(See
also interview with Sen)
LAST year, shortly after he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for economics, Amartya Sen returned to his native India
for a visit. One December morning, just outside Calcutta, at Santiniketan,
the school where Sen had studied as a child, he was made to climb
a dais and sit on a makeshift throne. News reports say that he
looked tired, but he found the energy to address the assembled
crowd. He reminisced about his childhood, and spoke of the influence
exerted on his work by the school's founder -- Rabindranath Tagore,
who in 1913 became the first Asian Nobel laureate when he won
the prize for literature, and who, as Sen's teacher, named him
Amartya (Bengali for "immortal").
Tagore is the most famous in a distinguished school of Bengali
thinkers who have left a lasting mark on the Indian social and
intellectual landscape. Known as the Bengali bhadralok (or "gentlemen"),
they include the filmmaker Satyajit Ray, the freedom fighter Aurobindo
Ghose, the author Nirad Chaudhuri, and now, as the standard-bearer
in the dying days of that tradition, Sen himself. From the nineteenth
century onward bhadralok have been India's version of public intellectuals
-- engaged with social life, battling against such evils as untouchability
and suttee (the practice of widow-burning). They have been adamantly
outward-looking, eager to absorb the best of competing traditions
and methods. Tagore was proud to be an Indian, and he was in many
ways a traditionalist; but he was not, as Sen wrote in an article
for The New York Review of Books, "a prisoner of the past."
His method was akin to what the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss
called "bricolage" -- the drawing together of diverse
traditions and ideas into a new reality. Sen called attention
to this method that day at Santiniketan. Paraphrasing his teacher,
he reminded the assembled crowd that in Tagore's view, "all
that is best in the world is also ours."
...
In Development as Freedom, Sen, who discusses the virtues
of the Buddhist "middle path," applies this view to
the topic of economic development. It is a needed, if daunting,
endeavor. Since development's emergence as the great hope of the
postwar era, the debate over Third World poverty has been polarized.
On one side of the divide are the forces of the development establishment
-- Western policymakers, and economists at the World Bank and
other aid institutions. For them, development is a form of tough
love. "Rapid economic progress is impossible without painful
adjustments," proclaims a 1951 United Nations document that
was recently cited by the anthropologist Arturo Escobar as an
example of development's cold economic calculus.
Ancient
philosophies have to be scrapped; old social institutions have
to disintegrate; bonds of caste, creed and race
have to burst; and large numbers of people who cannot keep up
with progress have to have their expectations
of a comfortable life frustrated.
Pitted against this view of development -- which Sen calls the
"fierce" or "hard knocks" approach -- has
been an equally uncompromising critique voiced by grassroots activists
and nongovernmental organizations around the world. We see it
in the Chipko movement, in the Himalayan foothills, where peasants
symbolically hugged trees to stop the logging that was destroying
their traditional forest-based economy; in the Zapatista movement,
in the impoverished Chiapas region of Mexico, whose enigmatic
leader, Subcomandante Marcos, railed against globalization as
a "hemorrhage that fattens the powerful"; and in the
British-based Jubilee 2000 Coalition, which is calling for a cancellation
of the stifling debt ($400 per person in the Third World) imposed
in the name of development. In these movements there is a growing
sense not only that the UN document has proved all too prescient
but also that much of the "painful adjustment" has been
exacted without the promised recompense: the income of the wealthiest
quintile today is seventy-four times that of the poorest quintile;
more than 850 million adults remain illiterate, and 840 million
people are malnourished. Clearly, development's critics say, the
orthodoxy needs a dose of the same harsh medicine it has so long
prescribed; the single-minded focus on GNP and free markets must
be replaced by a similarly unyielding concern for local cultures,
ecology, and social issues such as health and education. Recent
literature speaks of a "rejection of the entire paradigm"
of growth; what's needed, according to one anthology, which brings
together many leading critics of development, is a "post-development"
era.
INTO this ideological minefield steps Sen, whose book exudes a
refreshing reasonableness and a willingness to acknowledge rival
points of view. Like development's critics, Sen, the master of
Trinity College, Cambridge, decries the narrowness of the standard
model. With the inexplicable omission of ecology, Sen takes up
all the familiar battle cries: democracy, culture, human rights,
gender rights, education, health care -- these matter to people,
he says, and cannot be sacrificed at the altar of what Gandhi
called "the monster god of materialism." Though sometimes
portrayed as such, Sen is not a leftist radical. He includes material
wealth on his list of things that matter, and acknowledges that
"it is hard to think that any process of substantial development
can do without very extensive use of markets." Markets, in
Sen's view, need to be supplemented with social safety nets; economic
growth must co-exist with local cultures, which cannot be swept
away like "old and discarded machinery." For Sen, the
"overarching objective" of development is to maximize
what he calls people's "capabilities" -- their freedom
to "lead the kind of lives they value, and have reason to
value." He is concerned with the entire gamut of human experience.
In his own characterization, the book represents a return to the
"integrated approach" of economics practiced by Adam
Smith.
In other words, Development as Freedom, which is billed
as "a new general theory of development economics,"
is not so much a repudiation of the standard theory as an attempt
to synthesize it with a competing one. More than any other of
Sen's books, this one is steeped in the ethos of bricolage. It's
not just a matter of integrating competing approaches to development.
At a time when intellectual labor is increasingly specialized,
Sen -- who contemplated a career as a Sanskrit scholar before
settling on economics -- is a polymath, discussing mortality rates
among African-Americans one moment, Confucius' views on liberty
the next. Straddling the cultural gap that so often pits Western
"development experts" against Third World "development
subjects," Sen quotes as readily from John Stuart Mill as
from the ancient Indian Upanishads.
This approach, more than the specific conclusions it supports,
is the most significant aspect of Development as Freedom. Indeed,
many of Sen's conclusions have a certain repetitiveness to them.
Sen says that "Western discussion of non-Western societies
is often too respectful of authority," and suggests that
"development cannot really be so centered only on those in
power." That has long been the demand of development's critics,
who have called for more grassroots participation. Sen says that
the best way to lower fertility is not with coercive birth-control
programs (such as the one-child policy that the Chinese for a
time rigidly enforced) but by empowering women through education
and employment to make their own choices. Much the same point
was made three decades ago by Ivan Illich, whose characterization
of development as "planned poverty" was one of the earliest
and most influential attacks on the establishment. More generally,
Sen's exhortation to look beyond just material wealth expresses
a fairly conventional discontent with modernity.
Sen's critics have often charged him with simply repeating the
obvious -- an accusation that was made most forcefully against
his Poverty and Famines (1981), one of the two titles
cited by the Nobel committee. In that book -- whose main points
are summarized in Development as Freedom -- Sen concluded
that famines occur not necessarily because of declines in food
production but when some social or political upheaval (mass unemployment,
say, or government mismanagement) leaves parts of the population
too poor to feed themselves. (It was in that book, too, that Sen
made his famous assertion that no famine has ever occurred in
a democracy -- a remarkable fact, which he takes as testimony
to the importance of political freedoms in development.)
The book is credited with changing the way governments handle
food distribution -- for example, by making them focus on public-works
programs to boost incomes rather than on direct food replacement.
Yet for all the book's importance, Sen's point was quite simple:
people's social and economic circumstances dictate what goes onto
their plates. It was so simple, in fact, that it led Indian critics
to ridicule Sen for arguing something that any "street urchin"
or "grandmother" knows. (They were echoed by The Wall
Street Journal in a blistering attack on Sen soon after he won
the Nobel. "Where Mr. Sen's insights have been accurate,"
opined the newspaper, citing his work on famines, "they have
been unremarkable.")
The charge is not so much wrong as misdirected. Poverty and Famines
was important precisely because Sen was not a street urchin or
a grandmother but a highly respected economist, one who had established
his credentials with mathematically sophisticated work on poverty
measurement and (in Collective Choice and Social Welfare, the
other title cited by the Nobel committee) social-choice theory.
Sen may have been repeating a homily, but the book's effect was
akin to that of a clinical drug trial that proves the efficacy
of a home remedy. Sen backed up his argument with mathematical
models and detailed micro-economic data on regional and occupation-specific
income patterns. (He showed, for instance, that during the 1974
famine in Bangladesh, which coincided with a peak year of food
availability, those most likely to starve were rural laborers
who had lost their jobs -- and thus their wages.) In other words,
what mattered was not so much what Sen said as how he said it
-- a point Sen himself seemed to make when, in response to his
critics, he denied "claiming any original insight" and
told an interviewer that "the purpose of the book was to
analyze in a systematic way how that deprivation of purchasing
power comes about."
THE significance of this latest book -- in many ways a grand summation
of Sen's work over the past decade -- is much the same. Sen repeatedly
takes issues that are dear to development's critics and articulates
them in terms that will be reassuringly familiar to the establishment.
He defends women's rights (in part) on the grounds that they can
contribute to economic growth; he argues for political liberties
not only for their "intrinsic" value but also for their
"instrumental" role in promoting economic stability.
(The recent Asian financial crisis, Sen points out, was largely
the result of a lack of political openness and accountability.)
Ultimately, this is the significance of Sen's synthesis: in pairing
the orthodoxy with its critique, in using the language of the
establishment to challenge the establishment, Sen has stretched
the boundaries of development far wider than development's critics
have themselves managed to do. Like Tagore, Sen is a reformer
of the most effective kind -- one from within. His method recalls
a piece of advice about conventional economics that he received
early in his career, which he recently described this way: "We
must learn it, but not use it much."
The wisdom of this advice is today evident. Sen -- along with
others, notably the late Pakistani economist Mahbub Ul-Haq --
has been at the forefront of what can only be described as a paradigm
shift. Today the vogue is something called "human" or
"social" development -- an approach that takes account,
precisely, of the social and cultural dimensions to development.
The cynosure of this new approach is the United Nations' annual
Human Development Report (pioneered by Haq, with input from Sen),
which assesses countries not just by their GNP but also by their
achievements in areas such as health, education, gender equality,
and political liberty. (The report includes an index, which is
today a widely cited alternative to the World Bank's more narrowly
conceived ranking of economic development; the United States,
first in terms of GNP, falls to third place on this index.) The
World Bank, long the embodiment of insensitive economic policy,
is a changed organization, producing a paper titled "Beyond
the Washington Consensus," among others, and (in the resolutely
technocratic language of its president, James Wolfensohn) "mainstreaming
social issues -- including support for the important role of indigenous
culture."
Much of this change, it is true, has yet to trickle down to the
ground -- to the dams and roads and power projects around the
world, where the hard-knocks paradigm often persists. In addition,
as much as Development as Freedom is likely to be seen as something
of a manual for this new development, there remain important differences
between Sen's philosophical breadth and the narrow -- some would
say practical -- approach of organizations like the United Nations
and the World Bank. Sen, who praises the new attitude as "momentous"
and "enriching," nonetheless recently characterized
the Human Development Index as "crude"; the Bank, despite
its embrace of social concerns, often values them less for their
intrinsic than for their instrumental importance. (Take the Bank's
recent statement, published after the Asian economic crisis, that
"without attention to the social underpinnings of development,
it is difficult for economic growth and development to succeed."
In Sen's view, the statement would be not so much wrong as incomplete.)
Yet for all the differences, and for all that remains incomplete,
development is today a changed game. The battle that continues
to be waged against what Majid Rahnema, an Iranian development
expert, calls "the HIV type of invasion" perpetuated
on cultures and societies is somewhat anachronistic. Change has
come from unexpected quarters, and in an unexpected fashion. And
Development as Freedom, which showcases the change, is
also a tactical manual for how it was achieved.
[Editor's Note:
This is a book review of Amaryta Sen's book, Development as Freedom,
published by Knopf. This review appeared in The Atlantic
in 1999.]