Adding links,adding persons,and adding structures: Using Sen's frameworks

Abstract

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.     

Rawls's influence and counter-influence on Sen: Post-welfarism and impartiality

Abstract

This article aims to clarify Sen's paradoxical relationship to Rawls's work in the face of some misconceptions. It is argued, first, that the dialogue between the authors did not start with Sen's 1980 article “Equality of What?”: Rather, this article represents the beginning of a transformation in Sen's position towards Rawls. Second, Sen's approach to justice is not a mere extension of Rawls's theory of justice as fairness: The departure relies less on a different metric of justice than on a divergent conception of impartiality, one which undermines the foundation of Rawls's theory of justice.     

GLOBALIZATION AND WOMEN'S PAID WORK: EXPANDING FREEDOM?

In Development as Freedom , Amartya Sen takes expanding freedom to be the primary end and the principal means of development. I discuss his emphasis on women's agency as central to development theory and practice and the strategies he advocates for enhancing it. Recent work in feminist economics and postcolonial studies tests Sen's complex account of freedom. Further levels of complexity need to be added when we examine how global forces of power interact with local systems of oppression in ways that often limit women's freedom. This argument rests on an analysis of how globalization affects a domain of freedom that is a central concern for Sen, that of increasing women's freedom to work outside the home as a way of strengthening their agency. Attending to elements missing in Sen's account will enhance freedom in women's lives.     

Starvation and Social Class: Amartya Sen on Markets and Famines

In his recent work, Amartya Sen assesses markets positively because they contribute to freedom. His work on famines, however, harbours a critical stance toward markets. In this paper, I compare Sen's ‘two views’ of markets and argue that his positive assessment is untenable. Markets can undermine freedom and, to show this, I examine the effects of market-dependence in times of famine; I extend the purview of Sen's analysis to include the manner in which subsistence producers who were once relatively autonomous from markets for their survival become dependent on markets. In conclusion, I examine the normative aspects of Sen's work on famines.     

DEVELOPMENT AS FREEDOM v - v AND AS WHAT ELSE?

To what extent can Amartya Sen's ideas on freedom, especially his conceptualization of development as freedom, enrich feminist economics? Sen's notion of freedom (as the capability to achieve valued ends) has many attractions and provides important opportunities to analyze gender inequalities. At the same time, Sen's recent emphasis on freedom as the dominant value in judging individual well-being and societal development also contains risks, not least for feminist analysis. We characterize the risks as an underelaboration and overextension of the concept of freedom. Drawing on Sen's earlier work and various feminist theorists, we suggest instead a more emphatically pluralist characterization of capability, well-being, and value, highlighting the distinct and substantive aspects of freedom, as well as of values besides freedom, in the lives of women and men. We illustrate this with reference to women's economic role as caregivers.     

Reassessing welfare reform data: a response to cherry

Abstract

This is a response to Robert Cherry's comment on the article, “Welfare as We [Don't] Know It: A Review and Feminist Critique of Welfare Reform Research” that appeared in the 10(2) issue of Feminist Economics. This response argues that while some combination of welfare reform, the booming economy in the late 1990s, and changes in economic policy all worked together to decrease caseloads and increase employment rates among welfare leavers, these are incomplete measures of the impact of welfare reform on the lives of lone mothers. This paper also argues that the effects of welfare reform on lone mothers are more mixed than Cherry acknowledges. This paper concludes that when one holistically examines low-income lone mothers' lives, it is premature to declare welfare reform a success.     

Capabilities and Personal Identity: Using Sen to explain personal identity in Folbre's 'structures of constraint' analysis

Folbre's 'structures of constraint' analysis treats women as socially embedded in 'multiple, often contradictory positions, because they belong to multiple groups'. This paper addresses the problem of women's multiple collective identities by arguing that Sen's capability framework offers a means of explaining how women can maintain coherent personal identities. Using Sen's real opportunities sense of capabilities, the paper argues that women can acquire personal identities apart from their multiple collective identities if they acquire the specific capability of being able, freely and successfully, to negotiate their multiple group involvements. Folbre's list of policies for a more egalitarian family is reconsidered from this perspective.     

Jacob Viner on Adam Smith: Development and reception of a theological reading

Abstract

Jacob Viner was one of the most important interpreters of Adam Smith's work, particularly for his emphasis in a classic 1927 article on Smith's theological framework, his discussion of the relationship between the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations and dismantling of a popular view of Smith as a doctrinaire advocate of laissez-faire. What is less well known is that Viner's theological reading of Smith developed over the next 40 years through intense study of eighteenth century natural theology, and some of his views changed. This article traces the development of Viner's interpretation of Smith. It assesses the suggestion of D.D. Raphael that Smith moved away from a theological framework over time and that Viner repudiated his theological reading of Smith. I argue instead that Viner's mature work broadened and strengthened the theological reading. Much of the literature on Smith and Viner wrongly assumes that naturalistic explanation and theological frameworks are mutually exclusive. This may be the dominant twentieth century view, but it was not so in the eighteenth century, as Viner well understood.     

African Women: A Modern History,by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch

Abstract

Recently, a considerable amount of research has focused on the evidence of gender differences in corruption. Research conducted on another predatory activity, tax evasion, similarly shows strong differences between women's and men's behaviors. This paper tests this finding in a transition country using a unique data set collected from a field survey of households in Tirana, Albania in 2000. Acknowledging that scholars generally explain gender differences in economic behavior either as biological or by social/psychological role theory, this paper examines a broader range of explanations for gender differences in tax evasion. Taking new institutional theory as a starting point to explain the differences in men's and women's tax behaviors, this paper discusses the relative importance of education, income, age, and number of children, among other factors. Finally, it explores the explanations provided by feminist theory and to what extent these can be integrated into the new institutional theoretical framework.     

Perfectionism,Paternalism and Liberalism in Sen and Nussbaum's Capability Approach

The aim of the paper is to analyse the theoretical foundations of human development policies as found in Sen's and Nussbaum's capability approach to development, and to examine to what extent undertaking policies according to the capability approach respects people's freedom to pursue their own conception of the good. The paper argues that policies undertaken according to the capability approach have to be guided by a perfectionist conception of the good; that is, they cannot avoid promoting one certain conception of the human good. Such a perfectionist conception of the human good, and the policies ensuing from it, has often been qualified as paternalist, depriving the human being of choosing her own conception of the good. The paper examines to what extent those fears of paternalism that seem to underlie policies guided by a perfectionist account of the good are legitimate, and to what extent the capability approach can escape those charges of paternalism and respect each person's freedom to pursue the human good as she conceives it.     

The Economic Contributions of Amartya Sen

This paper examines the major economic contributions of Amartya Sen. Sen's contributions fall into three main areas: a philosophical critique of traditional economic assumptions, an attempt to build a more realistic economic science based on the notion of entitlements and human capabilities, and a long series of practical contributions to welfare economics that follow from the capabilities approach - how to measure poverty and inequality better, how to understand famine and hunger, the importance of gender in economic development, and the differences between economic development and economic growth. The paper concludes with a brief assessment of the significance of Sen's work.     

Sen and Commons on Markets and Freedom

Amartya Sen's enlarged conception of freedom has augmented the scope of economic analysis but it also has had the surprising effect of being more supportive of the free market than conventional welfare economics. It is argued here that a comparison of Sen's position with that of the American institutionalist, J R Commons, highlights some problems with Sen's approach and points to possible ways in which they might be addressed.     

Assessing welfare reform data: a comment on christopher

Abstract

This paper responds to Karen Christopher's recent Feminist Economics paper that posits that welfare leavers did not benefit much financially during the Clinton-era economic boom. On the contrary, this paper finds that child poverty rates declined dramatically as did material hardships while the situation worsened for only a very small share of mothers. These benefits came as a result of welfare reform rather than simply an outgrowth of the booming economy that enabled a greater share of welfare leavers to find employment and gain sizeable transfer payments compared to the pre-reform time period.     

Moral Dilemmas and Factual Claims: Some Comments on Paul Krugman's Defense of Cheap Labor

In 1998, Paul Krugman published a collection of short polemical essays on economic themes under the title The Accidental Theorist And Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science . Among those essays was one entitled "In Praise of Cheap Labor: Bad Jobs at Bad Wages Are Better than No Jobs at All". This brief article is an extended comment on that piece, which happened to contain factual claims central to the empirical research program of one of us, and ethical and political issues of concern to us both. Our view is that in his essay on cheap labor, (as indeed in many of the others in the collection), Krugman makes some pungent and telling criticisms of other writers on economic matters and—in this particular case—of some analytically weak and ethically dubious claims which are frequently espoused by contemporary anti-capitalist and anti-globalization radicals conventionally regarded as being on the political left. But at the same time—or so we shall argue—his own polemic is, in important ways, undermined by the narrowness of the theoretical framework within which it is constructed, and most especially, by Krugman's almost total lack of an historical perspective in which to see either contemporary debates over global capitalism or the ethical issues at their heart.     

Sen after Putnam

Modern classical economic theory, originally austere and minimalist (as in Sraffa and Neumann), has entered a second, more enriched phase. Inspired by Adam Smith, Amartya Sen has drawn out the moral implications of formal classical models. But Sen remains open to neoclassical attack on the grounds that science must be value free. In his book The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays , Hilary Putnam rebuts the view that "fact is fact and value is value and never the twain shall meet". This paper explores consequences of this argument for classical theory. It explains the nature and significance of the entanglement of facts, analysis and values; and the impact of this entanglement on the concept of rationality, on capability theory, on the relationship between human needs and Sraffa basics, on Pasinetti's transformational growth, and on Sen's analysis of the disabled and most wretched. Supporting Sen's approach to human development, it opens the possibility of an enriched classical analysis, which can absorb Martha Nussbaum's analysis of tragedy using a logically and morally coherent political economy.     

ECONOMIC RELATIONS BETWEEN WOMEN AND THEIR PARTNERS: AN EAST AND WEST GERMAN COMPARISON AFTER REUNIFICATION

abstract

This article compares women's and men's economic relations in East and West Germany following the 1990 reunification to exemplify the impact of varying opportunity structures on women's relative contribution to family income. West Germany's takeover set in motion a rapid transformation of East German institutions and employment structures. The analysis shows that women in West Germany became less dependent on their partners in the 1990s, largely because fewer women were housewives without earnings. In contrast, the contributions of women to the family economy in East Germany fell between 1990 and 1996. Afterwards, women in East Germany regained some of their economic power because of their partners' increasing difficulties sustaining employment. A multivariate analysis showed that the fact that women in West Germany were more likely to work less or not at all – especially if they were married or had children – accounted for much of the difference.     

SEN,ETHICS, AND DEMOCRACY

Amartya Sen's ethical theorizing helps feminists resolve the tensions between the claims of women's particular perspectives and moral objectivity. His concept of "positional objectivity" highlights the epistemological significance of value judgments made from particular social positions, while holding that certain values may become widely shared. He shows how acknowledging positionality is consistent with affirming the universal value of democracy. This article builds on Sen's work by proposing an analysis of democracy as a set of institutions that aims to intelligently utilize positional information for shared ends. This epistemological analysis of democracy offers a way to understand the rationale for reserving political offices for women. From a political point of view, gendered positions are better thought of as an epistemological resource than as a ground of identity politics v - v that is, of parochial identification and solidarity.