This is one of a series of posts that will ask what the most pertinent question raised by a prominent influencer of political economy might have been, and what the relevance of that question might be today. There is a list of all posts in the series at the end of each entry. The origin of this series is noted here. 

After the first two posts in this series, the topics have been chosen by me, and this is one of those. This series has been produced using what I describe as directed AI searches to establish positions with which I agree, followed by final editing before publication.

Amartya Sen's inclusion in the series follows naturally from my reading of his book A Idea of Justice, in which he built on the work of John Rawls and advanced it for the sake of society at large. Few political economists leave a legacy as significant as that. Sen has been awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, but that is not a reason to be here: he is here because he helped shape my thinking about the world we should live in by presenting a coherent philosophy of economics and of life itself that explains how we can help people live fulfilled lives. For me, that is what political economy is about. 

Amartya Sen's work is one of the quiet revolutions in modern political economy. At the very moment when mainstream economics had reduced almost everything to income, prices, and what neoclassical economists call utility, Sen asked a much older and much more human set of questions. What does it mean to live well? What does it mean to avoid needless suffering? What does it mean to be genuinely free, not just on paper, but in the texture of everyday life?

His answer was as simple as it was subversive. We cannot judge a society by what it produces, or even by what it pays, but only by what people are actually able to do and be. He called these real possibilities capabilities, and with that one move, he exposed how shallow and how morally evasive so much of modern economics had become.

Hence, the Amartya Sen Question: If freedom is the capability to live a full human life, why do we still run economies that deny so many people the means to be free?

Income is not life

Sen's work begins from an obvious truth that economics has learned to ignore. Two people with the same income may live utterly different lives. One may be healthy, secure, literate, and politically included; the other may be ill, excluded, or constantly afraid. Raise national income and you may not improve any of those things.

Deprivation, he argued, is not just a matter of low money income. It is the loss of the freedom to avoid preventable illness, to learn, to participate in society, and to exercise agency over one's own life. A country can grow richer in the aggregate while large parts of its population become less free in any meaningful sense. Once that is understood, it becomes impossible to pretend that GDP, or even average household income, can stand in as measures of well-being.

Capabilities and real freedom

For Sen, freedom is not simply being left alone, whether by the state or the market. Freedom is having genuine options, backed by real resources, to choose and pursue a life one has reason to value. A person without access to healthcare is not free to be healthy. A child without schooling is not free to develop their potential. A carer without income security is not free to say no to exploitation.

Capabilities are, in that sense, the real content of liberty. They describe what people can actually achieve in the circumstances in which they find themselves. Sen's move from income to capability is therefore a move from abstraction to reality. It insists that the language of “choice” and “opportunity” is empty if people lack the material, social, and institutional support that makes those choices real.

Why democracies prevent catastrophe

Perhaps Sen's best-known empirical claim is that famines do not happen in functioning democracies. That is not because democracies are magically richer or more efficient, but because they provide people with political capabilities. A free press can report hunger. Opposition parties can raise it in parliament. Citizens can organise, protest, and vote governments out of office.

In authoritarian systems, by contrast, those capabilities do not exist. People may starve while official statistics show surpluses. Here, Sen's framework shows its political edge. Starvation, premature death, and extreme insecurity are not just misfortunes; they are failures of public responsibility. They reflect a lack of accountability and participation — a lack of capability in the political sphere. That is why he insisted that development is inseparable from democracy, and that deprivation is always, in part, a political fact.

The poverty of mainstream economics

By the time Sen's work on capabilities became widely known, mainstream economics had largely retreated into a narrow concern with preferences, prices, and growth rates. Welfare was equated with utility and measured by consumption. Policy success was read off from movements in GDP or productivity.

Sen's work quietly dismantles this entire edifice. People need far more than consumption to live decent lives: they need public health, education, safety, social recognition, environmental stability, and time to care. None of these appear in standard models. An economy that expands output while undermining these foundations may look successful on paper, but it is failing in terms of capabilities. Sen, in effect, accuses the profession of having confused what is easy to count with what actually counts.

Power and the production of capability

Sen is often presented as gentle and technocratic, but his analysis has a hard edge. People lack capabilities for reasons that are deeply structural. Low pay, insecure work, unaffordable housing, underfunded services, discrimination, and deliberate austerity all constrain what lives people can live.

To talk about capability is to talk, inevitably, about power. Who decides how resources are allocated? Whose needs are recognised? Which voices shape policy? A capability perspective makes it impossible to treat poverty as individual failure or inequality as a natural outcome of talent. It reveals them instead as the predictable result of institutions designed around profit and so-called sound finance rather than human flourishing.

Ecology and future freedoms

Although Sen did not frame his work primarily in environmental terms, the implications are clear. Capabilities are not only those of the present; they also belong to future generations. A society that degrades its soil, water, air, and climate is destroying the capabilities of those who come after it.

Environmental damage does not show up straightforwardly in income statistics, but it does, inexorably, reduce the real freedoms future people will have — to avoid disease, to find secure shelter, to grow food, and to live without chronic disaster. An economic system that treats ecological limits as an afterthought is therefore one that is trading away freedom for short-term gain. Sen's framework makes that trade-off morally explicit.

What answering the Amartya Sen question requires

Seen from Sen's perspective, the usual language of “freedom” in economic debate looks threadbare. To answer the Sen Question would require us to redesign our priorities. That would mean, at the very least:

• Reframing policy goals so that success is judged by the expansion of people's capabilities on issues such as health, education, security, and participation, rather than by the size of GDP.

• Rebuilding public services, requiring that healthcare, education, housing, social care, and income security be the core infrastructures of freedom, not as costs to be cut.

• Redistributing power and resources, meaning that taxes, regulations, and labour and democratic rights be reformed to ensure that no group's capabilities are systematically sacrificed to others' wealth.

• Embedding ecological limits, which would require recognition that sustaining the capabilities of future generations requires deliberate restraint on forms of production and consumption that destroy the conditions of life.

These are not technocratic adjustments. They represent a wholesale change in what we think economies are for.

Inference

The Sen Question goes to the heart of our contemporary confusion. We insist that we value freedom, but we organise our economies in ways that deny millions the real means to live freely. We celebrate choice while eroding the public systems that make meaningful choice possible. We measure growth while capabilities stagnate or decline.

Sen offers a way out of that confusion. He gives us a language in which to say, plainly, that freedom without capability is an illusion, and that an economic system which cannot deliver the basic conditions for a fulfilled human life is, in the end, a failure, whatever the national accounts may say.

Answering his question would mean abandoning the comforting fictions of neoliberalism and accepting a much more demanding standard: that the purpose of the economy is to expand what people can actually be and do. Until we are willing to make that shift, our talk of freedom will remain just that.

Previous posts in this series

• The economic questions
• Economic questions: The Henry Ford Question
• Economic questions: The Mark Carney Question
• Economics questions: The Keynes question
• Economics questions: The Karl Marx question
• Economics questions: the Milton Friedman question
• Economic questions: The Hayek question
• Economic questions: The James Buchanan question
• Economic questions: The J K Galbraith question
• Economic questions: the Hyman Minsky question
• Economic questions: the Joseph Schumpeter question
• Economic questions: The E F Schumacher question
• Economics questions: the John Rawls question
• Economic questions: the Thomas Piketty question
• Economic questions: the Gary Becker question
• Economics questions: The Greg Mankiw question
• Economic questions: The Paul Krugman
• Economic question: the Tony Judt question
• Economic questions: The Nancy MacLean question
• Economic questions: The David Graeber question

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