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Development as Freedom – Enterprise as a Key

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Last night Nobel prize winning Economist and philosopher Amartya Sen gave an address with Demos and the Indian High Commission.  Sen has spent a lifetime studying poverty, its causes and how it may be alleviated.  His writing is dense, often supported with mathematical arguments.  He is not an easy read.  By his own admission he is a theorist and a researcher.  It is up to others to put his research into practice.

So what does Sen have to say?  How is it relevant to enterprise?  Well here is my interpretation and, no doubt, gross simplification – tentatively offered….

  • Poverty is fundamentally rooted in injustice – the problem 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
  • Development is a measure of the extent to which individuals have the capabilities to live the life that they choose.  It had 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

Clearly Sen is not arguing that everyone should start their own business.  Entrepreneurship is on the agenda but not at the top of it.

He is arguing for enterprising individuals and challenging us to develop our society in a way that encourages and supports them.

Anyone for enterprise?

Watch Out for the Vision…

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The point about Visions of the Anointed is that, whether they are co-produced or not, they will always be problematical. They will always create winners and losers. They will always consume vast amounts of time, energy, cash and other resources. And they will always be, at best, contemporary. They never successfully anticipate, and therefore can never be built well for the future.

They provide a damaging diversion, a displacement activity, that allows individuals to continue to blame the planners, the builders and their fellow citizens instead of doing the long hard work of climbing their own personal mountains and seeing how they can help fellow climbers along the way.

Co-production in the Vision of the Anointed is perhaps an impoverished and futile version of ‘active citizenship’?

By ‘engaging’ us in polishing their visions they disengage us from our own.

Communities are the product of citizens leading active and engaged lives in pursuit of progress. Not by getting the spatial infrastructure right.  By shaping plans that we then expect others to deliver.

And if ‘citizens’ can start to set the parameters for Placemaking then we are just replacing one group of the anointed (a professional elite) with another (the proletariat). Sowells’ point in Vision of the Anointed, IF I have understood it properly, is that it does not matter how we choose the anointed, the product of their deliberations WILL be flawed.

I think Drucker was also onto this in his work on meta-economics where he argued that planners can NEVER keep up with the process of enterprise and entrepreneurship as a force for driving social change.

So let’s be careful in our collusion with the anointed in trying to build the perfect cathedral. Let’s take ourselves instead into the bazaar and work on more personal, small scale pursuit of progress.

Anyone for ‘enterprise’ (rightly understood)?

People in Policy Land

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Until people in policy-land stop implying that there are things called communities which can be called on to voice an opinion and take uncontested collective action that will be acceptable to the state, we’re going to see neither genuine empowerment nor meaningful co-delivery

Kevin Harris

Good stuff – and one of the reasons why I believe that the development of community is contingent on the development of people and their self interest.  Once individuals are clear on what matters, and what they are going to do in pursuit of it, then community starts to emerge as people associate in pursuit of shared interests and exchange.

Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. ‘Tis profitable for us both that I shou’d labour with you today, and that you shou’d aid me tomorrow. I have no kindness for you, and know that you have as little for me. I will not, therefore, take any pains on your account; and should I labour with you on my account, I know I shou’d be disappointed, and that I shou’d in vain depend upon your gratitude. Here then I leave you to labour alone: You treat me in the same manner. The seasons change; and both of us lose our harvests for want of mutual confidence and security.

David Hume 1711-1776

Self Interest as the Starting Point for Community

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In my community development work I am, on occasion, criticised for putting individual self interest right ‘up front and centre’.  I honestly believe that until individuals are clear on what they REALLY want, in which direction progress lies for them they cannot effectively learn to associate and community cannot be built.

Robert M. Pirsig in his classic Zen and the Art of motorcycle Maintenance which I first read 25 years ago and have recently re-read says this:

I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not to talk about relationships of a political nature, which is inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another, or with programs full of things for other people to do.  I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes that the end is the beginning.  Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right.  The social values are right only if the individuals values are right.  The place to improve the world is first on one’s own heart and head and hands and then work outward from there.  Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind.  I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle.  I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.

This then is the focus of my work on working with individuals as the starting point of a process of community development.  Clarifying self interest. Pursuing ‘good work’ with head, heart and hands. Then, and only then working on association and mutuality in pursuit of collectively negotiated self interest.

Good communities are a product of good people.  And good people are a product of their own good work.

It is NOT all about the economy, stupid

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There is an assumption behind most economic development organisations that if we can just get the economy right, just about everything else will fall into place. There is a belief that the economy is in some way foundational.

It is not.

Economies are the products of communities.  Products of individuals and associations.  Products of mutual exchange and trade.  Products of aspiration, skill and education.

Community is not a by product of economy.  Economy is a by product of community. We are putting the cart well and truly before the horse.

If we want a better, more sustainable economy then let’s invest in better and more sustainable communities. And if we want better communities then let’s work with the people that live in them in ways that are constructive, inclusive, engaging, challenging and creative. Let’s shift to a different narrative for ‘development’.  Let’s throw less money at the architects, developers, placemakers and investors.

Instead, let’s invest in high quality, ‘street based’ education and development.  Real community coaches trained to offer a confidential, person centred, responsive but challenging service.  Let’s use it to unlock and develop the confidence, talent, passion and skill that so often lies dormant or unrecognised.

We don’t do this by engaging ‘the few’ community ‘champions in setting up Development Trusts, Enterprise Centres or in tidying up shabby spaces.

We do it through radical, respectful and skilled outreach work.  Models for this are few and far between – but they do exist.  Simon on the Streets is the best example I know of in Leeds.

Perhaps you know others?

Thoughts and suggestions welcome!