Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom

Seeing any x as some y is always a silly thing to do. However, if you've fucked up big time, you may try to justify yourself by saying 'I saw your hat as a toilet. That is why I shat in it. I honestly did not intend to make you look foolish at Ascot. It was purely a coincidence that, just when you were curtsying to the Queen Gor' bless 'er, a sudden gust of wind whipped your hat off your head and splattered the Royal Equerry with shit.'

Amartya Sen started off as a Development Economist. However no Development occurred thanks to Mathematical Economists like him, so he switched to Social Choice theory and some wholly obsolete type of Psilosophy.

To explain his futile trajectory, he has a 'seeing a hat as a toilet' type theory- viz.

Development can be seen, it is argued here, as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy.

This is nonsense. There is no necessary connection between Development and Freedom. On the contrary, poor agricultural nations which have become more Developed have only done so by reducing 'real freedoms that ordinary people enjoy'. Rich people may gain more freedoms but poor people are likely to have less freedom as a result of any process of Development.

Focusing on human freedoms contrasts with narrower views of development, such as identifying development with the growth of gross national product, or with the rise in personal incomes, or with industrialization, or with technological advance, or with social modernization.

Freedom is essentially subjective and ontologically dysphoric. It neccessarily features antagonomic preferences. Focusing on it is silly. By contrast, one can usefully measure G.N.P, National Income, Industrial output, Technological progress and Social Modernization.

Growth of GNP or of individual incomes can, of course, be very important as means to expanding the freedoms enjoyed by the members of the society. But freedoms depend also on other determinants, such as social and economic arrangements (for example, facilities for education and health care)

which show up in GNP as items of expenditure

as well as political and civil rights (for example, the liberty to participate in public discussion and scrutiny).

these rights can be traded off for Economic Growth. What matters is that there is effective 'Exit' from a particular regime. Then we can look to see whether people are running away from, or thronging to, a particular 'Tiebout Model'.  The problem with Rights is that other people have them too. One may prefer to live in a place where nobody has the right to do all sorts of stuff which you personally find repugnant.

One reason why Development matters is because it increases the possibility of Exit for a widening class of people. Thus, Indians use the fruits of growth to relocate to places where the rights of cows and communists are curtailed.  Chinese expats may, if Xi's plans succeed, go the other way.

Similarly, industrialisation or technological progress or social modernization can substantially contribute to expanding human freedom, but freedom depends on other influences as well.

Rights are linked to remedies under a bond of law. But Justice is expensive. Providing remedies is even more costly. Thus, Freedom based on asserting Rights- as opposed to simply fucking up anyone who tries to fuck with you- is wholly dependent on Economic Development.

If freedom is what development advances, then there is a major argument for concentrating on that overarching objective, rather than on some particular means, or some specially chosen list of instruments.

Getting richer or simply living in a richer society where Rights are linked to effective remedies, is what makes people more free. Living in a poor shithole means living in terror of the local gangsters.

People genuinely want to get richer and are prepared to sacrifice many of their liberties to do so. One reason they may wish to overthrow oppressive regimes is because Development is not happening.  The goons in charge are too corrupt, or too crazy, or simply incompetent. No doubt, the revolting masses may use slogans like 'Liberty' or 'Freedom' etc. but these are not things valuable in themselves but mere cheap talk 'puffery'. Only stupid academics, or eternal adolescents, believe otherwise. But such guys are obvious tossers.

Viewing development in terms of expanding substantive freedoms draws attention to the ends that make development important, rather than merely to some of the means that, inter alia, play a prominent part in the process.

Viewing a hat as a toilet draws attention to the ends that make hats important- viz. they are put on one's head and so it would be hilarious if you took a dump in one.
By contrast, viewing development in terms of expanding substantive freedoms is foolish because they are the very thing which people may choose to trade off against Development itself.

Only a stupid ideologue would insist that more freedom means faster Development.

Sen is an ideologue of an even stupider stripe. He speaks of 'unfreedoms'. This is like saying a bareheaded person is un-hatted. Hatting requires curbs on the major sources of unhattedness ; poverty, the tyranny of people who steal your hat and shit in it, poor economic opportunities leading to poverty and lack of access to hat retailers, systematic Social deprivation leading to widespread nudity and hatlessness, neglect of public facilities for hat checking, as well as intolerance of hat wearing or over-activity of repressive anti-hat regimes.

Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic Social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or over-activity of repressive states.

What I wrote about the unhatted is true- if silly. What Sen says about Development is demonstrably false. Tyrannies have, if they pursued sensible economic policies, greatly out performed countries which have more Freedom and greater Rights to Education, Food &c.

Despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers-perhaps even the majority of people.

This is because the opulence was created by violating the elementary freedoms of vast numbers of people.

Wealthy countries would very quickly become very poor if they stopped denying 'elementary freedoms' to all and sundry. They would also be conquered, or have their polities subverted, by more ruthless regimes.

Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty, which robs people of the freedom to satisfy hunger, or to achieve sufficient nutrition, or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses, or the opportunity to be adequately clothed or sheltered, or to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities.

What a wonderful discovery! Poverty robs people who would otherwise be Wealthy. We should put Poverty in jail where it will get ass-raped. However, if very poor people continue to have lots of babies, they will still get robbed by Poverty of their freedom to become slaves to Mammon.

Freedom is central to the process of development for two distinct reasons

Development means freeing up scarce resources so that they flow to their optimal use.This involves 'mechanism design'- incentivizing and expanding the information set of those in charge of the resources so they can do this. Negative incentives- like not getting sent to the Gulag- work even better than positive ones- like getting a bonus.

Sen doesn't mention any of this. Instead he gives two indistinguishable reasons for, not why freedom is central to development, but why it is so completely peripheral that Development neither needs nor cares about it.

1) The evaluative reason: assessment of progress has to be done primarily in terms of whether the freedoms that people have are enhanced.

This is sheer nonsense. Progress is progress. It does not need to be 'assessed'. We say, progress has been made when we can see we are better off. Only cretins and lunatics need to be 'assessed'.

In any case, Sen is defining 'freedoms that people have' so it include eating nice food and having a shit in a clean toilet. This is what GNP measures.

2) The effectiveness reason: achievement of development is thoroughly dependent on the free agency of people.

Evaluation involves checking effectiveness. If my purchase of a Porsche was ineffective coz my check bounced, evaluation will show I don't got no sports car. Thus, the two reasons are indistinguishable.  Furthermore, development is not dependent on 'the free agency of people'. It depends on superior coordination of people- who may, in the process, lose, not gain, agency.

Sen- as a former Development Economist- wants to pose as a Philosopher and thus get to gas on about Freedom and Liberty and so on same as what J.S Mill did back in the Nineteenth Century which was like real cool and the reason he got so much tail.

 Thc difference that is made by seeing freedom as the principal ends of development can be illustrated with a few simple examples... 

First, in the context of the narrower views of development in terms of GNP growth or industrialization, it is often asked whether certain political or social freedoms, such as the liberty of political participation and dissent, or opportunities to receive basic education, are or are not conducive to development.

Who asks such a stupid question? How often do they do it? The answer is that some third rate pedagogues in shite College Departments are paid a little money to ask these questions, year after year, in front of an audience of teenagers who are struggling not to jerk off for the tenth time that day.

Nobody thinks basic education is bad for development. Everybody agrees that political participation and dissent can be useful. However, under certain circumstances both must be curbed in specific ways for a specific duration.

There is no 'more foundational' view than this.  Pretending otherwise, leads to verbal diarrhea of this sort-

In the light of the more foundational view of development as freedom, this way of posing the question tends to miss the important understanding that these substantive freedoms (that is, the liberty of political participation or the opportunity to receive basic education or health care) are among the constituent components of development.

The question was foolish. It missed the important understanding that talking shite is a shite way to pass the time. Substantive freedoms- like the right to marry your sister- are not the constituent components of anything.

 A second illustration relates to the dissonance between income per head and the freedom of individuals to live long and live well. 

There is no such dissonance. We simply change the way Income is measured to take account of externalities and so forth.

A third illustration relates to the role of markets as part of the process of development. The ability of the market mechanism to contribute to high economic growth and to overall economic progress has been widely-and rightly-acknowledged in the contemporary development literature. But it would be a mistake to understand the place of the market mechanism only in derivative terms.

That is what Sen is doing. His notion of the market is derived from a convention in Mathematical Econ that markets don't use up resources. They just magically exist. Thus, in 'Development as Freedom' Sen explains that, “I have, in fact, demonstrated elsewhere that in terms of some plausible characterizations of substantive individual freedoms, an important part of the Arrow-Debreu efficiency result readily translates from the ‘space’ of utilities to that of individual freedoms, both in terms of freedom to choose commodity baskets and in terms of capabilities to function” (extracted from 'Against Amartya Sen- by Dr. Benicourt) 

In other words, Sen's shite assumes Markets cost nothing to run and that there is Perfect Information, no Uncertainty, no Market Failure and so forth. If life evolved by natural selection, then Sen's work is worthless. If not, his oeuvre is the joke of an Occassionalist God.

Sen now drags in the name of a man well versed in theology.

As Adam Smith noted, freedom of exchange and transaction is itself part and parcel of the basic liberties that people have reason to value.

Smith was a shrewd Scotsman who saw with his own eyes that the enormous amount of money the English had invested in creating a legal system supportive of the Market was the reason it was ahead of his native land. The Scots got busy developing even better institutions which they paid for out of their taxes.

Markets work coz contracts are enforced, scamsters are punished, the medium of exchange is also a good store of value and unit of account etc, etc. All this stuff uses up scarce resources. It costs a lot of money. Development means more resources are available to do this stuff. Sen believes otherwise. He thinks Markets only work coz everybody first got together and had a long debate at the end of which they decided that people should acknowledge that they ought to be free to exchange.. words. I'm not kidding. See for yourself-

 The contribution of the market mechanism to economic growth is, of course, important, but this comes only after the direct significance of the freedom to interchange words, goods, gifts has been acknowledged.

Mathematical Economists were stupid because they thought Markets work by Magic. However Sen is being even stupider by saying that before we do Mathematical Econ we must first acknowledge something silly.

Why does Sen write such worthless tosh? His answer is that he was traumatized as a kid-

 I was playing one afternoon-I must have been around ten or so-in the garden in our family home in the city of Dhaka, now the capital of Bangladesh, when a man came through the gate screaming pitifully and bleeding profusely; he had been knifed in the back. Those were the days of communal riots with Hindus and Muslims killing each other), which preceded the independence and partitioning of India and Pakistan.

 Hindus, like Sen's family, were ethnically cleansed from Bangladesh. Why? Because the British were leaving and so the Rule of Law had collapsed. Land hunger in an over-populated country was the cause of a runaway process catalysed by professional gangsters working hand in glove with well-financed Politicians.

Sen remains to this day remains as innocent as a child regarding the inner workings of a process which continued in East Pakistan while he was studying Economics at Presidency College.

The knifed man, called Kader Mia, was a Muslin daily laborer who had come for work in a neighbor's house-for a tiny reward-and had been knifed on the street by some comnunal thugs in our largely Hindu area.

So, Kader came became he was afraid someone else would get his job if he stayed home. However, some thugs thought he might also be spying for the Muslim League gangsters. That is why they thought it worthwhile to stab him.

As I gave him water while also cryins for help from adults in the house, and moments later, as he was rushed to the hos pital by my father, Kader Mia went on telling us that his wife had told him not to go into a hostile area in such troubled times. Bur Kader Mia had to go out in search of work and a bit of earning because his family had nothing to eat. The penalty of his economic unfreedom turned out to be death, which occurred later on in the hospital.

Sen is being childish. Kader Mia would not have gone to a Hindu neighborhood if he had known he would be killed. Clearly, he calculated that since he was known in the area, the 'bhadralok' would speak up for him if he was challenged by the local tough-guys. What he had not bargained on was that rumors of menials spying out the lie of the land for Mob bosses tend to gain currency during a riot. Anyone who has lived through rioting in an Indian City would be familiar with this phenomenon. Even if Kader Mia was not personally suspected, he may have been killed to cause genuine spies to avoid the area. This is because the local tough guys always have arms dumps and vantage points and safe houses in a given neighborhood. They operate underground when it is the C.I.D they have to fear. During riots, they come out into the open and make hay while the sun shines- i.e. notch up kills so as to burnish their reputation and increase their value in the market for extortion and contract enforcement.

The experience was devastating for me. It made me reflect, later on, on the terrible burden of narrowly defined identities, including those firmly based on communities and groups.

Sen owes his own success to his narrowly defined identity- viz. that of a High Caste Bengali with prestigious Credentials. It has not been a 'terrible burden' to him- though his worthless oeuvre has been nothing else for students of Economics.

But more immediately, it also pointed to the remarkable fact that economic unfreedom, in the form of extreme poverty, can make a person a helpless prey in the violation of other kinds of freedom.

This is not a fact and it is not remarkable. Bengal had just had a massive famine because the transition to Democracy put a bunch of incompetent crooks in charge. Both the Famine and the Partition Riots were caused by the weakening and consequent departure of the Brits- i.e. the sub-continent's attainment of Freedom. The price was death for millions of poor Bengalis

Kader Mia need not have come to a hostile area in search of a little income in those terrible tines had his family been able to survive without it.

How would getting killed have helped feed his family? He may well have been knifed because the thugs didn't believe he was an idiot. Thus he must be a spy.

Sen shows us that the thugs reasoning was faulty. Kader Mia was probably a Development Economist avant la lettre who had come to believe in 'Development as Freedom'. Not getting knifed is an unfreedom we must all devoutly pray that Sen-tentious fools are rapidly released from.

Economic unfreedom can breed social unfreedom,just as social or political unfreedom can also foster economic unfreedom.

Economic unhattedness can breed Social unhattedness, just as social or political unhattedness can also foster economic unhattedness. Thus if a guy stops wearing a hat coz he can't afford one and if people say 'Cor! That guy looks cool' then Society may stop wearing hats. Similarly if Society decides hat-making or hat-selling is repugnant, or if Politicians ban the production or sale of hats, this too can create a situation where people can't buy hats.

By contrast, Economic unfreedom can't breed social unfreedom. They both arise simultaneously. If nutritional, health & life expectancy outcomes increase if a member of a particular population is incarcerated, then Sen type unfreedoms are removed when Freedom, in the ordinary meaning of the term, is removed.

 By contrast, Economic freedom can breed Social freedom- entrepreneurs may finance liberal reforms to increase the size of their market of the efficiency of their operations- which is why freedom is a useful word and unfreedom isn't.

Consider how attitudes change when a previously oppressed community gets more disposable income. The very people who their persecutors, suddenly start fawning over them. Political freedom, however, does not correlate to Economic freedom. This is because politics involves a lot of virtue signalling and preference falsification and fake news. Sen's shite helped elites involved in that type of fraud. But, its day is done.