8.2 /10 1 Votes
Language English Originally published 1999 | 4.1/5 Goodreads Publication date 1999 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Development as Freedom is a 1999 book by economist Amartya Sen, which focuses on international development.
Background
Amartya Sen was the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. His book argues that economic development entails a set of linked freedoms:
A state of poverty will generally be characterised by lack of at least one freedom (Sen uses the term unfreedom for lack of freedom), including a de facto lack of political rights and choice, vulnerability to coercive relations, and exclusion from economic choices and protections. From this, Sen concludes that real development cannot be reduced to simply increasing basic incomes, nor to rising average per capita incomes. Rather, it requires a package of overlapping mechanisms that progressively enable the exercise of a growing range of freedoms.
Sen views free markets as an essential method of achieving freedom. His work has been criticized by those who claim that capitalism—and especially neo-liberal capitalism—reinforce unfreedoms.