Development as Freedom

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Oxford University Press, 1999 - 366 páginas
In Development as Freedom Amartya Sen quotes the eighteenth century poet William Cowper on freedom: Freedom has a thousand charms to show, That slaves howe'er contented, never know. Sen explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence, millions of people living in rich and poor countries are still unfree. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedom and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms' to the unfree citizens. Freedom, Sen persuasively argues, is at once the ultimate goal of social and economic arrangements and the most efficient means of realizing general welfare. Social institutions like markets, political parties, legislatures, the judiciary, and the media contribute to development by enhancing individual freedom and are in turn sustained by social values. Values, institutions, development, and freedom are all closely interrelated, and Sen links them together in an elegant analytical framework. By asking "What is the relation between our collective economic wealth and our individual ability to live as we would like?" and by incorporating individual freedom as a social commitment into his analysis, Sen allows economics once again, as it did in the time of Adam Smith, to address the social basis of individual well-being and freedom.
 

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Contenido

Development as Freedom
3
1 The Perspective of freedom
13
2 The ends and the Means of Development
35
3 Freedom and the Foundations of Justice
54
4 Poverty as Capability Deprivation
87
5 Markets States and Social Opportunity
111
6 The Importance of Democracy
146
7 Famines and Other Crises
160
8 Womens Agency and Social Change
189
9 Population Food and Freedom
204
10 Culture and Human Rights
227
11 Social Choice and Individual Behavior
249
12 Individual Freedom as a Social Commitment
282
Notes
299
Index
353
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Amartya Sen is the Master of Trinity College Cambridge and the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Science. He has been President of the Indian Economic Association, the American Economic Association, the International Economic Association and the Econometrics Society. He has taught at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and the London School of Economics.

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