MC433 - week 5
« Back to MC433These are my notes from October 26 for MC433 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.
The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.
Inclusion and Access
Readings
Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (chapter 3)
Context: written in 1999, seems like he’s trying to sway a fairly libertarian/right-leaning audience into caring about inequality and justice. He starts from a Rawlsian POV but then modifies/builds on it, saying that if we truly care about equality, we can’t just be satisfied by “income” equality—we have to ask if people have different needs. Basically a long-winded way of saying “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” but in a more libertarian-friendly way. I wasn’t really into this reading though I’m sure it was important at the time, and probably had some impact on his intended audience (i.e., people who aren’t me).
Report from Chilean Presidential Commission, 1999
On best practices for how to move toward an information society. Acknowledging the technological revolution (the rising importance of the Internet, non-material assets, and computerisation). The state will have to play a role in modernising—there has already been some push toward greater access to digital resources, but it’s been uneven. Summary of suggested landscape: public-private partnerships, transparent/competitive markets, new legal frameworks for fostering spread of e-commerce, flexible regulations to encourage investment by private corporations. A fairly neoliberal agenda overall.
Technologies of Choice? by Dorothea Kleine (chapter 6)
On digital procurement services in Chile and the problem with them (not really designed for citizens and thus allowed corporate interests to proliferate at the expense of local microentrepreneurs).
Lecture
(First week of our look at the networked era of communication technologies.)
- previous weeks: focus on self-regulating via professional ethics (kinda market, kinda norms)
- focus today: getting people digitally included in networks (esp in the transition from analog to digital)
- on the early history of the Internet (DARPA) & code as a structuring factor that determines the architecture and thus the behaviour of users
- the limits of the democratic framework when it comes to justice
- following Sen’s “capabilities” framework
- Sen’s contribution is an understanding of the value of economic development (in this case, communications infrastruture) not as an end, but as a means for empowering individuals
- in this vein, he builds on a Rawlsian foundation but then moves away from it
- says Rawls is important for identifying necessary goods, but doesn’t explain the purpose of these goods (Sen expounds on this in his 1970 essay, Equality for What?)
- Sen’s crucial idea is that of a “conversion point”, for converting from a good to a capability
- you can have an equal distribution of a good (in this case, access to communication) but inequality in well-being because of differing needs
- this framework is more flexible and doesn’t necessarily need to be paired with a liberal democratic state
- it’s about positive, or substantial, freedom/liberty as opposed to rights; iterative over linear
- economic growth is seen as a means for increasing the human freedom to choose, not as an end
- contrast this view with that of people like Al Gore, who saw the Internet as a boon for business—first and foremost, a driver for econ growth
- on Dorothea Kleine’s framework for understanding rights in the Internet age, esp in Chile (the context of the last 2 readings)
- the 1999 report came out at a time of high social and regional inequality
- in the 90s, following the transition from Allende to neoliberalism, Chile saw lots of growth & wanted to become an “emerging economy” not just a developing country
- one of the things the state did was try to bring its procurement system online, allowing microentrepreneurs to access a new market
- ofc there was a gap between the ideal & the reality … the project wasn’t very successful, and policy makers blamed digital illiteracy
- a better analysis would have concluded that the system was just not designed to accommodate microentrepeneurs
- the system was confusingly designed, plus microentrepreneurs found that they had to compete with outsiders (large foreign corps)
- their profits fell as a result, which negatively affected local community
Seminar
- we have to recall the context of Sen: he was addressing a tradition of neoclassical, libertarian, utilitarian arguments (not really written for people like me, hence why it fell so flat with me)
- Sen, Freire, Young: they all build on Rawls in terms of ideas but also diverge somewhat (Sen/Young responding to Rawls directly; Freire writing contemporaneously withe Rawls)
- on Chile: the document is all about econ growth as opposed to justice; citizens feel like an afterthought
- Sen’s framework would have been useful here (they should have involved the public more)
- seems like a case where the market was reified, at the expense of actually serving small businesses
- system wasn’t designed to consider existing inequalities, and thus ended up catering to transnational corps
- Sen’s views on technocracy v democracy: I thought there was an interesting tension in Sen’s work here
- because he recognises that structural forces condition people’s views and thus true “democracy” is not always desirable
- but at the same time, a fully technocratic approach doesn’t work either because then it becomes detached from what people really want, thus impeding justice
- so he advocates a balance between the top-down and bottom-up approach
- whereas Freire is more about trusting the bottom-up approach
- plus Sen mostly neglects the role of communication in all this (which is Young’s thing)