By contrast, India stagnated because the 'license permit Raj' was destroying the capability of the population to rise up by its own efforts. By the time Amartya Sen left India it was clear that Development Economics was utterly shite. His old mentor Sukhamoy Chakroborty demonstrated this for all to see during his inglorious tenure as Planning Chief. Another Bengali, a philosopher, was Indira's Minister for Industries at that time. The country languished as never before. Sen was respected in India because he emigrated and took up an obsolete type of philosophy and a wholly useless Social Choice theory. This was not the only way he- like his pal Mahbub ul-Haq- showed his patriotism. Both did junk econometrics to prove the sub-continent hadn't been turned into a shithole by stupid, corrupt, Leftists of the sort who patronized them.
Sen, like Haq, also contributed to the burgeoning of wholly worthless International Aid related Bureaucracies and NGOs by pretending that measuring things was more important than fixing things. Sen's distinctive feature in this field was his pretense of philosophical erudition.
Thus, Amartya Sen, begins a paper titled 'Development as Capability expansion', by quoting the German title of a standard philosophical work so as to give the impression that he himself is fluent in that language and is a profound student of Idealistic Philosophy.
In his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik de Sitten, ImmanueI Kant argues for the necessity of seeing human beings as ends in themselves, rather than as means to other ends: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only.”
By saying this Kant has violated his own categorical imperative. If people are ends in themselves- not a means by which a particular ethical theory is propagated and gets linked to social change- then one must never lay down any maxim to influence other people. We must respect the ends they have chosen for themselves, not regard them as a means to realize our moral vision. True, while he was alive, we would be forbidden from judging his ends to be self-contradictory, but now the old fool is dead we are released from any such obligation.
Of course, any currently living person can adopt Kant's ends as his own. But, if Sen believes what he is writing- and the above is not simply a literary flourish or a ceremonious clearing of the throat- then he ought not to be an economist. This is because making choices under scarcity means treating yourself, or whoever it is you are choosing for, as a means to an end- with respect to that choice situation- rather than as an 'end withal'. Thus, in choosing whether to order bread or rice, one should only consider oneself as acting as a mere means to gaining nutrition not as being the end for which nutrition exists. This is because rice and bread and cake and custard can't flow by themselves to you. You are a mere instrument in the survival of your germ-line not the goal of all that is necessary for your flourishing.To assert otherwise is a convenient doctrine for an Economist who doesn't want to actually economize on the use of scarce resources but nevertheless wishes to pose as a great benefactor of mankind.
If human beings mustn't be seen as 'means' to ends, they mustn't be seen to have 'capabilities' either because to be capable of something means being a possible means of effecting that end. If we are 'ends' in ourselves our instrumental capabilities are irrelevant save to one solely concerned with using others for his own purposes. Moreover, the only type of ends we are allowed to be are those we endow ourselves with, not for any instrumental reason or as a means to fulfill someone else's vision, but because these are our own true ends. Thus, if I starve to death because I believe everybody should feed me delicious dishes cooked by the top chefs in the world, then who is to say that this was not my own self constituted end? You may not think I'm being very sensible, but you have to respect my decision to scream continually about how you fucking bastards are starving me to death because you refuse to accept that your true teleology, your Divine purpose, is to bring me the tastiest dishes in the world.
Aristotle didn't know about Evolution and Genetics and Statistical Game Theory and so forth. He was foolish enough to believe in Teleology- the notion that things have a final purpose or 'end'. Kant, too, was as ignorant as shit because he didn't have a smartphone. We, on the other hand, know that- unless an Occasionalist God created the world and endowed us with the illusion of free will- no 'final' purposes or Kantian 'ends' actually exist. One may still say that one's end is to treat others as ends but this is the remark of a bell-end. What you are doing is using the existence of other people to virtue signal and glorify yourself. One may as well say one is spending one's time praying for the welfare of all sentient beings. No doubt a few people can make a little money by this type of hypocrisy but the thing could easily turn into a public nuisance.
It may be that Sen's 'end' is to talk worthless shite rather than be the means of some amelioration in the lot of those at scarcity's sharp end. If so, how could Sen's end be best achieved? One answer that suggests itself is that Sen could spend time 'analyzing' things which require innovative, technology based, solutions of a type which increases productivity and thus reduces relative scarcity.
Kant's principle may have importance in non-economic concepts- i.e. where there is no scarcity. Indeed, in the Greek Church, economia is contrasted with akrebia. The former is an accommodative praxis, the latter a rigid principle. Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, had warned against a type of akrebia which seeks a higher standard of precision than the subject matter affords. There are idiographic problems which afflict human societies- tackling poverty, catalyzing progress, and planning under radical, Knightian uncertainty. All these problem require knowledge of 'minute particulars' and can be done very efficaciously by non-economists. By contrast, the nomothetic approach of academic, mathematical economists, has proven to be a big part of the problem and no part of the solution.
This principle has importance in many contexts–even in analysing poverty, progress and planning. Human beings are the agents, beneficiaries and adjudicators of progress, but they also happen to be– directly or indirectly–the primary means of all production. This dual role of human beings provides a rich ground for confusion of ends and means in planning and policy-making.This is true if the 'planning and policy-making' is done by cretins like Sen. However, in their own personal lives, these academics don't get confused at all. They lie and cheat and blackguard their rivals so as to make out that their true 'end' is Truth and Justice and Liberty for all.
Indeed, it can–and frequently does–take the form of focusing on production and prosperity as the essence of progress, treating people as the means through which that productive progress is brought about (rather than seeing the lives of people as the ultimate concern and treating production and prosperity merely as means to those lives).Economists like Sen may earn some money for gassing on about such things but this is simply window dressing. It is people with expert knowledge- engineers, agronomists, entrepreneurs and so forth- who do first order good and this has mimetic effects which Sen-tentious economics remains wholly ignorant of.
Indeed, the widely prevalent concentrationamong academic or bureaucratic economists who are wholly worthless as everybody now realizes
on the expansion of real income and on economic growth as the characteristics of successful development can be precisely an aspect of the mistake against which Kant had warned.But it is a mistake we have all easily remedied by ignoring economists save when ourselves engaged in propaganda or partisan polemics of a phatic, not alethic, type.
This problem is particularly pivotal in the assessment and planning of economic development.This type of assessment and planning should not be done by cretinous academicians. Would you let Sen run your business?
The problem does not, of course, lie in the fact that the pursuit of economic prosperity is typically taken to be a major goal of planning. This need not be, in itself, unreasonable.It is unreasonable. Because of Knightian Uncertainty, plans should be 'regret minimizing'. They should provide against unforeseen contingencies. Furthermore, if the planners are cretins- as economists generally are- they should be modest and about letting more capable people decide how to allocate resources. This involves checking they have the incentive to do so.
It is unreasonable to let a bunch of people who have created no wealth to make plans for those who do create wealth.
The problem relates to the level at which this aim should be taken as a goal. Is it just an intermediate goal, the importance of which is contingent on what it ultimately contributes to human lives? Or is it the object of the entire exercise? It is in the acceptance–usually implicitly–of the latter view that the ends–means confusion becomes significant–indeed blatant.The goals of cretins are cretinous. There is no need to worry about whether they are aiming to shit higher than their arsehole or, with greater methodological consistency, seeking to turn their entire body into one gigantic arsehole.
The problem might have been of no great practical interest if the achievement of economic prosperity were tightly linked–-in something like a one-to-one correspondence–with that of enriching the lives of the people.The problem is of no practical interest whatsoever because no country- including India- lets mathematical economists anywhere near the economy. The Soviet Union didn't actually listen to Kantorovich and so on. True, Gorbachev- idiot that he was, did listen to a couple of mathematical economists but, because he surrendered Party control of the economy, there was an immediate 'scissors crisis' and Communism collapsed almost immediately.
In India, it is true that Sukhamoy Chakrborty- whom Samuelson considered the best mathematical Development economist- was Indira's Planning Chief. There was also a Bengali philosopher as her Minister of Industries. But this was merely window dressing so Sanju and his chums could steal everything in sight. No one cared what Chakroborty or his ilk were aiming at. They were merely scum that floats to the top.
If that were the case, then the pursuit of economic prosperity as an end in itself, while wrong in principle, might have been, in effect, indistinguishable from pursuing it only as a means to the end of enriching human lives. But that tight relation does not obtain.There was no relationship whatsoever between what Planners aimed at and what was happening to the Economy. What mattered was who had control rights and what their incentives were. If they got shot for not reporting an over-fulfillment of the 5 year plan then it appeared that Growth had shot up.
Countries with high GNP per capita can nevertheless have astonishingly low achievements in the quality of life, with the bulk of the population being subject to premature mortality, escapable morbidity, overwhelming illiteracy and so on.Rich people can have astonishingly low life expectancy if they keep shooting up heroin and eating cheeseburgers. So what?
Just to illustrate an aspect of the problem, the GNP per capita of six countries is given in table 1, along with each country’s respective level of life expectancy at birth.
TABLE 1. ECONOMIC PROSPERITY AND LIFE EXPECTANCY, 1985 Country GNP per capita Life expectancy at birth China..................................................... 310 69
Sri Lanka ................................................ 380 70 Brazil..................................................... 1 640 65
South Africa ............................................ 2 010 55 Mexico................................................... 2 080 67 Oman..................................................... 6 730 54
Source: World Development Report 1987 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1988), table 1. A country can be very rich in conventional economic terms (i.e., in terms of the value of commodities produced per capita) and still be very poor in the achieved quality of human life.That is why it is meaningless to compare countries which have very different histories and geographies and political regimes.
South Africa, with five or six times the GNP per capita of Sri Lanka or China, has a much lower longevity rate, and the same applies in different ways to Brazil, Mexico, Oman, and indeed to many other countries not included in this table.Only an idiot would compare apartheid South Africa to Sri Lanka. One may as well compare Amy Winehouse- a millionaire pop-star with a drug problem- to a Carmelite Nun who has no wealth whatsoever but whose lifestyle promotes longevity.
There are, therefore, really two distinct issues here. First, economic prosperity is no more than one of the means to enriching lives of people.This is why, when taking a job, you don't just look at the salary being offered, you also take into consideration the health plan, housing and transport costs, working conditions etc.
It is a foundational conclusion to give it the status of an end.It is nonsense. Economists know that Knightian Uncertainty exists. This means that they don't know for sure whether or not Economic prosperity has been attained. It may turn out that Income is not sustainable because a lot of things which currently count as Wealth turn out to be worthless or White Elephants simply.
Thus no a priori, or 'foundational', conclusions can be arrived at in the realm of 'economia'. That is why Sen-tentious 'akrebia' is useless- it is a mischievous waste of resources- in this context. It is now more than three decades since academics and bureaucrats started using Sen's jargon. What have they achieved? Nothing whatsoever. They thought Chavez's Venezuela, or Lula's Brazil were showing the way forward. They were wrong.
Secondly, even as a means, merely enhancing average economic opulence can be quite inefficient in the pursuit of the really valuable ends.But planners weren't 'enhancing' anything. They were merely having a wank. It is silly to examine their 'efficiency' in this respect. What mattered was staying clear of their jizz.
In making sure that development planning and general policymaking do not suffer from costly confusions of ends and means, we have to face the issue of identification of ends, in terms of which the effectiveness of the means can be systematically assessed.By the time Sen was writing this it was clear than 'Development planning' was utterly useless. It prevented development and created crony capitalism and corruption on a colossal scale. It didn't matter whether planners got confused and tugged each other, rather than themselves off, all that mattered was to keep out off range of their ejaculate.
This paper is concerned with discussing the nature and implications of that general task.
The capability approach: conceptual roots
The particular line of reasoning that will be pursued here is based on evaluating social change in terms of the richness of human life resulting from it. But the quality of human life is itself a matter of great complexity.Because of Knightian uncertainty, it is of exponentially greater complexity than any discourse concerning it. Thus such discourse is useless, if not actively mischievous.
The approach that will be used here, which is sometimes called the “capability approach”, sees human life as a set of “doings and beings”–we may call them “functionings”–and it relates the evaluation of the quality of life to the assessment of the capability to function.This is the kind of thing done by an insurance claims adjuster, or a Judge evaluating damages, or a bureaucrat assessing eligibility for a Disability check. In balmy times, this may be a feel-good activity. However, austerity soon kicks in and the thing soon turns into a Gradgrindian exercise in denying people the Social Insurance benefit they or their families have been paying for and are entitled to expect.
It is an approach that I have tried to explore in some detail, both conceptually and in terms of its empirical implications.Thirty years later it is clear that Sen explored nothing. There were no 'empirical implications'. There are plenty of other indices of Human Development and Welfare and Press Freedom and so forth. There is none for anything that Sen has gassed on and on about.
The roots of the approach go back at least to Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and indeed to Aristotle.They also go back to gibbering lunatics whose names are lost to history. Smith's importance is that he said there was no need for Planners. The market could coordinate things better. The importance of Marx is that, in his name, despotic One Party States could rob and loot and kill more ruthlessly than any Tszar. The importance of Aristotle is wholly, not Philosophical, but Theological. The Epicurean economists laughed themselves silly over his cretinous strictures.
In investigating the problem of “political distribution”, Aristotle made extensive use of his analysis of “the good of human beings”, and this he linked with his examination of “the functions of man” and his exploration of “life in the sense of activity”.That's why he was anti Democratic, anti Market, and only useful to Theologians and penurious pedants and pedagogues whose existence was entirely parasitic.
The Aristotelian theory is, of course, highly ambitious and involves elements that go well beyond this particular issue (e.g., it takes a specific view of human nature and relates a notion of objective goodness to it). But the argument for seeing the quality of life in terms of valued activities and the capability to achieve these activities has much broader relevance and application. Among the classical political economists, both Adam Smith and Karl Marx explicitly discussed the importance of functionings and the capability to function as determinants of well-being.So what? That's not the reason they became famous. Smith was against vested interests expressing themselves as restrictive practices and mercanitlist dogmas. Marx was against sweated labor as the source of profit and the engine of Capitalist accumulation.
Marx’s approach to the question was closely related to the Aristotelian analysis (and indeed was apparently directly influenced by it). Indeed, an important part of Marx’s programme of reformulation of the foundations of political economy is clearly related to seeing the success of human life in terms of fulfilling the needed human activities. Marx put it thus: “It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy come the rich human being and rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human life-activities–the man in whom his own realization exists as an inner necessity, as need.”Which is hilarious coz Sen was writing this shite at a time when the Soviet Union was still Gulaging the shite out of dissidents and Communist China was re-purposing its Labor Camps to make them more profitable.
Why pretend that humans can flourish more because some cretinous pedant has been put in charge of coordinating economic activity? Anyone can gas on about how, if only they themselves ran the world, everybody would live fuller, richer, lives. Man is born free, but everywhere we see men in trains commuting to work. Under Iyerism, your office will come to you and suck you off without your having to get out of bed. Also every time you take a dump, your feces will automatically get transferred on to the cranium of your Department Head.
Commodities, functionings and capability If life is seen as a set of “doings and beings” that are valuable,then the person doing the seeing is as thick as shit. Life is something which evolved on an uncertain fitness landscape. We don't know what smart people are really 'doing' though we can observe their actions. Another's 'being'- even that of one's spouse- is wholly mysterious. That is why Love is such an adventure and all Human tragedy a Divine Comedy.
the exercise of assessing the quality of life takes the form of evaluating these functionings and the capability to function.Assessing stuff is stooopid. Teachers want to teach not assess shite. There is a crowding out effect whereby enhanced assessment means less teaching. There is also a 'Goodhart's law' type effect, whereby assessment criteria are gamed and become not fit for purpose.
Sen type shite appeared a patriotic gig for Brown people to pretend their countries weren't shitholes coz of stupid policies and corrupt politicans. Thus to do a bit of junk econometrics to show that a Black Man in a crackhouse in New York had a lower life expectancy than a Brown Man not in a crack-house in Dacca was supposed to be a great victory over the neo Imperialists.
This valuational exercise cannot be done by focusing simply on commodities or incomes that help those doings and beings, as in commodity-based accounting of the quality of life (involving a confusion of means and ends). “The life of money-making”, as Aristotle put it, “is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.”The life of philosophy is one undertaken under the compulsion to appear to be doing something smart when the reverse is the case. If you actually do something smart, a lot of lives- including your own- improves. One way the good you have done can be quantified is in terms of money or wealth both of which can be used to do first order good.
Thinking about what constitutes the 'good' is bad. It is a waste of costly cognitive resources. No doubt, it may serve a pedagogic or sophistical purpose. But that purpose is charlatanry.
The task is that of evaluating the importance of the various functionings in human life, going beyond what Marx called, in a different but related context, “commodity fetishism”.Who set this task? No one. Sen and other such pedagogues were paid to ration Academic Credentials which served a more or less adversely selective screening or signally purpose.
The functionings themselves have to be examined, and the capability of the person to achieve them has to be appropriately valued.Why? Britain was doing fine before Sen showed up. So was America. Thirty years on, we can all see that no 'examining of functionings' occurred. Nothing was evaluated.
Suppose, by some magic, the thing had been done properly back then. A lot of working class people, more especially women, would have been discovered to have far greater productive capacity than Society, at that time, assumed. Some members of the hereditary elite may have been discovered to lack the sort of capability everybody assumed they had.
However, the working of competitive markets would have had the same effect as this magical evaluation method. It is because markets aren't sufficiently competitive that the problem arises in the first place.
Previously, during the War or the long Cold War, States would spend a little money finding out who had what functioning or capability so as to overtake its rival in various military, industrial or scientific fields. However, with the end of the Cold War, this ceased. Some Corporations may spend money on this sort of thing. However, it is not clear that this endows them with a competitive advantage because test criteria can be gamed and can become adversely selective and tend to reinforce a fatal type of 'group-think'.
In the view that is being pursued here, the constituent elements of life are seen as a combination of various different functionings (a “functioning n-tuple”).This is a terrible mistake. If Life evolved by natural selection and if our fitness landscape is uncertain, 'n' is unkowable. Functions can't be factorized. However, after the fact, it would always be possible to say such and n-tuple satisfies the observed data. But these n-tuples are not unique. They are non-denumurably infinite.
This amounts to seeing a person in as it were, an “active” rather than a “passive” form (but neither the various states of being nor even the “doings” need necessarily be “athletic” ones).But this can only be done after the fact. If it were possible to look at people at this moment and identify their 'functionings' and 'capabilities' one could become very very rich by setting up a Talent or Employment or other such Agency. Every big company would pay you to handle Personnel selection and promotion for them.
The included items may vary from such elementary functionings as escaping morbidity and mortality, being adequately nourished, undertaking usual movements etc., to many complex functionings such as achieving self–respect, taking part in the life of the community and appearing in public without shame (the last a functioning that was illuminatingly discussed by Adam Smith as an achievement that is valued in all societies, but the precise commodity requirement of which, he pointed out, varies from society to society).These items were already adequately evaluated by Government Agencies and were the basis of Social Insurance schemes. Sen added nothing to this. Indeed, over the subsequent three decades the 'social minimum' was undermined or made contingent by popularly elected Governments. 'Workfare' replaced 'welfare'. Mandatory entitlements proved to be discretionary because Governments could ration them, substantially reduce them or completely abrogate them. There is 'sovereign immunity' to Rights based entitlements.
The claim is that the functionings are constitutive of a person’s being, and an evaluation of a person’s well-being has to take the form of an assessment of these constituent elements.This is a foolish and unnecessary claim. We don't know what functionings are 'constitutive of a person's being' which is why we can't clone them or replace them with identical androids. We can try to assess these constituents but will soon find that we are behaving like the stupidest sort of petty bureaucrat. Also, the people being assessed will tell us to fuck off- if they don't kick our heads in.
Sen is saying 'well being' can be 'factorized' into 'constitutive elements'. It can't. Well-being is incohate and has impredicative elements. We know this because our own well-being fluctuates despite no or minimal changes in our endowments or 'functionings'.
The primitive notion in the approach is that of functionings–seen as constitutive elements of living.Following Tarski, we know a 'primitive notion' must be undefined. Other things in the theory can be defined in terms of such primitive notions. But the primitive notion can't be seen as, or defined, in terms of anything else.
A functioning is an achievement of a person: what he or she manages to do or to be, and any such functioning reflects, as it were, a part of the state of that person.Achievements may have nothing to do with one's functioning. They may be wholly contingent on exogenous factors. A 'part of the state of a person' does not reflect anything about functioning. It only gives information about what a person has received irrespective of how it was received.
The capability of a person is a derived notion. It reflects the various combinations of functionings (doings and beings) he or she can achieve.If capability is 'a derived notion', then it has an intensional definition. To say it 'reflects' something else only means that there is some homology between it and that other thing.
The truth is 'functioning' is not different from 'capability' because 'doing' is not different from 'being'. This is because there is no such thing as a 'Time category' separate from a 'Space category'. There is only Space-Time.
It takes a certain view of living as a combination of various “doings and beings”.Why does it do anything so stupid? What is the point? Einstein took a view of events as occurring in Space-Time. This turned out to be very useful because it corresponded to empirical facts about the Universe we inhabit.
Capability reflects a person’s freedom to choose between different ways of living.People are free to choose different ways of living. We directly observe them doing so. Why bother with something which merely reflects a reality we can not just observe more vividly but also directly interact with?
Consider my own Socioproctological Evaluative Procedure which reflects a savant's freedom to talk worthless shite. This procedure requires its practitioners to stand on their heads for ten hours after sticking a radish up their bums. The reason I don't actually follow this procedure is because I can see that savants- in obedience to Rothbard's Law- talk worthless shite all the time. The thing is directly observable.
The underlying motivation–the focusing on freedom–is well captured by Marx’s claim that what we need is “replacing the domination of circumstances and chance over individuals by the domination of individuals over chance and circumstances”.Very true! Instead of being at the mercy of the Law of Gravity, we should be able tell Gravity to go fetch us a cold beer and nice slice of pizza.
The underlying motivation of talking worthless shite may indeed be to gain magical powers- or pretend such powers are easily available. However this is mere magical thinking. Only savants teaching worthless- i.e. non STEM- subjects are forced to exercise their freedom to go down this road so as to 'shit higher than their arseholes'.
Utilitarian calculus versus objective deprivation The capability approach can be contrasted not merely with commodity-based systems of evaluation, but also with the utility-based assessment. The utilitarian notion of value, which is invoked explicitly or by implication in much of welfare economics, sees value, ultimately, only in individual utility, which is defined in terms of some mental condition, such as pleasure, happiness, desire-fulfilment.'Utility' is a primitive notion. It is undefined. It can be Sen's functionings or his capabilities or my Socioproctological felicity.
Cost Benefit Analysis is idiographic, not nomothetic. A Judge has experience making these sorts of calculation when assessing damages. If appointed to head an Inquiry into, let us say, the citing of a new airport, she can certainly take evidence regarding 'functionings' just as much as she can take evidence regarding 'utility'. These are just different names for the same thing.
This subjectivist perspective has been extensively used, but it can be very misleading, since it may fail to reflect a person’s real deprivation.Only if the Judge is as stupid as shit. But this is equally true of a Sen-tentious professor. There is no need for any 'reflection' when genuine deprivation exists. A Youtube video showing this deprivation would be ten times more eloquent than some junk social science produced by a cretin.
A thoroughly deprived person leading a very reduced life, might not appear to be badly off in terms of the mental metric of utility, if the hardship is accepted with nongrumbling resignation.An affluent person who is constantly grumbling may not appear to be badly off. However an emaciated dude dressed in rags does appear to be leading a very reduced life even if he is whistling a merry tune. Sen is a cretin to think otherwise. I suppose he imagines that a Doctor when presented with a healthy patient who keeps grumbling that his head and arms have fallen off will say to himself- 'poor chap. He is suffering acute deprivation of head and limbs.' On the other hand, when presented with a guy dying of cancer who says 'I'm feeling chipper', the Doctor will make a note that the cancer has cleared up completely.
In situations of long-standing deprivation, the victims do not go on weeping all the time, and very often make great efforts to take pleasure in small mercies and to cut down personal desires to modest–”realistic”–proportions. The person’s deprivation, then, may not at all show up in the metrics of pleasure, desire fulfilment etc., even though he or she may be quite unable to be adequately nourished, decently clothed, minimally educated and so on.Where are these metrics of 'pleasure, desire fulfillment' etc? I've never seen one. No Government collects information of this sort. Why? It would be worthless. Gloomy people will report that they feel like shit. Cheerful people will report they feel great.
Similarly, employers don't take people's word for it that they are working very hard and doing a superb job.
On the other hand, assessing how people are doing is an expensive business. Some greater demonstrable gain is required before we incur that expense. No such gain arises in the case of Sen's shite. That is why, thirty years later, despite 'Big Data' and cheap computing power, no metric for it exists. The thing is useless.
This issue, apart from its foundational relevance, may have some immediate bearing on practical public policy.Sen is wrong. Consider what happened to housing policy in the Sixties in the U.K. There were plenty of 'metrics' which 'reflected' housing deprivation but it wasn't till the BBC screened 'Cathy come home' that fundamental reform, enshrined a decade later in the Homeless persons Housing Act of 1977, gathered pace.
My point is that actually seeing, or hearing from, people in genuine deprivation causes legal and political change of a type which 'metrics' are powerless to effect.
Everybody else knows this. If we are concerned with the plight of sex slaves in our inner city brothels we don't do an evaluation of 'functionings' or 'capabilities'. We approach newspaper editors or TV executives and ask them to do an expose.
Smugness about continued deprivation and vulnerability is often made to look justified on grounds of lack of strong public demand and forcefully expressed desire for removing these impediments.This smugness can't be dispelled by compiling a metric. The other side could easily show that it is 'junk social science'. A documentary or a journalistic expose would be far more effective.
Academic economists play catch up in these matters because they have little personal experience of deprivation or vulnerability. They lack the common sense or idiographic experience of 'economia' which alone allows us to evaluate and prioritize need or deprivation.
Economists have no unambiguous tools, nor any precise or relevant methods in these matters. That is why they have never been used to tackle any such problems.
Ambiguities, precision and relevance There are many ambiguities in the conceptual framework of the capability approach. Indeed, the nature of human life and the content of human freedom are themselves far from unproblematic concepts.Save for actual human beings doing things useful for other human beings.
It is not my purpose to brush these difficult questions under the carpet, In so far as there are genuine ambiguities in the underlying objects of value, these will be reflected in corresponding ambiguities in the characterization of capability. The need for this relates to a methodological point, which I have tried to defend elsewhere, that if an underlying idea has an essential ambiguity, a precise formulation of that idea must try to capture that ambiguity rather than attempt to lose it.
An idea that is ambiguous may not be an idea at all. It may be merely an availability cascade or learned reflex of stupidity or prejudice.
Sen has no way of telling whether he is genuinely thinking or merely performing some sort of senile reflex action,
Even when precisely capturing an ambiguity proves to be a difficult exercise, that is not an argument for forgetting the complex nature of the concept and seeking a spuriously narrow exactness. In social investigation and measurement, it is undoubtedly more important to be vaguely right than to be precisely wrong.It is even more important to only do stuff that yields a greater benefit than its cost. To spend money being vaguely right or precisely wrong about something you can't effect in any way and which yields no benefit to society is a foolish thing to do. In this respect, Sen-tentious Economists are no better than Astrologers. It does not matter if they are right or wrong. What matters is minimizing their emoluments and the time they waste.
It should be noted also that there is always an element of real choice in the description of functionings, since the format of “doings” and “beings” permits additional “achievements” to be defined and included.It also permits the inclusion of any old shite while stuff that is genuinely important gets left out. That's why nobody bothers doing it.
Even when it comes to highly fungible financial assets and realty, we often find out that we don't own something that everybody thought we did or that its value has greatly changed because of a change in the Law, or an exogenous shock, few saw coming.
Frequently, the same doings and beings can be seen from different perspectives, with varying emphases. Also, some functionings may be easy to describe, but of no great interest in the relevant context (e.g., using a particular washing powder in doing the washing).This could be highly relevant, if that particular washing powder has been tampered with by terrorists or a rival firm such that extreme pain or less of life is experienced by the one using it. This is not something we know in advance. Who would have thought that working in an office in the Twin Towers could put one's life at risk prior to 9/11?
There is no escape from the problem of evaluation in selecting a class of functionings as important and others not so.There is an easy escape and everybody else has already taken it- viz. not do this stupid shit in the first place or stop doing it immediately. Just say no.
The evaluative exercise cannot be fully addressed without explicitly facing questions concerning what are the valuable achievements and freedoms, and which are not. The chosen focus has to be related to the underlying social concerns and values, in terms of which some definable functionings and capabilities may be important and others quite trivial and negligible. The need for selection and discrimination is neither an embarrassment nor a unique difficulty for the conceptualization of functioning and capability.To conceptualize something means to have an idea of how the thing works and how to make it work better. My doctor has a good conceptualization of my body and can make it work better. There are people who have a good conceptualization of my functioning and capability which is why they won't employ me or have sex with me. Thankfully, there are people who lack any such conceptualization.
If Sen had really discovered a magical method of evaluating functioning and capability he could have chosen students and collaborators who could make economies work better. This has not happened. But that was wholly predictable.
In the context of some types of welfare analysis, for example, in dealing with extreme poverty in developing economies, we may be able to go a long distance in terms of a relatively small number of centrally important functionings and the corresponding capabilities, such as the ability to be well-nourished and well-sheltered, the capability of escaping avoidable morbidity and premature mortality and so forth.You can measure these things till you are blue in the face but if you continue to give really shitty economic advice you are part of the problem. Why pretend that poverty is something that only needs to be discovered for the remedy to be parachuted in?
In other contexts, including more general problems of assessing economic and social development, the list may have to be much longer and much more diverse.Junk the list. Sack the assessors. Do first order good if you can. If you can't, go play with yourself somewhere else.
The task of specification must relate to the underlying motivation of the exercise as well as dealing with the social values involved. Quality of life, basic needs and capability There is an extensive literature in development economics concerned with valuing the quality of life, the fulfilment of Basic needs and related matters. That literature has been quite influential in recent years in drawing attention to neglected aspects of economic and social development. It is, however, fair to say that these writings have been typically comprehensively ignored in the theory of welfare economics, which has tended to treat these contributions as essentially ad hoc suggestions.But the theory of welfare economics is known to yield no nomothetic or otherwise unambiguous policy prescriptions. Applied welfare econ is idiographic and requires a knowledge of the Law and actually obtaining social and political mechanisms.
This treatment is partly the result of the concern of welfare theory that proposals should not just appeal to intuitions but also be structured and founded. It also reflects the intellectual standing that such traditional approaches as utilitarian evaluation enjoy in welfare theory, and which serves as a barrier to accepting departures even when they seem attractive. The inability of utility-based evaluations to cope with persistent deprivations was discussed earlier, but in the welfare-economic literature the hold of this tradition has been hard to dislodge.Then that literature should be junked. The notion of 'cycles of deprivation' had become popular in the Sixties and Seventies but it had always existed. Mobility was the solution- even if this involved assisted passages to Canada or Australia. In the case of criminality and a poverty trap- the solution was to break up dysfunctional families and scatter them to the four winds to sink or swim. Simple mimetic processes lifted up those who could be lifted up. Malthusian 'curbs' took care of the rest.
Sen, arriving in England in the Seventies, may have believed that the Brits wanted to pamper their underclass. Some bureaucrats pretended this was so because 'fiscal drag' had increased their budgets and they wanted to hang on to the extra money on one excuse or the other. But the working members of the working class were in mood to see their lazier cousins pampered. Indeed, they were prepared to tolerate mass structural unemployment affecting even the 'labor aristocracy' so as to keep more of their own earnings and gain wealth through home and share ownership. One reason for this development was that it was immigrants who were doing the lower paid jobs and whose deprivation based entitlements which would be higher. Interestingly, post-Grenfell, we can say that Bureaucracies tasked with the management of Local Authority or other Public assets- e.g. housing stock- preferred to see these occupied by polyglot immigrants because this decreased the countervailing power of stakeholder's 'Voice' (to use the terminology of Hirschman) .
The charge of “ad hoc-ness” against the development literature relates to the different modes of arguing that are used in welfare theory and in development theory.The charge of being utterly useless is the only one which matters. Ikea instructions may or may not be 'ad hoc'. What matters is if they are clear enough for us to quickly assemble the item in question. This is all that can be said about 'development literature' either we can use it immediately and then forget about it or it is a waste of resources.
As far as the normative structure is concerned, the latter tends to be rather immediate, appealing to strong intuitions that seem obvious enough.So, there is a 'conceptual tie to action'. But, if so, why bother with theory? The answer is that intuitions mislead. If we see a young child in rags begging by the roadside, our instinct is to help. But we ought not to give it money or food. We should call the police and get its beggar-master arrested. One has to look at incentive structures and consider what happens if everybody acts as we migh instinctively wish to do. Thus, to eliminate begging, we should not give money to beggars. By all means, we can collectively invest in ways to help the needy to either fend for themselves or to gain coverage under a collective social insurance scheme. But, this requires idiographic knowledge and lived experience. The nomothetic approach of the armchair economist can be of little use- more especially if the fellow is a cretin.
Welfare theory, on the other hand, tends to take a more circuitous route, with greater elaboration and defence of the foundations of the approach in question. To bridge the gap, we have to compare and contrast the foundational features underlying the concern with quality of life, Basic needs etc. with the informational foundations of the more traditional approaches used in welfare economics and moral philosophy, such as utilitarianism. It is precisely in this context that the advantages of the capability approach become perspicuous. The view of human life seen as a combination of various functionings and capabilities, and the analysis of human freedom as a central feature of living, provide a differently grounded foundational route to the evaluative exercise. This informational foundation contrasts with the evaluative bases incorporated in the more traditional foundations used in welfare economics. The “basic needs” literature has, in fact, tended to suffer a little from uncertainties about how basic needs should be specified. The original formulations often took the form of defining basic needs in terms of needs for certain minimal amounts of essential commodities such as food, clothing and shelter. If this type of formulation is used, then the literature remains imprisoned in the mould of commodity-centred evaluation, and can in fact be accused of adopting a form of “commodity fetishism”.It can only be accused of this by stupid Marxists. This is like telling an off color joke and being accused of sexism by Jack the Ripper.
The objects of value can scarcely be the holdings of commodities.It can be nothing else. Either value has an object- in which case a commodity exists- or it has no object and is located entirely within the subject- even if that subject is the God of Sankara or the Geist of Hegel.
Judged even as means, the usefulness of the commodity-perspective is severely compromised by the variability of the conversion of commodities into capabilities.Variability is well understood by Statisticians. The fact that everything treated off by the applied Sciences and Arts features great variability does not compromise their usefulness in any way.
Economists know this very well. So do housewives and businessmen and everybody else.
For example, the requirement of food and of nutrients for the capability of being well-nourished may greatly vary from person to person depending on metabolic rates, body size, gender, pregnancy, age, climatic conditions, parasitic ailments and so on.And yet hostels and army barracks and hospital catering units have been functioning perfectly well for hundreds of years. Sen himself must have noticed that the food requirements for a family vary depending on the ages of the kids and their state of health and so forth.
The evaluation of commodity-holdings or of incomes (with which to purchase commodities) can be at best a proxy for the things that really mutter, but unfortunately it does not seem to be a particularly good proxy in most cases.This would only matter if free markets did not exist or substitutes were not available. If Sen's concern is with people with particular disabilities or medical conditions, then a Social insurance scheme or Charitable provision can take care of the problem. There is no need for armchair economists to bestir themselves save to warn against adverse selection or perverse incentives and preference falsification.
Rawls, primary goods and freedoms The concern with commodities and means of achievement, with which the motivation of the capability approach is being contrasted happens to be, in fact, influential in the literature of modern moral philosophy as well. For example, in John Rawls’ outstanding book on justice (arguably the most important contribution to moral philosophy in recent decades), the concentration is on the holdings of “primary goods” of different people in making interpersonal comparisons.Rawls thought his theory was based on 'rational choice'. Sadly, it is not rational to use 'rational choice' theory if all possible states of the world and their associated probabilities are not known in advance. In this context 'Regret minimization'- which involves 'hedging' and guarding against catastrophic risks, and includes an 'ontologically dysphoric' component- gains salience. This does involve consciously paying a little lip service, so as to disguise an atavistic reflex of a superstitious sort, to Justice and Beauty and Truth and God and Nature and Anti Semitism and like I'm cool with Gays but do they have to be so in your face all the time?
Because of Knightian Uncertainty nobody knows what primary goods (i.e “rights, liberties, opportunities, income and wealth.”) obtain or will obtain. This can only be known after the fact. Income is what you can spend without decreasing your wealth and wealth is what yields you your current income. But no one knows what that will be. The same point may be made about rights and liberties and opportunities. You may believe you have the right to go about your business without being molested, and therefore have a Hohfeldian immunity which others are bound to respect. However, a rapist may prove that you did not actually possess any immunity whatsoever. You can go to law, but the Jury may decide that you habit of bending over and baring your buttocks to every tattooed ape you encounter in the low dives you frequent cancelled this Hohfeldian immunity.
Rawls's 'equal liberty' principle states- '"First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.' The problem here is that rights are costly to enforce and this cost varies greatly from person to person. My right not to get raped is cheap to enforce whereas my right not to be swindled is expensive to enforce. This is because I'm as ugly and stupid as shit. Thus, to prevent my being swindled, everybody's right to strike deals has to be curbed. Either that, or rights are not linked to remedies. They are just 'cheap talk'.
Rawls didn't get that Societies use social insurance schemes and charitable provision for 'hard cases'. They don't fuck up the law to protect the cretin who keeps getting swindled.
In practice, Rawls's scheme is 'anything goes'. It can justify anything- Fascism, Anarchism, Jim Jones's suicide, anything at all- because it doesn't have its own theory of econ or law or anything else. These are exogenously given. The de facti/de jure distinction is only useful if the de jure side grows a pair instead of acting like a little bitch whenever the 'de facti' side claims exigent circumstances. That's why Rawlsian shite
Sen appears to think Rawls's scheme has some practical use-
His theory of justice, particularly the “difference principle” is dependent on this procedure for interpersonal comparisons.The 'difference principle' states- 'Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society, consistent with the just savings principle'
Rawls doesn't himself say how 'benefit' is to be measured. He assumes that Econ can do the job. But econ denies it can do interpersonal comparisons. If it could, studying Econ would mean you could get to sleep with anybody you liked. You'd know exactly what to offer them so they'd get as much utility from fucking you as stroking off to wet veshti pics of P. Chidambaram.
We don't know who is the least-advantaged. It may, at this moment, be a rich pop-star who has an un-diagnosed shellfish allergy which will cause her to suffer an agonizing death while publicly shitting herself at the Emmys. By contrast, the homeless wino rolling in the gutter may get sober and marry Rahul Gandhi and defeat Modi in 2024 and become Prime Minister of India. With hindsight, it will seem obvious that being a homeless wino is the necessary advantage to becoming a mega billionaire by carrying on the grand kleptocratic tradition of democratic Indian politics.
By the time Sen wrote the following, it was clear that nobody was going to operationalize Rawls's shite.
This procedure has the feature of being partly commodity-based, since the list of primary goods includes “income and wealth”, in addition to “the basic liberties”, “powers and prerogatives of offices and positions of responsibility”, “social bases of self-respect” and so on. Indeed, the entire list of “primary goods” of Rawls is concerned with means rather than ends; they deal with things that help to achieve what we want to achieve, rather than either with achievement as such or even with the freedom to achieve. Being nourished is not a part of the list, but having the income to buy food certainly is.Breathing is essential to life. So is being alive. But they don't make the list. Why? Coz the list- which was retarded in the first place- will look utterly silly if it starts with requiring a Universe, a solar system, a planet not too far or too close too the Sun and an atmosphere with enough oxygen and a sufficient number of ancient Greek pederasts with enough clout to create a wholly worthless subject called 'Philosophy' and then a whole bunch of stupid pedants who'd keep gassing on about that shite and then Mummy getting preggers by Daddy though what she really wanted to do was be a concert pianist and not having a g.f in High School and being too stupid to do a STEM subject and what the fuck is taking Death so long?
Similarly, the social bases of self-respect belong to the list in a way self-respect as such does not.This is reasonable. The social bases of self-respect may be necessary for the maintenance of life. Thus they could be 'goods and services' as opposed to qualities or states of being. Thus, the social bases of self-respect can be 'primary goods'- stuff like having access to water and soap so as to be able to clean oneself & not smell like shit all the time- but self-respect can't be a 'primary good' coz some people respect the fuck out of themselves coz they smell like shit unlike petty bourgeois sheeple who are brainwashed by Big Soap & its Madison Avenue minions.
Rawls is much concerned that the fact that different people have different ends must not be lost in the evaluative process, and people should have the freedom to pursue their respective ends.If Rawls genuinely had any such concern he would have let himself be shouted down by Harsanyi or- indeed- any sensible person who told him he was a cretin who didn't get that Social Insurance, not fucking up the Justice system, was the way to go if one really cared about the worst off.
The problem with freedoms is that one does not know in advance which are useful or desirable. Freedom of Religion was important when people believed that adhering to the wrong sect would damn your soul for all eternity. Freedom of Expression was thought to be important when it was believed that not denouncing Fascism four times a day would lead to the electoral victory of Modi or Trump or Macron. Access to Judicial remedies is important if they actually work. However the most important freedoms have to do with Exit, not Voice or Loyalty. Others, which we currently value, may give rise to a 'Tragedy of the Commons' or fail when they are needed. Thus, they are mischievous.
It may be that there are a few pedants or virtue signalling shitheads who like to present themselves as champions of Liberty or doughty fighters against Fascism or Nazism or the Spanish Inquisition. But, at this late hour, everybody knows these guys are shitheads. They have achieved nothing save fuel a backlash against their predecessors who actually did some good.
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