Creating Capabilities

Today, I listened to a podcast that the authors of the book "Freakonomics" put together. In the one I listened to today they interviewed a woman named Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher who teaches law at the University of Chicago. In the interview, they mentioned a book she had recently written titled "Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach." My first step was to see if this book was on my Kindle yet, which it wasn't, so it was quickly followed by my second step of going to Barnes and Noble to see if they had a copy. They did in fact and so I sat down a little over an hour ago to read the first chapter.

So far, it's a spectacular read and one that is of particular interest to me as I have a growing passion for international development growing within me. The only problem I have with it so far is that it was $23 and not available on my Kindle yet for half price like most other books are. Tomorrow I'm going to see if I can get it at the library in town.

The human development approach or the capabilities approach as it is sometimes referred to is a paradigm shift in the way we think about the health of a nation. In the past, and something that is still widely used today to measure the health of nations, is GDP, or gross domestic product. The theory goes that if your GDP is increasing then the overall economic well being of all people is increasing as well. What economists have learned over the last couple of decades is that this is a terribly unsatisfactory way of measuring the overall well-being of people within a society. One quote from the book is "The human development approach begins with a very simple question: What are people actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them?" Rather than just ask a generic question as to what a nation is able to produce, what are the people within that nation able to be and to do is a much better question to start from.

The human development index as used by the United Nations Development Programme does include GDP, but it also includes things like access to education and access to healthcare. What good is it to make all the money in the world if it doesn't translate into better access to education and healthcare for all members of a society? Sure, they may have access to a job now, but what good is that job if there's no room for moving up or providing an affordable education for your kids? They gave the example of a state within India offering a lunch at school as an incentive to get parents to send their kids to school. The reason for this was that parents felt they wouldn't lose that much economic output from their children if they were provided a meal at school; they would have less to pay for overall if the lunch was provided for free. She also mentioned in the book this one particular state in India that did a great job at providing education to all of its children. It almost has a 100% literacy rate, which is phenomenal in a country where just 75% of the men are literate and a paltry 53% of women are literate.

The book also talked about how development simply means making life better. While most people talk about developing economies as referring to poorer economies; all countries are in this sense developing, or making life better. Even the richest countries have room to improve the well-being of the people within their societies. To me, that approach makes way more sense than automatically separating rich from poor countries and gives us all a starting place for room to improve. No society is perfect, despite what nationalists within any country might tell you. We must consistently work for a better life for all people, not just those at the top. I recently posted a quote from a blog that stated Congress was currently considering a bill that cut a little over $800 million more from the Women, Infants, and Children program. To put that in perspective, that's about a week's worth of revenue that could have been collected if we let the tax cuts expire just on the millionaires in this country. You can't do or be much if you don't have adequate access to good nutrition.

In my opinion, our country has a long way to go in terms of the human development index. In the interview of the podcast they said we're number four, but last year we were number twelve. So many people believe the United States is the best country in the world, but I have to disagree with that. No country is perfect, but even after that I don't think our's is the best. We need to have more equal access to healthcare and a better way for the common man to access tertiary education if we want to say we're truly the best, not to mention a whole host of other things we don't do well. That being said, it starts on an individual level; what can I do to better the lives of the people around me? After reading the first chapter in this book, one thought that occurred to me was that I could start by becoming a better teacher. If I stay in teaching I will impact countless lives, either for better or worse. That is a tremendous responsibility, and one that I'm just now starting to realize the severity of. Part of me really wants to start a business someday to simply provide people with jobs, but maybe I'd be better off at developing my gifts as a teacher to better society that way. I don't think there will ever be a shortage of need for good teachers within our society. So that's it, that's what I'm going to contribute to the betterment of society; an education that enriches young people's lives and sets them on the path to success.