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Amartya Sen on economic inequality: the need for an explicit critique of opulence
Abstract
Amartya Sen has sought to maintain a dialogue with mainstream economics on inequality-a continuing theme in his writing. This paper suggests this dialogue has involved costs. The first and second sections outline where Sen has located himself in the epistemological range that defines acceptable knowledge in the general economics discourse and takes Sen's epistemological principles into the analysis of economic inequality. The third section links Sen's work on causes of famine with his work on inequality and shows how this has given a particular slant to the development of capabilities theory with a focus on the lower end of the inter-personal inequality distribution. The fourth section focuses on the need also for development ethics at the top end of the inequality distribution and economic opulence. The conclusion makes the case for further critical reflection on the top end of the inter-personal distribution and opulence as vital elements in the capabilities approach to improving the human condition, even if this means a greater distancing from mainstream economics than Amartya Sen has found acceptable in the past. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
... Jednakże naszym zdaniem największym niepowodzeniem współczesnych badań, a zwłaszcza tych publikowanych w prestiżowych wydawnictwach naukowych i przez to zyskujących uznanie szerokiego gremium ekonomistów, jest zbyt restrykcyjne trzymanie się neoliberalnej ideologii, którą można traktować jako filozoficzną podstawę ekonomii głównego nurtu. Warto podkreślić, że na takiej płaszczyźnie poznawczej współczesnej ekonomii trudno jest podważyć prawdziwość fundamentalnego założenia ekonomistów liberalnych i neoliberalnych, zgodnie z którym "nic nie można powiedzieć w sposób naukowy i nic nie można powiedzieć w ogóle na temat nierówności (dochodowych), jeśli wynikają one z działania wolnego rynku" [Cameron, 2000[Cameron, , s. 1034. ...
... Wniosek ten wynika z licznych prac systematyzujących badania nad nierównościami. Zob.[Cameron, 2000;Jenkin, 2011].9 Dyskusję wyników badań empirycznych dotyczących nierówności i wzrostu gospodarczego można znaleźć w m.in.:[Woźniak, ...
... M.in.[Cameron, 2000], także[Woźniak, 2005b]. 11 Interesującą dyskusję swego rodzaju awersji wielu ekonomistów do wyciągania wniosków wykraczających poza neoliberalne i matematyczno-formalistyczne ramy analizy ze szkodą dla poznania istoty nierówności i ich konotacji z realnymi procesami ekonomicznymi zaprezentował[Jenkin, 2011]. ...
Artykuł powstał w oparciu o prezentację przedstawioną w dniu 13 grudnia 2012 roku na spotkaniu zorganizowanym przez Biuro Promocji Nauki PAN (PolSCA) w Brukseli w ramach cyklu spotkań z ekspertami Komisji Europejskiej. Artykuł składa się z dwóch części.
W części pierwszej podjęto próbę ustosunkowania się do pytania o przyczyny wzrostu nierówności społecznych w świecie. Zaprezentowano również poziom i zmiany nierówności w krajach na różnym poziomie rozwoju ekonomicznego.
Część druga artykułu zawiera prezentacje założeń zintegrowanego podejścia do badań nie-równości, a także osiągnięcia badawcze zespołu o charakterze teoretycznym i empirycznym.
... Sen's earlier work in particular has been criticised as too focused on individual agency and insufficiently attentive to social structures (Robeyns 2005); ignoring human interdependency, the problems of the public sphere and the exploitative nature of capitalism (Dean 2009); and lacking a sufficiently developed theory of power, dominance and subordination (Hill 2003). Hartley Dean (2009) describes capitalism as " the elephant in the room " in the literature on capabilities (see also Cameron 2000; Carpenter 2009; Holland 2008; Navarro 2000; Sandbrook 2000). In recent years Sen has developed a more comprehensive theory of social justice that incorporates capability and human rights as the central criteria for the appraisal of justice, and public deliberation as the central mechanism for justice-related judgements. ...
The capability approach has been developed by Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum and others as a human-centred normative framework for the evaluation of individual and group well-being, quality of life and social justice. Sen and Nussbaum's ideas have influenced global, national and local policy and have been further developed in a number of academic disciplines, but so far have remained largely unnoticed in sociology. This article examines recent capability-informed theories and empirical applications in the sociology of human rights and other academic fields adjacent to sociology, focussing on examples of social policy studies in the fields of welfare, the labour market, health and disability, and education. The article outlines several potential areas in which capability-informed frameworks are relevant for critical social theory, public sociology and global sociology.
... Warto podkreślić, że, jak wyjaśnia Jenkins (2011), dominująca większość badań nad nierównościami, zwłaszcza publikowanych w prestiżowych wydawnictwach i przez to zyskujących uznanie szerszego gremium ekonomistów, ściśle nawiązuje do paradygmatów głównego nurtu ekonomii, a zatem liberalnych i neoliberalnych kierunków badań ekonomicznych. Taka płaszczyzna analizy nierówności we współczesnej ekonomii nie podważa zatem prawdziwości fundamentalnego założenia ekonomistów liberalnych i neoliberalnych, zgodnie z którym "nic nie można powiedzieć w sposób naukowy i nic nie można powiedzieć w ogóle na temat nierówności (dochodowych), jeśli wynikają one z działania wolnego rynku" (Cameron, 2000(Cameron, , s. 1034. ...
Purpose: The aim of the paper is to present the theoretical and empirical arguments for the causality between growing income inequality and increasing public debt within the capitalist economies.Methodology: The paper consists of two major parts. The first part discusses the long-term changes in value of public debt and income inequality within countries, and presents the theoretical arguments for the causality between these two categories. The second part of the paper is an attempt to investigate the impact of inequality in the upper and lower parts of income distribution on an increase of public debt in a sample of OECD-countries in 1995–2010. The statistical analysis is based on calculations of: (a) correlation coefficients between income inequality and public debt; and (b) parameters of regression equations of the level and rate of growth of public debt in a sample of countries. The parameters of regression equations were calculated with ordinary least squares and fixed effects methods.Findings: The results of the calculation illustrate that the growth of income inequality in the upper and lower parts of distribution stimulated an increase in value of public debt in the OECD countries between 1995 and 2010.
... Sen's system is an influential tool in the world, not a genre of chess puzzle. In the absence of strong attention to people's interdependencies in emotions and identity and to similar matters, the capability approach's language of increased options for attainment by individuals can lend itself to neo-liberal and consumerist uses (John Cameron 2000). ...
... In examining Ledra Palace's multiple investments, I want to offer a 'critique of the behaviour of the opulent . . . used to advocate a more revolutionary global redistribution of resources' (Cameron 2000(Cameron : 1043. In parallel, I also point to possible critiques of spatialized official narratives of heritage making and the 'spatial restructuring of capitalism' (Landzelius 2003: 215). ...
This article investigates the processes through which a site, thought to encapsulate the history of the Cyprus conflict, has been militarized in multiple ways. Defined as a site of negotiation since its opening, Ledra Palace Hotel has instead been a place where conflict has diachronically persisted. The masculinization and militarization of this environment is addressed within a gender-focused analysis that emphasizes the normalization of violence. This approach reveals the political potential of acknowledging conflict dynamics hitherto obfuscated by hegemonic conceptualizations of ‘the conflict’.
... The danger that underlies Sen's argument is that it can be interpreted as the position that one can be free and happy without control of economic resources, an assumption that supports the continued existence of socioeconomic inequality. He does not focus on the dialectic of opulence and poverty (Cameron, 2000 (Sen, 1999, p. 6, data based on UNHDR, 2007. This example creates the impression that life expectancy is an independent variable, but Sen did not mention that in China and Sri Lanka income distribution (Gini: 46.9 and 40.2) is more equal than in the other countries mentioned previously (Gini South Africa: 57.8, Namibia: 74.3, Brazil: 57) and that hence socioeconomic issues might have influence on noneconomic issues like life expectancy and, therefore, play a central role (data from UNHDR, 2007). ...
This article is subject to the following research question: Is the role of income inequality in com- parison to other factors an element that influences the digital divide? Eleven variables providing data on 126 countries are analyzed using multivariate regression to identify which of them influ- ence Internet usage to what extent. The used data on 126 countries refer to the year 2005. The results show that income inequality measured by the Gini coefficient is an important influencing factor besides per capita income, the degree of urbanization, and the level of democratization. The results question reductionistic digital divide approaches that analyze information inequality via focusing on a single variable (such as technology or markets). Access to ICTs is shaped by the interaction of socioeconomic, political, cultural, social, and technological factors. These results cast doubt on technological determinism, economic reductionism, and linear trend projec- tion in the digital divide debate. Digital divide causes are complex.
... Sen's system is an influential tool in the world, not a genre of chess puzzle. In the absence of strong attention to people's interdependencies in emotions and identity and to similar matters, the capability approach's language of increased options for attainment by individuals can lend itself to neo-liberal and consumerist uses (John Cameron 2000). ...
This essay is a comment on “Sen on Freedom and Gender Justice,” by Mozaffar Qizilbash, which appeared in Feminist Economics Volume 11, Number 3, November 2005. Building on the 2003 double special issue of Feminist Economics entitled “Amartya Sen's Work and Ideas,” this paper responds to the review essay by Mozaffar Qizilbash. It identifies and illustrates various possible evaluations of a theoretical system, including that it has acknowledged strengths, unrecognized strengths, remediable gaps or failings, or structural faults. The paper then looks at Sen's system as a theoretical basis for “human development”- in particular in relation to personhood, emotions, and psychological interdependence - and argues that it points in directions required for economic and social analysis, including towards theories of care, but is not itself a sufficient treatment. The paper suggests deepening Sen's system by connecting to other important languages of analysis concerning the structuring of attitudes, emotions, felt well-being, public reasoning, and politics.
... The structural, economic and developmental shifts in a family's lifecycle are concurrently reflected in the community's response to HIV. When 290 million Africans survive on less than $1 daily (Cameron, 2000), family survival is interdependent with their neighbours' welfare. In Kyalitsha, South Africa, if families fail to share food when available, the family starves during the next economic downturn; survival in a society with a very high rate of lifetime unemployment depends on strong community support networks (Van Derberg & Smit, 1990). ...
Given the historical emergence of the AIDS epidemic first among gay men in the developed world, HIV interventions have primarily focused on individuals rather than families. Typically not part of traditional family structures, HIV-positive gay men in Europe and the US lived primarily in societies providing essential infrastructure for survival needs that highly value individual justice and freedom. Interventions were thus designed to focus on at-risk individuals with programmes that were age and gender segregated. As the epidemic has unfolded, the early focus on individuals has become inadequate: families live with HIV, not just individuals. Families' structure, economy, migration patterns, and developmental life cycles are affected by HIV, and these changes radiate throughout the community creating parallel stresses. Family-based, intergenerational models of detection, prevention and treatment services offer enhanced opportunities for effective interventions and suggest very different intervention settings and strategies. However, these models also require addressing the family's basic needs for survival and security in order to be successfully implemented and sustained over time. As HIV was an opportunity for marginalized persons in the developed world to 'turn their life around', the strengths of families in the developing world may be mobilized to contribute to the community's long-term health, survival and security needs.
The objective of the article is to examine the role of RAKUB for the
empowerment of women entrepreneurship in Rajshahi, Bangladesh. It serves
to empower its women participants. This study is defining empowerment in
terms of control over economic, household, and physical decision-making
power. It also examines the influence of socio-economic factors on women
empowerment. The empirical model chosen for this study is a Binary Logistic
Regression Model. To estimate the model, data has been collected from 65
women entrepreneurs who receive loan from RAKUB. The model has been
estimated applying the STATA. Both results show that improved access to
income generating activities increases women’s power in the household. This
study highlights why women are lagging behind men in ethical terms. Ethics
or a moral value permits an equal treatment among all people. So the
degradation of women’s status in the household is beyond the ethical norms.
Authors conclude that more and special efforts should be made by
government for women’s empowerment in real term. They concludes that
bank credits should be given to women in easy terms so that they can reduce
their dependency on men through involvement in income generating activities
and spend freely their income and thereby play a greater role in household
decision-making and finally increase their awareness about social issues.
The new institutionalism in Western economic thought was developed within the neoclassical economic framework, although it incorporated the modification of a number of neoclassical assumptions, including those regarding information, transaction costs, and, most importantly, rationality. Douglass North argued for the notion of bounded rationality first proposed by Herbert Simon who had noted that a critical assumption of utility theory in neoclassical economics was based on the improbable— that a rational individual is capable of large, elaborate, and, often, instantaneous calculations before making decisions. This assumption is needed to justify a further assumption that individuals, asconsumers or as producers, behave in a manner so as to maximize satisfaction and profits, respectively. Simon argued instead that, in reality, individuals operate within a “zone” of rationality rather than full rationality because of constraints. Consequently, both the power and the scope of rationality are bounded. As a result, rational individuals do not aim to maximizes atisfaction, but to find a limited-scope-zone of operation within which the individual turns over part of the required immense calculation to habits, rules, social norms, and customs, namely, institutions. Thus the individual aims to “satisfy” rather than to maximize utility. The assumption of bounded rationality allows individual behavior to be influenced by cultural values, norms and rules of behavior.1
Over several decades, scientific progress has expanded our ability to improve human health, and many regions of the world have achieved significant health gains. Yet extreme deprivation in health is still widespread. Resolving this predicament of major health improvement in the midst of deprivation is one of the greatest global challenges of the new millennium. In the midst of such rapid global change and persistent health disparities, we need to revisit and underscore the moral and philosophical foundations for health improvement activities - to give them more forceful grounding and solidity. In this Article, I briefly survey some traditional philosophies of justice and health care. I then offer an alternative view of justice and health that builds on and integrates Amartya Sen's capability approach and Aristotle's political theory, and discuss the implications of this approach for public policy and for global health institutions to improve health acoss the globe.
Introduction
The Capability Approach (CA) has been initiated and guided by Amartya Sen, since the 1980s, as an alternative to neoclassical welfare economics. The approach emerged gradually out of his rich critique of mainstream economics, in particular his dissatisfaction with conventional notions of rationality (e.g. in Rational Fools, Sen, 1977), efficiency (e.g. in Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal, Sen, 1970), utility (e.g. in On Ethics and Economics, Sen, 1987), and wellbeing (e.g. in Development as Freedom, Sen, 1999). Arising out of this critique, the CA can be characterized as an alternative approach to the analysis of poverty and wellbeing, one that has tried to find a middle ground between purely subjective theories of wellbeing on the one hand, such as the preference-based neoclassical paradigm, and, on the other hand, purely objective theories focusing on goods or, a bit less objective, needs. In the CA, it is people’s capabilities to function that is the central focus of wellbeing analysis, in other words, what people are able to be or do, rather than what they have in terms of income or commodities.
It is argued that the radical implications of the capabilities approach have been widely overlooked, primarily because of a tendency for the approach to be combined with inadequate theories of society, particularly regarding the external conditions enabling or limiting capabilities. While the approach is accepted in principle, by turning to the theory of contributive justice, which focuses on what people are allowed or expected to contribute in terms of work, paid or unpaid, we can see that job shortages and unequal divisions of labour are a major cause of capability inequalities and deficiencies. In so doing the theory helps us to appreciate the radical implications of the capabilities approach.
The aim of this article is to examine the capability approach of Amartya Sen and mainstream economic theory in terms of their epistemological, methodological and philosophical/cultural aspects. The reason for undertaking this analysis is the belief that Sen’s capability approach, contrary to some economists’ claim, is uncongenial to mainstream economic views on epistemology and methodology (not on ontologically). However, while some social scientists regard that Sen, on the whole, is a mainstream economist, his own approach strongly criticizes both the theory and practice of mainstream economics.
Sen's capability approach (SCA) has supported valuable work on Human Development (HD). It has brought attention to a much wider range of information on people's freedoms and well-being than in most earlier economic planning; but it also has troubling features and requires modification and enrichment. This paper first identifies the approach's components, the contributions of the HD Reports, and the doubts about whether SCA has a sufficient conception of human personhood to sustain work on HD beyond finding indices superior to GDP. It then examines SCA's central concepts. The concepts of capability and functioning lead us to consider both possibilities and outcomes, but their definition and use has been confusing. Besides Sen's opportunity concept of 'capability' we must distinguish skills and potentials; and distinguish levels and types of 'functioning'. To understand both consumerism and what can motivate and drive more humanly fulfilling development, we must elaborate different aspects and sources of 'well-being' and the content and requirements of 'agency', more than in Sen's chosen strategy. SCA's priority category of opportunity-capability must be read as a measure of personal advantage relevant in many public policy situations, rather than as a theory of well-being; and its concept of freedom must be partnered by concepts of reason and need.
Following a brief review of the conception of freedom as employed in economic discourse, this paper focuses on the evolution of the concept of freedom in the work of Amartya Sen. It traces the development of Sen's thought from the capability analysis of the late 1970s to his more recent separation of freedom into its opportunity and process aspects. While broadly appreciative of Sen's development of the concept of positive freedom, the paper identifies some difficulties arising from his definition of capability as a set of options as well as from his separation of the opportunity and process aspects of freedom. Aspects of the relationship between Sen's conception of freedom and that of Marx are discussed briefly in the context of Sen's recent discussion of the market as a source of freedom. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.
This article examines the conceptual basis and analytical deployment of Sen's entitlement analysis in ethics and economics, focusing on the rules of entitlement. Sen specifies the rules of entitlement in different ways in his work, ignores how legal rules work in practice and downplays the way in which socially enforced moral rules constrain and enable entitlement. The appropriateness of Sen's approach for the analysis of hunger and famine and for the philosophical arguments which Sen makes are assessed, and an alternative view of the rules of entitlement is suggested. This draws in particular on the literature on the moral economy of provisioning.
Nolan's [1993] present ‘critique’, like his two previous ‘critiques’ of my work [Nolan, 1991; Nolan and Sender, 1992], draw liberally on misconstruction of what I have said. The distortions cover a vast field, including the concept of entitlements, the nature of famines in general (and of the Chinese famine in particular), the roles of food production, transport, and wars, and so on. In my reply I have tried to identify the misrepresentations in some detail. What Nolan calls ‘Sen's approach’ is his own creation, and the criticisms that Nolan makes of that approach should be addressed by its author, to wit, Nolan. I have tried to spell out the respects in which the analyses I have presented on famines differ from the views, conjectures and slogans cheerfully attributed to me by Peter Nolan.
A.K. Sen has dominated discussion of famines for the past decade. Hardly anyone analyses famine without reference to his ‘entitlement theory’. The rise to dominance of Sen's approach towards famine is an important example of the way in which ‘knowledge’ and language gain ascendancy in an area of social thought. This article analyses why this has happened. It evaluates the usefulness of Sen's contribution to the construction of policies to prevent famine. It summarises the major features of Sen's approach; presents some general problems with it, then looks in detail at the demand side, the supply side, and the marketing system. It concludes by arguing that the correct approach towards avoiding famine is to consider more carefully then Sen does the wide range of possible causes, among which food output, transport inadequacy and warfare play much more important roles than one is led to believe from Sen's analysis.
'Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.' In The Theory of the Leisure Class Thorstein Veblen sets out 'to discuss the place and value of the leisure class as an economic factor in modern life'. In so doing he produced a landmark study of affluent American society that exposes, with brilliant ruthlessness, the habits of production and waste that link invidious business tactics and barbaric social behaviour. Veblen's analysis of the evolutionary process sees greed as the overriding motive in the modern economy; with an impartial gaze he examines the human cost paid when social institutions exploit the consumption of unessential goods for the sake of personal profit. Fashion, beauty, animals, sports, the home, the clergy, scholars - all are assessed for their true usefulness and found wanting. The targets of Veblen's coruscating satire are as evident today as they were a century ago, and his book still has the power to shock and enlighten. Veblen's uncompromising arguments and the influential literary force of his writing are assessed in Martha Banta's Introduction.
Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0198281935/toc.html
Commodities and Capabilities presents a set of inter-related theses concerning the foundations of welfare economics, and in particular about the assessment of personal well-being and advantage. The argument presented focuses on the capability to function, i.e. what a person can do or can be, questioning in the process the more standard emphasis on opulence or on utility. In fact, a person's motivation behind choice is treated here as a parametric variable which may or may not coincide with the pursuit of self-interest. Given the large number of practical problems arising from the roles and limitations of different concepts of interest and the judgement of advantage and well-being, this scholarly investigation is both of theoretical interest and practical import.
This book, which was first published in 1973, presents a systematic treatment of the conceptual framework as well as the practical problems of the measurement of economic inequality. Alternative approaches are evaluated in terms of their philosophical assumptions, economic content, and statistical requirements. In a new annexe added in 1997, which is as large as the original book, Amartya Sen, jointly with James Foster, critically surveys the literature that followed the publication of the first edition of the book, and evaluates the main analytical issues in the appraisal of economic inequality and poverty. The technical and non‐technical sections of the book are not presented separately, but it is possible to skip or skim through the formal sections and go directly from the intuitive presentation of the axioms to the intuitive explanation of the results.