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August 25, 2002
Freedom — end or means
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze plead the case for human freedoms as an integral part of economic and social development
IT should be clear that we have tended to judge development by the expansion of substantive human freedoms — not just by economic growth (for example, of the gross national product), or technical progress, or social modernization. This is not to deny, in any way, that advances in the latter fields can be very important, depending on circumstances, as ‘instruments’ for the enhancement of human freedom. But they have to be appraised precisely in that light — in terms of their actual effectiveness in enriching the lives and liberties of people — rather than taking them to be valuable in themselves.
We are, of course, much concerned with economic development in particular. However, we cannot interpret economic development merely as expansion in the production of inanimate objects of convenience — the goods and services that are (as Aristotle put it) ‘merely useful and for the sake of something else’. We have to see what these goods and services do to the actual opportunities and freedoms of people, categorized according to class, gender, location, social status, and other relevant distinctions...
The integral nature of human lives leads to inescapable interrelations between the different domains of living. For example, lack of freedom in the form of illiteracy can severely restrict a person’s economic opportunities. School education, thus, not only advances social and cultural freedoms, it also enhances economic opportunities (for example, to get a job and to earn an income). Similarly, income poverty can also make it harder for a person to pursue social goals and even to participate adequately in the exercise of political rights.
Again, democratic and civil rights give a person the opportunity to demand and insist on the fulfilment of economic rights. In the absence of a political voice of the deprived, a government may be immune to public pressure when a policy failure occurs, and it is not surprising that famines, which typically result in one way or another from policy failures, continue to occur only in countries that lack democratic freedoms....
Tryst with destiny
Freedoms are, thus, among the principal means as well as the primary ends of development. How does this freedom-centred view, with its conceptual underpinnings, relate to Jawaharlal Nehru’s stirring public speech on the eve of independence, on an intensely political occasion?
As it happens, they relate very closely indeed. Consider Nehru’s identification of the task of ‘the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity’. Economic poverty in the form of low income limits the lives of people and curbs their freedom to do even the very basic things which they have reason to want to do (like eating adequately or being comfortably clothed and sheltered). The motivation underlying our concern for eliminating poverty clearly relates to the unfreedoms it imposes.
Similarly, illiteracy and what Nehru called, more generally, ‘ignorance’, involve not only a negation of the freedom to read and write, but also an impairment of the opportunity to understand and communicate, to take informed personal decisions, and to participate in social choice. Illiteracy is, in fact, a type of ‘social unfreedom’ and supplements and often intensifies the burden of economic unfreedom in the form of income poverty. Similarly, limitations in health care may be immediately associated with a lack of adequate public or private health facilities (or the inability to afford what is available), but its real rub lies in the lack of freedom to live healthy lives, free from preventable ailments and untimely death.
In effect, by formulating the demands of India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ in the way he did, Nehru pointed to the basic need for the removal of some central constraints that made human lives limited, insecure and unfree. By ambitiously affirming the importance of eliminating these unfreedoms, he was outlining a freedom-oriented commitment to development. Nehru was not, of course, the first person to focus on these issues, even though his emphasis on them in his watershed public speech contributed to the wider use of this type of conceptual approach in practical discussions.
The basic importance of freedoms and opportunities had often been invoked earlier, and had been critically defended, directly or indirectly, by such diverse authors as Aristotle, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Condorcet, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Frank Knight, and Friedrich Hayek, to mention just a few leading theorists who belonged, in other respects, to very different schools of thought.
Furthermore, interest in the freedom-centred view of human predicament and challenge is not confined only to the so-called Western heritage. Many non-Western thinkers have argued in that direction as well. Even two and a half millennia ago, when Gautama Buddha felt moved to leave his princely home in pursuit of enlightenment, he was directly influenced by the sight of three concrete illustrations of unfreedom, related respectively to old age, illness, and death.
Inequality and participation
One of the deprivations to which Nehru made an explicit reference is ‘inequality of opportunity’. The connection between opportunity and freedom is, of course, extremely close, but the pointer specially to inequality of opportunity enriches the investigation in three distinct ways.
First, it emphasizes the need not only to promote freedoms in general (no matter who the beneficiary is), but also to recognize the distributional aspects of freedoms in a society. Since there is, in economics, a tradition of identifying inequality with income distribution, it is important to acknowledge the case for being involved also with inequality of freedoms and opportunities.
Indeed, in so far as freedom provides a better perspective on individual advantage than does the mere size of one’s income, the interest in inequality of freedom has, it can be argued, a greater claim to our attention than income inequality could command. For example, a disabled person, or someone living in an epidemiologically vulnerable location (due, for example, to the prevalence of communicable diseases), can be seen to be particularly disadvantaged vis-a-vis others who have similar income levels but are free from that disability or those epidemiological surroundings.
There is a second reason why the focus on inequality of opportunity can be particularly illuminating in the context of development. In any society, most types of opportunities are enjoyed by some people, but not by others. The unfreedom of a section of the people contrasts with what others can do without any difficulty whatever. Extending freedom widely across the society typically involves countering this division between haves and have-nots. For example, the expansion of elementary schooling would reduce not only the overall extent of illiteracy, but also the inequality of educational achievements. The goal of inequality reduction, thus, fits in well, in general, with that of removing the deprivation of those bereft of basic opportunities.
There is also a third reason for focusing particularly on the issue of inequality of opportunities. This concerns the importance of participation in social change. The ability of people to participate in social decisions has been seen, particularly since the French Revolution, as a valuable characteristic of a good society.
Indeed, the subject of ‘social choice theory’, with its focus on the participation of members of the society in the making of social decisions, emerged as a discipline in the late eighteenth century, and that development was, to a great extent, inspired by the participatory focus of contemporary revolutionary thought. For example, one of the principal theorists of the French Revolution, Marquis de Condorcet, was also the main founder of the discipline of social choice theory.
Participation is intimately connected with demands of equality. At the most immediate level, democratic participation requires the sharing and symmetry of basic political rights — to vote, to propagate and to criticize. Actual participation in political movements and public action can make a major difference to the agenda of governments and influence its priorities.
Going beyond that elementary and fundamental association, another important causal connection is that political participation can be more effective and more equally enjoyed if there is some equity in the sharing of economic resources as well. Indeed, economic inequality can seriously compromise the quality of democracy, for example through the influence of money on electoral processes, on public decision-making, and on the content of the media. Overcoming the inequalities of power associated with economic privilege is an important aspect of democracy in the full sense of the term.
This integrating claim should not be confused with the very different claim that democracy is worthless or unimportant in the presence of sharp economic disparities. That reactionary argument with an apparently progressive veneer has supposedly provided intellectual justifications of much tyranny and arbitrary authoritarianism in the world. The sharing of political power need not be postponed until economic power is widely generated and equitably shared.
We have to acknowledge that many democratic countries have achieved much success in the practice of sharing political power despite the economic divisions between the rich and the poor. But in the same spirit, we must avoid taking what has been achieved as just fine, and acknowledge inter alia the adverse effects of economic inequality on effective political participation.
Social inequalities too can seriously interfere with equality of political participation. Divisions of power and influence related to caste, gender and even education can, in many situations, make the socially underprivileged also politically marginalized. Here again, it is important to recognize the adverse effects of inequality on political participation, and also the possibility of countering this by promoting greater social equality as well as by overcoming the association between social privilege and political power.
Participation and equality are extremely important also in extending the use of economic and social facilities that a nation can offer. For example, those who are solicitous of the idea that opportunities of market transaction should be open rather than restricted have good reason to consider not only the liberty of the rich to participate in market activities, but also the opportunity of the poor to join in what the market can offer.
This is one reason, among others, why initiatives geared to the economic participation of disadvantaged groups (e.g. through asset redistribution, or the creation of microcredit facilities, or the diffusion of skills) can be very significant. Similarly, the ability of the underprivileged to make use of public services such as health centres, government offices and the courts is often undermined by the social distance that separates them from those who run these services. This type of participation, too, can be promoted through means such as educational advancement and political organization.
Excerpted with permission from
India: development and participation
By Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen
Oxford University Press, New Delhi. Available at Oxford University Press, 5 Bangalore Town, Sharae Faisal, Karachi-75350 Tel: 021-4529025
Email: ouppak@theoffice.net
ISBN 019565875-2 512pp. Rs600
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