CREATING CAPABILITIES: THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT APPROACH
Martha C. Nussbaum (Belknap Harvard, 2011) ISBN: 9780674050549
I think I may have fallen in love with Martha C. Nussbaum. Law professor, ethicist, feminist, philosopher, confident teacher and elegant writer, she is a source of inspiration, even if I don’t subscribe wholeheartedly to her political biases. Creating Capabilities is but one of her numerous contributions to discourse on human rights and starts with a simple proposition: living beings are more important than money. GDP, which measures the economic wellbeing of a country in purely monetary form, is an at best unhelpful measure of any given nation’s actual prosperity. In its place, Nussbaum and other proponents, such as the originator of the school, Amartya Sen, nominate the “capabilities approach” to measuring human (and animal) development, suggesting several different benchmarks that should first be aimed for and then improved upon by the world’s nations. Creating Capabilities forms something of a manifesto for this approach.