The Capability — The Utility, Plate xi

The volume has spent itself in pursuit of a single quantity, and has come away empty-handed five times over. The want was named a substance and the scale to weigh it never arrived; it was pared to a ranking that could no longer say by how much; it was rebuilt from choice and turned out to be the choosing wearing the wanting's clothes; it was set, one person's against another's, and found to admit no common scale; and the instrument dreamed to read it off the brain proved, even granted, to be a witness against the theory rather than its rescue. At every turn the trouble was the same — the want is hidden, private, and immeasurable — and at every turn the response was to hunt the want by some subtler means. Two plates back, the argument stopped hunting. The flagship, having shown one person's satisfaction could not be laid against another's, named the exit its own architect had come to recommend; the plate on the hedonimeter, having granted the instrument and found it wanting, pointed the same way. Both pointed here. For the deepest answer to a quantity that cannot be measured may not be a better measurement at all, but the discovery that the quantity was never the one that mattered. The plate's question is that heresy stated plainly: what if the thing worth measuring was never the want?

This is the exit Amartya Sen proposed, and it is a change not of instrument but of object. Do not ask, of a person, how much utility they have — how much pleasure, or satisfaction, or fulfilled desire. Ask instead what they are able to do and to be: whether they are adequately nourished, in good health, able to read and to reckon, able to move about and to take part in the life of their community, able to appear among their fellows without shame. These doings and beings Sen called functionings — the actual states and activities that make up a life — and the range of them a person is free to achieve he called their capability: not the single life they happen to lead, but the set of lives within their power to lead, the freedom they have over their own being. Advantage, on this view, is not a quantity of feeling lodged in the mind, but a breadth of real options open in the world; not how a life feels from inside, but what a life can be made to hold.¹

1. Sen's exit changes not the instrument but the object. Do not ask how much utility a person has; ask what they are able to do and to be — nourished, healthy, literate, able to move about, to take part, to appear among others without shame. These doings and beings are functionings; the range of them a person is free to achieve is their capability — not the single life led but the set of lives within their power to lead. Advantage is a breadth of real options in the world, not a quantity of feeling in the mind.

The case for the change begins with what is wrong with measuring by the want, and the first thing wrong is that the want bends. A person's sense of what they need, and of how satisfied they are, is not fixed but schooled — by habit, by circumstance, by the long discipline of expecting only what one has learned one may have. The person ground down by deprivation learns, in self-defense, to want less: to take small pleasures in a narrow life, to stop yearning for what was never on offer, to count themselves content because to do otherwise would be to suffer twice. Measured by satisfaction, such a person registers as well-off — their wants are modest and largely met, their dissatisfaction low — and a calculus that reads advantage off the want will pronounce them so. But they are not well-off; they have merely cut their wanting to the size of their cage. This is the scandal that the utility measure cannot escape and the capability measure is built to expose: that the most deprived may report the least unmet desire, because deprivation teaches desire to be quiet. To ask what a person can do and be, rather than how much they want or how content they feel, is to refuse to let the adjustment of a person's hopes to their poverty pass as evidence that the poverty does not matter.²

2. The want bends. A person's sense of need and satisfaction is schooled by habit and circumstance: the deprived learn, in self-defense, to want less, to count themselves content. Measured by satisfaction they register as well-off — modest wants, largely met — and a utility calculus pronounces them so. But they have merely cut their wanting to the size of their cage. The scandal the utility measure cannot escape: the most deprived may report the least unmet desire, because deprivation teaches desire to be quiet. The capability measure refuses to let adjusted hopes pass as evidence that poverty does not matter.

⁂

The second thing wrong with the want is that it cannot see freedom, and freedom is half of what advantage means. Consider two people equally and meagrely fed, taking in the same thin ration, registering the same hunger. By any measure built on their condition or their satisfaction they are alike. Yet one is fasting, with a full table he has chosen to refuse, and the other is starving, with no table at all; and these are not the same case, though the want is the same in both. The faster has the capability to eat and declines it; the starving has no such capability. What separates them is not anything in their feeling or their present functioning, which are identical, but the range of what each could do — the options standing open behind the choice. A measure that looks only at the want, or only at the achieved state, collapses the two into one and loses precisely the thing that matters most: that to choose a hardship freely is a wholly different condition from suffering it for want of any alternative. The capability approach keeps them distinct because it measures not only the life led but the lives that could have been led instead — the freedom, and not merely its exercise.³

3. The want cannot see freedom. Two people equally and meagrely fed, the same hunger: by any measure on their condition or satisfaction, alike. Yet one fasts, with a table he has chosen to refuse; the other starves, with no table at all. The faster has the capability to eat and declines it; the starving has none. What separates them is not feeling or present functioning, identical in both, but the range of what each could do. A want-measure collapses the two and loses the thing that matters: choosing a hardship freely differs wholly from suffering it for want of an alternative.

Made a measure, this is the quiet revolution the plate records, for it gives the science of well-being something it had despaired of: a yardstick that points outward, at the conditions of a life, rather than inward, at a feeling no instrument can reach. The standard of living ceases to be a sum of satisfactions or a quantity of goods and becomes the breadth of a person's real freedoms — and development, at the scale of nations, ceases to be the swelling of output and becomes the widening of what people are able to do and to be: to live long, to be schooled, to be spared the diseases that the means exist to prevent. From this conception grew the practice of ranking nations not by their product alone but by the lives their people can actually lead, weighing health and education beside income as the nearest available signs of capability; and the case was made, at book length, that the whole end of development is the expansion of human freedom, of which prosperity is a means and not the measure. The want had sent economics chasing a ghost it could not catch; the capability sent it, instead, to count the doors a life has open — schools and clinics and the vote and the open road — things that can be seen, and built, and compared.⁴

4. Made a measure, the capability gives the science of well-being a yardstick that points outward, at the conditions of a life, not inward at an unreachable feeling. The standard of living becomes the breadth of real freedoms; development, at the scale of nations, the widening of what people can do and be — to live long, to be schooled, to be spared preventable disease. Hence ranking nations by the lives their people can lead, weighing health and education beside income; hence the case that development's whole end is the expansion of freedom, prosperity a means and not the measure.

And so the volume reaches its exit, which is not another door closing on the want but a way out of the house the want had built. Every plate before this one accepted the question economics had posed — how shall we measure utility? — and answered that we cannot, or can only in some crippled form. This plate refuses the question. It holds that the long failure to measure the want was not a defeat to be mourned but a clue to be read: that a quantity which forever slips the instrument, which bends to circumstance and hides from comparison and dissolves under inspection into the choosing it was meant to explain, may be telling us, by its very elusiveness, that it was never the right quantity.⁵ Put down the want, the plate says, and pick up the life — not the satisfaction a person feels, which is private and pliable and unreadable, but the range of what a person can be, which is public and stubborn and plain. The ghost in the machine is not caught here; it is, at last, dismissed, and the question that has run beneath every plate — how much does a person want? — gives way to the one the want was always standing in for: what is a person able to be?

5. The volume's exit is not another door closing on the want but a way out of the house it built. Every plate before accepted the question — how shall we measure utility? — and answered that we cannot, or only in crippled form. This plate refuses the question, reading the long failure as a clue: a quantity that slips every instrument, bends to circumstance, hides from comparison, and dissolves into the choosing may be telling us it was never the right quantity. Put down the want; pick up the life.