CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

The Global Divide 225
ments. At least these techniques focus on the most crucial aspect of poverty:
simply having enough to eat.
The United Nations Development Programme annually publishes a
composite index of monetary and nonmonetary indicators, called the
Human Development Index (HDI). This was an early 1990s brainchild
of Mahbub Ul Haq, a distinguished Pakistani economist at the UN. HDI
contains three elements: life expectancy at birth, a composite of school
enrollment and adult literacy, and GDP per capita. At first rejected by
other economists, Haq successfully argued that a broader measure than
GDP alone was needed, one that focused attention on health and education
as well. Ranking development standards from 0 to 1, the 2004 HDI
put Norway at the top with an index of 0.956, and clustered 31 African
countries at the bottom with indices all below 0.5. 10 The HDI has also
spawned the UNDP’s Human Poverty Index, which measures population
below the poverty line, availability of improved water sources, proportion
of underweight children under the age of 5, and probability of death before
the age of 40. Together, these two indices have helped meet Haq’s
goal of shifting social development “from the periphery to the core” 11 of
poverty debates.
Amartya Sen, distinguished economist and philosopher and 1998 Nobel
Prize winner, added to the intellectual ferment surrounding these issues with
his concept of development as the expansion of human capabilities. Sen refers
to Aristotle’s views in The Nicomachean Ethics: “First ascertain the function of
man” and then proceed to analyze “life in the sense of activity.” 12 For Sen,
“capability” is “a kind of freedom: the substantive freedom to achieve” 13 a set
of functions, as Aristotle spoke of, in order to live a fulfilling life. “In this perspective,
poverty must be seen as the deprivation of basic capabilities rather
than merely as lowness of incomes.” 14 In other words, Sen sought to refocus
assessments of poverty from means to ends, for example, from the means—
the money—available to buy food to the ends of being adequately nourished.
To Sen’s ideas about capabilities, others have added the concept of “social
exclusion,” that is, exclusion from normal activities in a society such as
employment, housing, minimal income, citizenship, democratic rights, and
communal contacts. In fact, the European Union has made the concept of
social exclusion a central tenet of its policy, focusing on any “process
whereby certain individuals are pushed to the edge of society.” 15