Child Mortality & Amartya Sen's Discussion of the Standard of Living
نویسنده
چکیده
A baby born in America today has a pretty good chance of making it to adulthood: only a bit more than 0.6% of US infants die (CIA World Factbook). It also has a pretty good chance of living a well-fed and care-for existence compared to most any time and place in history. Coincidence? Well, not exactly. In this paper, we will explore how child mortality affects the standard of living as discussed by economist Amartya Sen, particularly in the case of medieval Europe. Let's first take a more careful look at what we mean by standard of living. In his published lectures on the subject (1987), Sen takes on the challenge of analyzing different methods of evaluating this very familiar and yet very elusively-defined concept. As he correctly notes, "the standard of living communicates... with apparent ease" (Sen 1), but pinning down exactly (or even inexactly) what we mean by it is a daunting task: There are many fundamentally different ways of seeing the quality of living, and quite a few of them have some immediate plausibility. You could be well off, without being well. You could be well, without being able to lead the life you wanted. You could have got the life you wanted, without being happy. You could be happy, without having much freedom. You could have a good deal of freedom, without achieving much. We can go on (Sen 1).
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