Capabilities, freedom, and justice
Amartya Sen was voted president of the American Economic Association in January, 1994. This was a signal honour and in an appreciative tribute, Robert Solow of MIT, an earlier President of the AEA and a Nobel laureate, told an interviewer of the New York Times that Sen is “the conscience of our profession”. Four years on, in 1998, Sen himself became a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize for his contributions to welfare economics. The citation mentioned his contributions to the axiomatic theory of social choice, poverty indices and empirical studies of famine. More than two decades after the Nobel, the pace and scope of 87-year-old Sen’s work does not seem to have slowed down. He continues to teach his graduate course at Harvard, is one of the most prominent world intellectuals today, and is a consistent voice for the poor and downtrodden.
How to Read Amartya Sen offers a comprehensive introduction to Sen’s ideas. A former student of the Nobel laureate, the author Lawrence Hamilton, is now professor of political studies at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. This reviewer believes it is a great advantage to have a political scientist, and not an economist, put together Sen’s extraordinary range of ideas into a unified narrative.
The latter are often too fond of using obscure jargon.
A quintessential blend of economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen was engaged with philosophical issues even as a doctoral student at Trinity College, Cambridge in the 1950s. Today, he is most associated with social choice theory. The problem was one of consistently aggregating the preferences of a group of individuals over alternative social states. In a world where differences in tastes and preferences are the norm, this was clearly a non-trivial problem.
In 1951, theoretical economist Kenneth Arrow completed his doctoral dissertation, Social Choice and Individual Values, at Columbia University. In it, he demonstrated that there is no democratic way of aggregating the preferences of individuals into a social preference ordering if the rules of aggregation are to abide by certain ‘reasonable’ postulates.
Sen’s work builds on Arrow’s, and demonstrates how we may expect a group to arrive at reasonable decisions. Perhaps his greatest contribution has been to establish that it is often not necessary to identify the best alternative from a list of options but to be satisfied with comparing the available imperfect alternatives against one another. He has mounted possibly the strongest critique to the dominant school of utilitarianism, which is centred on human beings deriving utility from the consumption of commodities, and then proceeding to choose that option which maximizes the summation of individual utilities. Sen argues that, instead, the purpose of public policy should be to enhance the ‘capabilities’ of individuals to enable them to reach their full potential. Enhancing capabilities is also synonymous with enlarging the freedoms that individuals may enjoy. It is also integral to enhancing justice and the quality of democratic engagement in the political arena. Lest it be concluded that
Sen only indulges in philosophical abstractions, it needs to be emphasized that he is focused on practical issues. One of his greatest insights is to assure us that a democratic polity and a free press are the best antidote to famines. For anyone interested in the exciting cerebral world of Amartya Sen, this book is an invaluable companion.