Development can be seen as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. Although some people regard some indexes like the growth of GNP as a direct message of a country’s development, it is the real freedoms(for example, the opportunity to receive basic education) that allow and contribute to the growth of GNP and also many other forms of development.
Seeing development as a process of expanding real freedoms is an expansive view of development. This is because freedom is a constituent component of development and is both the means and the ends that make development important. The narrower view is to see it as only the means like modernization, industrialization, or technological advance.
The most intrinsic source of unfreedom is economic poverty which means that people who suffer from economic poverty lack the means necessary to meet basic personal needs and sometimes can not even survive let alone thrive. Also, another source is the neglect of public facilities and social care which includes the absence of health care and educational facilities. Thirdly, the denial of political liberty and basic civil rights will also take a toll on a country’s development. To be more specific, the author mentions “Lee thesis” which denies the importance of rights. This thesis can be proved to be wrong easily according to many historical records such as the deadliest famine in history, the great Chinese famines 1959-1961, took place because of the drastic changes to farming policy and prohibition of farm ownership.
Firstly, the author believes that human agencies can only be effectively achieved with freedom. Without freedom, people won’t have any opportunity to make their own decision and even being a active player or contributor. Thus, free agency itself is a “constitutive” part of development. Secondly, free and sustainable agency can also strenthen the other free agencies which is a positive feedback. For example, economic freedom can strenthen the social freedom. Social freedom in turn can also boost the achievement of the economic freedom. Therefore, freedom is not only a ends but also a means and a process of the development.
Being generically against markets is like to aginast the normal way for human to live. The author compares this to freedom to exchange words which has a basic role in social living. Planned economy which refers to a type of economic system that all kinds of economic activity is under planning can allow a country to survive and thrive at a short period without unanticipated emergencies and disasters. Thus, allowing market, an invisible hands, to play its role is important in boost economic growth and overall development.
Kader Mia was a Muslim but been knifed because he went to Hindu area to search for a job that he could earn his living and support his family. The penalty of his economic unfreedom in the form of extreme poverty was death. This is one example that the author provides to illustrate one type of unfreedom can breed another kind.
French raionalist Condorcet proposed that fertility rate would decrease with the increase of freedom people enjoy which will restrain population growth. His contemporary Thomas Robert Malthus proposed an opposite statement that beside the limitation of the necessaries of life, fertility rate wouldn’t decrease from the view of economic compulsion.