Goods and People
The "Capabilities" Approach of Amartya Sen

Sen's starting assumption: "Development" (i.e., "sustainable development") for people living in squalor and "absolute poverty" is desirable and a proper goal of public policy.

Sen's question: Given the starting assumption, what should be measured and targeted as we work for development?

Sen lists four candidates:

1. goods and services (commodities)

2. utilities (happiness)

3. basic needs

4. capabilities

Sen's arguments against candidate #1:

a. Dividing gross productivity (goods and services) by population count leaves out distribution variables.

b. Commodity measures (e.g., food consumed) need not correspond with true values (e.g., nutrition), since human welfare depends on several factors (including, e.g., knowledge of nutrition and health).

c. Emphasis on commodities sustains "commodity fetishism" (Marx, 1887).

Sen's arguments against candidate #2:

á  Happiness (desire fulfillment) represents only one human value (leaving out, e.g., being free to pursue happiness).

á  The utilitarian metric muffles or submerges "defeatist compromises with harsh reality induced by hopelessness" (the "cheerful servant syndrome").

á  Structural problems in institutions promoting exploitation and inequalities (the real problems) are not identified.

á  Removing deprivations of "starvation, poverty, inequity, exploitation, illiteracy,'' and others is viewed not as good in itself but only as instrumentally valuable.

Sen's arguments against candidate #3:

á  Basic needs (nutrition, health, shelter, water and sanitation, education) are defined in terms of commodities, and commodity-bundles need not correspond with true values.

á  Some values, for instance, "the ability to appear in public without shame," have no commodity-metric, and are determined, for example, through social interdependence.  (NB. Sen believes in reforming even intra-family practices, and is much more intent on local reform than, e.g., the Ecologist editors with their emphasis on local autonomy.)

á  To look only at "minimum specified quantities" leaves out the metrics of comparative advantage and disadvantage relevant to making public policy in rich countries.

á  "Needs" is too passive a concept, denigrating the autonomy of persons being helped.

Sen's argument in favor of candidate #4:

The capabilities approach suffers none of these defects but fosters targeting of matters that make a real difference in improving the lots of the unutterably poor and indeed everyone. 

---

Sen's attack on environmentalism:

1.  Models of economic collapse, though easy to construct, are, all told, not plausible.  (Compare McKibben on Condorset.)

2. "Neo-Malthusianism" invariably uses metrics in its pessimistic predictions that are one-sided, e.g., food production, thus often masking the real problems, e.g., nutrition and food entitlement.

3.  "Neo-Malthusianism" unrighteously distracts attention from the present to the future.  ("The real problem is not that the world will turn beastly, but that it is beastly already").