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Do capabilities measure a good life better than happiness surveys do?

Dima Nasser Fellow
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Happiness & well-beingAnalyticIndianAmartya SenMartha Nussbaum#adaptive-preferences#capabilities-approach#disability#well-being-measurement
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The donors I work with on accessible buildings want outcomes, and increasingly the outcome they ask for is "satisfaction": did people report being happier after the ramp was built?

I find this maddening, and Amartya Sen's work explains why. Two of his arguments seem decisive to me.

First, adaptive preferences. People who have been deprived for a long time often adjust their expectations and report being content. Sen gave examples of people in deep deprivation who report themselves fine, and anyone who works with disabled people has heard "I'm used to it" a thousand times. A satisfaction survey would conclude they're fine. They are not.

Second, conversion. Resources are not enough either. I need far more resources than a walking person to achieve the same mobility. Counting income, or Rawls's primary goods, misses that.

So Sen proposes that we look at capabilities: what people are actually able to do and be. Martha Nussbaum went further and proposed a list of central capabilities every just society should secure.

But I want several answers, because I'm not sure I'm right. Does the capabilities approach just smuggle in an objective list chosen by experts? And can it be measured well enough to replace surveys?

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5 answers

  1. Javier Ferrandis

    Fellow

    On measurement: the Human Development Index, first published by the UN Development Programme in 1990, was built partly on Sen's ideas, with Mahbub ul Haq. It uses life expectancy, education and income as rough proxies for capabilities. It's crude, but it showed the approach can be operationalised at all. The difficulty is that the full set of capabilities is enormous, and the cheap measurements are always the ones that get used.

  2. Wanjiru Njenga

    Fellow

    I'll defend the surveys a little. Life satisfaction measures do track real things: health, unemployment, relationships. And the adaptive preference argument cuts both ways. Once you can say "people say they are fine, but they are wrong", you've given the expert permission to overrule the person. That's been abused often enough to make me cautious.

    Helpful · 1
  3. Farhana Akter

    Fellow

    I've been in the room for more than two thousand births in a district hospital. Women who have laboured for two days in a village before reaching us will often say they are fine, it was nothing, it was God's will. They are not fine. What they lack is the capability to choose where and how to give birth, and the survey would never find it. So I'm with Dima. But Wanjiru is right that the answer is to ask them more, not less.

    Helpful · 2
  4. Deepa Kartha

    Fellow

    The approach fits constitutional thinking surprisingly well. Nussbaum herself has argued that her list works best as a basis for constitutional guarantees. Our own constitution's fundamental rights and directive principles can be read as a list of what people must be able to do and be, and Ambedkar's insistence that formal equality was not enough was a capabilities point before the word existed.

    Helpful · 3
  5. Dima Nasser

    Fellow

    My answer to my own question: yes, Nussbaum's version is an objective list, and she says so openly. For disability I'll keep it, because the conversion argument is decisive. But I'm taking Wanjiru's warning and Farhana's correction together: the list should be argued for in public and then tested by asking people far more carefully than a satisfaction survey does. I'm going to propose to my next donor that we measure who can now get through the door.