Sen on Capabilites & Functionings

 Amartya Sen says his Capabilities theory is 'a particular approach to well-being and advantage in terms of a person's ability to do valuable acts or reach valuable states of being.'

So Capabilities are abilities. Does the Capabilities approach tell people how they can improve their abilities? No. It does not have a 'Structural Causal Model' of any ability whatsoever. If it did, people would study Sen and his acolytes' work so as to personally profit by being better at their job or better at relationships or better at sports or better at some other thing that matters to them. This has not happened because Sen's Capability approach represents nothing more than his ability to talk worthless shite.

Stuff like this-

The expression was picked to represent the alternative combinations of things a person is able to do or be- the various 'functionings' he or she can achieve.

Abilities are 'functionings'. One possible ability, or 'functioning'  a person might have is to intuit all the alternative combinations of things a person is able to do or be. Such a person would be in great demand. We would consult them about what we should study, where we should work, whom we should marry, how we should educate our children and so on and so forth.  Governments would hire such a person to choose Cabinet Ministers and Senior Civil Servants and decide which Scientist or Artist should get funding. No doubt, a person with this ability could spot others with the potential to gain this functioning. Soon you would have a class of people whose function would be to judge the capabilities of the population and direct them into the vocation in which they contribute most to the commonweal. There would be no need for Free Markets or Representative Democracy or Public Discussion. An elite class of self-recruiting 'Capabilities' savants would run things so much more efficiently such that a Benthamite paradise would come into existence. All would be the humanly possible best without the vast majority of humans having to make any major decisions on their own.

Sadly, even if there were people with this 'Capabilities' functioning, we would be foolish to trust to the judgment of those purporting to have that ability. There are plenty of charlatans who claim to know what is best for everybody and for Society as a whole. Generally, this turns out to involve your doing unpaid agricultural labor while your little children get raped by that sociopath.

Sen, of course, is not a sociopath. He is simply stupid.

The capability approach to a person's advantage is concerned with evaluating it in terms of his or her actual ability to achieve various valuable functionings as a part of living.

This is an ability everybody already has. I often say, if only everybody would give me all their money, I could be a wealthy venture capitalist. Similarly, if only beautiful virgins would form an orderly line outside my bedroom, I could achieve the valuable functioning of fathering lots of cute babies thus replenishing the population.

Perhaps Sen means- 'The Capabilities approach is about looking at people who have ability but not the scope to use it to their best advantage'.  The problem here is that the free working of the market has already caused a class of 'talent scouts' and 'head hunters' and so forth to actively seek out people with valuable abilities who, currently, aren't able to use it profitably. Furthermore, there is a large Voluntary Sector where a similar things happens even if there is no arbitrage or brokering opportunity. Indeed, within every Vocation or well run Organisation, there are people who look out for people with ability- natural or acquired- and who seek to give them wider scope for the use of that ability.

Has Sen, or any of his acolytes, contributed anything either to the theory or the practice of developing actual Capabilities? No. They are useless tossers who write stupid shite. They already knew that 'utilities' or 'preferences' can't be aggregated. So they spoke of 'Capabilities' as if they could be aggregated. But they can't. They are unknown. Anyway, what good would aggregation do? No doubt, a pedagogue may think the mechanical process of adding up a student's marks  to decide whether or not she gets a Diploma is very important. It isn't. Most Diplomas are shit. They are just a rationing device which may or may not have a signalling function.

The corresponding approach to social advantage-for aggregative appraisal as well as for the choice of institutions and policy- takes the sets of individual capabilities as constituting an indispensable and central part of the relevant informational base of such evaluation.

Some people do have the ability to evaluate Institutions and Policy Proposals. Sen does not have this ability. He is a cretin. He thought the creation of an International University in rural Bihar was a swell idea coz there was a famous Seminary there a thousand years ago when Bihar was ahead, not behind, most other parts of the world. Under Sen's Chancellorship, Nalanda University became infamous as a place where students couldn't even get yoghurt. They were robbed and sexually harassed. Instead of being taught by Internationally renowned Professors, they were consigned to PhD students of remarkable stupidity.

Since Sen's Capability approach to evaluation has no Structural Causal Model of what it is which is being evaluated- i.e. it can't say how an Institution or Policy Proposal can be improved- it is wholly worthless. To take a case in point, Venezuela under Chavez appeared to be cutting poverty. From Sen's point of view, Capabilities had gone up. But the reverse was the case- as everybody now knows. My standard of living can go up if I borrow and spend recklessly. But, in the medium to long term, I've impoverished myself. A proper Structural Causal Model would warn Venezuela, or me, against improvidence. Sen's approach can do no such thing. Its business is telling stupid, albeit holier than thou, lies.

Why does it exist? The answer is that various stupid pedagogues had put up various similar schemes which were all, almost immediately, shown to be wholly worthless. By changing the name of the scheme, Sen was hoping to keep a worthless type of pedagogy on the road for a little while longer.

It differs from other approaches using other informational focuses, for example, personal utility (focusing on pleasures, happiness, or desire fulfilment), absolute or relative opulence (focusing on commodity bundles, real income, or real wealth), assessments of negative freedoms (focusing on procedural fulfilment of libertarian rights and rules of non-interference), comparisons of means of freedom (e.g. focusing on the holdings of 'primary goods', as in the Rawlsian theory of justice), and comparisons of resource holdings as a basis of just equality (e.g. as in Dworkin's criterion of 'equality of resources'). 

Everyone knows personal utility can't be measured. Similarly 'commodity bundles' only matter if they represent recurring, sustainable, income. A guy who borrows and steals so as to drive around in a Rolls Royce isn't 'opulent'. He is headed for Poverty- perhaps by way of Prison. A 'deontological' approach is not concerned with aggregating or evaluating anything. In a Rawlsian world, people 'behind the veil of ignorance' have access to the correct economic theory and thus support Social insurance of some ideal type such that his own prediction is falsified. Thus 'evaluation' and 'assessment' at the aggregate level do not arise.

An ability is a 'primitive term' in Tarski's sense. It is undefined and depends on the context. One could say that a particular ability is made up of a set of 'functionings'. Thus shooting a target depends on the functioning of one's eyes as well as the functioning of one's hands and the functioning of one's nerves and so forth. However, an ability to do something does not depend just on one's own functioning- someone else may have a reason to do it for you. Sen doesn't get this. He says-

Perhaps the most primitive notion in this approach concerns 'functionings'. Functionings represent parts of the state of a person-in particular the various things that he or she manages to do or be in leading a life.

A man unable to breathe for himself may be attached to a device which pumps oxygen into his blood. His ability to breathe does not depend on his own 'functioning'.  Capability, thus, is not a reflection of 'functioning'.  Sen holds a contrary view-                                                                   

The capability of a person reflects the alternative combinations of functionings the person can achieve, and from which he or she can choose one collection. 

The problem here is that no one, save God, knows 'the alternative combinations of functionings a person can achieve'. We don't even know what combination of mental operations gives rise to our choosing things. Thus 'capability' is unknowable while 'functioning' is indefinable. This means, inter alia, that there can never be an enumeration of functionings or a method of demarcating them fully from each other.

Sen says ' If there are n relevant functionings, then a person's extent of achievement of all of them respectively can be represented by an n-tuple.' However, there can't be 'n relevant functionings' unless a full structural causal model of each functioning has been found in which case the functioning is not undefined but is specified as the outcome of a particular process. Having a structural causal model means being able to enhance or weaken that functioning. It would enhance or retard an ability. Genuine Economic activity does seek for such structural causal models and may use statistical means to test the efficacy and cost effectiveness of various measures to enhance ability. Fraudulent armchair economics does not seek for structural causal models and simply shits itself continually by parodying the methods of useful branches of inquiry.

Life mustn't be viewed as as a combination of any x and y, unless we can actually create life by combining that x and y. Why not? What's the harm in telling stupid lies? The answer is that stupid lies breed yet greater stupidity and even more worthless lies. It is a waste of resources and crowds out useful stuff we could be doing.

Sen says-

The approach is based on a view of living as a combination of various 'doings and beings', with quality of life to be assessed in terms of the capability to achieve valuable functionings.

I suppose a Doctor may use such an approach. She may say- 'the patient is breathing more easily- as can be seen from such and such instrument. However, the patient's brain activity has decreased. I wonder whether this is because of a problem with the functioning of such and such organ. I shall order a test to find out.' This approach seems entirely reasonable to us. We know that over the centuries, the Medical Sciences have greatly improved. They do enable us to improve our bodily functioning and general capabilities. True, Doctors can't yet create a human life in the laboratory- but, it may be, they could find a complete Structural Causal Model for the human body, perhaps even for the mind, and so the artificial creation of human life is a possibility we can't wholly discount.

By contrast, nothing is gained by viewing life as a combination of 'doings and beings' whose mechanisms remain unknown to us. The thing is pointless. We can't assess 'quality of life' because we don't know whether a 'doing' or 'being' is adaptive given the circumstances or whether it represents a pathology. Consider the case of a very thin person who seems to have a miserable life stuck in a tiny bed-sit without company. This person may be doing something whose nature we can't understand. It turns out that being thin gets them laid and the time they spend alone doing abstruse research may win them great acclaim and social status.

In Economics, a person- or people's- quality of life should not be assessed purely on the basis of present indicators. That person, or that nation, may be burning through its capital in an improvident manner. If it were sensible, it would be experiencing guilt and remorse, not a high quality of life.

Some functionings are very elementary, such as being adequately nourished, being in good health, etc., and these may be strongly valued by all, for obvious reasons.

Having lots and lots of babies was strongly valued by almost all societies till relatively recently. Notions of 'adequate nourishment' may turn out to be wrong headed. Public Health improved during the Cuban famine. Similarly, 'good health' may dictate the opposite of what is conventionally assumed. In the old days a stout body and florid complexion was considered a sign of robustness. Now, Doctors are likely to treat them as risk indicators.

Others may be more complex, but still widely valued, such as achieving self-respect or being socially integrated.

It is not a good thing if rapists and murderers achieve self-respect. Being socially integrated into a sociopathic regime should not be 'widely valued'. Why? Sooner or later, Nemesis will catch up with the miscreants.

Individuals may, however, differ a good deal from each other in the weights they attach to these different functionings-valuable though they may all be-and the assessment of individual and social advantages must be alive to these variations.

What good is this 'assessment' doing? If it is doing no good at all, it would be better if it were dead to everything. Put corpses in charge of the Assessment mechanism. Don't pay them. If they go on strike, who will notice?

In the context of some types of social analysis, for example, in dealing with extreme poverty in developing economies, we may be able to go a fairly long distance with a relatively small number of centrally important functionings and the corresponding basic capabilities (e.g. the ability to be well nourished and well sheltered, the capability of escaping avoidable morbidity and premature mortality, and so forth).

In dealing with extreme poverty, don't do any fucking assessment. Don't give money to assessors. Give it to the poor. Disintermediate Econ or Philosophy Professors the way that Mathematical Development Economics was disintermediated from the actual development of countries which actually developed. Indira Gandhi appointed Sen's mentor as head of the Planning Commission. She put a Bengali Philosopher in as Minister of Industries. What was the result? Stagnation. India only started to grow once people like Sen were excluded from decision making.

Valuation should be done on the basis of a proper Structural Causal Model. Surgeons may disagree on the proper sequence of operations and other therapies required to restore health to a severely injured patient. However, there is an objective way- at least after the fact- to determine this sequence. This is because some 'functionings' are more vital- hence valuable- than others in terms of preserving life and enabling recovery. This is a purely scientific matter. No doubt, there may be special circumstances where this does not appear to be the case. The Police Detective may say 'Doc, you gotta restore this criminal's power of speech. Only he can tell us where the terrorists planted the nuke. Millions of lives are at stake.' The Doctor may reply 'I am bound by my Hippocratic Oath. My only concern is the well-being of the patient'. But, there is no real dilemma here. Society has a workaround. The Detective pulls a gun on the Doctor and thus extracts the information he needs. But, he gets sent to jail for this offense.  His ex-wife, now the First Lady, persuades the President to pardon him. However, just at that moment, the Vice President- who was actually the head of the Terrorist group- jumps into the air and kicks off the President's head. Luckily, the President doesn't need his head to do his job. Indeed, his ratings shoot up. All's well that ends well coz the Vice President is put in charge of Evaluating Capabilities because the First Lady sat on his face and drowned him and thus he is a corpse. This does not mean the Veep get off easy coz as Sen remarks-

There is no escape from the problem of evaluation in selecting a class of functionings in the description and appraisal of capabilities.

This is only true if you are a corpse or if the 'class of functionings' does not correspond to a structural causal model. But even if it true, it doesn't matter in the least because the problems of dead or very very stupid pedagogues are wholly inconsequential.

The focus has to be related to the underlying concerns and values, in terms of which some definable functionings 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.

The focus of worthless shitheads doesn't have to be related to anything because shitheads produce only worthless shite even if they are related to smart people.

3 Value-Objects and Evaluative Spaces 

In an evaluative exercise, we can distinguish between two different questions: (1) What are the objects of value? (2) How valuable are the respective objects?

It is true that, if you are asked to evaluate the performance of your students, you can distinguish between two different questions. (1) Who are your students?
and (2) How well have they performed? However, if you weren't an utter cretin, you would not in fact make any such distinction. Why? You already know who your students are. An evaluative exercise has a pre-specified domain.

Even though formally the former question is an elementary aspect of the latter (in the sense that the objects of value are those that have positive weights), nevertheless the identification of the objects of value is substantively the primary exercise which makes it possible to pursue the second question.

Nonsense! The 'primary exercise' has no 'halting' mechanism. Before we can say what are the objects of value, we first need to say what objects are. But before doing so we need to specify what saying is. But before that we need to be clear about what 'specify' means. But before we do so we need to understand what is meant by 'meaning' and so on and so forth.

Furthermore, the very identification of the set of value-objects, with positive weights, itself precipitates a 'dominance ranking' (x is at least as high as y if it yields at least as much of each of the valued objects).

If you are asked to do an evaluative exercise, the only proper result of doing that exercise is a ranking. But, if it is not tied to a proper Structural Causal Model, it will be shit. I could do an evaluative exercise on gene therapies, but because I don't know anything about gene therapies, the ranking I produce will be shit. To be on the safe side, I may content myself with cutting and pasting some math equations and claim to have developed a method for evaluating such therapies. But, it will still be shit unless it is applied by a smart guy who understands the relevant field. But, an even better result would arise if the smart guy didn't use my method.

This dominance ranking, which can be shown to have standard regularity properties such as transitivity, can indeed take us some distance-often quite a long distance-in the evaluative exercise. 

It can take you quite a long distance to being and remaining a stinky piece of shit.

 The identification of the objects of value specifies what may be called an evaluative space.

Evaluation is itself an ability or functioning. We don't know to what degree it is entangled with other abilities or functioning or, indeed, whether those abilities or functionings are themselves independent. Thus, there can be no 'evaluative space' corresponding to a 'commodity space'. Economists know that the 'general equilibrium' of a 'commodity space' is 'anything goes' precisely because of 'income effects' and 'hedging' both of which arise precisely because of 'entanglement'. Why is Sen, an Economist, importing something that failed with respect to commodities into a field where 'entanglement' is a much bigger problem? The answer is that, though he knows utilitarianism was useless, he wants to show he is a nicer guy than them and so, though doing something equally useless, he should get brownie points for being a nicer guy.

In standard utilitarian analysis, for example, the evaluative space consists of the individual utilities (defined in the usual terms of pleasures, happiness, or desire fulfilment). Indeed, a complete evaluative approach entails a class of 'informational constraints' in the form of ruling out directly evaluative use of various types of information, to wit, those that do not belong to the evaluative space.

Standard utilitarian analysis failed. Why? Because if it succeeded it would be a cardinal measure even if it tied itself in knots to avoid that outcome. But the moment it was discovered to be a cardinal measure, everyone who didn't like it would say it was subjective shite. The mathematics was just window dressing- which, indeed, it was.

This is not to say that we can't have useful 'evaluative spaces'. But that would involve having a useful 'Structural Causal Model' which people could use to directly enhance their abilities and functionings. In other words, evaluation would be useful- rather than an exercise in mental masturbation for armchair Pundits. But, if it were useful then smart people would be gaining acclaim and making money of it by helping people improve their own lives. This would mean that stupid pedagogues like Sen would lose salience as 'Mother Theresas' of Economics. People would say 'how many people has Sen lifted out of poverty'? The 'Mother Theresa of Pakistan' is a German nun who works with lepers. But she is a proper Doctor who actually helps people. Mother Theresa was not a Doctor. She was a Nun who helped the Pope by raising money and speaking out against contraception and abortion and so forth. Since she was genuinely Religious, Religious people liked her. Sen, similarly, is genuinely a worthless, hypocritical, holier-than-thou, shithead. That is why genuine, hypocritical, holier-than-thou, shitheads love him.

They think shite like this is profound-

 The capability approach is concerned primarily with the identification of value-objects, and sees the evaluative space in terms of functionings and capabilities to function.

Everybody is concerned primarily with the identification of value-objects. However, some people are hypocritical shit-heads. Thus they are primarily concerned with fooling other people into thinking they are actually 'identifying value-objects' for an altruistic reason. But they do no such thing. Sen does not go to the poor people of Bengal and say 'guess what guys! I've just found out that if you grow this particular strain of seed you will get a lot more money out of your farm. Thus your ability to eat well and educate your kids will increase!' Instead, he writes nonsense like this-

This is, of course, itself a deeply evaluative exercise, but answering question (1), on the identification of the objects of value, does not, on its own, yield a particular answer to question (2), regarding their relative values.

Wow! What a fantastic discovery! Identifying who your students are does not, by itself, yield a ranking of them!

The latter calls for a further evaluative exercise. Various substantive ways of evaluating functionings and capabilities can all belong to the general capability approach. The selection of the evaluative space has a good deal of cutting power on its own, both because of what it includes as potentially valuable and because of what it excludes.

Very true! By excluding cats who are not your students, the cutting power of your 'evaluative space' increases greatly! Why not do yourself a favor and also exclude giraffes?

For example, because of the nature of the evaluative space, the capability approach differs from utilitarian evaluation (more generally 'welfarist' evaluation ) in making room for a variety of human acts and states as important in themselves (not just because they may produce utility, nor just to the extent that they yield utility). 

If something is important in itself, a utility can be assigned to it. But why bother? Assigning utility to things is just shitting higher than your arsehole. It does not help anybody. You may as well grade the stars according to the sort of perfume you think they use or which magazines you reckon they subscribe to.

Being happy and getting what one desires may be inter alia valued in the capability approach, but unlike in utilitarian traditions, they are not seen as the measure of all values. It also makes room for valuing various freedoms-in the form of capabilities.

But these freedoms, taking the form of capabilities, can be assigned a utility in the same manner as eating an ice-cream. Indeed, one could look at how much 'transferable utility' (money) people spend on preserving a freedom they don't currently use- like my paying a Gym subscription just so I could work out anytime I wanted to, though in practice I prefer watching Netflix while typing up this drivel.

On the other side, the approach does not attach direct-as opposed to derivative-importance to the means of living or means of freedom (e.g. real income, wealth, opulence, primary goods, or resources), as some other approaches do.

Those other approaches were less shit than this approach because they focused on things which could be measured- however imperfectly. Metrics re. real income and wealth are useful to businessmen and bureaucrats.

 Sen's innovation is to create an approach which can't be operationalized at all.  However, there is a disutility attached to this type of cretinism. Furthermore, at the margin, it may crowd out genuine research on Structural Causal Models. It's like what happens to a School when all the Teachers have to spend more and more time 'evaluating' and less and less time teaching. This could yield a benefit, if evaluation is on the basis of objective tests. It is wholly useless if teachers can make up anything they like or, even worse, if they are forced to make up imaginary qualities possessed by the child upon which they can make flattering comments. Come to think of it, I did attend a 'Progressive School' where the teachers would write nice things about my artistic ability on the basis of my drawing pictures of cats on my Maths answer sheet. My parents thought I should be a painter. Actually, thanks to my personality, Accountancy is my vocation. However, my inability to add and subtract led to my forcible exit from that profession. I'd have been better off having a teacher who slapped the black off me for getting sums wrong. Sen, too, would have been better off if he'd stuck with Physics- where his imbecility would soon have been apparent to all- rather than moving over to Economics at Sukhamoy Chakroborty's suggestion. Still, at least the fuckwit emigrated rather than join his old mentor at the Planning Commission. But, according to Meghnad Desai, Sen only left because of his divorce. Patriotism was not his motive. But that too has become obvious in recent years.