EA - The Capability Approach by ryancbriggs

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Capability Approach, published by ryancbriggs on January 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This post outlines the capability approach to thinking about human welfare. I think that this approach, while very popular in international development, is neglected in EA. While the capability approach has problems, I think that it provides a better approach to thinking about improving human welfare than approaches based on measuring happiness or subjective wellbeing (SWB) or approaches based on preference satisfaction. Finally, even if you disagree that the capability approach is best, I think this post will be useful to you because it may clarify why many people and organizations in the international development or global health space take the positions that they do. I will be drawing heavily on the work of Amartya Sen, but I will often not be citing specific texts because I’m an academic and getting to write without careful citations is thrilling.This post will have four sections. First, I will describe the capability approach. Second, I will give some simple examples that illustrate why I think that aiming to maximize capabilities is the best way to do good for people. I’ll frame these examples in opposition to other common approaches, but my goal here is mostly constructive and to argue for the capability approach rather than against maximizing, for example, SWB. Third, I will describe what I see as the largest downsides to the capability approach as well as possible responses to these downsides. Fourth and finally, I will explain my weakly-held theory that a lot of the ways that global health or international development organizations, including GiveWell, behave owes to the deep (but often unrecognized) influence of the capability approach on their thought.The capability approachThe fundamental unit of the value in the capability approach is a functioning, which is anything that you can be or do. Eating is a functioning. Being an EA is a functioning. Other functionings include: being a doctor, running, practicing Judaism, sleeping, and being a parent. Capabilities are options to be or do a functioning. The goal of the capability approach is not to maximize the number of capabilities available to people, it is instead to maximize the number of sets of capabilities. The notion here is that if you maximized simply the number of capabilities then you might enable someone to be: a parent or employed outside the home. But someone might want to do both. If you’re focusing on maximizing the number of sets of capabilities then you’ll end up with: parent, employed, both parent and employed, and neither.The simple beauty of this setup is that it is aiming to maximize the options that people have available to them, from which they then select the group of functionings that they want most. This is why one great book about this approach is entitled “Development as Freedom.” The argument is that development is the process of expanding capabilities, or individual freedom to live the kind of life that you want.I will come to criticisms later on, but one thing people may note is that this approach will lead to a lot of sets of capabilities and we will need some way to rank them or condense the list. In theory, we would want to do this based on how much people value each capability set. I will discuss this issue in more detail in the third section.Examples of why I love the capability approachHere I’ll lay out a few examples that show why I think the capability approach is the best way to think about improving human welfare.First, in opposition to preference-satisfaction approaches, the capability approach values options not taken. I think this accords with most of our intuitions, and that it takes real work for economics to train it out of people. Here are two examples...