- Poverty is not about scarcity – it is not that there is not enough – but that it is not shared
- The challenge is to give more people the power that they need to play a positive and powerful role in markets; This means accessible and relevant processes to develop individual capabilities and power
- Markets will always have a place in our society but not everything can be bought and sold. Care for example is an emotional relationship that cannot be bought and sold.
- Development is a measure of the extent to which individuals have the capabilities to live the life that they choose. It has little to do with standard economic measures such as GDP.
- Helping people to recognise choices and increase the breadth of choices available to them should be a key objective of development.
- Developing the capability and power of individuals provides a key to both development and freedom
- Development must be relevant to lives, contexts, and aspirations
- Development is about more than the alleviation of problems – stamping out anti social behaviour, teenage pregnancies, poor housing and so on.
- It is about helping people to become effective architects in shaping their own lives
- We need practices that value individual identity; avoid lumping people into “communities” they may not want to be part of, and promote a person’s freedom to make her own choices. Promoting identification with ‘community’ risks segregation and violence between communities
- Society must take a serious interest in the overall capabilities that someone has to lead the sort of life they want to lead, and organise itself to support the development and practice of those capabilities
- We should primarily develop an emphasis on individuals as members of the human race rather than as members of ethnic groups, religions or other ‘communities’. Humanity matters.
- We need to make the delivery of public education, more equitable, more efficient and more accessible
If we took this stuff seriously what kind of enterprise development activities would a LEP commission?