Human development theory

Human development is the science that seeks to understand how and why the people of all ages and circumstances change or remain the same over time. It involves studies of the human condition with its core being the capability approach. The inequality adjusted Human Development Index is used as a way of measuring actual progress in human development by the United Nations. It is an alternative approach to a single focus on economic growth, and focused more on social justice, as a way of understanding progress. Human development is the science that seeks to understand how and why the people of all ages and circumstances change or remain the same over time. It involves studies of the human condition with its core being the capability approach. The inequality adjusted Human Development Index is used as a way of measuring actual progress in human development by the United Nations. It is an alternative approach to a single focus on economic growth, and focused more on social justice, as a way of understanding progress. The term human development may be defined as an expansion of human capabilities, a widening of choices, 'an enhancement of freedom, and a fulfilment of human rights. This also simply means developing mentally, socially through growing and experiencing things in your life and learning new things. The United Nations Development Programme defines human development as 'the process of enlarging people's choices,' said choices allowing them to 'lead a long and healthy life, to be educated, to enjoy a decent standard of living,' as well as 'political freedom, other guaranteed human rights and various ingredients of self-respect.' Development concerns expanding the choices people have, to lead lives that they value, and improving the human condition so that people have the chance to lead full lives. Thus, human development is about much more than economic growth, which is only a means of enlarging people's choices. Fundamental to enlarging these choices is building human capabilities—the range of things that people can do or be in life. Capabilities are 'the substantive freedoms enjoys to lead the kind of life reason to value'. Human development disperses the concentration of the distribution of goods and services underprivileged people need and center its ideas on human decisions. By investing in people, we enable growth and empower people to pursue many different life paths, thus developing human capabilities. The most basic capabilities for human development are to lead long and healthy lives, be knowledgeable (i.e., educated), have access to resources and social services needed for a decent standard of living, and be able to participate in the life of the community. Without these, many choices are not available, and many opportunities in life remain inaccessible. An abstract illustration of human capability is a bicycle. A bicycle itself is a resource—a mode of transportation. If the person who owns a bicycle is unable to ride it (due to a lack of balance or knowledge), the bicycle is useless to her or him as transportation and loses its functioning. If a person owns a bicycle and has the ability to ride a bicycle, they have the capability of riding to a friend's house, a local store, or a great number of other places. This capability would (presumably) increase their value of life and expand their choices. A person, therefore, needs both resources and the ability to use them to pursue their capabilities. This is one example of how different resources or skills can contribute to human capability. This way of looking at development, often forgotten in the immediate concern with accumulating commodities and financial wealth, is not new. Philosophers, economists, and political leaders emphasized human well being as the purpose, or the end, of development. As Aristotle said in ancient Greece, 'Wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking, for it is merely useful for the sake of something else.' Human Development Theory has roots in ancient philosophy and early economic theory. Aristotle noted that 'Wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking, for it is merely useful for something else', and Adam Smith and Karl Marx were concerned with human capabilities. The theory grew in importance in the 1980s with the work of Amartya Sen and his Human Capabilities perspective, which played a role in his receiving the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics. Notable early active economists who formulated the modern concept of human development theory were Mahbub ul Haq, Üner Kirdar, and Amartya Sen. The Human Development Index developed for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) stems from this early research. In 2000, Sen and Sudhir Anand published a notable development of the theory to address issues in sustainability. Martha Nussbaum's publications in the late 1990s and 2000s pushed theorists to pay more attention to the human in the theory, and particularly to human emotion. A separate approach stems in part from needs theories of psychology which in part started with Abraham Maslow (1968). Representative of these are the Human-Scale Development approach developed by Manfred Max-Neef in the mid-to-late 1980s which addresses human needs and satisfiers which are more or less static across time and context. Anthropologists and sociologists have also challenged perspectives on Human Development Theory that stem from neoclassical economics. Examples of scholars include, Diane Elson, Raymond Apthorpe, Irene van Staveren, and Ananta Giri. Elson (1997) proposes that human development should move towards a more diverse approach to individual incentives. This will involve a shift from seeing people as agents in control of their choices selecting from a set of possibilities utilizing human capital as one of many assets. Instead, theorists should see people as having more mutable choices influenced by social structures and changeable capacities and using a humanistic approach to theory including factors relating to an individual's culture, age, gender, and family roles. These extensions express a dynamic approach to the theory, a dynamism that has been advocated by Ul Haq and Sen, in spite of the implicit criticism of those two figures. One measure of human development is the Human Development Index (HDI), formulated by the United Nations Development Programme. The index encompasses statistics such as life expectancy at birth, an education index (calculated using mean years of schooling and expected years of schooling), and gross national income per capita. Though this index does not capture every aspect that contributes to human capability, it is a standardized way of quantifying human capability across nations and communities. Aspects that could be left out of the calculations include incomes that are unable to be quantified, such as staying home to raise children or bartering goods/services, as well as individuals' perceptions of their own well being. Other measures of human development include the Human Poverty Index (HPI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure. It measures many aspects of development.