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Development as Freedom: Amartya Sen
- Development as Freedom (2000) is Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s book on his groundbreaking work on development studies. Sen argues and urges in this intellectually compelling tome to go for comprehensive view on economic development rather than just identifying development purely on the basis of per-capita income or per-capita GNP. Development, Sen contends, should be seen in the perspective of freedom; development should be seen as an expansion of people’s freedom.
- He delineates freedom into its various realms namely social, political, and economical and cogently puts how expansion of freedom is at the same time “the end” we seek and “the means” to it. In this expanded and comprehensive perspective, previously unattended domains like Healthcare and education gets importance in the measurement of real development
- Sen brings the notion of how democracy and market economics cater to the expansion of people’s capabilities. He draws examples of market reformation from the developing world (mainly India and China) to bring forth the merits and demerits of market economics and the need for state intervention in fields like education and Healthcare. He notes the importance of democracy and public discussion in bringing about social changes like reducing fertility in India or reducing the instances of famine. A whole insightful chapter has been dedicated to the study of how famines are entirely preventable if it is seen as the victim’s loss of capability to get proper food rather than just a reduction of national food-output
- Sen ends his book with his “ideas of social justice” in which he vouches for a more practical view of justice by trying to remove manifest forms of injustice instead of focusing to form a ideally just society
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