Inequality Reexamined

"That you can’t just be flat-earth about this. You can’t just say if the Gini coefficient – a measure of inequality – is moving very rapidly and you want to get it back to a tolerable level, then all you need to do is tax the rich and give the proceeds to the poor. Simple acts of redistribution like that are a necessary but insufficient condition, because you’ve also got to equip the poor to get themselves out of their position. So it’s not just about poverty relief, and that is where Sen is so efficient. He puts on the table a much more tolerable statement than simply, ‘Everyone should be equal.’ No one believes that, because I can’t be equal to a brilliant musician or mathematician, or someone who can run the 100 metres in close to nine seconds. Those apologists are out there, but once you think about the whole basket of things that everyone needs you quickly get yourself into a fix. What works much better is to say that everybody has the right to live a life of value, and it is the job of all of us to create the institutions and processes that permit people to develop their capabilities wherever they are on the rungs of intellectual or physical capability. To have the opportunity, given what they’ve got, to develop themselves to be the best they can be. But you can’t have freedom, Amartya says, if you can’t read and write. Of course this very much comes out of his experience of India , where elections are manipulated because so many of the peasants who vote can’t even read the ballot paper. What kind of a democracy is that? You have to be able to weigh what competing candidates are saying, and you must be able to bring your case to a court of law if there’s been an injustice. You must have these capabilities in order to operationalise freedom. The freedom just of having liberty to do whatever you like is a utopian notion. There are always internal constraints on what you can do, as John Stuart Mill has argued. One has to have the capability to make the most of any opportunities that freedom might provide. Freedom alone is an empty promise. Yes, that is very much the thesis of the book. And it leads onto the next one."