Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very rewarding, 24 Jun 2005
This is a superb book that sets out Sen's influential approach to thinking about economic development. In it he combines economics and political philosophy to show how thinking about what people have and what they are capable of attaining, given their situation, can yield important insights into the nature of development. The focus is not just on the material aspects of development, but also on considerations such as political and societal participation, human rights and institutions. Sen views the ultimate goal of development as maximising peoples' freedom to lead the lives they wish within the context of society.
Among the 12 chapters, a couple of my personal favourites include his analysis of the problem of "Missing Women" in China, a chilling illustration of the consequences that a prohibition of societal participation can bring about. Also, his discussion on famines, which views their possible cause not just as crop failiure, but as a failiure of democratic rights.
Sen's writes with the aplomb that one would expect from a philosopher (he is published in ethics and political philosophy as well as economics). There are many parts of the book, especially one of the earlier chapters, that require some concentrated reading (several times in my case!) to fully grasp the ideas, but the rewards to be had are more than worth any effort put in.
I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with any interest in the developing world. This is a human, hopeful, brilliantly lucid and intelligent read that does what all the best non fiction does: really makes you think.
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Humanitarian" Economics for the 21st Century:, 27 Mar 2001
By A Customer
A readable and reasoned evaluation of the need to place "humanity" rather than "Economics" at the forefront of development. Sen questions the rational behind economist's supremacy in the field and graphically illustrates the dangers of such a myopic view. Sen places the "freedom" to live the life one has reason to value at the forefront of his argument. What lies at the heart of this book is the belief that the object of development is "increasing the range of human choice". The most powerful example Sen gives of the danger of blind faith in the power of the Markets is the lesson taken away by the Development Community from the experience of the East & S.East Asian Tigers. In contradiction to the commonly held view which sees the Markets as central to the Tiger's success, Sen considers the E.Asian economic boom to be the result of the implementation of basic social policies, such as an emphasis on elementary education and health. He compares them to South Asia who duly swallowed the "lesson" and followed the East Asian market formula. Despite this S.Asia has consistantly failed to achieve the expected economic growth. Sen points to the S. Asian government's failure to implement basic social policies and stresses the fact that those implemented are often counter productive, such as an emphasis on higher education at the expense of universal elementary education etc. He does not deny the necessarily close relationship between economic improvement and social improvement but he takes an extra step back and reminds his readers that true economic improvement, which will benefit a cross-section of society (rather than a privledges elite, and this is the main crux), is often a by-product of social development rather than the other way round. Sen's seemingly radical stance is merely a return to older thought on the subject. Among others, he quotes from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to illustrate his point: "Wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else". Sen's is a valuable lesson, not only to all who work in the "Development Industry", whether Economists or otherwise, but to those politicians and think-tanks who take development in the "First World" for granted. Criticism of his work as "impractical" merely outlines the Development Industry's fascination with quick-fixes, whose long term consequences often prove disasterous. His stress on basic freedoms of choice is highly adaptable. Sen presents us with a foundation on which to build . His is not a cure all formula to be rigidly applied.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Development as rhetoric, 11 May 2009
This is Amartya Sen's, Nobel Prize winner in Economics and collaborator of Martha Nussbaum, most famous work. In "Development as Freedom" he gives a broad and general overview of his views on development economics, and in particular on the priorities that must be made in creating social and economic policy in the developing world. The general thesis of the book is that many economic advisors have far too much relied on measurements of real income alone, and ignored the fact that income and wealth are a means to an end, and that this end is freedom (broadly defined as capacity); and that for this reason any policy which increases income but decreases freedom must be rejected. This thesis of itself is strong and well-made, and a deserved rebuttal to the ideas of many Asian development economists and politicians who see a right-wing dictatorship à la Lee Kwan Yew as the most effective way to create economic growth, and therefore desirable.
But that is, unfortunately, the only point of the book. Sen's actual discussion of which economic policies would lead to the results of increasing freedom is so general as to be practically unusable. He has a completely unwarranted faith in the capacity of markets (albeit interventionist ones) to create these increases in freedom, and incorrectly claims that the proof is overwhelmingly in favor of markets leading to growth on their own, when the evidence is in reality wildly conflicting and the strongest proofs are against markets. What makes this even worse is his ignorant conflating of markets as such with capitalism, which leads to such silly canards as dismissing criticisms of capitalism as not understanding freedom, since after all, what can be more free than freedom of exchange? In this way, his defense of mainstream development policy is worse than undergraduate level.
Moreover, the very greatest part of the book is filled with meaningless and saccharine rhetoric of the most astonishingly unintelligent kind. In each short chapter addressing some major aspect of development economics and its problematic, he will, after much talk, come to such stunning conclusions as "take the middle road" and "there are arguments for and against interventionism and we must consider both", as well as the whopping conclusion that we need to take the whole spectrum of effects on people into account when suggesting policies. One hardly needs to have a Nobel Prize to come to these 'insights'.
To add insult to injury, his discussion of past economic policies and economists in general is incompetent and historically dubious. He claims that no democratic state has experienced famines, but then qualifies this by excluding colonies of such states, without however giving any reason for this - creating a wholly ad hoc argument for an unproven link between 'democracy' (which apparently includes pre-Reform Bill Britain) and well-being. Similarly, he constantly cherry-picks quotes from Adam Smith to cast him as a concerned and judicious proponent of development, while a more objective look at the entirety of Smith's oeuvre would quickly reveal the degree to which he appeared as a propagandist for the Glasgow mercantile and industrial interests. It must be said in Sen's favor though that he does recognize that famines can easily occur where free markets are present, which at least puts him at a level above most apologetics for economic orthodoxy.
On the whole this book is a major disappointment. Sen's vague and hand-waving rhetoric is useless for any kind of policy purpose and yet fills most of the book, even obscuring the one point he does have about freedom as end and means. With the idea he originally had, he could have done a lot better, but his unwarranted support for mainstream economics and its equivocations has made this impossible.
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