As the world’s foremost ‘conscientious economist’, Nobel prize-winner Professor Amartya Sen has every right to feel vindicated. The issues of welfare economics and political justice that he has championed have risen firmly up the international agenda, most pressingly right now in the context of the ongoing negotiations over climate change mitigation. His lifetime’s body of work ranges from developing the theory of ‘social choice’ to his pioneering studies on famine and poverty, and from helping to bring into being the UN Human Development Report (which has just marked 20 years of annual publication) to his more recent focus on definitions of ‘capabilities’, ‘rights’ and ‘identities’.
Global: Can the concept of sustainability be reconciled with the priorities being discussed in the ongoing climate change negotiations?
Professor Amartya Sen: The answer is definitely yes. The climate change negotiations are indeed efforts to guarantee sustainability and are motivated, directly or indirectly, by the demands of sustainable development. This requires global cooperation, including the recognition of the already-rich countries that they have been having a larger share of the global cake of nature than the poor countries which are not yet industrialised, or are getting there only just now. They also require an understanding on the part of the newly-industrialising nations, including China, India, Brazil and others, that they must do their share of climatic reasonableness along with just recognition of their needs and a fair understanding of the necessity of the richer countries to do enormously more than what they are doing now (after polluting the world for a century or more in the past).
It is also important for China, India and Brazil and other relatively dynamic economies to see that if they fill the global atmosphere with pollution, in addition to what has already been done by America and Europe in the past, the problems of not-yet industrialising nations (many of them in Africa) would be made even worse. The need for leadership and responsibility, and for a cooperative understanding, has never been greater.
Your recent work with the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress urged a shift from measuring production towards measuring human wellbeing. At the same time, it notes the huge complexity of measurement in the emergence of new global economics. Are you confident that the Commission’s work will bring about a significant shift in current practices?
The measurement of economic performance and social progress is certainly very complex, and there is no hope of capturing a diversity of concerns at all adequately in one number, which is after all what an index is. The work of the Commission can, however, have some value. It is not because some one measure or one index is suggested for such a complex phenomenon, but because it brings to focus the importance of assessing performance and progress themselves, rather than something which relates to it only indirectly, such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Of course the GDP has its uses, and appropriately measured it can tell us about the nature of activities related to human wellbeing and freedom, though even a properly emended GDP will not in itself reflect social wellbeing or the quality of life of people. The Commission does recommend ways and means of improving the measurement of GDP, for what it is worth. But there is a need to concentrate more directly on wellbeing and quality of life. So the Commission recommends some ways of going about assessing them directly both in terms of indicators of human capability and freedom, and also in terms of evaluations of the happiness that people experience. There is a plurality there already, in addition to including the modified GDP, and we add to this plurality our concern about performance in the future and wellbeing of future generations by taking note of indicators of sustainability.
So we are not recommending any single indicator, but drawing attention to a collection of concerns and their respective measurements, and the most important result from this that we can hope for is stimulation of public discussion on these issues, rather than going only by measures of financial success and of economic production, without proceeding beyond them. Any shift of current practices has to have this inclusive feature, along with encouraging ways and means of informed public discussion on the extraordinarily important subject of assessing progress, rather than being limited by some index that stands for something quite different (like financial opulence or unmodified GDP) which may pretend to represent progress for humanity, but delivers far less.
Do the Commission’s findings imply a further refinement of the Human Development Index, which you helped to develop? In particular do you think it can start to focus more clearly on matters like the distribution of wealth and wellbeing?
You are absolutely right to draw attention to the Human Development Index because that indeed was an earlier attempt to get at the same problem, moved to a great extent by the same concerns that led to the establishment of our Commission. There had been dissatisfaction with the over-reliance on GDP, and this we wanted to change, and our academic efforts were put into the practical realm by a visionary move of Mahbub ul Haq, the great economist from Pakistan (who was a very close friend of mine from our student days together in Cambridge and whose absence – he died in 1998 – I feel very strongly). But the thing to note about the work of the Human Development initiative is not just the index, in the development of which I did indeed have a role as you say, but much more importantly the variety of tables that each Human Development Report presents every year on a number of components and correlates of human wellbeing and freedom that provide a much wider and fuller understanding of the process of social change and progress.
In the Human Development Index (HDI), there is little room for adding anything else like ‘the distribution of wealth and wellbeing’ to which you refer. If you add a fourth dimension to the HDI, which already has three dimensions (life expectancy, school education, and basic income), it will reduce the importance of the existing three, since one number cannot give you more than one overall assessment. I would suggest it would be best to keep the HDI as it is – it is well understood and widely used – and consider other indicators for capturing such issues as the distribution of wealth.
The important thing is to broaden the discussion, not to narrow it.
The Commission’s work relates to a somewhat different motivation from the one that led Mahbub ul Haq in 1989 to initiate the HDI. His primary concern was with poor countries, and there, life expectancy and the other similarly elementary variables have a lot of cutting power. As it happens, the HDI has been used by rich countries in Europe and America as well (for example the fact that America has a relatively moderate life expectancy, remaining behind many countries which are far less rich and spend far less on health care, has turned out to add a dimension to social criticism within the United States). But the new Commission wanted to concentrate particularly on the articulation of its indicators for the conditions of richer countries, for example France and others in Europe, and America. There are many indicators that have received attention here which become important when your basic achievement of HDI is high and you need further discrimination with more complex goals of economic and social progress.
What role can democratic governance and the expansion of political freedoms and human rights play in a country’s development?
Democratic governance is extremely important for keeping the government attentive and careful on matters of significance for citizens and, with a broad global vision, of importance for noncitizens as well. Public reasoning is central to the pursuit of justice (as I have discussed in some detail in my last book, The Idea of Justice).
The pursuit of human rights fits into this. Human rights are not legal rights, even though they can motivate new legislation and help in their enforcement. Human rights gather their force from reasoned agreement on certain freedoms being central to our lives and through the understanding that these individual freedoms demand some kind of a social commitment and help from others. This is part of the democratic engagement when we understood democracy to be, as John Stuart Mill has made us understand better, ‘governance by discussion’.
