Development As Freedom

“Development can be seen, it is argued here, as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy.”

Sen summarizes his main thesis in this sentence that appears near the beginning of the book. He believes that development should be seen as increasing freedoms rather than merely a measure of wealth. The qualifier “real” prefigures his insistence on looking at practical consequences of policies and not merely treating freedom at a theoretical level, like some libertarians.

“Despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to a vast number—perhaps the majority—of people.”

Sen adopts a dry, analytical tone for most of the book so as to offer a dispassionate scholarly argument. Sentences such as this one, however, make it clear that he has a passion for justice. Even if Sen chooses not to use emotional language, the contrast between increasing opulence for some people and the denial of basic freedoms for others highlights his sense of justice.

“The experience was devastating for me. It made me reflect, later on, on the terrible burden of narrowly defined identities, including those firmly based on communities and groups (I shall have occasion to discuss that issue in this book). But more immediately, it also pointed to the remarkable fact that economic unfreedom, in the form of extreme poverty, can make a person helpless prey in the violation of other kinds of freedom.”

Sen allows himself one personal anecdote in his introduction (which was not part of the original series of lectures to the World Bank). He describes the death of the laborer Kader Mia on the doorstep of his childhood home, and he uses this example to justify the urgency of thinking about development. He also begins to explore how different freedoms are interconnected. In this example, social and religious prejudice contributed to economic