Sen's Capability approach evaluated

The main cause of poverty globally is that pairs of people have the capability to make other people even if they are themselves poor and have no means to ensure these new people won't themselves be poor. The main driver for  the accumulation of wealth arises in a non-linear manner from rents associated with such pairings.

One sort of rent relates to wiping the bums of the the product of pairings. Another relates to pedagogy of a worthless sort which, however, might distract its audience from masturbation or pairing off.


The Internet encyclopedia of Philosophy- which is one type of pedagogy- tells us about its conception of capabilities. You will notice it does not mention either why poverty or wealth exists. This is because its mission is to prevent young people from mounting each other incessantly or just sitting in a corner drooling and jizzing repetitively.

The Capability Approach attempts to address various concerns that Sen had about contemporary approaches to the evaluation of well-being, namely:
(1) Individuals can differ greatly in their abilities to convert the same resources into valuable functionings (‘beings’ and ‘doings’). For example, those with physical disabilities may need specific goods to achieve mobility, and pregnant women have specific nutritional requirements to achieve good health. Therefore, evaluation that focuses only on means, without considering what particular people can do with them, is insufficient.

Suppose I wish to eradicate poverty by assigning every human being a basic equivalent of 1 Iyerian Dinar per year. This Iyerian Dinar is convertible into 10 million US dollars at any Iyerian Dinar Exchange in a neighbouring galaxy. Thus everyone is now, in some sense, a dollar millionaire and has more than sufficient means.

Would an evaluation of actual poverty discover that there were no more poor people? No, because of my stipulation that that Iyerian Dinars can only be used to purchase access to this blog. Thus, when we consider what particular people can to do with the means I have so generously provided them with, we find that individuals differ considerably in their ability to convert reading my blog into valuable 'functionings'- e.g. being well fed or having adequate shelter.


It is for this reason that there had never been any approach to the evaluation of 'well-being' which focused only on means. Thus, in practice, entitlements increased if a person had a disability- e.g. a blind or crippled ex-soldier received a larger pension. Insurance payouts as well as damages awarded by the courts similarly took 'what particular people could do' into consideration.


Of course, for purposes of comparing large groups of people, such consideration would be irrelevant because they would tend to cancel each other out.


Did Sen come up with a way to measure what disabled people could do if properly assisted? No. Don't be silly. He didn't come up with anything at all. He just stated the bleedin' obvious mate and then went on repeating it decade after decade till people thought maybe other philolsophers or economists were so stupid they didn't already know this.

(2) People can internalize the harshness of their circumstances so that they do not desire what they can never expect to achieve. This is the phenomenon of ‘adaptive preferences’ in which people who are objectively very sick may, for example, still declare, and believe, that their health is fine. Therefore, evaluation that focuses only on subjective mental metrics is insufficient without considering whether that matches with what a neutral observer would perceive as their objective circumstances,.

Evaluation is wholly worthless.  What matters is identifying a way a particular group of people can be made better off and then actually doing the thing.
There are no prizes for giving prizes at the Olympics. Any lard ass bureaucrat can hand out prizes. It is winning those prizes which is difficult and therefore worth doing.

Desiring to evaluate other people's first order work is not a type of second order work which is itself similarly worthwhile. Sen may have internalized the harshness of his circumstances- viz. teaching a subject he was shit at- by not desiring to actually help poor people in developing countries by making them less poor but rather by talking worthless, mischievous, shite. This does not mean we should not judge him to be a worthless shithead just because he desired to be a worthless shithead. Rather we should judge him to be a worhtless shithead because, by any objective metric related to the real world, not shite academic papers or bureaucratic boondogle- he was and is a worthless shithead.

(3) Whether or not people take up the options they have, the fact that they do have valuable options is significant. For example, even if the nutritional state of people who are fasting and starving is the same, the fact that fasting is a choice not to eat should be recognized. Therefore evaluation must be sensitive to both actual achievements (‘functionings’) and effective freedom (‘capability’).

Where was there ever a fool stupid enough to think a guy who was fasting was actually starving? Which philosopher or economist made that mistake?

Anyway the fact that people have valuable options is not significant. Rather one must focus on whether it is common knowledge they have those options and what's more whether they have Muth rationality- i.e. act in accordance with the predictions of the correct economic theory.

Otherwise a man who is fasting may actually be starving if the only reason he is fasting is because it isn't common knowledge that he has a stash of chocolate bars under his bedding. He is hoping his audience gets bored and leaves so he can eat his fill.

One important consequence is that Sen's analysis can have no purchase in situations where hedging occurs or there are large 'income' effects.This is because common knowledge of the capability would destroy it. The guy fasting while hiding chocolate bars will starve when the audience gains 'common knowledge' of his stash and pushes him aside and devours his stock. There are many hedges which are only effective if the arbitrage opportunity they arise out of isn't common knowledge but rather represents an informational rent or derives from 'adaptive expectations' rather than Muth rational common knowledge. Income effects can have a similar effect and can lead to market failure.

(4) Reality is complicated and evaluation should reflect that complexity rather than take a short-cut by excluding all sorts of information from consideration in advance. For example, although it may seem obvious that happiness matters for the evaluation of how well people are doing, it is not all obvious that it should be the only aspect that ever matters and so nothing else should be considered. Therefore, evaluation of how well people are doing must seek to be as open-minded as possible. (Note: This leads to the deliberate ‘under-theorization’ of the Capability Approach that has been the source of some criticism, and it motivated the development of Nussbaum’s alternative Capability Theory.)

Evaluation shouldn't be done by stupid people or, indeed, smart people, unless the thing more than pays for itself. But, in that case, it is a first order public good and must compete with other first order public goods. The moment it is considered a second order public good it will start crowding out first order good. Academics seeking to escape very poor countries, where they may be required to show how their worthless shite every helped anybody, may wish to migrate to greener pastures on the basis of this sort of bogus 'evaluation' but they are locusts simply and will crash any research program which employs them.

An important part of Sen’s argument for the Capability Approach relates to his critique of alternative philosophical and economics accounts. 

This is the rub. By the Seventies it was obvious that utility maximisation was silly. Regret minimisation was the way to go. Sen couldn't see it so talked worthless shite for decade after decade as if in obedience to Rothbard's Law- 'economists specialise in what they are worst at.'

In particular, he argues that, whatever their particular strengths, none of them provide an analysis of well-being that is suitable as a general concept; they are all focused on the wrong particular things (whether utility, liberty, commodities, or primary goods), and they are too narrowly focused (they exclude too many important aspects from evaluation).

So, lets junk them the way we did talk of a perpetual motion machine or a mathematical proof of God.

According to act consequentialism, actions should be assessed only in terms of the goodness or badness of their consequences.

Nothing wrong with that. Not let us see how Sen screws up.

This excludes any consideration of the morality of the process by which consequences are brought about, for example, whether it respects principles of fairness or individual agency.

No it doesn't. Either the process had a consequence or it didn't. If it did, consequentialism captures it. If it didn't the process was inconsequential.
In reading the above did you take into account that I was stabbed with a compass by Virendra Fernandes in 1974. Why not? You bastard, don't you realize how unfair you are being? Virendra is now a hijra, or so I fondly believe. How dare you show such insensitivity to the plight of a poor Transgender person now being sodomised on the streets of Delhi in return for a half smoked beedi?

Sen argues instead for a ‘comprehensive consequentialism’ which integrates the moral significance of both consequences and principles.

But that had already been done.

For example, it matters not only whether people have an equal capability to live a long life, but how that equality is achieved.

Nonsense! It does not matter at all whether people have an equal capability to live a long life.  All that matters is that a particular person escape avoidable death or illness now.

It is impossible to endow people with an equal longevity. Thus it does not matter in the slightest how that impossibility can be achieved.

Under the same circumstances women generally live longer than men, for largely biological reasons.

There is no evidence whatsoever for this view. All we can say is that under certain circumstances this statistical result appears. It is likely that the male-female gap in this respect, in the UK, will disappear within the next twenty years.

If the only thing that mattered was achieving equality in the capability to live a long life this fact suggests that health care provision should be biased in favor of men.

Even if this was true, it would not suggest any such thing. Perhaps Sen means 'health care provision should and will change so as to raise male longevity.' As a matter of fact, since men want to live longer, health care provision has indeed changed and men do live a lot longer, if that is what they really want and are prepared to spend money and time and to sacrifice immediate gratification.

However, as Sen argues, trying to achieve equality in this way would override important moral claims of fairness which should be included in a comprehensive evaluation.

You can't stop men from taking up a healthy life-style and spending more on health care to achieve this outcome. Moral claims of fairness are of no interest to anybody save those who make a living by lecturing about them.

Welfarism is the view that goodness should be assessed only in terms of subjective utility.

Nonsense. Welfarism is not Sen's strawman. It is the view that a Social Welfare Function exists which, if known, we ought to maximize, or which, if not effectively computable, is nevertheless action guiding in terms of the direction public policy should take.
As a matter of fact, the SWF is not effectively computable. but we have some intuition as to in which direction we should be doing and so 'regret minimization' counsels doing first order good to those unable to look after their own well-being.

Sen argues that welfarism exhibits both ‘valuational neglect’ and ‘physical condition neglect’.

He defined something which he then found fault with. What's so difficult about that? If I define Sen as a one legged camel, I get to say that Sen exhibits 'one leggedness' and 'being a fucking camel'.

First, although welfarism is centrally concerned with how people feel about their lives,

WTF?! Has there ever been a single guy who went on Welfare who was quizzed about how he felt about his life? Is that what happened to Reagan's 'Welfare Queens'?

it is only concerned with psychological states, not with people’s reflective valuations.

feelings are psychological states, reflective valuations may not be.

Second, because it is concerned only with feelings it neglects information about physical health, though this would seem obviously relevant to assessing well-being.

Why would a Social Welfare function reject information about health? Sen's straw-man may do so but that only proves Sen is as stupid as shit.

Not only does subjective welfare not reliably track people’s actual interests or even their urgent needs, it is also vulnerable to what Sen calls ‘adaptive preferences’. People can become so normalized to their conditions of material deprivation and social injustice that they may claim to be entirely satisfied.

No where in the world was there any legal or other welfare program or juristic process which asked whether people were satisfied. An unconscionable contract is still unconscionable if most people bound by it say they are satisfied with it.

Sen is simply creating a strawman.

As Sen puts it,

Our mental reactions to what we actually get and what we can sensibly expect to get may frequently involve compromises with a harsh reality.

Does Sen read his own shite? What we get always involves 'a compromise with harsh reality' in so far as what we get is material. What we actually get is correlated with what we can sensibly expect to get because being sensible means making accurate predictions. Naturally,our mental reactions will have this feature at the aggregate level. So what? The point of doing economics is to present people with a better choice menu. Sen is too stupid to do this but others aren't.

 The destitute thrown into beggary, 

could be provided with a job, if good economic policies are followed

the vulnerable landless labourer precariously surviving at the edge of subsistence

could be given security through cash transfers and could be found gainful employment in the manufacturing sector

, the overworked domestic servant working round the clock, 

should be helped to sue his employer and receive damages. She too should be found gainful employment in a more productive sector

the subdued and subjugated housewife reconciled to her role and her fate

should be given half a beedi and a dildo with which to sodomise Virendra Fernandes because there's a lot of people would pay good money to see that video on YouTube.

, all tend to come to terms with their respective predicaments.

As Sen had done with his own. Apparently, the guy wanted to be a Physicist! Look at the worthless shite he produced instead.

 The deprivations are suppressed and muffled in the scale of utilities (reflected by desire-fulfilment and happiness) by the necessity of endurance in uneventful survival. (Sen 1985, 21-22)

Which fucking utility function would muffle the disutilities they clearly experience? The law itself says these people are not bound by unconscionable norms or contracts. The fact that they will take the terms offered means nothing. All that matters is how much disutility they receive.

Sen is simply telling lies. Virendra Fernandes is being raped every day and, no doubt, the fellow expresses great satisfaction with his station in life, but what  is happening every time he rents out his stinking bumhole counts as disutitility in the relevant Bergsonian Social Welfare Function. Indeed, so would my own glee at seeing a YouTube clip of my snobbish old class-mate grunting and squealing in the course of his working day, count as dis-utility because the thing is repugnant and bad for Society- indeed, it is bad for me, because, to be frank, I am easily influenced and subject to Tarde's mimetic law and so would probably end up doing the same thing.

Sum-ranking focuses on maximizing the total amount of welfare in a society without regard for how it is distributed, although this is generally felt to be important by the individuals concerned.

In that case, Sum-ranking does not exist and has never existed. What the author meant to say was 'Sum ranking is the name pedagogues give to something which never existed nor will exist but which may feature on your exam paper so just mug this shite up and regurgitate it so as to pass your exams and go on to become an Accountant or a Bureaucrat or a Banker or whatever.'

Sen argues, together with liberal philosophers such as Bernard Williams and John Rawls, that sum-ranking does not take seriously the distinction between persons.

No Shit, Sherlock!

Sen also points out that individuals differ in their ability to convert resources such as income into welfare. For example, a disabled person may need expensive medical and transport equipment to achieve the same level of welfare. A society that tried to maximize the total amount of welfare would distribute resources so that the marginal increase in welfare from giving an extra dollar to any person would be the same. Resources would therefore be distributed away from the sick and disabled to people who are more efficient convertors of resources into utility.

Nonsense! Society gets dollars from people who are healthy enough to endure disutility at work and who earn enough by so doing to maintain themselves with enough left over for the State to tax. What will it do with the money? One thing it could do to legitimate its authority is to spend money improving the lives of disabled people. Taxpayers feel they are insuring themselves against some sudden calamity in their own lives.

Resourcism is defined by its neutrality about what constitutes the good life. It therefore assesses how well people are doing in terms of their possession of the general purpose resources necessary for the construction of any particular good life. Sen’s criticism of John Rawls’ influential account of the fair distribution of primary goods stands in for a criticism of resourcist approaches in general. Sen’s central argument is that resources should not be the exclusive focus of concern for a fairness-based theory of justice, even if, like Rawls’s primary goods, they are deliberately chosen for their general usefulness to a good life. The reason is that this focus excludes consideration of the variability in individuals’ actual abilities to convert resources into valuable outcomes. In other words, two people with the same vision of the good life and the same bundle of resources may not be equally able to achieve that life, and so resourcists’ neutrality about the use of resources is not as fair as they believe it is. More specifically, Sen disputes Rawls’ argument that the principles of justice should be worked out first for the ‘normal’ case, in terms of a social contract conceived as a rational scheme for mutually advantageous cooperation between people equally able to contribute to society, and only later extended to ‘hard’ cases, such as of disability.

Rawls was a fool. He didn't get that a compulsory insurance scheme was the way to go. Sen too is a fool.

Sen believes such cases are far from abnormal and excluding them at the beginning risks building a structure that excludes them permanently. The general problem is that such accounts ‘fetishize’ resources as the embodiment of advantage, rather than focusing on the relationship between resources and people. Nevertheless Sen acknowledges that although the distribution of resources should not be the direct concern in evaluating how well people are doing, it is very relevant to considerations of procedural fairness.

Utter baloney. All that is needed is an incentive compatible insurance scheme which is fit for purpose.

When evaluating well-being, Sen argues, the most important thing is to consider what people are actually able to be and do.

Unfortunately, nobody knows what they can actually do or be in advance, let alone determine this for someone else.

The commodities or wealth people have or their mental reactions (utility) are an inappropriate focus because they provide only limited or indirect information about how well a life is going.

So does anything else you care to mention.

Sen illustrates his point with the example of a standard bicycle. This has the characteristics of ‘transportation’ but whether it will actually provide transportation will depend on the characteristics of those who try to use it.

Nonsense! Those who can't use it sell it to those who can and use the money to meet their own transportation or other needs.

It might be considered a generally useful tool for most people to extend their mobility, but it obviously will not do that for a person without legs. Even if that person, by some quirk, finds the bicycle delightful, we should nevertheless be able to note within our evaluative system that she still lacks transportation. Nor does this mental reaction show that the same person would not appreciate transportation if it were really available to her.

How fucking stupid are Sen's students? Do they really not get that this cheerful, legless, soul can always get someone to give him a ride on his bike just for a laugh? I bet this guy has loads of friends and gets a lot pints bought him at the pub. He probably pulls a lot too. I mean it's not like he can do a runner in the middle of the night, and the ladies appreciate that quality in a man.

The Capability Approach focuses directly on the quality of life that individuals are actually able to achieve. This quality of life is analyzed in terms of the core concepts of ‘functionings’ and ‘capability’.

• Functionings are states of ‘being and doing’  such as being well-nourished, having shelter. They should be distinguished from the commodities employed to achieve them (as ‘bicycling’ is distinguishable from ‘possessing a bike’).

Functionings are wholly independent of utility or well-being. You may be well-nourished but are on your way to the electric chair. You may have shelter, but it is in Abu Ghraib.

• Capability refers to the set of valuable functionings that a person has effective access to. Thus, a person’s capability represents the effective freedom of an individual to choose between different functioning combinations – between different kinds of life – that she has reason to value. (In later work, Sen refers to ‘capabilities’ in the plural (or even ‘freedoms’) instead of a single capability set, and this is also common in the wider capability literature. This allows analysis to focus on sets of functionings related to particular aspects of life, for example, the capabilities of literacy, health, or political freedom.

Capability too is wholly independent of utility of well being because Functionings today may be linked to be fucked over tomorrow.
Thus, though capabilities increased for a lot of people in Venezuela under Chavez, they were actually being fucked over. A poor Venezuelan woman who studied Sen-tentious shite in the expectation that she'd be employed giving cool stuff to poor people so they could realize their capabilities, was not receiving any utility from her education. It was actually disutility. She'd have been better off learning Voodoo.

Sen argues that the correct focus for evaluating how well off people are is their capability to live a life we have reason to value, not their resource wealth or subjective well-being.

The correct focus for evaluating any action is to see whether it pays for itself in terms of first order good. There is no point evaluating how well off people are anymore than it is worthwhile to argue who would win in a fight- Dracula or Spiderman? No doubt, some shit heads can make a little money writing this sort of stuff- so what? The thing is stupid.

But in order to begin to evaluate how people are performing in terms of capability, we first need to determine which functionings matter for the good life and how much, or at least we need to specify a valuation procedure for determining this.

Doing this sort of shite does not matter for the good life. Stop doing it. You are being silly.

One way of addressing the problem is to specify a list of the constituents of the flourishing life, and do this on philosophical grounds (Martha Nussbaum does this for her Capability Theory of Justice). Sen rejects this approach because he argues that it denies the relevance of the values people may come to have and the role of democracy (Sen 2004b). Philosophers and social scientists may provide helpful ideas and arguments, but the legitimate source of decisions about the nature of the life we have reason to value must be the people concerned. Sen therefore proposes a social choice exercise requiring both public reasoning and democratic procedures of decision-making.

Why propose something which either already exists or doesn't and certainly won't come into existence as a result of the proposal? It is a waste of everybody's time.

One reason that social scientists and philosophers are so keen to specify a list is that it can be used as an index: by ranking all the different constituents of the flourishing life with respect to each other it would allow easier evaluation of how well people are doing.

Okay. So if you have a bunch of worthless bureaucrats and you can't fire them and you want to keep them from incessantly masturbating in the office, you could set them some such task simply as a matter of busying 'idle hands'.

Sen’s social choice exercise is unlikely to produce collective agreement on a complete ranking of different functionings, if only because of what Rawls called the ‘fact of reasonable disagreement’. But Sen argues that substantial action-guiding agreement is possible.

Only if it would was possible without this time-wasting exercise, and everybody realises this exercise is a waste of time so no further 'facts of reasonable disagreement' are discovered.

First, different valuational perspectives may ‘intersect’ to reach similar judgments about some issues, though by way of different arguments.

In which case those arguments were irrelevant.

Second, such agreements may be extended by introducing ‘ranges’ of weights rather than cardinal numbers.

Only if participants are stupid and don't know from math. 'Ranges of weights' can always be normalised as cardinal numbers.

For example, if there are four conflicting views about the relative weight to be attached to literacy vis-à-vis health, of ½, ⅓, ¼ and 1/5, that contains an implicit agreement that the relative weight on education should not exceed ½, nor fall below 1/5, so having one unit of literacy and two of health would be better than having two units of literacy and one of health.

Once again, the arguments behind these conflicting views turn out to be irrelevant. There was no need for any public discourse.

Sen does suggest that in many cases a sub-set of crucially important capabilities associated with basic needs may be relatively easily identified and agreed upon as urgent moral and political priorities. These ‘basic capabilities’, such as education, health, nutrition, and shelter up to minimally adequate levels, do not exhaust the resources of the capability approach, only the easy agreement on what counts as being scandalously deprived.

Sen is wrong. The method of provision of crucially important capabilities is likely to be essentially contested in a plural democracy. Vegans have one view on nutrition but we are not allowed to eat them. Religious people have strong views on what constitutes basic education. So do Marxists. As for health- don't get me started on how, like, naturopathy is so much better than allopathic medicine. Indeed, I only take the pills my GP prescribes because it helps keep me alive and thus able to consume naturopathic remedies.

They may be particularly helpful in assessing the extent and nature of poverty in developing countries.

Unfortunately 'assessing the extent and nature of poverty in developing countries' leads to Aid programs which fuck up those countries big time. So stop doing it or keep quiet about it or do it on your own dime.

However, taking a basic capability route has implications for how the exercise of evaluating individuals’ capability can proceed, since it can only evaluate how well people’s lives are going in terms of the basics.

It can't evaluate anything at all. It will stupid shite like hooray for Chavez, boo to Kuwait- coz the latter has a well run Sovereign Wealth fund while the former was as stupid as shit.

Evaluating capability is a second order exercise concerned with mapping the set of valuable functionings people have real access to.

In other words, it is a waste of time. People have already done the mapping themselves and gained 'real access'. No fucking 'mapping' is going on as 'a second order exercise'.

Since it takes the value of functionings as given, its conclusions will reflect any ambiguity in the valuation stage.
Assessing capability is more informationally demanding than other accounts of advantage since it not only takes a much broader view of what well-being achievement consists in but also tries to assess the freedom people actually have to choose high quality options. This is not a purely procedural matter of adding up the number of options available, since the option to purchase a tenth brand of washing powder has a rather different significance than the option to vote in democratic elections.

Only the second best option- i.e. the opportunity cost- matters. However, opportunity cost is global, not local. Having the option to buy 'Kosher Washing Powder' may be more valuable than having the right to vote for the Fuehrer in democratic elections.

For example, Sen argues that the eradication of malaria from an area enhances the capability of individuals living there even though it doesn’t increase the number of options those individuals have (since they don’t have the ‘option’ to live in a malarial area anymore).

WTF? Of course it increases options- e.g. not having to buy a mosquito net or invest in quinine or whatever, with the result that one can buy other stuff.

Because the value of a capability set represents a person’s effective freedom to live a valuable life in terms of the value of the functionings available to that individual, when the available functionings are improved, so is the person’s effective freedom.

Utterly meaningless. One can swap around the various clauses as one pleases to get something indistinguishably vacuous. Consider the following-  'Because the capability of a value set represents a person's effective freedom to translate values into outcomes in terms of the capability of the values available to Society, when the available values are improved, so is Society's effective freedom.'

The capability approach in principle allows a very wide range of dimensions of advantage to be positively evaluated (‘what capabilities does this person have?’).

The same is true of any brand of tripe. My own approach to evaluating Social Welfare focuses on the ability to make cat like noises. I do not say that a person must themselves make such noises. What matters is their capability to increase the quantum of cat like noises. Every capability Sen says a person might have translates directly into a cat like noise making capability.

My theory is, however, superior- for more parsimonious- to Sen's because his approach can't a priori rule out capabilities such as those of making noises like those of an incompossible cat whose meows are treacle in a Universe composed entirely of treacle except for that one cat.

This allows an open diagnostic approach to what is going well or badly in people’s lives that can be used to reveal unexpected shortfalls or successes in different dimensions, without aggregating them all together into one number.

Utterly foolish. There is not a single 'dimension' here which does not turn out to have millions of dimensions within it. We can't say how well or badly my nutrition or education is going because these things have millions of dimensions most of which are unknown to us. In other words, nothing at all has been gained.
By contrast, my definition of capability which only looks at cat-like noise production has no similar problem of 'state space explosion' or, indeed, 'McKelvey chaos'.

The informational focus can be tightened depending on the purpose of the evaluation exercise and relevant valuational and informational constraints. For example, if the approach is limited to considering ‘basic capabilities’ then the assessment is limited to a narrower range of dimensions and attempts to assess deprivation – the shortfall from the minimal thresholds of those capabilities – which will exclude evaluation of how well the lives of those above the threshold are going.

This sort of shite has been done by committees for a long time now. There is no reason to have a theory for the thing- which, more often than not, misfires completely.

As well as being concerned with how well people’s lives are going, the Capability Approach can be used to examine the underlying determinants of the relationship between people and commodities, including the following (Sen 1999, 70-71):

In other words, you get to talk ignorant shite under this rubric. So what? There will always be some Credentialised rubric under which shite gets talked. Why fucking add to the nuisance?

Consider the following list- each of these headings is unpredictable. Planners are bound to get things wrong because of this unpredictability.

(1)      Individual physiology Suddenly the healthiest, most virile people in the community may become the victims of a wasting illness like AIDS. Which planner could have predicted its sudden onset and dramatic consequences in some developing countries?

(2)      Local environment diversities Even these can change unpredictably. Who, in Europe, was prepared for devastating heat waves which, we are warned, are likely to increase in severity putting many at risk from heat exhaustion or death by wild fire?

(3)      Variations in social conditions, Who could have predicted the abrupt descent of parts of the former Yogoslavia into vicious ethnic strife featuring genocide? I recall the philosopher Borna Bebek lecturing us Indians about how his nation had overcome sectarianism.

(4)    Differences in relational perspectives. Once again, these shift abruptly. In 1980, there was a sketch on 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' where the Trade Union Shop Stewards demand the right to sleep with the Manager's pretty daughter. He offers his wife instead as a compromise. Within five years, the balance of power had shifted completely. 

(5)      Distribution within the family This too shifted in a dramatic manner in the late Seventies and Eighties with the decline of mining and heavy industry and the rise of the Service sector in which, more often than not, women did better than men. Such dramatic shifts have continued. Ten years ago, most of us believed our college age kids would get fantastic jobs and earn big bucks. We never predicted that a 'boomerang' generation would end up sleeping on our couch and relying upon the 'Bank of Mum and Dad'.

Applying Sen’s Capability Approach

is a waste of time because we don't know what capabilities actually exist and can't predict how they will change.

The concept of a capability has a global-local character in that its definition abstracts from particular circumstances, but its realization depends on specific local requirements. For example, the same capability to be well-nourished can be compared for different people although it may require different amounts and kinds of food depending on one’s age, state of health, and so on.

This is why it is not a good idea for the State to provide us food in communal messes. It is better for the Market to do so in a decentralised manner.

Cash transfers on the basis of need can be calculated in an ad hoc manner.

This makes the Capability Approach applicable across political, economic, and cultural borders.

This approach has not changed anything anywhere. On the contrary, its appearance as an academic availability cascade has coincided with the replacement of 'Welfare' with 'Workfare' and the removal of 'safety nets' in the name of 'Austerity'.

For example, Sen points out that being relatively income poor in a wealthy society can entail absolute poverty in some important capabilities, because they may require more resources to achieve. For example, the capability for employment may require more years of education in a richer society

Nonsense! Wealthy societies actually reduce the returns on education for people from poorer countries who find it worthwhile to migrate to them in order to take up jobs which require no education whatsoever.

'More years of education' in a richer society may involve people being trapped in debt and thus having a lower disposable income than would otherwise have been the case.

Many capabilities will have underlying requirements that vary strongly with social circumstances (although others, such as adequate nourishment, may vary less).

However these social circumstances change unpredictably. When I was young, the CEO of a big company wore a suit. Now, he may wear cargo shorts and sandals. It has become impossible to tell who is rich and who is poor in many rich countries.

For example, the ‘ability to appear in public without shame’ seems a capability that people might generally be said to have reason to value, but its requirements vary significantly according to cultural norms from society to society and for different groups within each society (such as by gender, class, and ethnicity). Presently in Saudi Arabia, for example, women must have the company of a close male relative to appear in public, and require a chauffeur and private car to move between private spaces (since they are not permitted to use public transport or drive a car themselves).

This too has changed. Who predicted that the Saudi Crown Prince would push through such a dramatic U turn? But then, few- in the Seventies- predicted that Saudi Arabia would clamp down so harshly after the Grand Mosque seizure in '79.

Strictly speaking the Capability Approach leaves open whether such ‘expensive’ capabilities, if considered important enough to be guaranteed by society as a matter of justice, should be met by making more resources available to those who need them (subsidized cars and chauffeurs), or by revising the relevant social norms.

So the Capabilities Approach is normatively worthless. It would provide subsidised cliterodectomies and foot binding services if required to do so.

The Capability Approach only identifies such capability failures and diagnoses their causes. However, if there is general agreement in the first place that such capabilities should be equally guaranteed for all, there is a clear basis for criticizing clearly unjust social norms as the source of relative deprivation and thus as inconsistent with the spirit of such a guarantee.

If there is general agreement that something isn't normative, then it can't be a social norm. Either the agreement is hypocritical or it is not general at all.

The capability approach takes a multi-dimensional approach to evaluation.

Thus, it is subject to 'agenda control' & McKelvey chaos. This means, whoever sets the agenda can say anything they want. That is why the US has quit the UN Human Rights Committee.

These 'multi-dimensional' approaches have generated a back-lash. Five years ago the SNP welcomed statements by the UN special rapporteur on Food Security which suggested that Westminster was starving wee Scottish bairns. Then, the rappourteur started talking about the tragic consequences of Scottish women's poor access to agricultural land so as to grow enough food for their families. This was going too far. Even the SNP can't pretend that Scottish women are malnourished because they have to feed their families all the deep fried Mars bars they can buy with their Welfare cheques and thus have to resort to growing a few carrots in the ditches of the great landed Estates so as to feed themselves.

Often it may seem that people are generally well-off, yet a closer analysis reveals that this ‘all-things-considered’ judgement conceals surprising shortfalls in particular capabilities, for example, the sporting icon who can’t read.

Or the Nobel Prize winning Economist who can't beat up Mike Tyson.

Capability analysis rejects the presumption that unusual achievement in some dimensions compensates for shortfalls in others.

Thus, it lacks common sense. The sporting icon can get people to read out to her anything she wants.  There is no actual utility shortfall here.

From a justice perspective, the capability approach’s relevance here is to argue that if people are falling short on a particular capability that has been collectively agreed to be a significant one, then justice would require addressing the shortfall itself if at all possible, rather than offering compensation in some other form, such as increased income.

This is a foolish and mischievous procedure. We may well collectively agree that the capability to cook a tasty and nourishing meal is a significant one. However justice does not require everyone being trained to do so. It is sufficient that their income be increased so that they can access tasty and nourishing food. Still, there may be cases where direct provision- e.g. 'meals on wheels'- is a superior alternative because some extra benefit- e.g. checking to see if an elderly person is cheerful and in good health- is secured.

Capability evaluation is informationally demanding and its precision is limited by the level of agreement about which functionings are valuable.

Information is costly to aggregate. Agreement is difficult to secure. Thus Capability evaluation does not 'pay for itself'. Its only purpose would be that of bureaucratic empire-building and Credentialised rent-seeking.

However, Sen has shown that even where only elementary evaluation of quite basic capabilities is possible (for example, life-expectancy or literacy outcomes), this can still provide much more, and more relevant, action-guiding information than the standard alternatives.

Sen has shown nothing of the sort. Rather his approach would lead to praise for Chavez's Venezuela and condemnation for South Korea's policies over the same period. Sir Partha Dasgupta has comprhensively rubbished Sen's approach precisely because it is not concerned with sustainability- in particular, with reference to depleting resources and environmental goods.

In particular, by making perspicuous contrasts between successes and failures the capability approach can direct political and public attention to neglected dimensions of human well-being. For example, countries with similar levels of wealth can have dramatically different levels of aggregate achievement - and inequality - on such non-controversially important dimensions as longevity and literacy. And, vice versa, countries with very small economies can sometimes score as highly on these dimensions as the richest. This demonstrates both the limitations of relying exclusively on economic metrics for evaluating development, and the fact that national wealth does not pose a rigid constraint on such achievements (that GNP is not destiny). Such analyses are easily politicized in the form of the pointed question, Why can’t we do as well as them?

Sadly, this approach is wholly worthless because the answer is always- because we are nothing like them. Where heterogeneity prevails, comparisons are odious.
The other point is that a country which initially worsens conditions for its poor may, by that sacrifice, experience rapid growth. A country's willingness to take this drastic path may depend on an exogenous factor. South Korea, for example, faced an existential threat. It needed to rise up by its own efforts very quickly or risk annihilation at a time when the Communist bloc was growing more rapidly than the Capitalist bloc.

Sen relies on hetrogeneity to criticise other approaches to Justice, yet his own approach has the same Achilles heel.

Theories of justice that focus on the distribution of means implicitly assume that they will provide the same effective freedom to live the life one has reason to value to all, but this excludes relevant information about the relationship between particular people and resources.

This is nonsense. Distribution of means is discussed ceteris paribus- i.e. on the assumption that classes are homogeneous in everything save wealth. It is easy to further partition such classes on the basis of a disability or particular work related disutility.

Even if one abstracts from existing social inequalities or the results of personal choices (‘option luck’), as many liberal theories of justice do, one will still find a substantial and pervasive variation in the abilities of different members of a society to utilize the same resources - whether of specific goods like education or general purpose goods like income.

This does not matter at all so long as this variation in ability is reflected in outcomes which are the basis of taxes or subsidies which directly relate to disability or disutility- e.g. disabled people receiving a larger tax allowance or non-means tested benefit.

Suppose there is no correlation between a disability or disutility and outcomes. Then, Sen's approach would have no way to discover the relevant capability deficit. It is a different matter that people who experience the disability or disutility can organise themselves and persuade others that they deserve some extra help.
Thus, when ordinary people watch a documentary on the effects of autism and we realize that people who are earning good money nevertheless have spend a lot of it on special equipment simply so as to bear the suffering caused by their condition, we do agree that they should receive extra help.
Similarly, we feel an orphan or widow should receive extra money to cope with their bereavement. We understand that the 'marginal utility' of a holiday for a bereaved person would be much greater than for us- coz. we'd just end up drinking too much and doing the walk of shame out of some vomit speckled hotel bedroom.

That means that even if it happened that everyone had the same conception of the good, and the same bundle of resources, the fact of heterogeneity would mean that people would have differential real capability to pursue the life they had reason to value. Therefore, Sen argues, a theory of justice based on fairness should be directly and deeply concerned with the effective freedom – capability – of actual people to achieve the lives they have reason to value.

However, this theory of justice would have no means to discover the heterogeneity he speaks of.  This is a good reason why actual juristic processes are defeasible and protocol bound, not theoretic or a priori, and feature equitable remedies based on the facts of the case.

To be fair, Sen does admit 'that the Capability Approach is not a theory of justice but rather an approach to the evaluation of effective freedom.'

However an approach to something which can never actually happen is wholly useless. The most important thing about freedom is that it can defend itself in an unpredictable world. This is why we may oppose a thing not because if affects us adversely but because it may reduce our freedom in some more or less likely future scenario. Sen's approach is blind to the future. That is why it is mischievous.

With regard to ‘irreducibly social goods’ like culture, Sen argues that they not only enter into the analysis instrumentally (such as in the requirements for appearing in public without shame) but also as part of the lives people have reason to value.

Unfortunately 'irreducibly social goods' have a signalling component and thus can't be instrumentalised. Normally, waking around naked is shameful. However, it may have the opposite signalling function- e.g. the Mothers of Manipur's naked 'Indian Army come rape us' protest.

Nevertheless Sen is clear in his view that the value of social goods is only derivative upon the reflective choices of those concerned (see, for example, Sen 2004a).

Thus, they aren't social at all.

So if people on reflection don’t value such social goods as the traditional religious institutions of their society or continuing to speak a minority language then that should trump the ‘right’ of those institutions to continue.

Unfortunately, those social goods have a signalling function which people who don't want them nevertheless want to see continuing to exist so as to protect their own future freedom. Thus a secular Jew may still want to see the orthodox Haredi community keep its own schools and traditional way of life because any collective action against this visible 'alterity' has a valuable signalling function which, if history is any guide, others- including non-Jews- should pay attention to.

Once again, Sen's approach lacks the dynamics to capture what is salient here.

With regard to freedom, Sen distinguishes the ability to choose between different options from the value of those options.

Why? It is pointless to do so. All that matters, with regard to freedom, is that a present choice does not compromise one's future ability to choose in some drastic fashion.

That is why people may pass up advantageous contracts which, however, bind their future actions.

These two together make up effective freedom or capability.

Sheer nonsense! The ability to choose is something another may impute to a person for the purpose of some juristic deliberation. It is not something it is cognitively advantageous to have. Rather, effective freedom is about Entry and Exit and Voice of a mimetic, not rational choice, type. Being allowed to do what the smart people are doing is Freedom. Having someone 'evaluating' your 'capabilities' sounds like a slippery slope to the concentration camp.

Simple freedom to choose may be vulnerable to the objection that it is compatible with invidious freedoms,

Freedoms don't want to be vulnerable. They want to be robust. That is why Freedom insists on its right to tell Professors or Pundits to go fuck themselves if they start raising 'objections' re. 'invidious freedoms' .

but the Capability Approach is concerned with people’s ability to live a life they have reason to value, which incorporates an ethical evaluation of the content of their options.

The only way you can show you are concerned about me is by making my life better. If you say 'I am concerned with your immortal soul', I tell you to fuck off and slam the door in your face. On the other hand, if your bring me a nice piece of cake and do my washing up and hoovering and paint my flat, then I will believe you are genuinely concerned about me and will let you tell me about how I can get to Heaven, or vote for the Party which will advance the interests of lazy shitheads like myself.

It is not concerned only with increasing people’s freedom-as-power.

Only? Fuck has it ever done to raise anyone's 'freedom-as-power'? The Nicaraguan horcruxes of my neighbour's cat, by contrast, are not just concerned with increasing people's freedom-as-power to make cat like noises, it also has actually increased my freedom-as-power to say Miaow.

Finally, Sen’s Capability Approach is particularly concerned with grasping the dimensions of human well-being

There are billions upon billions of such dimensions. It is neither possible nor desirable to grasp them unless you know the future fitness landscape for our species.

and advantage missing from standard approaches.

Standard approaches, I suppose, were the ones encoded in Welfare Legislation and Case Law. They have been severely eroded but at least they did exist. Sen's approach does not.

This relates to its concern with tracing the causal pathways of specific deprivations, with how exactly different people are able or unable to convert resources into valuable functionings. Although this remains somewhat abstractly presented in the formal structure of the Capability Approach, Sen’s analysis of, for example, adaptive preferences and intra-household distribution do go at least some way to a situated and sociological analysis.

Which, however, has done absolutely no good whatsoever.

Can anything good come out of talk of 'Capabilities'? Sure. Why not?  Some people are capable of doing a lot more for Society and we should help them. Thus, Abdul Sattar Edhi was capable of running an ambulance service in Karachi and so people helped him do it. It has since expanded hugely on a purely voluntary basis. I have read that it sent $100, 000 to the Hurricane Katrina relief fund. This may not be much of a return on the vast sums the US has doled out to South Asia, but it is a better return than 9/11.

Doing 'first order good' is worthwhile and has mimetic effects. Evaluating imaginary programs is not a 'second order public good'- it is a cruel joke played by an entitled elite which holds the 'deplorables' in contempt.