It is difficult for Hindus to admit that the persistence of the caste system caused those of an older generation to have an unconscious belief that some people have different 'capabilities'- or even 'functionings'- than others. You can't expect a Dalit to have the same ability to reason or a Muslim to be able to function in any other than a burqa-burqa-jihad manner.
Non-Indians might not understand this aspect of the Indian intellectual. Consider the following essay titled
Against Amartya SenBy Emmanuelle BénicourtAmartya Sen is often portrayed as a different economist. As a Nobel Prize recipient in 1998, he serves as a reference for both mainstream economists (“neoclassical”) and their adversaries (“heterodox”).
He is neo-classical in the Arrow-Debreu tradition. He is 'normative' not 'heterodox'.
He is accredited with reconciling the unemotional approach of economists with the humanity of philosophers, as is reflected in the titles of his works (On Ethics and Economics, Inequality Reexamined, or Development as Freedom, to name just a few).
Nothing wrong with being a normative economist. The instrumental value of your work- i.e. whether it causes the Government to do things you want- justify it. Sen could point to welfare schemes in India- e.g. MGNREGA- as being directly linked to the work he (or Jean Dreze) had done.
The “capability approach,” which is at the heart of Sen’s analyses of poverty, development, and inequality, is portrayed as uniting these two disciplines in a way that surpasses conventional approaches to economic analysis.
If there were some way to determine capabilities objectively then we would be half way to figuring out a way to raise them. This would be very useful to Society. We'd know which 12 year old to invest in such that, within 10 years, some open STEM subject problem is satisfactorily closed. It may be that there is a young Kenyan girl who, if taught the right subjects by the right tutors, could invent faster-than-light travel within a couple of decades. By the year 2050, humans would be colonising distant planets.
To some extent, a capabilities approach is being implemented in all well run countries. There are 'talent spotters' in sports, music, but also maths & science. Moreover, there are methods by which one's capabilities can be raised through special training or nutritional supplements or, maybe, A.I based implants or nanotechnology.
Sadly, if you think 'lower class' people (like Modi) have lower capability & functioning, then you might favour endless discussion and no decision making because it is pointless to try to raise the condition of people who are stupider than shit.
Given the consensus this author garners, there is a paucity of critiques of the theories he propounds.
I think he was critiqued in India by people like Bhagwati.
Yet such critiques would be merited. This is the objective of the present paper, which summarizes Sen’s main analyses and positions, and seeks to identify the problems they raise on both the theoretical and the practical level. The main difficulty in studying Amartya Sen stems in particular from the terms he uses for the core concepts in his theories, which are often words of his own invention.
No. They are ordinary English words but with an odd, casteist, Indian intonation.
While these may bestow his writings with an aura of scholarship, they make reading and understanding his work particularly arduous. This paper will first provide a brief overview of Sen’s two core notions, namely “functionings” and “capability,” and then seek to determine what distinguishes his approach from conventional approaches. Next, the focus will turn to Sen’s ethical approach. Lastly, Sen’s positions regarding economic policy will be examined, with consideration given to his underlying ethical and theoretical perspectives.
The “Capability” Approach
One of the tenets of Sen’s analysis is his refusal to assimilate well-being and utility (which Sen sometimes calls happiness, sometimes satisfaction, and sometimes describes as a ranking according to a scale of preferences). Sen considers utility-based approaches to be reductionist as they only take into account the psychological or mental consequences of owning goods in terms of the happiness or satisfaction they provide, [1] and not the actual well-being of individuals (the standard of living attained thanks to these goods).
You can't tell me a Muslim Dalit can get utility from a computer. If he can't chop its head off & turn it into kebabs, he isn't interested mate. Ghanchis, like Modi, won't take a sword to their laptop but will try to squeeze & squeeze it so as to release the oil it contains.
From Goods to Functionings
The concept of capability, which was first proposed by Sen in 1979 (Sen 1982), is intended to account for human characteristics more accurately than the conventional approach in economics, which is based on utility. To define capability, Sen begins by representing individuals through a set of goods they may acquire (an “entitlement set”). However, Sen rejects the standard reference to “commodities” and prefers instead that of the “characteristics” of commodities. For example, instead of considering goods such as apples, peanuts, rice, or beef, Sen prefers to base his analysis on their nutritional value, their taste, and so on.
Coz he comes from a country where some won't eat beef and others won't eat pork & so forth. The Brits had a complicated way of working out what items needed to be procured to maintain a given number of workers from various castes, creeds & regions. Obviously, you couldn't expect a person of the carpenter caste to function in the manner of a person from the mason caste.
However, this change in perspective does not make it possible to account for what individuals are, or do, thanks to the characteristics of these goods. Sen therefore also endows each individual with a set of what he calls “utilization functions,” which convert the characteristics of goods into “functionings” (Sen 1985), which are defined as the “doings and beings” of an individual.
India did change greatly over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century and early Twentieth century. The Great War showed that capability and functioning wasn't really caste based. However, older attitudes prevailed in rural places like Shantiniketan where Sen was born and where he went to school.
The effective functioning of a particular individual will therefore depend on that individual’s choice of a set of goods (transformed into characteristics), as well as on that individual’s choice of utilization functions.
Thus, during the Second World War, Europeans in Calcutta protested against the requisitioning of air-conditioners for the Army VD clinic. Whites can't function without AC. This doesn't mean you should replace them with darkies. They lack executive capability. Give them nothing but clerical work.
Thus, Sen intends to incorporate human diversity into the analysis of well-being as these utilization functions translate inter-individual differences into doings and beings that can be attained thanks to the characteristics of goods. [3]
Indians of my generation don't believe this because we have seen that capabilities and functionings have changed greatly since the days of our grandparents. It isn't really true that if an Iyer eats a biryani and drinks brandy that he will necessarily turn into Mani Shankar Aiyar. Clearly Iyer genetics changed in the Sixties.
This may sound rather obscure, which is indeed the case. Yet it may also be what explains Sen’s popularity (we all think it is profound, although we do not understand much of it).
Sen was at his intellectual peak in the late Sixties & early Seventies- the time of 'the Club of Rome' & 'limits of growth' & Soylent Green ('they making food out of people!'). The Government may have to take over everything on 'Spaceship Earth' & strictly ration nutrients. Obviously, high capability people who need caviar & champagne to function must be accomodated.
Nevertheless, those familiar with neoclassical theory may recognize such concepts, as they merely reproduce the conventional neoclassical approach, albeit dressed in a different vocabulary.
The neoclassical approach assumes that market-makers spontaneously arise. What if that isn't the case? Then there is no alternative to Central allocation of everything. To preserve our material standard of living, we need to pretend 'Capabilities' is about poor people- not our need for caviar & champagne to continue to function.
Capability and Choice of a Particular Lifestyle
Functionings therefore replace the goods (or their characteristics) found in standard approaches in economics, and in particular in microeconomics. As in microeconomics, these functionings can be combined by a person who makes a choice, and it is based on this combination of functionings that Sen defines “capability,” which is conceived as the freedom to choose functionings.
We are free to choose to be high caste. Dalit Muslims are free to chose to have the smallest entitlement.
As Sen writes in The Quality of Life,
The life that a person leads can be seen as a combination of various doings and beings,
only if we actually knew what 'doings' and 'beings' obtain. Sadly, even the greatest biologists and chemists and so forth don't have this knowledge. If they did, they could turn me from an elderly cretin into Terence Tao with the body of Beyonce.
which can be generically called functionings.
Okay. I see what Benicourt is getting at. Still, if you come from a place with a backward, occupational, caste system you think of people as being the function they perform. Back in the Seventies, I had a Professor who took an early morning job cleaning toilets for five years so as to fund the purchase of a house suitable for his disabled wife. No doubt, he was pondering arcane subjects as he performed this menial activity. Our respect for him did not fall when we learned of this. It increased.
These functionings vary from such elementary matters as being well-nourished and disease-free to more complex doings or beings, such as having self-respect, preserving human dignity, taking part in the life of the community, and so on.
The function of the priest is to be fat. The function of the coolie is to be a walking skeleton.
The capability of a person refers to the various alternative combinations of functionings, any one of which (or rather any combination of which) the person can choose to have.
Sen uses the term 'choose' in the farcical manner that Commies used the word 'freedom'.
In this sense, the capability of a person corresponds to the freedom that a person has to lead one kind of life or another.(Nussbaum and Sen 1993, 3)
The high caste is free to be high caste. Thee low caste can choose to have a shitty existence instead of not existing at all.
Similarly, in Development as Freedom, Sen explains that, “A person’s ‘capability’ refers to the alternative combinations of functionings that are feasible for her to achieve.
For example Rahul has the functioning of being the first born son of his daddy who was the first born son of his Mummy who was the only child of her Daddy. This is called 'having the capability to be India's PM.'
Capability is thus a kind of freedom, or the substantive freedom to achieve alternative combinations of functionings (or, to put it less formally, the freedom to achieve various lifestyles)” (Sen 2000, 74–75).
Which depends on money. But would a properly casteist society have anything so vulgar? Nehru promised to 'Brahminize' India. It is only banias who care about money.
In fact, the essence of Sen’s approach by no means constitutes a departure from mainstream economics (whether microeconomics or neoclassical economics) since all of these assume that individuals make free choices (of “functionings” rather than goods) subject to constraints (through “capability” instead of income).
Sen's appeal is that it doesn't mention money. Translate 'capability' as 'caste' & you get his point- though you may be too ashamed to say so.
The Capability Approach and Neoclassical Theory
Moreover, Sen does not hide his intention to situate his analysis within the neoclassical theoretical framework developed by Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu (1954). For example, in Development as Freedom, Sen explains that, “I have, in fact, demonstrated elsewhere that in terms of some plausible characterizations of substantive individual freedoms, an important part of the Arrow-Debreu efficiency result readily translates from the ‘space’ of utilities to that of individual freedoms, both in terms of freedom to choose commodity baskets and in terms of capabilities to function” (Sen 2000, 117–119).
This is because the Arrow-Debreu price vector encodes all relevant information & has no Knightian Uncertainty. But, suppose an omniscient, omnipotent God ordained a caste system then Sen is being perfectly reasonable. You can only choose to be and do according to your caste.
This begs the question of what prices—as well as supply and demand—may be (and mean) in such a market.
Everything is exactly what it has to be such that there is only one 'efficient cause'. This is an occassionalist Universe.
Nevertheless, the main point here is that Sen fully and unreservedly adopts the Arrow-Debreu model. As Sen stated at a conference held by the French Economic Observatory (Observatoire français de conjoncture économique—OFCE) in Paris, he is a mainstream economist, so we should not expect too much from him in terms of methodology or analytical frameworks, since his approach does not provide an alternative path to mainstream economics.
Traditionally, Welfare Econ was taught together with Public Finance. Mathematical economists separated them. The result was that Welfare Econ turned to shit.
But what about Sen’s approach in terms of philosophy and, more specifically, the solutions he offers from an ethical perspective?
Multiple Ethical Criteria
Sen’s widespread popularity stems not from his academic writings,
but from his being a darkie.
which are not particularly accessible, but from his work intended for the general public, in which he adopts an engaging viewpoint, in particular with respect to the issue of poverty and to ways of resolving it.
Anybody can pretend to care so much for the poor that they say stuff like 'it isn't enough to buy every poor person a nice mansion, one must also consider whether they need training in sodomy so as to achieve more intense orgasms.'
Ethics boils down to forming criteria that enable a choice to be made between various situations, after having ranked these situations according to these criteria.
That's economics. Ethics is about becoming a better person with nicer preferences.
One of the major ethical doctrines is utilitarianism, which values any action or institution according to its propensity to increase—or decrease—the happiness of the community. Drawing solely on one criterion—general happiness—thus makes utilitarianism a monist ethical doctrine.
Sadly, because we live under Knightian uncertainty, regret minimization is better.
Sen departs from this doctrine, which, implicitly or explicitly, is adhered to by most economists, because he considers its vision of well-being to be excessively one-dimensional.
Nobody knows what happiness is.
According to Sen, the happiness criterion neglects individuals’ other values, which he purports to incorporate with the use of functionings and capabilities,
Nobody knows what either of those two things are. We do know about money. Maximise that by all means.
thereby providing a better assessment of well-being. This is equivalent to adopting an ethical framework comprising several criteria, for which Sen uses the term “pluralism.”
Sadly nobody knows what any of those criteria are. Still, if you are high caste, fuck you need knowledge for?
Critique of Monism
In Inequality Reexamined, Sen writes that, “While being happy may count as an important functioning, it cannot really be taken to be all there is to leading a life (i.e., it can hardly be the only valuable functioning)” (Sen 1982, 54).
Dalits can be happy. That shows happiness is overrated. Some Dalits become billionaires because they great entrepreneurs or the invented cool stuff. This shows that money & entrepreneurship and inventing cool stuff isn't really anything to be proud of.
Thus valuable functionings are seen to be the basis for a life worth living. While happiness features among the factors that constitute a “valuable life,” it is not the only factor—hence Sen’s critique of utilitarianism.
Was Bentham a Baidya? No. He had no caste. Fuck him.
In Development as Freedom, Sen states that, “To insist that there should be only one homogeneous magnitude that we value is to reduce drastically the range of our evaluative reasoning.
There should be at least five castes. Modi is very evil because he wants to create just one homogenous caste of people who work hard & feel a sense of duty to the common good. This is why we must reject Hindutva & back the Dynasty.
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