Development as Freedom (53 page)

49.
On these issues see my
Commodities and Capabilities
(1985);
Inequality Reexamined
(1992); and “Capability and Well-Being” (1993).

50.
See Rawls,
A Theory of Justice
(1971) and
Political Liberalism
(1993). In analogy with Kenneth Arrow’s famous impossibility theorem, various “impossibility theorems” have been presented in the literature about the existence of satisfactory overall indices of Rawlsian primary goods; see Charles Plott, “Rawls’ Theory of Justice: An Impossibility Result,” in
Decision Theory and Social Ethics
, edited by H. W. Gottinger and W. Leinfellner (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978); Allan Gibbard, “Disparate Goods and Rawls’s Difference Principle: A Social Choice Theoretic Treatment,”
Theory and Decision
11 (1979); Douglas H. Blair, “The Primary-Goods Indexation Problem in Rawls’
Theory of Justice,” Theory and Decision
24 (1988). Informational limitations play a crucial part in precipitating these results (as in the case of Arrow’s theorem). The case
against
imposing such informational limitations is discussed in my “On Indexing Primary Goods and Capabilities” (mimeographed, Harvard University, 1991), which reduces the rub of these alleged impossibility results, applied to Rawlsian procedures.

51.
Analytical correspondences between systematic narrowing of the range of weights and monotonic extension of the generated partial orderings (based on “intersections of possible rankings”) have been explored in my “Interpersonal Aggregation and Partial Comparability” (1970) and
Collective Choice and Social Welfare
(1970), chapters 7 and 7*; and in Charles Blackorby, “Degrees of Cardinality and Aggregate Partial Ordering,”
Econometrica
43 (1975); Ben Fine, “A Note on Interpersonal Aggregation and Partial Comparability,”
Econometrica
43 (1975); Kaushik Basu,
Revealed Preference of Government
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); James Foster and Amartya Sen, “On
Economic Inequality
after a Quarter Century,” in my
On Economic Inequality
, expanded edition (1997). The approach of intersection partial orderings can be combined with “fuzzy” representation of the valuation and measurement of functionings, on which see Chiappero Martinetti, “A New Approach to Evaluation of Well-being and Poverty by Fuzzy Set Theory” (1994), and also her “Standard of Living Evaluation Based on Sen’s Approach” (1996). See also L. Casini and I. Bernetti, “Environment, Sustainability,
and Sen’s Theory,”
Notizie de Politeia
12 (1996), and Herrero, “Capabilities and Utilities” (1996). But even with an incomplete ordering many decision problems can be adequately resolved, and even those that are not fully resolved can be substantially simplified (through the rejection of “dominated” alternatives).

52.
This issue, and its connection with both social choice theory and public choice theory, are discussed in my presidential address to the American Economic Association, “Rationality and Social Choice,”
American Economic Review
85 (1995).

53.
T. N. Srinivasan, “Human Development: A New Paradigm or Reinvention of the Wheel?”
American Economic Review
, Papers and Proceedings 84 (1994), p. 239. In presenting this argument, Srinivasan quotes, in fact, from Robert Sugden (“Welfare, Resources, and Capabilities: A Review of
Inequality Reexamined
by Amartya Sen,”
Journal of Economic Literature
31 [1993]), whose skepticism of the possibility of valuing different capabilities is clearly less intense than Srinivasan’s (as Sugden puts his own conclusion, it “remains to be seen whether analogous metrics can be developed for the capability approach,” p. 1953).

54.
Paul A. Samuelson,
Foundations of Economic Analysis
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), p. 205.

55.
I have tried to address this issue in my presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1995 and in my Nobel lecture in 1998; see “Rationality and Social Choice,”
American Economic Review
85 (1995), and “The Possibility of Social Choice,”
American Economic Review
89 (1999).

56.
These approaches have also been discussed in the new annex (authored jointly with James Foster) in the enlarged (1997) edition of my
On Economic Inequality
.

57.
It is tempting to consider distribution measures in different spaces (distributions of incomes, longevities, literacies, etc.), and then to put them together. But this would be a misleading procedure, since much would depend on how these variables relate to one another in interpersonal patterns (what may be called the “covariance” issue). For example, if people with low incomes also tend to have low literacy levels, then the two deprivations would be reinforced, whereas if they were unrelated (or “orthogonal”), this would not happen; and if they are oppositely related, then the deprivation in terms of one variable would be, at least to some extent, ameliorated by the other variable. We cannot decide which of the alternative possibilities holds by looking only at the distribution indicators separately, without examining collinearity and covariance.

58.
In a study on poverty in Italy, in the European context, undertaken by the Bank of Italy and led by Fabrizio Barca, it is mostly this supplementary approach that is used and applied.

59.
On this see Angus Deaton,
Microeconometric Analysis for Development Policy: An Approach from Household Surveys
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press for the World Bank, 1997). See also Angus Deaton and John Muellbauer,
Economics and Consumer Behaviour
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), and “On Measuring Child Costs: With Applications to Poor Countries,”
Journal of Political Economy
94 (1986). See also Dale W. Jorgenson,
Welfare
, volume 2,
Measuring Social Welfare
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).

60.
See Hugh Dalton, “The Measurement of the Inequality of Incomes,”
Economic
Journal
30 (1920); A. B. Atkinson, “On the Measurement of Inequality,”
Journal of Economic Theory
2 (1970).

61.
Particularly in my
Commodities and Capabilities
(1985); “Well-Being, Agency and Freedom” (1985); and
Inequality Reexamined
(1992).

62.
Some of the more technical issues in the evaluation of freedom have been investigated in my
Freedom, Rationality and Social Choice: Arrow Lectures and Other Essays
(forthcoming).

1.
This view of poverty is more fully developed in my
Poverty and Famines
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) and
Resources, Values and Development
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), and also in Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen,
Hunger and Public Action
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), and in Sudhir Anand and Amartya Sen, “Concepts of Human Development and Poverty: A Multidimensional Perspective,” in
Human Development Papers 1997
(New York: UNDP, 1997).

2.
These claims and their implications are more fully discussed in my “Poverty as Capability Deprivation,” mimeographed, Rome: Bank of Italy.

3.
For example, hunger and undernutrition are related both to food intake and to the ability to make nutritive use of that intake. The latter is deeply affected by general health conditions (for example, by the presence of parasitic diseases), and that in turn depends much on communal health care and public health provisions; on this see Drèze and Sen,
Hunger and Public Action
(1989), and S. R. Osmani, ed.,
Nutrition and Poverty
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

4.
See, for example, James Smith, “Healthy Bodies and Thick Wallets: The Dual Relationship between Health and Socioeconomic Status,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
13 (1999). There is also another type of “coupling” between (1) undernutrition generated by income-poverty and (2) income-poverty resulting from work deprivation due to undernutrition. On these connections, see Partha Dasgupta and Debraj Ray, “Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment: Theory,”
Economic Journal
96 (1986); “Inequality as a Determinant of Malnutrition and Unemployment: Policy,”
Economic Journal
97 (1987); and “Adapting to Undernourishment: Biological Evidence and Its Implications,” in
The Political Economy of Hunger
, edited by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). See also Partha Dasgupta,
An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and Debraj Ray,
Development Economics
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

5.
The large contribution of such handicaps to the prevalence of income poverty in Britain was sharply brought out by A. B. Atkinson’s pioneering empirical study,
Poverty in Britain and the Reform of Social Security
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). In his later works, Atkinson has further pursued the connection between income handicap and deprivations of other kinds.

6.
On the nature of these functional handicaps, see Dorothy Wedderburn,
The Aged in the Welfare State
(London: Bell, 1961); Peter Townsend,
Poverty in the United Kingdom: A Survey of Household Resources and Standards of Living
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979); J. Palmer, T. Smeeding and B. Torrey,
The Vulnerable: America’s Young and Old in the Industrial World
(Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1988); among other contributions.

7.
I have tried to investigate the perspective of capability deprivation for analyzing gender inequality in
Resources, Values and Development
(1984; 1997);
Commodities and Capabilities
(Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1985); and “Missing Women,”
British Medical Journal
304 (March 1992). See also Pranab Bardhan, “On Life and Death Questions,”
Economic and Political Weekly
9 (1974); Lincoln Chen, E. Huq and S. D’Souza, “Sex Bias in the Family Allocation of Food and Health Care in Rural Bangladesh,”
Population and Development Review
7 (1981); Jocelyn Kynch and Amartya Sen, “Indian Women: Well-Being and Survival,”
Cambridge Journal of Economics
7 (1983); Pranab Bardhan,
Land, Labor, and Rural Poverty
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Drèze and Sen,
Hunger and Public Action
(1989); Barbara Harriss, “The Intrafamily Distribution of Hunger in South Asia,” in Drèze and Sen,
The Political Economy of Hunger
, volume 1 (1990); Ravi Kanbur and L. Haddad, “How Serious Is the Neglect of Intrahousehold Inequality?”
Economic Journal
100 (1990); among other contributions.

8.
On this, see United Nations Development Programme,
Human Development Report 1995
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

9.
See W. G. Runciman,
Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-Century England
(London: Routledge, 1966); and Townsend,
Poverty in the United Kingdom
(1979).

10.
On this see my “Poor, Relatively Speaking,”
Oxford Economic Papers
35 (1983), reprinted in
Resources, Values and Development
(1984).

11.
The connection is analyzed in my
Inequality Reexamined
(Oxford: Clarendon Press; and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), chapter 7.

12.
Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen,
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).

13.
See the collection of papers in Isher Judge Ahluwalia and I.M.D. Little, eds.,
India’s Economic Reforms and Development: Essays for Manmohan Singh
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Vijay Joshi and Ian Little,
Indian Economic Reforms, 1991–2001
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).

14.
These arguments are more fully developed in Drèze and Sen,
India: Economic Development and Social Opportunity
(1995).

15.
See G. Datt,
Poverty in India and Indian States: An Update
(Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institute, 1997). See also World Bank,
India: Achievements and Challenges in Reducing Poverty
, report no. 16483 IN, May 27, 1997 (see particularly figure 2.3).

16.
Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759; revised edition, 1790); republished, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

17.
John Rawls,
A Theory of Justice
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971). See also Stephen Darwall, ed.,
Equal Freedom: Selected Tanner Lectures on Human Values
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), with contributions by G. A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, T. M. Scanlon, Amartya Sen and Quentin Skinner.

18.
Thomas Scanlon, “Contractualism and Utilitarianism,” in
Utilitarianism and Beyond
, edited by Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also his
What We Owe Each Other
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

19.
See, for example, James Mirrlees, “An Exploration in the Theory of Optimal
Income Taxation,”
Review of Economic Studies
38 (1971); E. S. Phelps, ed.,
Economic Justice
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973); Nicholas Stern, “On the Specification of Modes of Optimum Income Taxation,”
Journal of Public Economics 6
(1976); A. B. Atkinson and Joseph Stiglitz,
Lectures on Public Economics
(London: McGraw-Hill, 1980); D. A. Starrett,
Foundations of Public Economics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); among many other contributions.