Books we rate below 5 won’t be summarized. Our rating helps you sort the titles on your reading list from solid (5) to brilliant (10). We rate each piece of content on a scale of 1–10 with regard to these two core criteria. Helpful – You’ll take-away practical advice that will help you get better at what you do. Whatever we select for our library has to excel in one or the other of these two core criteria:Įnlightening – You’ll learn things that will inform and improve your decisions. “Human Development: A New Paradigm or Reinvention of the Wheel.” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 84: 238–243.At getAbstract, we summarize books* that help people understand the world and make it better. Development as Freedom New York: Alfred A. “The Possibility of Social Choice.” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 89: 349–378. “Rationality and Social Choice.” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 85: 1–24. “The Wrong Economist Won.” Wall Street Journal, 15 October (Editorial).

The Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India. Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd ed. Sen’s capability approach provides an invaluable analytical and philosophical foundation for those interested in pursuing development as freedom, but it is a foundation that must be built on, not just admired.Īrrow, Kenneth, 1951.

Indeed, without possibilities for collective mobilization formal elections too easily become a hollow farce. Institutional strategies for facilitating collective capabilities are as important to the expansion of freedom as sustaining formal electoral institutions.

As the global political economy moves with ever greater determination toward the implantation of more thoroughly marketized economic relations, analysts must correspondingly focus more closely on how to prevent market-based power inequalities from undermining “development as freedom.” Centralization of power over the cultural flows that shape preferences is a more subtle form of “unfreedom” than those which Sen highlights, but no less powerful for being subtle. Nonetheless, the understanding and pursuit of “development as freedom” must go beyond the arguments he lays out. Sen showed his usual wisdom and astute judgement in keeping his argument carefully focused and, therefore, elegant and compelling.

Development and freedom