There is a deep complementarity between individual agency and social arrangements

Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom (p. xii). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

The exercise of freedom is mediated by values, but the values in turn are influenced by public discussions and social interactions, which are themselves influenced by participatory freedoms.

The success of a society is to be evaluated ... primarily by the substantive freedoms that the members of that society enjoy.

Having greater freedom to do the things one has reason to value...

person?s opportunity to have valuable outcomes.

..unilateral rejection of modernity in favor of tradition by political rulers, or religious authorities, or anthropological admirers of the legacy of the past.

But the relevance of the radically different levels of social preparedness in China and India for widespread market-oriented development is worth noting

The health conditions in China were also much better than in India because of the social commitment of the pre-reform regime to health care as well as education.

The social backwardness of India, with its elitist concentration on higher education and massive negligence of school education, and its substantial neglect of basic health care, left that country poorly prepared for a widely shared economic expansion.

But the relevance of the radically different levels of social preparedness in China and India for widespread market-oriented development is worth noting

The basic point is that the impact of economic growth depends much on how the fruits of economic growth are used. This also helps to explain why some economies, such as South Korea and Taiwan, have been able to raise life expectancy so rapidly through economic growth.

For a variety of historical reasons, including a focus on basic education and basic health care, and early completion of effective land reforms, widespread economic participation was easier to achieve in many of the East Asian and Southeast Asian economies in a way it has not been possible in, say, Brazil or India or Pakistan, where the creation of social opportunities has been much slower and that slowness

For example, the fact that the Indian state of Kerala has achieved impressively high life expectancy, low fertility, high literacy and so on despite its low income level per head is certainly an achievement worth celebrating and learning from. And yet the question remains as to why Kerala has not been able to build on its successes in human development to raise its income levels as well, which would have made its success more complete; it can scarcely serve as a ?model? case, as some have tried to claim.

The quality of life can be vastly raised, despite low incomes, through an adequate program of social services.

There were two periods of remarkably fast expansion of support-oriented policies in this century; they occurred during the two world wars.

Even the National Health Service was born during those war years.

It is, in fact, confirmed by detailed nutritional studies that during the Second World War,even though the per capita availability of food fell significantly in Britain, cases of undernourishment also declined sharply, and extreme undernourishment almost entirely disappeared.19 Mortality rates also went down sharply (except of course for war mortality itself). A similar thing had happened during the First World War.

We must also ask whether the much sharper increase in life expectancy during the war decades can be explained alternatively, by faster economic growth over those decades. The answer seems to be in the negative. In fact, the decades of fast expansion of life expectancy happened to be periods of slow growth of gross domestic product per head,

A much more plausible explanation of the rapid increase in British life expectancy is provided by the changes in the extent of social sharing during the war decades, and the sharp increases in public support for social services (including nutritional support and health care)

An unjust society, in this view, is one in which people are significantly less happy, taken together, than they need be.

many social arrangements are advocated because of the attractions of their constitutive features, without any note being taken of their consequential outcomes.

1. When results are looked at an aggregate level, whole sections of societies can still be disadvantaged as the distribution of results is not uniform

2. The fundamental freedoms can still be denied while achieving aggregate results, (like the one child policy in China)

3. Measurements can skewed as sections of population could get used to the disadvantages and accept "This is our lot" and the outcomes may look acceptable or even rosy

Social and economic factors such as basic education, elementary health care, and secure employment are important not only on their own, but also for the role they can play in giving people the opportunity to approach the world with courage and freedom.

1. American social ethics seems to find it possible to be very non-supportive of the indigent and the impoverished, in a way that a typical Western European, reared in a welfare state, finds hard to accept.

2. But the same American social ethics would find the double-digit levels of unemployment, common in Europe, to be quite intolerable.

3. Europe has continued to accept worklessness?and its increase?with remarkable equanimity.

1.Judged in terms of the usual standards of retardation in weight for age, the proportion of undernourished children in Africa is 20 to 40 percent, whereas the proportion of undernourished children in India is a gigantic 40 to 60 percent.

2.About half of all Indian children are, it appears, chronically undernourished. While Indians live longer than sub-Saharan Africans, and have a median age at death much higher than Africans have, nevertheless there are many more undernourished children in India than sub-Saharan Africa?not just in absolute terms but also as a proportion of all children.