Development as Freedom

When we want to know whether a society is just or whether a life is going well, what should we measure? Income? Wealth? Reported happiness? The capability approach, developed by the Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen (b. 1933) and the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947), answers differently: what matters is what people are actually able to be and to do — the real freedoms they have to live the life they have reason to value. It is one of the most influential contributions to political philosophy and normative economics in recent decades, at the frontier between the two disciplines. ...