Development As Freedom

The title of this book—Development as Freedom—outlines one of its most important themes. Sen’s most important argument throughout the book is that policy makers and the development community must reconceptualize development’s goal as enhancing individual freedoms rather than merely considering income. Sen uses “freedom” to encompass a wide range of capabilities people should have. Besides civil liberties like free speech, Sen includes the ability to acquire enough food to eat, to be educated, to access healthcare, and to be socially accepted in society, as well as the right to transparency in government and business.

Freedoms or “capabilities” give people the ability to choose a “functioning” or life that they may reasonably desire. Freedoms must be “substantive,” in that a person can actually achieve the desired functioning rather than merely having a theoretical right to it. This broad definition has long roots in the global development community; it goes back, for example, to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inclusion of “freedom from want” as one of the four freedoms he envisioned as a foundation for the postwar world. The fact that many people still lack some of these capabilities, including the ability to feed themselves, is a scandalous deprivation of freedom, particularly as the world grows richer. Sen warns: “Despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to a vast number—perhaps the majority—of people” (3-4). This deprivation of freedoms demands that economists’ approach to development be recontextualized to more broadly consider people’s wellbeing, rather than focus solely on a reductionistic income approach. It directly challenges thinkers and policy makers (particularly like Lee, the mildly authoritarian leader of Singapore) who assert that civil liberties can be ignored for the sake of economic growth.

Sen places freedom as the goal of development and the primary instrument to achieve that goal. As he says, “in this approach, expansion of freedom is viewed as both (1) the primary end and (2) the principal means of development” (36). In considering freedom as the primary end or goal of development, Sen argues that guaranteeing freedom is the best way to protect a person’s total wellbeing. A simplistic focus on income fails to capture other aspects of life that make it worthwhile. Utilitarian analysis of aggregate “utility” (usually via ranked preference) for a community ignores rights and inequality, including how such inequality may hamper marginalized people’s ability to hope for the same kind of goods that the more fortunate enjoy. However, a person’s freedom to choose the life they desire encompasses all aspects of their wellbeing that are important to that person. It also simply has value in itself. Sen points out that historical research has demonstrated that some enslaved people had greater food security than the free poor, along with similar life expectancies, “yet slaves did run away, and there were excellent reasons for presuming that the interest of the slaves were not well served by the system of slavery” (29). Since enslavement was bad even when it met normal development criteria such as income, then its opposite—freedom—is desirable.

Sen argues that freedom not only serves as the goal by which development ought to be evaluated, but it is also the means to achieve that goal. Economists in the last quarter of the 20th century shifted decisively in favor of the free market system as the key to development in poorer countries. Sen agrees that an open and free market, in which people can sell their labor or negotiate mutually advantageous deals, is desirable. This is both due to the principle of freedom and due to its practical benefits, as both theoretical modeling and real-world statistical analysis show. He even goes to say that “it is hard to see how any reasonable critic could be against the market mechanism as such” (142), though he does immediately note that critics can and ought to challenge ways in which the privileged may try to undermine the free market. Critics also reasonably assert that market solutions cannot solve every kind of development problem.

However, the biggest reason that Sen claims that freedom is the key instrument for development is because of the “mutually reinforcing connections between freedoms of different kinds” (4). Social freedoms, including education, allow people to not only work more productively (thereby increasing economic freedom and income), but also to understand the implications of economic and financial information (such as transparency) and to participate rationally in political dialogue. The freedom of speech and related civil rights allow the needs of the common people to enter the public consciousness and shape policy. Voting rights hold the powerful accountable to implement policy that meets these concerns about unfreedoms, from which people suffer. These interconnections have many practical variants. Educating women, for example, has empirically been shown to reduce child mortality rates more effectively than many direct interventions.

Freedom, broadly conceived, encompasses the full range of those capabilities that make a person’s life worthwhile. Making freedom the focus of development, Sen argues, allows a better evaluation of how well people are overcoming existing problems, and it also gives them the tools to do so.