Bernard Williams on Amartya Sen's 'Inequality Examined'.

Should we concern ourselves with inequality? If so, why?

Suppose there are people like us who earn more or have a better life. Knowing that this is so motivates us to change our behavior and institutional arrangements so we can catch up. 

Similarly knowing we have more, or score better on a certain metric, than others is helpful because it concentrates our mind on what made us different in the first place. Clearly, we need to conserve and nourish the source of our preeminence. 

A quite separate point has to do with pooling risk through collective, perhaps compulsory, Insurance schemes. Here we must not aim at equality of outcome because of 'Moral Hazard'. People should avoid risky behavior because they can't rely on being fully compensated for a bad outcome. 

The same point arises if the population is fails to meet a 'Goldilocks condition' of heterogeneity because either the thing will be under-provided or there will be rationing or some other type of separating equilibrium.

Amartya Sen takes a different view. The late Bernard Williams gives an able summary of the doctrine he propounded in the former's review of the latter's book  'Inequality Examined' (1992)

Every modern state and every modern political philosophy believes in equality of something.

Presumably, this is equality before the Law or equal subordination to the State itself.
Some States may aim at some other sort of equality- e.g. that of Income and Wealth- but they soon give up this aim because it is ruinous to the country. Beliefs don't matter very much if you end up taking a pragmatic course. Thus, it doesn't matter that my Accountant believes in UFOs. The fellow does his job in exactly the same manner and with equal diligence as any of his colleagues.

Political Philosophers are widely considered to be utter fools. They may believe otherwise, but this scarcely matters.

As Amartya Sen points out in this book, even libertarians, who think that there should be no politically imposed limits on what people may retain of what they gain without force or fraud, believe in the equal right to exert oneself in the market and not to be taxed.

Once again, they may have this belief but they act very differently- or else end up homeless and drunk off their heads.

Those who think that more effortful or productive or responsible work deserves higher rewards think that this principle should be applied equally to all citizens.

They may think this from time to time, but stop doing so in order to get on with their lives. If they fail to do so they end up starving to death because they forget to take adequate nourishment.

The important issue, then, as Sen has helpfully insisted over many years, is not whether we are in favour of equality, but rather: equality of what?

How is this helpful? Only a Professor lecturing a bunch of adolescents would find it useful to ask such a stupid question.

Metrics re. stuff which is beneficial or harmful are useful to us because any inequality they reveal can become the basis of some useful action. Metrics re. stuff which does not matter, do not themselves matter. The answer to 'Equality of what?' is simple. Stuff that matters and which we can do something about is usefully measured because the inequalities such metrics reveal can motivate either 'catch up' growth or, in the case of the top dog, a renewed commitment to conserve and nurture the source of one's preeminence.

Even if all modern outlooks accept some kind of equality, many of them do not list it among their political ideals. There is a question, then, about what it is that makes some conceptions of equality rather than others into the focus of political programmes that aim to increase equality; programmes, for instance, which stand in the tradition of linking equality with liberty and fraternity. There is a question, too, of why it is that all modern states do profess some conception of equality. It is not enough to reply that they have to do so, because equality is (even now) a leading catchword of modern politics: this merely raises the question again, in a more cynical tone of voice. The answer seems to be that in the modern world, which has largely rejected mythical or merely traditional sources of authority, only some conception of equal consideration for each citizen can form the basis of uncoerced and informed allegiance to a government.

People voluntarily relocate to Saudi Arabia or Shanghai and give uncoerced and informed allegiance to the government there. Why? It is in their interest to do so. Illegal migrants have inferior rights to American citizens. Yet millions continue to live in America though no one is forcing them to stay.

Williams asked a stupid question and gave it a stupid answer.

Not so many governments at the present time can be said without any hesitation or qualification to live up to the promise offered by that formula, and that fact itself leads back to the problem of defining equality as a political ideal, rather than as a mere assumption. The point of articulating and pursuing a political ideal of equality is not to indulge resentment or a managerial passion for uniformity, even though both have no doubt played some part in the history of egalitarianism.

The history of an abstraction may interest pedagogues. But the reason they are paid a little money is so as to act as child-minders. If they can get their students to stop masturbating for an hour, they have more than earned their wage.

The basic aim, now more important than ever, is to find a practical conception of equality that can give people a genuine sense that they receive equal consideration from society and so have a stake in it.

That is the business of genuine politicians who kiss babies and knock on doors and make speeches. Theory is no help at all. The only practical conception of equality has to do with saying 'we are behind our neighbors on such and such metric'. We must catch up! Our kids' futures are at stake!

Only this has any hope of giving people a reason why they should obey and co-operate.

So, if Williams and Sen and other such pedants went on strike, our pious hope that people will continue to obey the law and co-operate with each other, will be dashed to the ground. Utter chaos would descend. There would be scenes of mass cannibalism in Piccadilly Circus. Leicester Square would be drenched in the blood.

Without such a reason, there are only coercion, mystification, habit, and the hope that people will be content with making the best of where they find themselves.

Yes, yes. Without such a reason there would only be a Gestapo, and a Spanish Inquisition, and the sheer force of habit such that people would continue to turn up for their day-jobs though cannibals had bitten off their arms and legs.

The sort of equality that contains no aspiration and can be comfortably announced as being already here, such as an equal legal right to become a millionaire, is quite obviously not enough.

This is not obvious at all. Tony Blair would lead his party down a Thatcherite route. Shirley Williams' S.D.P merged with the Liberals who later joined a coalition Government along with the Tories. It is only after the rise of Jeremy Corbyn that there has been any push-back against Thatcher's vision. However, for Nationalization to be back on the agenda, we'd have to have hard Brexit because EU rules forbid the Government from taking back control of even the most abysmally run Rail network.

It is extraordinary that anyone can have thought, as some followers of Lady Thatcher have thought and perhaps in a few cases still do think, that mere equality in the face of the market could realise enough of an idea of equal citizenship to make anything work, including the market itself.

Risk-pooling through compulsory Social Insurance is a perfectly 'Capitalist' way forward. Accountancy firms can't operate without professional indemnity insurance. You can't drive a car without motor insurance. So what? This is no great scandal. The Insurance industry is a wholly Capitalist institution.

Sen’s theory of equality does yield an aspiration that can speak to the problems of the modern state, although he does not himself discuss the most basic and general reasons for which a modern society might be interested in ideals of equality.

Thus his work is ab ovo worthless. We want to know which countries are poorest because we may be able to source labour more cheaply there. We want to know which countries are richest so as to direct our marketing at them. The same holds across regions and between people.

He concentrates rather on what such an ideal should be.

Thus he was a 'transcendentalist'. Good to know.

He properly reminds us that if we are going to develop ideas of equality, we had better have some notion of their purpose, and that for different purposes we may want to use different ideas of equality. For some purposes of economic understanding, inequality of income may be the relevant measure, but for broader political and social aims we need richer ideas.

Why? You need affordable, not richer, ideas if your political and social aims are broader, not narrower, than is common.

Sen is extremely aware of political issues, such as poverty, deprivation and injustice to women, but this book is not a work of political theory, and it does not start from the political questions that themselves create the demand for an understanding of equality. Sen is both an economist and a moral philosopher, but he approaches the problems of equality by a route that runs from economic theory.

Economic theory is either itself economic or it is nonsense. It would not expend scarce resources on 'richer ideas'. Rather it would roll up its sleeves and get idiographic so as to generate a surplus and thus pay its way.

The issue, as I said at the start, is, equality of what? Or as Sen also puts it, in the language of mathematical economists, in what space do we want equality to obtain?

Economics has only one configuration space- that of all agents over time.

It is a fundamental point that equality in one space can, in virtue of the very same facts, mean inequality in another.

No. An equality relation of a certain type may hold across a configuration space whereas another may not. Relations are not the same thing as Spaces.

To take one of Sen’s favourite examples, people have different needs with respect to food, because of their body weight, their age, their state of health, and so on. To give them all the same food will not generate the same degree of nutrition in each; equality in the space of food provision means inequality in the space of nutrition.

No. A relation to do with food availability is different from a relation to do with nutrition. The configuration space remains the same.

To take an example- suppose there are ten people in your classroom. The relation 'wanked once today' picks out five of them. By contrast, the relation 'is currently wanking' picks out only four of them till teacher puts his hands in his pockets. This does not change the fact that the space contains ten people.

Similarly, equality of money or other such resources does not mean equality in terms of what people can achieve: for many different reasons, people are not the same in their capacity to convert resources into worthwhile or satisfying activity.

Earth shaking revelation- Captain Obvious!

Welfare economists have made this point in terms of what was traditionally their favourite measure, ‘utility’ – which means roughly the degree to which someone is satisfied with a given outcome or gets what he wants. An addition of the same resource does not yield the same increase in utility, either between different people, or indeed for the same person in different contexts. One application of this point is the familiar ‘diminishing marginal utility of money’, by which an additional hundred pounds means more to someone who has a little than to someone who has a lot. Sen, however, has been a powerful and influential critic of those who overestimate the usefulness and, beyond a certain point, the coherence of the concept of utility, and for many reasons (not for the most part stated here, but referred to as appearing elsewhere) he rejects utility as the measure of what he calls ‘basal equality’.

But everybody else rejected this nonsense long go- or else never heard of it in the first place. Only some stupid pedagogues bothered with the thing so as to earn a little money as glorified child-minders.

He also rejects as the measure of equality the ‘primary goods’ that John Rawls has specified as the objects of distribution in his political theory. Rawls described these as multi-purpose goods that any reasonable human being in most social circumstances would want: they include money and ‘the means to self-respect’.

Rawls was a theologian manque who was saying to his wealthy students- be nice to the poor. Why reject whatever silliness the silly man propounded? It's not like he changed anything. Ignore him the way everybody else does.

Sen’s own proposal is that the space in which the most basic equality is to be established is that of freedom itself.

Rawls was silly. Sen is idiotic. Freedom isn't a Space. It is a relation. Thus 'is free to buy a gold Rolex' is a relation which picks out certain members of a configuration space. This is useful information for marketing companies.

Rawls’s primary goods, he claims, represent means rather than ends: the only point of money as a primary good is its power to increase one’s freedom to choose.

However one's freedom to choose buying a Rolex depends on how much money you have. One may as well say the only point of 'one's freedom to choose' is its power to contribute to human flourishing. Furthermore, the only point of 'human flourishing' is its power to contribute to not being dead. The only point of 'not being dead' is its power to increase one's ability to resist being buried or cremated.

If Sen-tentious shite is accepted as something valuable, we have an algorithmic method for generating an infinite amount of scholarship. But what good would that do? If everybody becomes a Mother Theresa, who will bail out the Vatican Bank?

The criticism should, perhaps, rather be that the description of the primary goods that Rawls gave in A Theory of Justice was misleading. One of Rawls’s primary goods was freedom itself, and Sen’s criticism, that the primary goods are only means to freedom, can hardly apply to that; but then Rawls’s description of a primary good does not apply to it very neatly, either.

Is it possible that Sen was revenging the Third World on stupid Western Professors- whom poor desis have to study to get a Credential and a place in the queue for Government jobs-  by satirizing their stupidity?

If we can make freedom equal between different people, then we shall make equal the range of choices they have, and, with that, the range of ‘capabilities’ they possess for different kinds of human ‘functioning’.

If we can. We can't. So pull the flush on this shite. It is worthless.

If we bring it about that disabled people get more resources, we increase the range of things that they can choose to do, and this is the sense in which we increase their freedom.

But Britain and America and everywhere else already had higher payments or tax allowances for disabled people. Courts already took disability into account when calculating damages.
Economists and Political Philosophers may not have known that big fat men like me need more food than slim, petite, women. They may have thought that Courts and Social Insurance Schemes give the same amount of money to disabled people as they would to the able bodied. But this just shows that these guys were stupid and that their University Departments needed to be closed down.

In explaining these ideas, Sen makes a number of careful and important distinctions.

Sen has never made a distinction which was not utterly foolish.

In many cases, having a range of alternatives from which to choose is an instrumental good, in the sense that it enables one to find the most satisfactory option. This is so in the standard type of economic model centred on utility, in which the desired outcome is merely identified with the item one picks, and the range of choice one had serves only as the basket out of which one picks it. Sen points out, however, that in many connections, choosing is itself important. It often makes a difference whether one chose a certain outcome, or the outcome was simply delivered to one, even though the outcome is just as good in itself.

Economics already had a distinction between the Endowment set (which includes stuff you are given) and Choices made in the Market. Hayek explained why the latter, under certain conditions, would be more efficient because information is costly to aggregate and process. Furthermore, as a number of economists in the late Sixties and Seventies showed, there were substantial Preference Revelation and Moral Hazard problems, not to mention constraints arising from Complexity, Computability, Concurrency etc.

Sen thus wants to give choice and action a real place in the theory of equality, and not leave them as merely the routes that lead to desirable outcomes, as they standardly have been left, not only in theory, but, too often, in the practice of the welfare state, which has tended to regard the disabled as beneficiaries rather than as people who want the chance to make their own choices.

Theories aren't real. Wanting to give abstractions a real place in a theory is a silly objective- like wanting to give UNESCO world-heritage status to one's Castle in Spain.

The welfare state had discovered that it was cheaper and better to give money to disabled people rather than to board them in Institutions. It was Thatcher, not Shirley Williams (who was married to Bernard) who made this change. But that was a decade previously.

If equality is basically to be understood as equality of freedom, then the supposed clash between equality and freedom, so famous from confrontations between Left and Right, must in some way be ill-defined. Sen indeed says that to put the problem in these terms reflects a category mistake. ‘They are not alternatives. Liberty is among the possible fields of application of equality, and equality is among the possible patterns of distribution of liberty’ (his emphasis).

Equality is a set of relations on a configuration space. If 'Equality of freedom' is defined as Hohfeldian rights on the commodity space, then it is a member of the set mentioned in the first sentence. However, if it is undefined, then it isn't because it is not truly a relation at all.

Sen claims that Liberty is a field of application- i.e. a configuration space. Either this configuration space is the one which includes all human beings through history or it is ontologically dysphoric- it does not relate to this world at all. This is plausible, Religions speak of 'Liberation' from earthly bondage. Liberty may refer to self-subsistent, intensional, things of this type. Equality, by contrast, is purely relational. It can't be 'a possible pattern of the distribution of liberty' because if liberty is distributed then some coalition is distributing it. This means the coalition is in a superior position. By contrast, if everyone has the same endowment of liberty, then no distribution is occurring.

Sen does not go as far as Rousseau and some other philosophers who say that there cannot be a conflict between liberty and equality at all, on the ground that nothing which conflicts with equality can be genuine liberty, and nothing that conflicts with liberty can be genuine equality. To the extent that equality at the most basic level is being extended, it must indeed be true in Sen’s view that someone’s freedom (of some kind) is being increased, since freedom is what is being more equally distributed. However, this does not mean that we can think solely in terms of an increase in freedom, and forget about conflicts between freedom and equality.

In other words, distributional mechanisms need to be constantly monitored for efficiency and unintended consequences.

Everybody already knows this.

Suppose that the freedom of some poor and disabled people to get around is increased by special provision, and this is paid for by an increase in redistributive taxation. (Given present attitudes in Britain, the example is distinctly utopian, but that does not affect the argument.) As a result of the tax increase some higher tax-payers’ range of choices, and hence, in Sen’s sense, their freedom, is diminished: they can no longer afford both the Bentley and Gstaad this year.

Williams is being naive. Higher tax-payers have numerous ways to avoid taxation. At the margin, that is what happens. Freedom is not affected, because Exit is not curtailed. On the contrary, the existence of progressive taxation creates an incentive to make demand and supply more elastic. Only economic rent can be taxed. Increasing transfer earnings gets rid of the problem. Freedom is costly to maintain because it requires provision against all that threatens it. Sen's mistake is to think it is a tangible service which can be provided like hair-cuts or manicures. Actually it is more like an insurance policy. Sen has said that his thinking can be easily accommodated in an Arrow-Debreu framework. But such a framework does not take Knightian Uncertainty into account. It assumes that all possible states of the world, and their likelihood, is known in advance. But, if this were the case there would be no need for Language or Markets or Law Courts or anything else. Thus, this is the equivalent of an Occassionalist theology where all are as windowless monads perfectly synchronized in the unfolding of their entelechy.

Now what is being bought with this bit of their freedom is an increase in someone else’s freedom.

Sheer stupidity! Suppose you are a prison visitor. Some convict steals your Rolex without your noticing. Since you are a sensible man, you pay the deductible and get money from your Theft insurer. The thief's freedom does not increase. He still rots in jail- indeed, his sentence may be increased if a C.C camera captured the moment when the theft occurs.

One can gas on and on about how you sacrifice your Buddhahood to raise up the ignorant to an equal soteriological stature, or make a great show of washing the feet of lepers, or making a speech at Davos about how you are helping the UN meet its Sustainable Development Goals- surely a more intrinsically repugnant activity- but this sort of shite is puerile and impresses only pedagogues.

However, it is not necessary to Sen’s argument that the increase in the disabled person’s freedom would be greater than the rich person’s loss of freedom. One person’s freedom is being set against another’s, because freedom is the currency of equality, but it is not necessarily the case, merely in terms of freedom, that one person’s gain will more than cancel out the other’s loss: all that is necessary is that at the end we should be nearer to equality.

Sen is saying 'we needn't bother working out if there is a Hicks-Kaldor improvement. No need for a Cost Benefit Analysis. We can just run around doing stupid shit in the name of 'Freedom'.

The problem with this view is that those who have Freedom have the means to defend it. They exit the jurisdiction and laugh themselves silly as a Venezuela type humanitarian catastrophe unfolds. -

In such a case there can be a real conflict between freedom and equality – even though the equality is itself equality of freedom.

There can't be a real conflict between imaginary things. I recall ringing the Police because a fight had broken out between Fraternity and Solidarity. I got arrested for being off my head on booze.

Sen recognises that in such transactions there is a danger, as with equality over other spaces, of ‘levelling down’, but argues that there are other values to be taken into consideration.

Like getting a Nobel for being the Mother Theresa of Economics- i.e. pretending to help the poor and starving while kissing the ring of Power and Wealth.

He accepts, for instance, that it would not be sensible to use large resources in order to increase marginally the capabilities of disadvantaged people, if the cost of this were to reduce severely the productivity of advantaged people; that would be an unacceptable loss in efficiency. He does not say much about values other than economic efficiency in their relation to equality of freedom. Thus he does not say much about the situation just discussed, in which the loss is of freedom. Again, he does not say very much about fairness, for instance in relation to questions of giving people who are more skilled better rewarded positions. He discusses this in terms of incentives and efficiency, but many people think that it is not merely inefficient, but actually unfair, not to give some such rewards (though Rawls dissents on the ground that no one deserves their talents, which is true but doubtfully relevant). It would be interesting to see how Sen would bring together freedom, the basic currency of equality, with desert and similar differential ideas of fairness; outside the area of punishment, does anyone deserve more freedom than another?

Freedom is not the basic currency of equality. Money is. Poor people want a Welfare check, not increased freedom to marry their blood relatives same as wot them rich people do.

Determinations of equality and inequality in the space of freedom demand, as the examples show, some ways of ‘measuring’ increases or decreases in freedom.

Such measures now exist. They are all totally shit. One survey shows the UK as behind Jamaica and Ghana in Press freedom with the US even further behind Burkina Faso though journalists in that country have to rely on 'expenses' paid to them by NGO's for favourable coverage. Otherwise, they would starve on their official salaries. India, btw, is ranked below Myanmar!

No sensible person should demand highly determinate or quantitative measures, and Sen has for many years been a leader in trying to persuade his fellow economists that some reasonable comparisons in the actual world are worth a great deal more than highly sophisticated operations on quantities that exist only in mathematical models.

Reasonable comparisons of the actual world are made by the private sector and by smart people who are genuinely interested in public policy in a specific area. Thus if Finland is at the top of the education tree, people will study what makes that country different.

However, we have lost faith in silly indices which are clearly politically motivated. Nobody really believes that the UK and the US have less press freedom than Ghana.

Sen is right to say a lot of mathematical econ is a wank, but this is only true if it takes something silly as its object. Social Welfare is silly. Auction Design isn't because it can pay for itself. That's all that matters. Economics must pay for itself or pretend to be Philosophy or else put on a Panda suit and make videos for Pornhub.

In the matter of counting or weighing freedoms or capabilities, however, we do need some guidance, and it can be fairly complained that Sen does not give us very much. It is an obvious point that one can count capabilities, choices, and so forth in any way one likes. To use an example I have put to Sen before, someone who introduces a new washing powder introduces also indefinitely many new choices (such as choosing between buying some arbitrary other good and buying this washing powder) and at the same time takes others away (such as the chance of making an informed choice of washing powder without worrying about this one). Counting, clearly, will get us nowhere. To this line of questioning Sen gives a robust reply to the general effect that any criterion can give rise to some such difficulties, and you just have to use good judgment in the face of actual circumstances.

Good judgment is idiographic and best developed by actual judging. Theory may systematize a corpus of judgments and provide hermeneutic principles or methods of 'harmonious construction'. However, unless theory has a superior Structural Causal Model and can actually change outcomes, its range is pedagogic not such as could be an input for public policy.

The considerations one uses in actual circumstances rely, unsurprisingly, not on numbers, but on weight: some capabilities (or freedoms or possibilities of choice) are more important than others.

The problem with weightings is that if they become common knowledge then it becomes possible to game their criteria. Thus any metric they instrumentalise ceases to be a good proxy. Change the weighting, and smart people just change how they present themselves.

In very many cases, however, the importance of the freedom is directly related to the importance of the functioning in question.

In very many cases the importance of the functioning in question is directly related to not being dead. In very many cases the importance of not being dead is directly related to not being buried or cremated. In very many cases the importance of not being buried or cremated is directly linked to being able to be a seat-filler at the Oscars when the 'Weekend at Bernie's' franchise finally receives the acclamation it so richly deserves.

The capacity to walk is important in the first instance because walking is important.

Walking implies the capacity to walk.

If I can walk, there are many more things that I can do, and choices come with this, of where and when to walk.

One choice you can make is to walk away if anyone in your vicinity starts talking nonsense of this sort. If you can't walk, you can urinate furiously to mark your displeasure. 

But if there is a real question that centres on the choices – a question whether I can walk where and when I choose – this is naturally understood as a further matter, one that comes up only if I can walk.

Normally, at least in America, we say a hypothetical question is moot. However, if a person is crippled by reason of a tort or crime, the Court will certainly take into account what the person would have been able to do with his ability to walk in assessing damages.

Similarly, a National Health System, or panel of Doctors, will take into account what a patient will be able to do and for how many years she will be able to do before deciding who gets priority of an expensive course of treatment which will allow them to walk.

Judges and Doctors do useful stuff. They have to make 'hard choices' all the time. Academics are free to talk nonsense to their hearts content. However, even they won't buy each other's shite.

To put both questions under the language of freedom runs the risk of mixing together two different kinds of political concern: it is one thing to able to walk (not to be paralysed, for instance), and another to be free (e.g. from police interference) to walk where and when I want.

Sen misused language. He treated Freedom as though it was a commodity which could be distributed. But, Freedom is more like Physical Fitness. It is something you have to work hard and take precautions to maintain. You can't take physical fitness from an athlete and give it to a slob like me. You can try to limit a person's freedom, but if that person had taken proper precautions, he evades your attempt.

There are other cases in which Sen’s emphasis on freedom seems to pick on a consequence, rather than the centre, of some undesirable state.

To pick on 'the center' of some undesirable state means having a Structural Causal Model of it. Armchair economists, or philosophers for that matter, don't have any such thing. They can't even 'pick on a consequence' of the undesirable state because they are completely ignorant of real world workarounds. Thus, they assume that a guy who can't walk, can't get around at all. This is because they have never seen a wheelchair. Or maybe they did see one and thought it was just a mode of conveyance for lazy people. Anyway, their Professors didn't tell them about it, so it couldn't possibly exist.

Stressing, as Franklin Roosevelt did, the importance of ‘freedom from’ such things as malaria, he lays the weight on counterfactual choice, the kinds of life people could choose to lead if they did not have malaria.

This is foolish. 'Freedom from malaria' means having a Structural Causal Model of it. This enables us to do smart things to greatly reduce its incidence and virulence.

Gassing on about what a wonderful world it would be if nasty things didn't happen is utterly useless.

It is importantly true that malaria is not just unpleasant but disabling. On the other hand, does that fact in itself pick out what is so obviously bad about it? ‘If only I had not been ... I could have chosen a richer life than the one I have’ can be truly filled in many different ways, and not all the fillings have anything like the same political or social significance.

Structural Causal Models pick out what is bad in a situation- viz. there is a quantum of avoidable harm which can be relatively cheaply remedied.

In many of Sen’s examples, there is no doubt at all that the state of disadvantaged people would be improved if resources could be devoted to relieving their disadvantage: malnutrition, disease, ignorance, insecurity.

This is not the case. In each such situation the state of disadvantaged people would be worsened if resources were devoted to Sen-type shite.

Consider the citizens of Nalanda District who were disadvantaged in terms of access to College education. Sen was the Chairman of Nalanda International University which took land away from peasants and gave them a White Elephant  which was wholly worthless and which didn't admit local kids. They are worse off as a result. The newspapers publicized cases of students being sexually harassed and robbed. It seems they couldn't even get yoghurt, forget about medical services. This caused fewer tourists and pilgrims to go to stay in Rajgir than would otherwise have been the case.

Equality would be advanced if their state were better.

Nonsense. Equality would be advanced if their state became more common.

But – as Sen himself admirably brings out in some of his technical discussions of comparabilities – you can arrive at this conclusion on almost any account of equality.

No. Any useful account of equality increases comparability because it uses a superior Structural Causal Model. This is because, in application, it establishes a Cost-Benefit schedule. If we find that it costs x dollars to raise an under-performing school to the average level, and y dollars to raise an under-performing hospital, then we get a means of comparing different, seemingly incomparable, things. This is because they are actually interdependent. Better education could correlate to better future health. But only if that education is useful- not Sen-tentious shite.

With regard to these disadvantages, any reasonable story about the way human beings should live will deliver much the same result, and the special emphasis on freedom seems unnecessary, and in some cases, as I have already suggested, secondary.

These are not 'reasonable stories'. They are unscientific shite. Structural Causal Models need to be Scientific and first order.

In other cases, on the other hand, the emphasis on freedom makes a considerable difference, but its results are also contestable. This is true with Sen’s admirable discussion of gender discrimination in various parts of the world. Many of the statistics about women’s disadvantage refer, once more, to such uncontroversial evils as malnutrition and early death, but others, relating to women’s levels of education and chances of employment, raise ideologically disputed questions of what capabilities should be developed by women.

This was written almost thirty years ago. Thankfully there are no longer any 'ideologically disputed questions of what capabilities should be developed by women'. The only capabilities that matter are those that produce nice things or cool services. One capability some women have is making the nicest possible thing- viz. a baby and then letting us play with it. It is entirely proper that this is rewarded- up to a point.

It is no criticism of Sen that he should take a stand in favour of women’s rights to self-development.

Nor is it an endorsement. What was he supposed to do? Say 'Women should be barefoot and pregnant?' He'd have been lynched.

What is unclear, rather, is the extent to which he thinks that these dimensions of freedom and capability can themselves be theoretically derived.

The extent to which 'dimensions of freedom and capability' can be theoretically derived is ZERO. That is why, if you are arrested for a crime, you hire a lawyer, not an Armchair Economist. Similarly, if you are no longer capable of walking, you need a Doctor, not a Philosopher.

Does his theory say only that freedom and capability are the proper basis of claims to equality?

A claim to equality arises out of a comparison. Thus, when African Americans claimed equality with White people, they pointed to specific disparities not abstract considerations.

Theory is quite useless in this context unless it genuinely has a Structural Causal Model that 'pays its way'- i.e. using the theory generates a surplus by reason of the superior application of Scientific methods.

Or does the theory deliver also the conclusion that the demand for equality of educational opportunity for women follows from any adequate account of human capabilities and potentialities? I should not be surprised or disappointed if he wanted to say the second. But then his theory will need to be supplemented by materials which at the moment it does not offer or even promise, in particular a theory of false consciousness which will explain why many women have failed to understand their own capabilities.

Thirty years later, we have much more empirical knowledge and a better Structural Causal Model of why women, in affluent, egalitarian, societies, may have less equality of opportunity in STEM subject education than women in more patriarchal societies like Iran.

The answer is not 'false consciousness' but rational choice based on expected returns to education.

As it is, Sen’s theory does stand rather oddly to the politics with which he is so evidently concerned. Much of the disadvantage that he mentions, which a move to greater equality would hope to reduce, is so uncontroversially awful that the refined arguments about the primacy of freedom seem unnecessary: whatever space you are working in – whether it is that of utility, resources, primary goods or freedom – you will get the same answer.

So, he is reinventing the wheel. Why? Coz he is Brown, not White and thus should be given a gold star just for not swinging from tree to tree or filling his hands with faeces and flinging the stuff all over the place. Williams is clearly a Racist who does not understand what an epoch making achievement it is for a poor little brown boy, born in a shit-hole country, to grow up to use long words like 'Freedom' and 'Equality' almost as though he could understand what they meant.

In other cases, the results of the approach are much more controversial, at least in terms of local cultural problems, and then one must ask how far Sen’s theory licenses us politically to treat such cases as being just like the uncontroversial cases (which is what, in terms of his theory, they are: all the cases equally involve the restriction of basic freedoms). But that needs a further political dimension of the theory: a dimension in which we can understand such things as false consciousness and the ideological misrepresentation of basic human capacities, and which will help us to discuss (among other things) the relation of Western agencies to people who do not necessarily share Western views.

True, the little brown fellow is not flinging faeces at nice White people who are only trying to help. But, that is precisely the problem. After all, his people spend their time doing nothing else. Just as women have 'false consciousness', so to do Brown people. They think flinging faeces is a good thing. However, it is an ideological misrepresentation of basic human capacities due to it is not really true that 'round the corner chocolate is made'. The anus does not work that way. Western Agencies are trying to explain this to Brown people. Sen isn't helping. He should go back to jabbering in his own language so that his people will be able to understand that shitting into your hands and flinging your faeces at nice White people is not the true meaning of freedom, nor the acme of human capability.

In his work on many topics, notably famine, and also on several subjects discussed in this book, such as the definition of poverty, Sen’s acute analysis and his remarkable powers of making subtle and relevant distinctions combine with his astonishing range of information to make instruments suitable for immediate political application.

Williams was writing this before the age of the internet. He honestly did not know that all of Sen's work was mischievous and counter-productive.

Still, Sen was a hero to people of Indian origin. Why? It was because if we were ever asked to do some useful work- e.g. point the way to the toilet for someone who urgently wished to relieve herself- we could reply 'Before pointing the way to the toilet we must make a distinction between the substantive and procedural aspects of the toilet. The first is a euphemism for a receptacle for urine and feces whereas the latter refers to the process of attending to one's appearance and hygiene. Since all things are potential receptacles for urine and feces and farting too is a method of relieving oneself, it follows that much much more Research into Toilet theory must be performed before any point can be irrefragably established about the Space of Toilets as Freedom within the context of Capabilities and Entitlements.'

Obviously, the other guy- who has shat himself while listening to you- will turn out to be a Phd from MIT and he will critique you by recasting your argument, as is right and proper, in the theory of Directed Graphs.

The theory of equality as the equality of freedom does not seem quite to do this.

Quite true. It must be recast in terms of Directed Graphs in the manner of Toilet Theory.

Its distinctions seem to yield either more than we need for political purposes, or less. Perhaps this is only to say that we need more weapons than this compelling and elegantly argued book can offer.

With more weapons like this, how can you not lose?

Granted the depth and the growth of inequality in this country, to look no farther, it is hardly surprising.

Three decades later, we are in a position to pronounce judgment on the impact of British theorizing about inequality. It did no good whatsoever. It wasn't a weapon, but a self-inflicted wound.

Why?

It stopped talking about how to make things better for the majority of British people. So, they lost interest in Equality. Similarly, when the EU stopped talking about making things better for Europeans, the Brits Brexited. Not the more equal ones. It was the less equal who rebelled.

That's the problem with Equality. The poor don't want to hear any more lectures about it. They want Science to do its stuff and make things better for everybody. Armchair Economists and Philosophers are welcome to continue to cretinize over privileged kids in tony Colleges. They are welcome to circle jerk to their heart's content at Davos. But, they must stop filling their hands with faeces and flinging it all and sundry. If Amartya Sen could wean himself off this habit- so can you. Mind it kindly.