The Standard of Living

by Amartya Sen, Geoffrey Hawthorn (Editor)

Amartya Sen argues that "the standard of living" has been poorly understood and narrowly defined; it is not just a function of opulence, and cannot be seen as utility. It is, he suggests, the "capabilities" offered in states of affairs. In his comments, Bernard Williams considers the conceptual connections among Sen's capabilities, economic welfare, and the broader notion of "well-being", and asks whether the notion raises questions of justice. Ravi Kanbur considers the implications of the uncertainty in the choice that might be thought to be one desirable capability. John Muellbauer offers a specification of choice, and discusses the importance, for assessing capabilities, of the relation between preferences and constraints and between preferences themselves. Keith Hart explores the issue for those societies in which economic life is not fully "commoditized" and in which, therefore, it does not always make sense to reduce things to a price. Sen concludes with replies to these comments.

Genres: Economics

140 pages, Paperback

First published September 25, 1987

About the author

Amartya Kumar Sen is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members.

Sen was best known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food. He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he previously served as Master from the years 1998 to 2004. He is the first Asian and the first Indian academic to head an Oxbridge college.

Amartya Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. In 2006, Time magazine listed him under "60 years of Asian Heroes" and in 2010 included him in their "100 most influential persons in the world".

Reviews

[Tom]

Summary:

How do we define the standard of living? It's tempting to use a utilitarian (with respect to pleasure, desire-fulfillment, or choice) definition, but using any of these utilitarian measures as the sole basis of the standard of living seems flawed. Against pleasure utilitarianism: if someone is starving and overworked but is satisfied due to heavy social condition, would we consider them to have a good standard of living? Against desire and choice utilitarianism: while desire and choice provide evidence of what people value, it is hard to believe that they are perfectly correlated with value. Instead, Sen prefers to measure the standard of living via functionings (achievements of particular conditions) and capabilities (the ability to achieve).

An approach to evaluating the standard of living of someone or of a population must balance two conflicting factors: relevance (adequately captures the richness of our idea of the standard of living) and usability (practical to actually assess). Also, it is acceptable for an approach to be unable to compare two sets of conditions; an approach can be useful even if it does not generate a total ordering of preferred conditions.

(I only read the two lectures by Sen, "The Standard of Living: Lecture I, Concepts and Critiques" and "The Standard of Living: Lecture II, Lives and Capabilities". These are freely available online as PDFs in the University of Utah's library of Tanner lectures, though these PDFs are missing a couple pages in the beginning. The remaining two-thirds of the 140-page book that this Goodreads listing refers to consists of essays responding to Sen's lectures.)

[Shubham Agarwal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, Crisp and to the point.
Makes you think a lot and urges you to read more in the topic.

Loved It!