The title of this book—Development as Freedom—outlines one of its most important themes. Sen’s most important argument throughout the book is that policy makers and the development community must reconceptualize development’s goal as enhancing individual freedoms rather than merely considering income. Sen uses “freedom” to encompass a wide range of capabilities people should have. Besides civil liberties like free speech, Sen includes the ability to acquire enough food to eat, to be educated, to access healthcare, and to be socially accepted in society, as well as the right to transparency in government and business.

Freedoms or “capabilities” give people the ability to choose a “functioning” or life that they may reasonably desire. Freedoms must be “substantive,” in that a person can actually achieve the desired functioning rather than merely having a theoretical right to it. This broad definition has long roots in the global development community; it goes back, for example, to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inclusion of “freedom from want” as one of the four freedoms he envisioned as a foundation for the postwar world. The fact that many people still lack some of these capabilities, including the ability to feed themselves, is a scandalous deprivation of freedom, particularly as the world grows richer.