Development as Freedom

This time, my trip to Chennai was also a road trip. I got a ride with friends in the car, and it also gave us lots of time for conversation. As we were going to the convocation, the discussions turned to education and degrees. Though there are lots of folks dissing college education and degrees in the tech world. I thought that a college education and formal degrees have value. And to know its value, one should speak to someone who is the first graduate in the family and what kind of changes it brings.

I think we all kind of agreed, and friend mentioned an article by Amartya Sen on education and human capability. I did find myself agreeing with the points and, hence, searched for that article, which led me to the book, Development as Freedom. I am reading it currently. I think it’s a valuable read.

Also this take on the book by Denis O’Hearn on it’s tenth year of publication.

The center of Sen’s vision is what he calls a ‘capability approach’, where the basic concern of human development is ‘our capability to lead the kind of lives we have reason to value’, rather than the usual concentration on rising GDP, technical progress, or industrialization (Sen, 1999:285). His approach ‘inescapably focuses on the agency and judgment of individuals’ (ibid.:288) including their capability, responsibility, and opportunity. Raising human capability is good because it improves: the choices, wellbeing, and freedom of people; their role in influencing social change; and their role in influencing economic production.

He painstakingly distinguishes human capability from human capital. Human capital is important, as it refers to the agency of people in augmenting production possibilities. Yet human capability is more important because it refers to the substantive freedom of people to lead the lives they have reason to value and to enhance the real choices they have. Education, for example, is crucial beyond its role in production; its most important role being that of increasing human capability and therefore choice. Again, Sen cites Adam Smith who links productive abilities to lifestyles to education and training, and presumes the improvability of each. While the popularity of the concept of human capital is for Sen ‘certainly an enriching move’, it needs supplementation by an approach that takes human capability as its central concern.

Read the book if you have time.