This is a fairly lengthy article (~1,800 words) so I'm just going to post a few short snippets here. The article talks a little bit about how Sen's ideas are becoming influential in the Labour Party in the UK. I wish the Democrats could start seeing how Sen's ideas relate to inequality and economics in the U.S. too. Then we might finally have a Democratic Party that is actually capable of doing things like getting meaningful healthcare reform.
“Responsible adults," Sen wrote, "must be in charge of their own well-being; it is for them to decide how to use their capabilities. But the capabilities that a person does actually have (and not merely theoretically enjoys) depend on the nature of social arrangements, which can be crucial for individual freedoms. And there the state and the society cannot escape responsibility."
Redistribution of income and resources matters, on this view, but so does what people are able to do with those resources - their “capabilities", in other words, among which Sen lists literacy, nutrition and the "power to participate in the social life of the community". You can increase people's income without thereby enhancing their power or ability to choose for themselves the kinds of lives they aspire to lead.
This latter point is also a reminder of something that Purnell and other proponents of the capabilities approach on the centre-left sometimes forget: there may be more to inequality than disparities in income distribution, but this does not mean that people's ability to choose for themselves the lives they wish to lead is not drastically curtailed by their economic circumstances - by what they earn and what they own. If we are to take the story Sen tells about Kader Mia seriously, then the conclusion we ought to draw is not that we should forget about income inequality. It's rather that people want income and resources not for their own sake, but in order to do things with them.
Mainstream economists who claim to be upholding the legacy of Smith are committed to a view of economic behaviour which, if Sen is right, the author of The Wealth of Nations never held. "Rational economic man, in the narrow mainstream sense, is close to being a social moron," he says. "The inability to think about other people is not a proof of reason - it's the absence of reason! But the kind of self-satisfied, self-interest maximisation that Smith demolished in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, came back in the form of rational choice theory, and it's only now that we're getting away from it, though many of us have been sceptical of it for a very long time."
