Lelo Nxumalo

For a while it seemed self evident to me that income growth precedes human development, and that nations should focus on engineering growth before focusing on the distributional aspects (think China). Without even trying I implicitly rationalized the need for benevolent dictators to champion rapid economic development ( See here ). Even after reading Amartya Sen's seminal work Development as Freedom , which argues that this so-called "Lee thesis" (attributed to Singapore's former leader Lee Kuan Yew) lacks comprehensive inter country evidence, I found myself leaning toward what William Easterly calls "conscious planning" in his latest book. In this post, however, I confront this bias of mine and conclude that growth ought to be judged by the extent to which it facilitates the acquisition of what Sen calls individual agency. Individual agency is practically manifested as the ability to escape premature mortality, preventable morbidity, or involuntary st...