Development as Freedom

...But he is not satisfied with that as a measure of the process...

...The utilization of advanced technology results in an enhanced ability to produce goods and services and that, in turn, tends to result in improved living conditions...

...FEW SCOOPS Robert Murray Davis n the 1980s, Auberon I Waugh gave permission, on the condition that the result was never to appear in England, to collect and publish what he called scraps from his father's wastebasket in Evelyn Waugh, Apprentice: The Early Writings, 1910-27...

...Jay R. Mandle is the W. Bradford Wiley Professor of economics at Colgate University...

...That requires that we conceptualize the two separately, and not as Sen would have it, as "constituent components" of each other...

...That problem is nonexistent in Sen's framework...

...On the very first page of the book, Sen makes explicit his motivation for reconceptualizing development as freedom...

...With his definition, unless both are promoted, neither is...

...The greater the degree of this mastery, the higher the level of economic development...

...The freedoms that interest him "have to be understood as constitutive parts of the ends of development in themselves...

...Those limitations are most noticeable in the recurring characters who people what an earlier anthologist called "the world of Evelyn Waugh...

...With his approach it would not be possible in the name of development to do something that many development practitioners and theorists do: dismiss as a secondorder concern the fact that "despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to vast numbers--perhaps even the majority---of people...

...For example, Alastair Trumpington and Margot Metroland appeared in Waugh's first novel Decline and Fall (1928), and intermittently, in character or cameo parts, in the subsequent novels and some of these stories, until their farewell thirty-five years later in "Basil Seal Rides Again," which collects other characters from the novels Black Mischief (1932) and Put out More Flags (1942...

...That said, I confess to not being able to accept Sen's definition of development...

...The publicity release maintains that the stories show that Waugh "was also a master of the short form...

...In this, Sen's formulation that "development can be seen...as a process of expanding the freedoms that people enjoy" is not helpful...

...The basic story I tell is that a profound gap in levels of economic development exists among nations in the contemporary world...

...The fundamental determinant of where a country ranks in development is the extent to which its businesses and people have mastered the application of advanced technology to production...

...Some of the stories are linked to the novels in more subtle ways, for after the fact it is clear that they served as drafts, and sometimes parts' bins, for further and more substantial work to come...

...I note that unfortunately there is no necessary connection between a developed and a good society...

...Charles Ryder's Schooldays," written and soon abandoned in Waugh's postwar slump and based on his own schoolboy diaries, is a prequel to Brideshead Revisited (1945...

...Waugh's persona, Gilbert Pinfold, believes that "most men harbor the germs of one or two books only...

...Correcting that denial of freedom, however, requires that we think analytically about the nature and use of advanced technology and why its positive impact is as constrained as it is...

...In my classes this subject is fundamentally concerned with the causes and consequences of technological change...

...Compassion" was clearly a holding action to fix in Waugh's imagination the setting and theme for the climactic scene in the last volume of his Commonweal 2 5 January 14, 2000...

...He has a political agenda--in the broadest meaning of that term...

...Only when these "freedoms" advance is development successful...

...I resist because I believe that conflating development and freedom makes it impossible to investigate precisely the problem that animates Sen: why technological change has been only partially liberating...

...More nearly the opposite is the case...

...In the United States, for example, a country of undeniable technical prowess, many are denied the kinds of freedom with which Sen is concerned, something that Sen himself documents in his discussion of African-American mortality rates...

...In my discussion I take care, however, to distinguish between achieving economic development and building what I call a "good society...

...If as technology advances we are going to extend the scope of freedom, we will have to engage in careful study of the interface between the two...

...Sen, a Nobel Prize winner, acknowledges that the growth of the gross national product per person, the measure that draws the attention of the economics profession, is important in development...

...While I myself do not believe that a good society is possible without taking advantage of advanced technology, it is clear that the latter alone is not enough to ensure a society of justice...

...This is an extreme, if not outrageous, claim, but one can agree that these stories are recognizably the work of Evelyn Waugh...

...Sen writes, "Viewing development in terms of expanding substantive freedoms directs attention to the ends that make development important, rather than merely to some of the means that, inter alia, play a prominent part in the process...

...Freedom, according to Sen, should not be thought of either as a means to achieve development nor as an objective to be compromised or deferred in the name of facilitating economic growth...

...That is, if increasing "freedom" is not integral to the process of social change, development is not occurring...

...Sen's volume is important because it will allow advocates for the poor to employ the work of a Nobel Prize economist in policy debates...

...Sen's concept of freedom--and therefore development--includes the avoidance of "starvation, undernourishment, escapable morbidity and premature mortality as well as the freedoms that are associated with being literate and numerate, enjoying political participation and uncensored speech...

...Since I do not believe that one necessarily implies the other, my constant worry is that I may not be paying enough attention to one when I address the other...

...More important to careful readers of Waugh's work, three of the stories are direct spinoffs from the novels...

...The Complete Stories confirms this view...

...all is professional trickery...

...An Englishman's Home" borrows some of the country dialect from Scoop (1938) and anticipates the naive and complacent householders upon whom the awful refugee children are visited in Put out More Flags...

...By Special Request" is the ending for the serial version of A Handful of Dust (1934), written because key parts of the original ending had already been sold in story form as "The Man Who Liked Dickens...

...Development, Sen believes, requires "the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states...

...In the United States, for example, the process of economic development was initiated in an era when slavery was a thriving institution, and today dramatic technological changes are occurring while the distribution of income and wealth in the country becomes increasingly uneven...

...The dissolute doctor who fakes a death certificate in Waugh's undergraduate story "Edward of Unique Achievement" is resuscitated for Decline and Fall, as is the charming, vacuous young woman from "On Guard" for "Lucy Simmonds...

...In formulating their programs, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, for example, will be told, on Sen's authority, that when they look at a country's ecoCommonweal 2 4 January 14, 2000 nomic performance, their evaluation should be judged "primarily by the substantive freedoms that the members of that society enjoy...

...Because he provides an enhanced voice for citizens---especially poor people-in an age of globalization in which mammoth corporations seem ever more powerful, I would like nothing more than to agree with Sen that development should be defined as the expansion of human freedom...

...Now eighteen stories from that volume and twenty-one previously collected and more widely known works of short fiction have been gathered in what is, according to the dust-jacket flap, "a dazzling distillation of Waugh's genius...

...For Sen, the criterion of development used by the economists is unacceptable because it is too narrow...

...It is this way of presenting development, shared by many economists, that is fundamentally challenged by Amartya Sen in his book Development as Freedom...

...The latter I describe as one in which members of a country's population possess roughly equal life opportunities and where there is the ability to participate equally in decision making...

...Instead, as the title of his book suggests, he argues that development can be said to occur only when freedom--itself very broadly inclusive of social and economic elements--is advanced...

...Agreeing would allow me to achieve a synthesis of my own professional and political concerns that have sought to advance both economic prosperity and political democracy...

...Neither historically nor at the present time can it be said that economic development either originates in good societies or necessarily produces them...

...Incident in Azania," though it uses the setting and some of the characters of Black Mischief, was not, from the evidence of the novel's manuscript, ever intended to be part of the longer work but is a kind of jeu d'esprit based on a story about a faked kidnapping in China...