Sen’s Development as Freedom

Very interesting. I wonder how much it applies to black Britons? I know the difference in life expectancy between the best and worst by local auhority is 8 years (79 to 71) but I don’t think we keep life expectacny figures by racial grouping.

Andrew,

I thought the point was that there’s more to poverty than an absolute level of income. The example shows that great disparities of wealth within a society lead to real world problems (such as low life expectancy) even if the absolute level of poverty is higher than in many other countries.

It’s a welcome analysis although the findings still require explanation. Why would being relatively poor lead to lower life expectancy? Answers on a postcard.

Also Nicholas you forget to add that black people in the US have a longer life expectancy than black people in …er…Liberia, hence proving they’re better off in the US.

All irony aside, I wonder why Sen uses certain groups of Chinese and Indians to draw his comparison. Similar data for Sub-Saharan Africa might be at least equally interesting and relevant–and not just for obvious horrorshows like Liberia and the Congo, but also for relative success stories like Botswana. Maybe Sen goes into this elsewhere.

ok, here’s my guess as to why: because the presence of a lot of rich people drives up the cost of certain essential or highly desirable things at a much higher rate than inflation. Look at the cost of housing in NYC. Or the difficulty for a college student to find a paid summer job in a lot of fields, because there are plenty of smart rich kids to do the unpaid internship. Or the cost of college itself. Or our whole health care system, which is the best in the world if you’ve got money but very far from it if you don’t.

I mean, it’s not the only explanation, and this is partly anecdotal. But I think there’s something real.

Amartya Sen wrote:

In fact, it turns out that men in China and in Kerala decisively outlive African American men in terms of surviving to older age groups. Even African American women end up having a survival pattern for the higher ages similar to that of the much poorer Chinese, and decidedly lower survival rates than then even poorer Indians in Kerala. So it is not only the case that American blacks suffer from relative deprivation in terms of income per head vis-a-vis American whites, they are also absolutely more deprived than low-income Indians in Kerala (for both women and men), and the Chinese (in the case of men), in terms of living to ripe old ages.

Or it could just be that because Americans in general (and black Americans in particular) choose different diets than people in China or India which lead to things like obesity and heart disease it reduces life expectancy. How did Amartya Sen account for these and other factors when he did his comparison of apples to oranges?

I remember that they did something relevant to this on amptoons, some while ago, and the implication was fairly obvious. Poor Americans only have access to the same level of healthcare as some of the poorer countries of the world. For women, this was especially noticeable in post-natal deaths.

Nicholas Weineger wrote:

How much of this disparity is due to deaths from homicide? How much is due to differences in lifestyle choices— diet, exercise, etc?

I am sure that since Chris Bertram read the book and began this thread, he will be more than happy to explain how Amartya Sen accounted for these differences. If he does not or is unable to adequately explain how these differences were accounted for in Sen’s book, then the study is flawed and its conclusions questionable to put it mildly.

There are plenty of reasons why these outcomes might exist that are not necessarily determined by income inequality. Indeed, the causation may go the other way: cultural/behavioral factors that shorten life expectancies may also cause income disparities.

I agree, that seems more logical. If one wishes to tie poverty to life expectancy it is usually based on the theory that if a person has below X number of resources then they are unable to adequately meet their needs for food, shelter, health care, etc. Whether another person has more resources and is able to therefore meet these needs with less difficulty is irrelevant.

That Amartya Sen (according to the excerpt printed by Chris Bertram) accounted for the differences in cost of living between his three very different sample groups seems to indicate then that Black American males would then be just as able if not more so to have the resources necessary to take care of their needs than their Indian and Chinese counter-parts. The fact that their White counterparts might be even more able to do so is irrelevant.

For whatever it’s worth, according to this 1995 study from the University of Michigan, about 27% of the difference in life expectancy between American whites and blacks is due to homicide; another 14% is due to HIV/AIDS. Higher rates of death from common diseases of old age like heart disease, cancer, stroke, etc. account for about another 40% of the difference.

It would be interesting to see figures corrected for income, to see if that is the crucial variable.

Vinteuil,

Thank you for finding and posting that link.

Chris Bertram,

How does Amartya Sen account for differences in life expectancy between Black American males and those in China and Kerala which are the result of diet, exercise, sexual practices, and homicide?

I just realized something that was not provided to us but needs to be considered. The except from the book mentions a disparity between the income of American whites and blacks but I am curious about two things.

First, is this a comparison of households or individuals? As many people are aware, as a result of personal choices there are a huge number of single parent households amongst black families (about 70%) while most white households tend to have two parents and a potential for two earners. In which case if you compare households based on racial lines (rather than individuals) you get a far greater disparity largely because you are comparing a disproportionate number of two income families to one income families.

The second thing is that black Americans disproportionately live in Southern States which have a lower cost of live and wage-scale then their northern counterparts. Which makes it important to account for geographical differences (e.g. comparing Southern blacks to Southern whites rather than Southern blacks to Northern whites) to make an adequate comparison. How did the author account for this difference or didn’t he?

Strike the first question, I reread the excerpt and caught “per capita income” which I had missed before. My bad although it would be nice (perhaps it was footnoted) to know what the source was for this claim to make sure it really was per capita.

tw: American blacks do indeed contract HIV/AIDS at much higher rates than whites. It’s interesting, though, that intravenous drug use, which accounts for about 40% of black infections, is an even bigger factor here then sexual transmission, which accounts for about 30% of cases.

Sorry all–I don’t want to drag this too far off on a tangent. But HIV/AIDS *is* a significant factor in dragging down African-American life expectancies.

There was an article in the NYTimes describing how many black men will often have unprotected sex with other men and not tell their wives. Their wives don’t find out until they discover they and their children are now HIV positive. It’s a real health problem in the community. I have a couple friends who are gay and black who will tell you that the black American community is more hostile to homosexuality than white Americans are.

Prison knocks the life out of people too. Lots more African-Americans go to prison, often for offences for which whites don’t.

Katherine wrote:

you do realize that the homicide rate being responsible does not prove that income has nothing to do with it, right?

Does that mean then that we should expect a higher rate of homicide amongst the Chinese and Indian populations in this study since they have a lower per-capita income then American blacks?

;)

Seriously, though, does anyone else get the suspicion that Sen’s book may not be a credible work but rather that he might have cherry-picked results that fit his theory without doing something as basic as comparing apples to apples?

I could be mistaken and I will confess that I am not intimately familiar with his work. However, when we received the Nobel Prize in 1998 and I read about him and his work, it struck me that he was praised more for having the “correct” opinions on income inequality than for anything else. Perhaps his receiving the award may have been just a teensy bit political.

Or it could be that he is one of those rare human beings who is totally objective and intellectually honest. We’ll have to wait for Chris Bertram or whomever else has read the book to let us know how exactly Sen accounted for these other differences to make sure that he was making a valid comparison between Black Americans and the Indians and Chinese.

Well, try reading him, Thorley.

And there have been a great many Nobel prizes in economics given to people who don’t have opinions similar to Sen’s, to put it mildly.

Thanks for correction on cost of living though, you’re right. I was answering comments rather than the quotation itself – should have stipulated that.

I think (based on reading the Preface) Sen’s point is that measurement of GNP and GDP and per capita income can be highly misleading, because it says nothing about, for instance, economies in which some people get very rich indeed and others stay very poor indeed, whereas others that have lower overall figures also may have better figures for people on the bottom. Just as a statistical or empirical fact, quite separate from how one gets such situations or what one thinks of them. To put it another way, comparing national per capita income statistics really doesn’t tell us as much as we tend to think it does – it can hide a lot.

‘Clearly we need to address the issue of richer people outbidding poorer people for restricted-supply goods such as housing and medical care.’

No that it isn’t clear at all. Nobody in this thread in any way shape or form has made an even mildly persausive argument that we need to address that issue.

Nobody in way shape or form has presented a convincing case detailing the consequences of ‘the issue of richer people outbidding poorer people for restricted-supply goods such as housing and medical care.’. No one has weighed the positive consequences of such an action against the negative consequences of such an action.

It’s nice that you believe that to be true. Just like it is nice that some people believe in god. But don’t expect anyone who doesn’t share your faith to be convinced by a few anecdotes and a re-statement of your faith in your faith.

“Why is it the responsibility of the “system” to guarantee “reasonable and just human outcomes”?”

Well that’s the subject of the whole book. That’s the point of reading it – to understand Sen’s argument.

‘Sen chose Kerala because it has a remarkably developed welfare state for a part of India that is poor even by Indian standards. The point is that, at a given level of aggregate wealth, health outcomes (and other outcomes) are better in countries with good social programs.’

An equally likely explanation might be that he choose China and India because the Chinese and Indians are both genetically and culturally pre-disposed to live longer lives.

If memeory serves me correctly Japan does not have a Nationalized Health Care system and yet the Japanese live as long as Europeans.

As another poster has repeatedly pointed out you compare likes to likes.

British blacks would be much closer both culturally and genetically to US blacks. And yet Britian has Nationalized Health Care and the US doesn’t. This would be a much better comparision.

And yet the another comparision was choosen. Mighty odd. Actualy it isn’t odd.

The choice was made becasue it is very shocking to say black Americans are worse off than 3rd world citizens.

It is rather less shocking to say poor black Americans live 1.5 years less than poor British blacks.(I don’t know the real numbers appearently no such numbers exist for British blacks)

“Infamouse fails to recognize the irony. People do not choose to be born into two-income or one- income families.”

I’m not saying that the children choose the circumstances they were born into, but the parents do choose the circumstances their children will be born into. If you are a single woman who has a child and does not have much money, then you are damning your kids, especially the boys.

Chris, the only person on this thread who said “bad choices by stupid people” was you.

“All irony aside, I wonder why Sen uses certain groups of Chinese and Indians to draw his comparison.”

“Am I implying Sen lies? Why, yes!”

I’ve got to wonder why all the posters are assuming diet, sex, and homicide rates are orthogonal to income.

You may see it as an offensive comment, but it is not meant as such. People are often at the mercy of things they cannot control, but just as often they can control certain things. There are certain behaviors that lead to certain outcomes. Birth out of wedlock often leads to increased poverty (2 incomes would preclude this), drug use, incarceration, etc. It is not offensive to take note that people often make choices that are harmful to themselves as well as their children. It is not offensive to take note that black America is not just a passive victim and as a group, they exhibit certain behaviors (birth out of wedlock) that make their economic situations demonstrably worse.

You clearly believe that “stupid” people make “bad” choices. You don’t have to be “stupid” to make a “bad” choice.

I’ll venture into the Infamouse/Bertram fray to scold you both — please stick to the issue at hand.

The issue, as I see it, boils down to whether or not you agree with Chris’s statement: “Shocking, for the strongest economy on earth to create these outcomes”

I don’t agree because I don’t think the economy can be held totally responsible for such outcomes. Do you agree or disagree?

I also tried to raise the issue — perhaps too oblique to pursue on this thread and/or important only to me — that much moral shock and outrage in left wing economic thought seems to be based on confused premises. If you’re shocked by unequal distribution of wealth, then let’s be clear about the source your moral outrage. Why and when is unequal distribution of resources wrong?

I hope I haven’t offended anyone.

“No that it isn’t clear at all. Nobody in this thread in any way shape or form has made an even mildly persausive argument that we need to address that issue.”

I saw several posts in this thread suggesting that one reason for disappointing life expectancy is because the population at issue has trouble obtaining medical care, housing, and police protection. I think that’s a strong possibility, and I mentioned policy changes that would ameliorate such problems.

“Nobody in way shape or form has presented a convincing case detailing the consequences of ‘the issue of richer people outbidding poorer people for restricted-supply goods such as housing and medical care.’. No one has weighed the positive consequences of such an action against the negative consequences of such an action.”

So what are the negative consequences of allowing the supply of medical care, housing, and police protection to meet demand without interference? Are we supposed to take seriously the notion that human-built structures are ugly and unused green spaces are beautiful, for instance?

“It’s nice that you believe that to be true. Just like it is nice that some people believe in god. But don’t expect anyone who doesn’t share your faith to be convinced by a few anecdotes and a re-statement of your faith in your faith.”

It’s hardly faith to note that allowing the supply of something to meet demand will allow more people to avail themselves of it than will restricting the supply so that it cannot meet the demand. It may be “faith” to believe that more available housing and medical care is preferable to less available housing and medical care, but I’ll bet it’s a faith that’s rather strongly held by people who are looking for housing and medical care and finding it difficult to obtain.

This article from the NYTimes Magazine on the higher number of health problems in America’s ghettos is incredibly good for a more close up look at these issues. I think the best thing that could be done would be to improve the areas by containing crime, vandalism, litter, development. Stop letting these areas turn into wastelands. A lot of it seems psychological and stress-related.

Was just browsing through the thread. No specific points yet until I get a chance to browse through Sen’s book again, other than that I find it amusing that Mr. Thorley Winston is accusing a past presidient of the econometric society of making basic mistakes, that even an undergraduate student shouldn’t make.

Reading this thread is like watching a train wreck. I can’t look away, but it’s awful. So complacent — “Sen got the Nobel Prize cause he’s a liberal!” No I’m not surprised either, but fuck me backwards.

Thorley Winston wins the complacency award here with (“which would never be tolerated from an undergraduate at my school by any of the profs I’ve had) as evidenced in the except Chris Bertram is typical of Sen.” Yeah, I’ll bet you’ve been cranking out Microeconomics papers 10 times better than that crap Sen puts out.

BTW, keep posting on the book. It’s great and maybe a real discussion could form.

David wrote:

Thorley Winston wins the complacency award here with (“which would never be tolerated from an undergraduate at my school by any of the profs I’ve had) as evidenced in the except Chris Bertram is typical of Sen.” Yeah, I’ll bet you’ve been cranking out Microeconomics papers 10 times better than that crap Sen puts out.

So I take it then that your professors would have been okay with comparing two very dissimilar groups (rather than two more similar groups such as blacks from the UK and US) without holding the other variables constant?

Mine would not have been okay with this and as I said before, I am going to wait until I have had a chance to read the book before trying to decide if this sort of sloppy “analysis” is typical of his work or if this is an aberration.

sorry, that sounds like the Atkins diet. I know what you mean though. There’s a very popular local grocery store chain in my area that has a special separate branch for the innercity area. The whiter branch is sparkling with lots of service and pretty produce, the blacker branch is hella cheap and hella awful. It’s depressing. Unfortunately, a friend who works for this company told me that when they tried to improve one of the innercity branches, the people stopped coming and it went out of business. It’s cheaper to buy a .99 carton of Ring Dings than it is to purchase a bag of apples. Essentially, the people in the area got priced out of the store. That’s why the produce in that store you saw looks like crap. They can sell it for cheaper. A junkfood tax coupled with ridding ourselves of agriculture subsidies would make healthy food more affordable for the poor, who are more susceptible to obesity, no matter their skin color.

I must say I’m even more confused this time. Chris Bertram, to whom are you referring? If I used the term “out of wedlock”, it is because the term “illegitimate” is cruel. No child is “illegitimate”.

Signed,
A slightly conservative (“Don’t have kids out of wedlock!”,) slightly liberal(“Gay marriage? Go for it!”) chica who is slightly confused.

vinteuil, blacks even have lower test scores and grades than whites of similar income levels, even in the same schools and classrooms. It’s very perplexing. There’s a test score hierarchy: Asians, then whites, then hispanics, then blacks. There are some very controversial books on teh matter.

Okay first off this is a complicated issue; and Sen’s work can be questioned on a number of grounds, unfortunately none of the ones put forward here really number amongst them. The technical aspects of links between nutrition and poverty from this angle are covered in SR Osmani’s “Nutrition and Poverty” and the excellent collection of essays edited by KR Krishnaswamy “Poverty and Income Distribution” which explore these topics at some length. The whole issue about consumption baskets is a valid one but as far as possible differences can be adjusted for and by large have been, any discrepancies that remain are statistically small ones; so I doubt whether Sen’s comparison will suddenly become flawed because African Americans are all eating fried chicken while Malayalees have fantastically healthy diets or sthg. It should also be remembered that such large variations in life expectancy can’t be put down to dietary patterns alone; as much of the rest of India has similar intakes to Keralites, but only a few other states do as well – one needs to ask that if the Indian diet was so much healthier than African Americans why morbidity rates are so much higher in other Indian states like Madhya Pradesh or Orissa. Obviously diet is not the most important factor at work here. Also the implicit reason is that for some reason Indian and Malayalee food is much healthier than what African Americans eat – why this should be so is not explained it is simply asserted. The WFP had a conference earlier this year that has had fairly large-sampled surveys on family nutrition and infant eating patterns across various states; these reveal some disturbing trends such as the high level of anaemia and vitamin deficiency amongst those under 5 and pregnant women and also the relatively high morbidity rates. Even states praised for their HDI performance like Kerala and Tamil Nadu do badly while some northern ones do better; no clear patter emerges as to what can explain these difference as it depends on a number of complex factors most of them to do with local state policy, agrarian structure, wage and income distributions and ecological conditions. Diet again was not found to be a significant factor.

It should be kept in mind that Sen is just extending the work he did a decade ago with Jean Dreze on comparing more progressive states like Kerala with more backward BIMARU ones in northern India; while he chooses to place a heavy stress on state developmental policy; he has ignored other important factors like the different nature of caste politics, a more matriarchal pattern of family structures and rather different historical integration into the regional agricultural economy which are also important explanatory variables. As for the reason why he uses Kerala as an example; it should be quite obvious: apart from the fact that he is an Indian and heavily influenced by developments in this country; the so-called ‘Kerala miracle’ has attracted the attention of numerous social scientists for its ability to combine poor economic growth with high levels of social development; explaining this paradox has become a sort of cottage industry amongst South Asianists and everybody refers to it in the sphere of poverty/development economics in Asia. Being one of the pioneers in the field and who has done the most work on this, it would be surprising if Sen left out copious references to Kerala in any of his major works on the issue.

This thread can serve as a sort of metaphor of the contemporary American political process. (Yes, I know that this is a Brit site).

Can a bunch of nice academic liberals compete with a bunch of shit-flinging iron-butt trolls? Is it possible to have intelligent discussions about a book with stubborn, ignorant people who haven’t read the book? I’ll leave the answer to the reader.

I came here with two things in mind.

First: “I really want to read this book. What do the CT people have to say about it? Almost every one of them knows more than I do about economics.”

Second: “I wonder if Sen has acquired a lynch mob yet?”

The second question has been answered. In my opinion, CT should ban the moronic brownshirt fucks.

But of course, that would be Stalinist. And certainly we can’t be Stalinists; the message of Orwell is that nice people should be passive all the time. So y’all just oughta let the MBF’s ruin every thread you ever put up.

“I recalled near the beginning of this long thread that American Indians are across the board the most disadvantaged ethnic group in America, and no-one gives a damn.”
Or it could be that not many people (myself included) really know much about the situation regarding Native Americans, but it clearly makes you feel morally superior to other people to think that.

“The possibility has been mentioned that “stupid people make bad choices.” “
You’ll have to talk to Chris Bertram about that one.

“And certainly we can’t be Stalinists; the message of Orwell is that nice people should be passive all the time.”
This is an Orwell I have never encountered. He/she must be different from George Orwell.

“So y’all just oughta let the MBF’s ruin every thread you ever put up.”
Yes, because dissent and an actual attempt at debate just ruins everything.

Chris, if I can pull you away from shrieking about ‘righties’ (and you moan about ad hominem comments!)for a moment, I’ve a comment and a question.
The comment is, I find your ‘stupid people making bad choices’ infinitely more offensive than the original ‘people making stupid choices.’ I can identify myself among the people who make stupid choices that lower their income, health, both at the time of decision later on, but not among your (quite frankly offensive and dehumanising) ‘stupid people’.
My question is, does Sen comment on the direction in which the life expectancy of the groups he talks about is going? I have a professional interest in the answer, as I am involved in the Surestart programme in London, which among other things is trying to increase the use of breastfeeding and thus raise the nutritional bar for very young children. (It was at a ‘shocking’, seeing as you like the word so much, level to begin with. We’ve doubled it in our area in the last 18 months.)So – how are blacks doing in the US compared with say, thirty years ago? Where are the numbers going? Up? Down?