Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen

CHAPTER 1
THE PERSPECTIVE OF FREEDOM

It is not unusual for couples to discuss the possibility of earning
more money, but a conversation on this subject from around the
eighth century B.C. is of some special interest. As that conversation is
recounted in the Sanskrit text Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a woman
named Maitreyee and her husband, Yajnavalkya, proceed rapidly to
a bigger issue than the ways and means of becoming more wealthy:
How far would wealth go to help them get what they want?1 Maitreyee
wonders whether it could be the case that if “the whole earth, full of
wealth” were to belong just to her, she could achieve immortality
through it. “No,” responds Yajnavalkya, “like the life of rich people
will be your life. But there is no hope of immortality by wealth.”
Maitreyee remarks, “What should I do with that by which I do not
become immortal?”
Maitreyee’s rhetorical question has been cited again and again in
Indian religious philosophy to illustrate both the nature of the
human predicament and the limitations of the material world. I
have too much skepticism of otherworldly matters to be led there by
Maitreyee’s worldly frustration, but there is another aspect of this
exchange that is of rather immediate interest to economics and to
understanding the nature of development. This concerns the relation
between incomes and achievements, between commodities and
capabilities, between our economic wealth and our ability to live as
we would like. While there is a connection between opulence and
achievements, the linkage may or may not be very strong and may
well be extremely contingent on other circumstances. The issue is
not the ability to live forever on which Maitreyee—bless her soul—
happened to concentrate, but the capability to live really long
(without being cut off in one’s prime) and to have a good life while
alive (rather than a life of misery and unfreedom)—things that
would be strongly valued and desired by nearly all of us. The gap
between the two perspectives (that is, between an exclusive
concentration on economic wealth and a broader focus on the lives
we can lead) is a major issue in conceptualizing development. As
Aristotle noted at the very beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics
(resonating well with the conversation between Maitreyee and
Yajnavalkya three thousand miles away), “wealth is evidently not
the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of
something else.”

If we have reasons to want more wealth, we have to ask: What
precisely are these reasons, how do they work, on what are they
contingent and what are the things we can “do” with more wealth?
In fact, we generally have excellent reasons for wanting more
income or wealth. This is not because income and wealth are
desirable for their own sake, but because, typically, they are
admirable general-purpose means for having more freedom to lead
the kind of lives we have reason to value.
The usefulness of wealth lies in the things that it allows us to do—
the substantive freedoms it helps us to achieve. But this relation is
neither exclusive (since there are significant  on our lives 

other than wealth) nor uniform (since the impact of wealth on our
lives varies with other influences). It is as important to recognize the
crucial role of wealth in determining living conditions and the
quality of life as it is to understand the

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen