Thought Patterns
by Emanuel
Creativity as freedom does not here imply the liberty of artistic expression but something more profoundly linked to human development and how one might affect the other, or vice-versa. The thoughts here gathered spawned from two books I read recently and, although unseemly related at first, both tackled the topic of development with some noteworthy similarities.
The objective of development should be to increase the scope of human choice, not only in the economic theory sense of having more purchasing options but more importantly in allowing for greater capability to choose. This nuance of freedom as a mean and not only as an end of development is tackled in length by Amartya Sen, Nobel prize winner for his work in welfare economics, in his ‘Development as Freedom‘ where he details his insightful notion of capabilities, which can also be described in other words as the removal of unfreedoms.
His amazing work is part-philosophy, part-economics yet neither in their more traditional sense as it is neither filed with economic formulas nor overly-dense with philosophical complexities. It offers new ways to look at several topics including inequality, and therefore poverty, not simply as an economic analysis of unequal income distribution, as it is often narrowly constrained to in much of economics, but as a deprivation of capabilities. Sen discusses the ‘significant transformation that has occurred in recent years in giving greater recognition to the role of human capital‘ and this relation with human capability, ‘a difference that relates to some extent to the distinction between means and ends‘. This nuance highlights the why of development rather than simply the how, since development is here understood ‘as the expansion of human capability to lead more worthwhile and more free lives’.
Although on a different level, substantive opportunities arising from development are also discussed by Richard Florida in his ‘Cities and the Creative Class’ as his new way of looking at human capital, creative capital in this case, is at the ‘core of his message as the ultimate source of economic growth’. I’ll risk over-simplifying his findings by summarizing that quality economic growth is fundamentally linked to the location decisions of the Creative Class, decisions that are not driven by ‘traditional values’ but rather by the third T of his 3 T’s of economic development: Tolerance (the other two are Technology & Talent).
Tolerance in this context is the ‘low barrier to entry’ into these communities and the detailed analysis presented in his work ‘makes the process quite clear: talent migrates to regions possessing high degrees of social openness, diversity and creativity’. Economic growth follows. And inequality. Indeed, another of the findings of his work is that these dynamic regions also have greater income and social inequality. We find ourselves confronted with inequality as a surprising externality of tolerance.
Florida rightly indentifies that‘ understanding this process of adaptation’ and developing ‘future models of social organization that better align economic development with further development of all human potential’ need to be the central theme of further research.
These two books offer very interesting view points on the transformation of values and how attention to human capital, in similar yet not identical forms (creativity & capability), as a mean rather than and end is a critical and necessary, although not sufficient, ingredient of development (freedom).
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Vancouver Blues | Thought Patterns
on February 19, 2009 at 13:03
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