Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice The Capability Approach Re-Examined, 2017a

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4. Critiques and Debates 207 When Amartya Sen introduced the capability approach in economics, there was some scepticism about its potential for empirical research. For example, Robert Sugden (1993, 1953) famously wrote: Given the rich array of functionings that Sen takes to be relevant, given the extent of disagreement among reasonable people about the nature of the good life, and given the unresolved problem of how to value sets, it is natural to ask how far Sen’s framework is operational. Is it a realistic alternative to the methods on which economists typically rely — measurement of real income, and the kind of practical cost-benefit analysis which is grounded in Marshallian consumer theory? What Sugden and other early welfare economic critics of the capability approach, such as John Roemer (1996, 191–93) were looking for, is a theory that is fully formalised and provides a neat algorithm to address questions of evaluation and/or (re-)distribution, resulting in a complete ranking of options. That requires two things: first, to be able to put the capability approach in a fully formalized model which can be econometrically estimated. This requires us to move beyond the welfare economic models as we know them, and may also require the collection of new data (Kuklys 2005). In addition, it requires us to accept that the different dimensions (functionings and/or capabilities) are commensurable, that is, have a common currency that allows us to express the value of one unit of one dimension in relation to the value of one unit of another dimension. One-dimensional or aggregated evaluative spaces are, ultimately, a necessary condition for conducting empirical work in contemporary mainstream welfare economics. Yet there may well be a trade-off between the number of dimensions and the informational richness of the evaluative space on the one hand, and the degree to which the theory can be formalised and can provide complete orderings of interpersonal comparisons on the other hand. Some welfare economists are working on the question of how to aggregate the many dimensions such that one has, in the end, one composite dimension to work with, but it should be obvious that this is not the only way to develop capabilitarian welfare economics. The alternative is to stick to the view that wellbeing is inherently multidimensional,
208 Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice which requires other methods and techniques that allow for fuzziness, vagueness and complexity (Chiappero-Martinetti 2008, 2000, 1994, 2006; Clark and Qizilbash 2005; Qizilbash and Clark 2005). One could also advance work on dominance rankings or incomplete rankings, which Sen has been defending in his social choice work for several decades (e.g. Sen 2017). As a consequence, there are several ways to develop a capabilitarian welfare economics, and to make the capability approach “operational” (Atkinson 1999, 185). Sugden’s objection can be best answered by looking at the applications that have already been developed, and which have been listed in several overviews of the empirical literature (e.g. Kuklys and Robeyns 2005; Robeyns 2006b; Chiappero-Martinetti and Roche 2009; Lessmann 2012). 17 However, whether the applications discussed in those surveys satisfy the critics depends on what one expects from empirical work in capabilitarian welfare economics. As was already shown in chapter 1, empirical applications of the capability approach do make a substantive difference to research using other normative frameworks, such as income-based metrics. But from that it doesn’t follow that capabilitarian welfare economics will be able to deliver alternatives for each and every existing welfarist study in economics. It may well be that sometimes the informational riches of the capability approach clash with requirements regarding measurability that certain empirical applications put upon the scholar. welfare economics? In the last two sections, we discussed how the capability approach can make a difference to contemporary welfare economics both theoretically and empirically. Those debates by and large stay within the mainstream of contemporary welfare economics, even though as Amartya Sen (1996, 61) notes, they require us “to go more and more in these pluralist and 17 In addition to the first, rather rough empirical application in the Appendix of Sen’s (1985a) Commodities and Capabilities, the literature on empirical applications in welfare economics that used individual-level data started off with the paper by Schokkaert and Van Ootegem (1990), in which they showed that unemployment benefits may restore an unemployed person’s income level, but do not restore all of her functionings to the level they were at before she become unemployed.
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Contents Acknowledgements 3 1. Intr
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3. Clarifications 89 3.1 Introducti
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4.7 What about power and political
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Acknowledgements In 1998, when I st
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Acknowledgements 5 the capability a
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1. Introduction Many people who en
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1. Introduction 9 capability approa
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1. Introduction 11 Moreover, it bri
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1. Introduction 13 Countries Outsi
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1. Introduction 17 their collaborat
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1. Introduction 19 This book has a
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Page 262 and 263: Index abortion 15, 145 advantage 25
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