Development as freedom - Amartya Sen

1999 paperback with 366 pages in very good condition. R65 postage in SA.

Amartya Sen was the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics.  His book argues that economic development entails a set of linked freedoms

• political freedoms and transparency in relations between people
• freedom of opportunity, including freedom to access credit; and
• economic protection from abject poverty, including through income supplements and unemployment relief.

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.

His work has been criticized by those who claim that capitalism—and especially neo-liberal capitalism—reinforces unfreedoms