Development as Freedom (5 page)

Having greater freedom to do the things one has reason to value is (1) significant in itself for the person’s overall freedom, and (2) important in fostering the person’s opportunity to have valuable outcomes.
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Both are relevant to the evaluation of freedom of the members of the society and thus crucial to the assessment of the society’s development. The reasons for this normative focus (and in particular for seeing justice in terms of individual freedoms and its social correlates) is more fully examined in
chapter 3
.

The second reason for taking substantive freedom to be so crucial is that freedom is not only the basis of the evaluation of success and failure, but it is also a principal determinant of individual initiative and social effectiveness. Greater freedom enhances the ability of people to help themselves and also to influence the world, and these matters are central to the process of development. The concern here relates to what we may call (at the risk of some oversimplification) the “agency aspect” of the individual.

The use of the term “agency” calls for a little clarification. The expression “agent” is sometimes employed in the literature of economics and game theory to denote a person who is acting on someone
else’s behalf (perhaps being led on by a “principal”), and whose achievements are to be assessed in the light of someone else’s (the principal’s) goals. I am using the term “agent” not in this sense, but in its older—and “grander”—sense as someone who acts and brings about change, and whose achievements can be judged in terms of her own values and objectives, whether or not we assess them in terms of some external criteria as well. This work is particularly concerned with the agency role of the individual as a member of the public and as a participant in economic, social and political actions (varying from taking part in the market to being involved, directly or indirectly, in individual or joint activities in political and other spheres).

This has a bearing on a great many public policy issues, varying from such strategic matters as the widespread temptation of policy bosses to use fine-tuned “targeting” (for “ideal delivery” to a supposedly inert population), to such fundamental subjects as attempts to dissociate the running of governments from the process of democratic scrutiny and rejection (and the participatory exercise of political and civil rights).
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On the evaluative side, the approach used here concentrates on a factual base that differentiates it from more traditional practical ethics and economic policy analysis, such as the “economic” concentration on the primacy of
income and wealth
(rather than on the characteristics of human lives and substantive freedoms), the “utilitarian” focus on
mental satisfaction
(rather than on creative discontent and constructive dissatisfaction), the “libertarian” preoccupation with
procedures
for liberty (with deliberate neglect of consequences that derive from those procedures) and so on. The overarching case for a different factual base, which focuses on substantive freedoms that people have reason to enjoy, is examined in
chapter 3
.

This is not to deny that deprivation of individual capabilities can have close links with the lowness of income, which connects in both directions: (1) low income can be a major reason for illiteracy and ill health as well as hunger and undernourishment, and (2) conversely, better education and health help in the earning of higher incomes. These connections have to be fully seized. But there are also other influences on the basic capabilities and effective freedoms that
individuals enjoy, and there are good reasons to study the nature and reach of these interconnections. Indeed, precisely because income deprivations and capability deprivations often have considerable correlational linkages, it is important to avoid being mesmerized into thinking that taking note of the former would somehow tell us enough about the latter. The connections are not that tight, and the departures are often much more important from a policy point of view than the limited concurrence of the two sets of variables. If our attention is shifted from an exclusive concentration on income poverty to the more inclusive idea of capability deprivation, we can better understand the poverty of human lives and freedoms in terms of a different informational base (involving statistics of a kind that the income perspective tends to crowd out as a reference point for policy analysis). The role of income and wealth—important as it is along with other influences—has to be integrated into a broader and fuller picture of success and deprivation.

The implications of this informational base for the analysis of poverty and inequality are examined in
chapter 4
. There are good reasons for seeing poverty as a deprivation of basic capabilities, rather than merely as low income. Deprivation of elementary capabilities can be reflected in premature mortality, significant undernourishment (especially of children), persistent morbidity, widespread illiteracy and other failures. For example, the terrible phenomenon of “missing women” (resulting from unusually higher age-specific mortality rates of women in some societies, particularly in South Asia, West Asia, North Africa, and China) has to be analyzed with demographic, medical and social information, rather than in terms of low incomes, which sometimes tell us rather little about the phenomenon of gender inequality.
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The shift in perspective is important in giving us a different—and more directly relevant—view of poverty not only in the
developing
countries, but also in the more
affluent
societies. The presence of massive unemployment in Europe (10 to 12 percent in many of the major European countries) entails deprivations that are not well reflected in income distribution statistics. These deprivations are
often downplayed on the grounds that the European system of social security (including unemployment insurance) tends to make up for the loss of income of the unemployed. But unemployment is not merely a deficiency of income that can be made up through transfers by the state (at heavy fiscal cost that can itself be a very serious burden); it is also a source of far-reaching debilitating effects on individual freedom, initiative, and skills. Among its manifold effects, unemployment contributes to the “social exclusion” of some groups, and it leads to losses of self-reliance, self-confidence and psychological and physical health. Indeed, it is hard to escape a sense of manifest incongruity in contemporary European attempts to move to a more “self-help” social climate without devising adequate policies for reducing the massive and intolerable levels of unemployment that make such self-help extremely difficult.

Even in terms of the connection between mortality and income (a subject in which Maitreyee was rather overambitious), it is remarkable that the extent of deprivation for particular groups in very rich countries can be comparable to that in the so-called third world. For example, in the United States, African Americans as a group have no higher—indeed have a lower—chance of reaching advanced ages than do people born in the immensely poorer economies of China or the Indian state of Kerala (or in Sri Lanka, Jamaica or Costa Rica).
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This is shown in
figures 1.1
and
1.2
. Even though the per capita income of African Americans in the United States is considerably lower than that of the white population, African Americans are very many times richer in income terms than the people of China or Kerala (even after correcting for cost-of-living differences). In this context, the comparison of survival prospects of African Americans vis-à-vis those of the very much poorer Chinese, or Indians in Kerala, is of particular interest. African Americans tend to do better in terms of survival at low age groups (especially in terms of infant mortality) vis-à-vis the Chinese or the Indians, but the picture changes over the years.

In fact, it turns out that men in China and in Kerala decisively outlive African American men in terms of surviving to older age groups. Even African American women end up having a survival pattern for the higher ages similar to that of the much poorer Chinese, and decidedly lower survival rates than the even poorer Indians in Kerala. So it is not only the case that American blacks suffer from
relative
deprivation in terms of income per head vis-à-vis American whites, they also are
absolutely
more deprived than the low-income Indians in Kerala (for both women and men), and the Chinese (in the case of men), in terms of living to ripe old ages. The causal influences on these contrasts (that is, between living standards judged by income per head and those judged by the ability to survive to higher ages) include social arrangements and community relations such as medical coverage, public health care, school education, law and order, prevalence of violence and so on.
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FIGURE 1.1
:
Variations in Male Survival Rates by Region

Sources:
United States, 1991–1993: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
Health United States 1995
(Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 1996); Kerala, 1991: Government of India,
Sample Registration System: Fertility and Mortality Indicators 1991
(New Delhi: Office of the Registrar General, 1991); China, 1992: World Health Organization,
World Health Statistics Annual 1994
(Geneva: World Health Organization, 1994).

Sources:
United States, 1991–1993: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
Health United States 1995
(Hyattsville, Md.: National Center for Health Statistics, 1996); Kerala, 1991: Government of India,
Sample Registration System: Fertility and Mortality Indicators 1991
(New Delhi: Office of the Registrar General, 1991); China, 1992: World Health Organization,
World Health Statistics Annual 1994
(Geneva: World Health Organization, 1994).

It is also worth noting that African Americans in the United States as a whole include a great many internal diversities. Indeed, if we look at the black male populations in particular U.S. cities (such as New York City, San Francisco, St. Louis or Washington, D.C.), we find that they are overtaken in terms of survival by people from China or Kerala at much earlier ages.
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They are also overtaken by many other third world populations; for example, Bangladeshi men have a better chance of living to ages beyond forty years than African American men from the Harlem district of the prosperous city of New York.
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All this is in spite of the fact that African Americans
in the United States are very many times richer than the people of comparison groups in the third world.

In the foregoing discussion, I have been concentrating on a very elementary freedom: the ability to survive rather than succumb to premature mortality. This is, obviously, a significant freedom, but there are many others that are also important. Indeed, the range of relevant freedoms can be very wide. The extensive coverage of freedoms is sometimes seen as a problem in getting an “operational” approach to development that is freedom-centered. I think this pessimism is ill-founded, but I shall postpone taking up this issue until
chapter 3
, when the foundational approaches to valuation will be considered together.

It should, however, be noted here that the freedom-centered perspective has a generic similarity to the common concern with “quality of life,” which too concentrates on the way human life goes (perhaps even the choices one has) and not just on the resources or income that a person commands.
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The focusing on the quality of life and on substantive freedoms, rather than just on income or wealth, may look like something of a departure from the established traditions of economics, and in a sense it is (especially if comparisons are made with some of the more austere income-centered analysis that can be found in contemporary economics). But in fact these broader approaches are in tune with lines of analysis that have been part of professional economics right from the beginning. The Aristotelian connections are obvious enough (Aristotle’s focus on “flourishing” and “capacity” clearly relates to the quality of life and to substantive freedoms, as has been discussed by Martha Nussbaum).
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There are strong connections also with Adam Smith’s analysis of “necessities” and conditions of living.
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