Will There Be Any Hope For The Poor?

By Amartya Sen

Progress is more plausibly judged by the reduction of deprivation than by the further enrichment of the opulent. We cannot really have an adequate understanding of the future without some view about how well the lives of the poor can be expected to go. Is there, then, hope for the poor? To answer this question, we need an understanding of who should count as poor. Some types of poverty are easy enough to identify. There is no way of escaping immediate diagnosis when faced with what King Lear called "loop'd and window'd raggedness."

But as Lear also well knew, deprivation can take many different forms. Economic poverty is not the only kind of poverty that impoverishes human lives.

In identifying the poor, we must take note, for example, of the deprivation of citizens of authoritarian regimes, from Sudan to North Korea, who are denied political liberty and civil rights. And we must try to understand the predicament of subjugated homemakers in male-dominated societies, common in Asia and Africa, who lead a life of unquestioning docility; of the illiterate children who are offered no opportunity of schooling; of minority groups who have to keep their voices muffled for fear of the tyranny of the majority; and of dissidents who are imprisoned and sometimes tortured by the guardians of "law and order."

Those who like to keep issues straight and narrow tend to resist broadening the definition of poverty. Why not just look at incomes and ask a question like "How many people live on less than, say, $1 or $2 a day?" This narrow analysis then takes the uncomplicated form of predicting trends and counting the poor. It is a cheap way of telling "the future of the poor." But human lives can be impoverished in many different ways. Politically unfree citizens--whether rich or poor--are deprived of a basic constituent of good living. The same applies to such social deprivations as illiteracy, lack of health care, unequal attention to the elementary interests of women and of young girls and so on.

Nor can we ignore the linkages between economic, political and social deprivations. Advocates of authoritarianism ask a misleading question, "Is political freedom conducive to development?," overlooking the fact that political freedom itself is part of development. In answer to the wrongly asked question, they respond with a wrongly given answer: "Growth rates of GDP are higher in nondemocratic countries than in democratic ones." There is no confirmation of this oft-repeated belief in extensive empirical studies. Sure, South Korea might have grown fast enough before the re-establishment of democracy, but not so the less democratic North Korea. And democratic Botswana certainly grew much faster than authoritarian Ethiopia or Ghana.

Furthermore, the growth of GDP is not the only economic issue of importance. Reducing political deprivation can indeed help diminish economic vulnerability. There is, for example, considerable evidence that democracy as well as political and civil rights can help generate economic security, by giving voice to the deprived and the vulnerable. The fact that famines occur only under authoritarian rule and military dominance, and that no major famine has ever occurred in an open, democratic country (even when the country is very poor), merely illustrates the most elementary aspect of the protective power of political liberty. Though Indian democracy has many imperfections, the political incentives generated by it have nevertheless been adequate to eliminate major famines right from the time of independence in 1947 (the last famine was four years before that, in 1943, which I witnessed as a child).

In contrast, China, which did much better than India in several respects, such as the spread of basic education and health care, had the largest famine in recorded history in 1959-62, with a death toll that has been estimated at 30 million. Right now, the three countries with continuing famines are also in the grip of authoritarian and military rule: North Korea, Ethiopia and Sudan.

In fact, the protective power of democracy in providing security is much more extensive than famine prevention. The poor in booming South Korea or Indonesia may not have given much thought to democracy when the economic fortunes of all seemed to go up and up together. But when the economic crises came (and divided they fell), political and civil rights were desperately missed by those whose economic means and lives were unusually battered. Democracy has become a central issue in these countries now: in South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and elsewhere.

Democracy, which is valuable in its own right, may not be especially effective economically all the time, but it comes into its own when a crisis threatens and the economically dispossessed need the voice that democracy gives them. Among the lessons of the Asian economic crisis is the importance of social safety nets, democratic rights and political voice. Political deprivation can reinforce economic destitution.

To look at a different type of interconnection, there is plenty of evidence from the positive experience of East and Southeast Asia that the removal of social deprivation can be very influential in stimulating economic growth and sharing the fruits of growth more evenly. If India went wrong, the fault lay not only in the suppression of market opportunities but also in the lack of attention to social poverty (for example, in the form of widespread illiteracy). India has reaped as it has sown by cultivating higher education (its booming software industry is only one effect of that), but the country has paid dearly for leaving nearly half the people illiterate. Social poverty has helped perpetuate economic poverty as well.

If I am hopeful about the future, it is because I see the increasingly vocal demand for democracy in the world and the growing understanding of the need for social justice. Democracy is recovering some of its lost ground in Asia, Latin America and even Africa. Gender equity and basic education are beginning to receive more attention in India, Bangladesh and elsewhere. I am not unconditionally hopeful, but certainly conditionally so. We must, however, take a sufficiently broad view of poverty to make sure the poor have reason for hope.

Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998. His most recent book is Development as Freedom