Measuring development

It seemed to me that only in “Perspectives on the Economic Development of India and China” do we get a clear sense of the methods by which human development (as ul Haq calls it) or the expansion of human freedom are to be measured. In the other two readings, I got the general idea of the development as freedom approach: economic growth isn’t everything, because the way money is distributed and the ways in which people are able to constructively participate in society are also important when we are considering how developed a given country is. But those readings didn’t really pinpoint a way to compare countries or societies based on their levels of development. For instance, it’s hard to definitively call a country that has a growth rate of five percent per year and an authoritarian government more or less developed than a country with a two percent growth rate and a multi-party democracy. It’s very difficult for us to choose between economic freedom and political freedom, because, as both authors explain, they’re both essential to human freedom, broadly construed.

Sen, however, offers us metrics like infant mortality and life expectancy as convenient ways to roughly determine a country’s relative level of development. These statistics work especially well because they aren’t determined solely by any one aspect of a country’s development: “ … economic growth does contribute to the enhancing of living conditions, including longevity. However, … other factors, such as public policy of health care and educational expansion, can also make a radical difference” (Sen, “Perspectives,” 38). With basic measures like these, we can begin to get a feeling for the way social, economic, political, and cultural factors are combining within a given country to produce real results for people.

But then we run into another problem, because both Sen and ul Haq stress the fact that political and social freedoms are not only valuable because they produce better health or more equality—they’re valuable in what Sen calls a “constitutive” sense, which is to say that these kinds of freedoms are essential in an absolute, moral, philosophical way to human development. Economic growth, however, seems to have a relative importance, since it is said to be valuable only to the extent that it can enhance other freedoms. That is to say, if we can produce better health results through effective public health programs while having a one percent annual growth rate, the economic growth isn’t nearly as important as the overall health of the people. Only if the growth allowed overall health to improve, which it often does, would it be considered important. So, it seems, political and social freedoms are in fact more important to these authors than economic growth.