Functionings and Capabilities
The aspect of informational parsimony may have led Sen, in collaboration with Mahbub ul Haq, to devise and construct the so-called human development index. This index, as a rival to gross domestic product (GDP), was meant to serve as a more humane measure of development than a purely income-based (or commodity-based) measure like GDP, to reflect the “life chances” people have.
The idea was to divert attention from the single-focus GDP indicator to aspects that are fundamental ingredients of the freedom of living and well-being. For Sen, what defines the latter are the functionings of a person, his or her achievements and not just the accumulation of primary goods as in Rawls’ (1971) Theory of Justice. What a person manages to do or to be (for example, being well-nourished, well-clothed, taking part in community life, and having access to medical care) are functionings that are important for a person’s life. The total number of functionings that are available to a person or household define the advantages of that person, his or her real opportunities. According to Sen (1985), these make up the person’s capability set.Preferences over outcomes such as commodity allocations miss what is of primary importance, namely, that individuals are deeply concerned with what substantive opportunities are available to them. The opportunity set that is offered to an individual is as important to evaluating his freedom as is his autonomy in making decisions and his freedom from interferences imposed by others. Of course, measuring an individual’s freedom and the capability set available to him is not an easy task - there is both a measurement problem and a shortage of reliable data - but it should be done (and has already been attempted by a number of researchers). That the GDP as a measure for well-being is largely unsatisfactory had already been demonstrated by Sen in his book Commodities and Capabilities from 1985 where he showed that, at that time, India and China were close together in terms of gross national product per head but quite far apart in terms of criteria such as the ability to live long, the ability to avoid mortality during infancy and childhood, and the ability to read and write. All of these are of utmost importance for developing countries in particular.