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Summary: MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOK IN ECONOMICS IN THE 90s
Review: Development as Freedom is one of the most well written books on the value of freedom in society. It touches upon the values economists should emphasize (and often don't) and the errors made in the name of paternalism and a state that lead economic life. It is a book to be added to the likes of The Road to Serfdom (Hayek) and Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman). For such important and clear thinking Sen is worth the Nobel prize.
In terms of economics, Sen makes the clear case that it is freedom and not wealth that should be maximized. He defines a freedom as anything we have a reason to value, which is different than the usual definition and will strike many as strange, but accepting his definition is key to understanding and agreeing with the value of freedom in society. For example, we may want growth to get development, but development can also be defined as extended life expectancy (the freedom to enjoy more years alive) or less hunger (the freedom to avoid hunger).
I highly recommend Development as Freedom to anyone interested in development. As someone from a developing country, Sen is particularly attuned with the realities and the policies that are able to bring freedom, and hence development, to the developing world.
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Summary: valuable contribution to the dialogue on development
Review: Development is a worldwide, ongoing dialogue, and Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen makes a valuable contribution to it. He argues for the position that development is ideally conceived in terms of building a society that in its social, political, and economic institutions allows the individual to maximize the exercise of "substantive freedoms--the capabilities to choose a life one has reason to value" (p. 74). In this view, individual agency is both the means and end of development. Means, in the sense that "greater freedom enhances the ability of people to help themselves and also to influence the world, and these matters are central to the process of development" (p. 18). End, in the sense that "the success of a society is to be evaluated, in this view, primarily by the substantive freedoms that the members of the society enjoy" (p. 18). He calls this conception "development as freedom."It is not novel. Indeed, Sen squarely locates in the liberal tradition flowing from the eighteenth-century philosophes. However, Sen makes an eloquent case for his own uniquely nuanced interpretation. He recalls the finest traditions of the classical orator, drawing on his unquestionable economic expertise, broad knowledge, and warm humanity. The crux of his argument lies in what he believes "substantive freedoms" consist. He defines freedom in a negative way, what he calls "unfreedoms," as "elementary capabilities like being able to avoid such deprivations as starvation, undernourishment, escapable morbidity and premature mortality" (p. 36). He also defines freedom in a positive way, giving examples of "freedoms associated with being literate and numerate, enjoying political participation and uncensored speech" (p. 36). There is little dispute that "substantive freedoms" generally work together, synergistically, in advancing development, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Sen cites very poor countries like India, Botswana, or Zimbabwe, in which he believes the establishment of democracy has successfully thwarted famine, while in Maoist China, in sharp contrast, massive famines arose in the fifties despite its superior economic performance vis-à-vis India. He also cites the well-known inverse correlation between higher female literacy rates and lower child mortality rates. But there is some debate about whether the expansion of political freedoms, specifically, go hand-in-hand with the growth of economic benefits, that is, in Sen's framework, economic freedoms. Here is the real bone of contention. Sen argues against what is known as the "Lee thesis," meaning the claim that authoritarian regimes, with concomitant restriction of civil and political rights, purportedly have some advantage over democratic regimes in promoting economic advancement. He devotes two chapters--"The Importance of Democracy" and "Culture and Human Rights"--to rebutting this position, and in my opinion, they are the most important part of the book. But Sen is never entirely successful in his rebuttal because at one point he concedes: ...Systematic empirical studies give no real support to the claim that there is a general conflict between political freedoms and economic performance. The directional linkage seems to depend on many other circumstances, and while some statistical investigations note a weakly negative relation, others find a strongly positive one (p. 150). Sen does not adequately account for the unusual success of the East Asian economies--we must include Japan here--as prospective models in the transition toward development. There may indeed be undisclosed factors operating among these cultures, perhaps even a communal ethos working in a manner distinct from the individualistic ethos on which Sen's conception of development is based. Sen's objective is to contribute to the dialogue on development. In his words, his motivation is "to draw attention to important aspects of the process of development, each of which deserves attention" (p. 33). In this endeavor, he is eminently distinguished.
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Summary: Individual freedom finally assigned an economic value
Review: Human well-being is the *goal*, not a *side effect*, of social and economic life. This seems to be common sense. But few economists can subtract: no consensus exists on how to account for harms done to man or world, or to human potential discarded. How do we get beyond 'wealth' to understand 'value'? Sen has a solution. Extending his previous works 'On Ethics and Economics' (1989) and 'Choice, Welfare, and Measurement' (1997), he offers a model of human freedom and free choice as sole measure of value. He restates 'political' and 'ethical' problems as economic ones and measures the negative impact of denying human freedom to choose. For instance, reliance on expensive systems of distribution and mediation, instead of (anarchic) peer relations. Like Smith and Marx, Sen revisits the assumptions of economic life: why do we work? Why would we put ourselves in positions to endanger ourselves and waste our precious and irreplaceable time on Earth? From his first example, a poor man who was knifed to death for simple lack of freedom to avoid visiting 'a hostile area in troubled times', Sen reminds us that money is worth nothing without time and something to buy that we want more than the time we spent to get it. Escaping the ethical relativism which traps most economists (although, strangely, retaining the moral relativism of human existence and avoiding the 'natural capital' view that there are absolute and transhuman values that humans can ignore, e.g. integrity of DNA/RNA life) he focuses clearly on 'human capital' and how it is liberated through the mechanisms of 'freedom'. Transcends mere structural models such as those of Thurow and Mundell, proposes causal relationships more like those of Herman Wold, Karl Marx and Adam Smith. A powerful and convincing work by the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. Possibly the first credible anarchist economist. (c)1999 Craig Hubley - permission granted to copy without restriction as long as this notice remains
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Summary: A book that can give you a new the perspective of economy
Review: I am not a professional, so this book was a kind of hard for me to read. But I really learned a lot from this book. There are a lot of interesting datas in this book: for example, the life expectancy of an American Black is even lower then Chinese even though Chinese earn much less money than them; And in the civil war, Black slaves actually earn more money then Federal's workers, but because they had no freedom, so they still like Federals better, even though they are not going to earn as much money there. The relationship between the freedom that people enjoy and the amount of money they are are not Direct Variation, In another word, Money doesn't equal to freedom. I suggest you to buy this book, but you don't have to read the whole thing, the first three or four chapters are the core value of this book
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Summary: Corection to preceeding reveiw
Review: I am sory, I make a eror of speling in my preceeding reveiw, I mispelled LASSIEZ FARE. I appoligise!
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Summary: Business Sense In A Not-So-Sensible World
Review: I can relate to to wisdom and clear trail of knowledge and experience easily and relevantly. I am reminded of the old saying that it is better to teach a man, or in the present context, also the woman, how to fish rather than to give a fish; I would go a bit further to amend the old saying even further: It would be still better yet to bring within the economic grasp of the majority the overall costs of the fishing pole, the bait and tackle, the fishing licenses, and so on.
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Summary: A good text to follow others, but shaky on its own ground...
Review: I found Sen to be interesting, much more so in fact that I likely would have had I not come to Sen with an understanding of the material in Friedman's Capitalism & Freedom, Rawls' Theory of Justice and Schweickart's After Capitalism. In addition to the interest I found in Sen, which itself was based primarily on his new (or at least unique) definition of freedom as being primarily based in the development experienced by or promoted through, the work of the now free people in question. Indeed I found much of Sen's work to be strongly definitional in nature, seeming to draw almost entirely on the definitions of each aspect of his theory as he goes along through the text. This is all well and good until a reader does not share or cannot be made to understand the relation of his sometimes altered definition to the traditionally understood meaning of the terms he uses throughout. I should think, however that many would, could or simply should adopt to Sen's understanding of the major terms of socioeconomic influence and would be no worse off for it, and perhaps in the process, would have developed a more liberal viewpoint from which to gauge their own actions as well as those of others. In the notion of freedoms as being inhibited by unfreedom as put forth by Sen and later developed to be the idea of development as opposed to limited capacity to act, this is certainly true; when one comes to identify an unfreedom specifically as the limitation of another's rational and autonomous capacity, a certain liberalized viewpoint must enter into consideration in the form of a desire to release the constraint. This is precisely why I suspect Sen words his text as he does, to not only express his meaning, but to compel the reader to adopt a sympathetic yet active viewpoint of the struggle for freedom.
Though the text is long, it seems to me that much of its drive may be summarized fairly simply; the affluent will grow more so, based on the extent of the resources available to them, and the poor will remain so, continuing to be deprived of abilities (usually at the hands of the rich), and will continue to await an enlightenment that, according to Sen, will never arrive with the obstacles that are in place now being left as such. This is a difficult aspect of the text to my understanding largely due to the fact that while it serves admirably as a "call to action" there is very little actual action or proposals for potential actions within the book itself and by this I mean that while providing an impetus to act in the form of presenting the problem and perhaps creating in the reader the desire to act in some way, Sen provides very few avenues along which to do so. It would seem to me that few readers will find the motivation in Sen beyond a feeling of needing to do "something" that will allow and indeed encourage them to seek further action against the injustices (in the form of Sen's unfreedoms) that will continue unchecked without such action. I do not mean to say that Sen's text is ineffectual, for it indubitably calls the reader to action, though falls short on proposals for how to accomplish said actions.
On an economic basis, for up this point we have been led by our read authors to view freedom as inherently tied in to finance, Sen makes the clear case that it is freedom and not wealth that should be maximized. He defines a freedom as anything we have a reason to value (and not just in the sense of monetary or capital-producing value as before) and equates this new definition to understanding and agreeing with the value of freedom in society. For example, societies may want strive for political and economic growth to equal a sense of development, but development can also be, and Sen would seem to indicate is much more aptly and workably defined as extended life expectancy (the freedom to enjoy more years alive as opposed to the unfreedom of an early death) or less hunger (the freedom to avoid hunger in opposition to the unfreedom of starvation). Freedom and development, the two pillars upon which this book is supported are not so diametrically opposed as many may have thought previous to coming to Sen; and furthermore, on a Senian account, they actually reinforce and complement one another to achieve freedom for all by means of making economic prosperity more available to all. Sen seems to indicate that democracy is not a luxury whereby only rich or developed nations can profit and purchase to excess, but should be seen as an end in itself in a Kantian sense, as well as a guiding force to foster and promote economic development and individual freedom; a concept Friedman, Rawls and Schweickart should all certainly be able to agree on.
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Summary: sen has mien
Review: I had no idea after reading some pretty depressing developing country scenarios in "Development as Freedom" last year, that they would affect my country (Kenya) so powerfully. Famine, one of those degrading human disasters, once again stalks my country to the extent that the President had to appeal for international food aid,how regrettable after 40 years of so-called independence.
As the author candidly points out, famine doesn't occur in countries where citizens have consistent income streams because even if rains fail, food can be imported and purchased. But as usual, in our case, the weather, rather than lack of leadership in economically empowering Kenyans(for instance through food-for-work programmes) was blamed for the famine. Condorcet, a French mathematician, is quoted in the book as saying ..."If they have a duty towards those who are not yet born, that duty is not to give them existence, but to give them happiness."
I would recommend the book to the next occupant of State House and his (or her) administration, because the current administration is too busy figuring out how to contain Raila Odinga rather than efficiently running the country.
PS. I'm aware that "Development as Freedom" is more than just about famine, but I'm too 'hungry' to outline the rest of his ideas,I beg your pardon.
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Summary: Highly suggested
Review: I highly suggest this book to the readers, it is a very finely done, it bring distruction to the lassiez-fare agruments! I think this is accellent book, it is good to reading by any one, Who think freemarket is good! Freemarket [is not good], this is the massage of Armayta Sen who is economics genious! Better is Developement which is same as Freedom, this freemarket can not acomplish! While many people strave in this world, must we read this GREAT book by genious Sen! It distroy all these myths, which say freemarket is good! Developement is Freedom, freemarket is [is not good]! Buisness are no good, for Developement, that is why so many people straving with out food! This is freemarket failure, no good for the people! Also Sen is very good writter, you will not have no trouble understand what he say.
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Summary: Sensible Economics for Everyone
Review: I read this book because Sen had written the preface to one of my favourite books, Paul Farmer's "Pathologies of Power." I had absolutely no knowledge of economics when I went into this book, but a friend assured me that it was very accessible. It was fairly accessible: but perhaps my ignorance was just extreme. There were a few terms that I had to google, but overall it was a good introduction to some economic theories. As to the economic theories themselves: just plain brilliant. Who says that economists have no common sense? This book just made complete and utter... sense! I just sat there shaking my head, because sentence after sentence was phrased in just a way to make it so obvious that I wondered why I had never thought of it... and why those who have the power to listen to this book don't do something about it. I recomend this book to anyone who is interested in the state and the future of developing economies. Frankly, this should cover everyone who lives in North America and Western Europe because (as Sen shows) what affects horribly impoverished people on the other side of the globe affects us too. No knowledge of economics is required (though you might find Google helpful ;-) ), but an open mind and a modicum of common sense is necessary.
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