow. Instead, as the title of his book suggests, he argues that development can be said to occur only when freedom-itself very broadly inclusive of social and economic elements-is advanced.

Sen's concept of freedom-and therefore development-includes the avoidance of "starvation, undernourishment, escapable morbidity and premature mortality as well as the freedoms that are associated with being literate and numerate, enjoying political participation and uncensored speech." Only when these "freedoms" advance is development successful. Freedom, according to Sen, should not be thought of either as a means to achieve development nor as an objective to be compromised or deferred in the name of facilitating economic growth. The freedoms that interest him "have to be understood as constitutive parts of the ends of development in themselves." That is, if increasing "freedom" is not integral to the process of social change, development is not occurring.

On the very first page of the book, Sen makes explicit his motivation for reconceptualizing development as freedom. He has a political agenda-in the broadest meaning of that term. Sen writes, "Viewing development in terms of expanding substantive freedoms directs attention to the ends that make development important, rather than merely to some of the means that, inter alia, play a prominent part in the process." Development, Sen believes, 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." With his approach it would not be possible in the name of development to do something that many development practitioners and theorists do: dismiss as a second-order concern the fact that "despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers-perhaps even the majority-of people."

Sen's volume is important because it will allow advocates for the poor to employ the work of a Nobel Prize economist in policy debates. In formulating their programs, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for example, will be told, on Sen's authority, that when they look at a country's economic performance, their evaluation should be judged "primarily by the substantive freedoms that the members of that society enjoy."

Because he provides an enhanced voice for citizens-especially poor people- in an age of globalization in which mammoth corporations seem ever more powerful, I would like nothing more than to agree with Sen that development should be defined as the expansion of human freedom. Agreeing would allow me to achieve a synthesis of my own professional and political concerns that have sought to advance both economic prosperity and political democracy. Since I do not believe that one necessarily implies the other, my constant worry is that I may not be paying enough attention to one when I address the other. That problem is nonexistent in Sen's framework. With his definition, unless both are promoted, neither is.

That said, I confess to not being able to accept Sen's definition of development. I resist because I believe that conflating development and freedom makes it impossible to investigate precisely the problem that animates Sen: why technological change has been only partially liberating. In the United States, for example, a country of undeniable technical prowess, many are denied the kinds of freedom with which Sen is concerned, something that Sen himself documents in his discussion of African-American mortality rates. Correcting that denial of freedom, however, requires that we think analytically about the nature and use of advanced technology and why its positive impact is as constrained as it is. In this, Sen's formulation that "development can be seen...as a process of expanding the freedoms that people enjoy" is not helpful. More nearly the opposite is the case. If as technology advances we are going to extend the scope of freedom, we will have to engage in careful study of the interface between the two. That requires that we conceptualize the two separately, and not as Sen would have it, as "constituent components" of each other.

Jay R. Mandle is the W. Bradford Wiley Professor of economics at Colgate University.