Redefining freedom as a collective concept

We live in uncertain times; the rise of diverse, unpredictable phenomena such as climate change, global power shifts, and the fourth industrial revolution require a reflection on our current concept of freedom. In this post, I will argue for a recalibration of the meaning of freedom to ensure that we, as a society, are in a position to analyse accurately, and respond to, the powerful global challenges we face. Specifically, I will argue that academic disciplines need to incorporate a collective concept of freedom that recognises the freedom of unborn generations.

In 1979, Amartya Sen introduced the capability approach as a new school of economic thought (Sen, 1979). The capability approach argues that freedom is a matter of what people are able to do and to be; if an individual’s capabilities to achieve what she values are inhibited in any way, her freedom is reduced (Robeyns, 2017:24). This definition implies that freedom is inherently an individual concept and has been used as the theoretical underpinning of multidimensional poverty.

In economic theory, the concept of freedom has traditionally manifested in models portraying individuals as maximising their ‘utility’ (a measure of happiness or satisfaction). If an individual’s freedom is inhibited, she will not be able to maximise her utility and, thus, overall welfare will be reduced. This shortfall from maximum utility is typically referred to as a ‘market failure’ and is often used to justify government intervention in private markets. While this individual concept of utility maximisation has yielded powerful insights into human behaviour, it is unsuitable for the challenges we face. In 2011, authors Wang, Malhotra and Murnighan found that exposure to economics courses was positively related to participants’ feelings toward their own greed, and to more positive views regarding the morality of greed. It is argued that this is largely due to economics majors constantly being exposed to the neoclassical assumption that the rational man is a self-interested, greedy agent who seeks to maximise his utility.

While individual capabilities are undoubtedly a necessary component of freedom as a concept, I do not believe they are sufficient to address the challenges we currently face. These challenges, such as climate change and the fourth industrial revolution, are inherently collective phenomena that profoundly affect all of us. Furthermore, in many of these challenges, current individuals’ actions have powerful consequences for future generations’ capabilities (current CO2 emissions being an obvious example). Therefore, the idea of freedom as an individual concept - in which each person should act to maximise their own capabilities - is ill-suited to create the collective action required to address issues such as climate change. I believe that we need to recalibrate our definition of freedom towards one that is more collectively focused.

In an insightful essay for The Economist’s Open Future Essay Competition, Larissa Parker, a law student at McGill University, argues that we can help solve climate change with a new legal framework. She highlights that today, for the most part, only generations that are alive have legal standing to sue; she argues that this is problematic in the context of climate change, as the effects of greenhouse-gasses emitted today take decades to manifest themselves. In light of this, she argues that the legal framework should be adapted to recognise of the rights of future generations and protect them from inheriting an uninhabitable Earth. In her essay, Parker therefore implicitly argues that we need to recalibrate our legal understanding of freedom away from an individually focused one towards a more collective one that recognises the externalities that individual actions have on society at large.

While this recalibration in the legal discipline is a novel, intelligent application of a more collective understanding of freedom, I believe that multiple disciplines need to adopt this understanding in order to address the challenges we are facing. Traditional economic models typically portray society using a single representative agent who lives forever; this agent is assumed to reflect all individuals, as preferences are assumed to be homogenous. However, we know that individuals differ on multiple dimensions; many are in different stages of their lives in which preferences are not the same. In response to this, economic theory has developed overlapping generations models. In the simplest of these models, the Samuelson-Diamond model, each generation lives for two periods; thus, in any period there are both young and old agents in the economy. While each agent still maximises his utility, preferences are no longer assumed to be homogenous as the model recognises that the young and old will have different preferences with regards to savings and consumption.

These models can provide powerful insights into intergenerational resource allocation over time and have been used to analyse the consequences of certain events on multiple generations. For example, economists Clive Bell, Shantayanan Devarajan and Hans Gersbach (2003) used a variation of the Samuelson-Diamond model to analyse the long-run economic costs of AIDS on adults and children in South Africa. In their paper, they concluded that, by killing mostly young adults, AIDS does more than destroy the human capital embodied in them; it also deprives their children of their parents’ loving care and knowledge. This paper sheds light on the multitude of consequences the disease could have in the country and had important implications for policy design.

While these economic models provide a useful framework, much like most of the present legal frameworks, they only recognise current generations’ utility. To address issues like climate change, I believe the models need to recognise freedom as a collective concept and formally include the utility of future generations. As a crude example, unborn generations could be added as another agent to the Samuelson-Diamond model in order to analyse the distributional effects of current agents’ decisions on both current and future generations. Any utility-maximising decisions of young and old generations that adversely affects the capabilities of unborn generations (examples include natural resource depletion and fossil fuel pollution) would negatively affect the utility of the unborn generations. If the future generations were added as an agent in the model, it could be used to analyse the long-run, intergenerational consequences of actions that exacerbate issues like climate change.

Given how influential economics as a profession can be in informing policy decisions, this fundamental change is likely to have important consequences for future policy decisions. While environmental scientists are already forecasting the consequences of our actions on the sustainability of the planet itself, economics could be used as a complementary discipline that highlights the effect of this environmental degradation on economic metrics like Gross Domestic Product and generational utility. Given the lack of urgent policy action in response to environmental evidence of climate change, the ability of economics to predict the consequences of current decisions on intergenerational freedom may have important implications for future policy decisions.

Furthermore, if freedom is recalibrated to reflect a collective capability, - that recognises both current and future generations’ rights - and it is accepted into academic disciplinary frameworks, more and more students will be exposed to this concept and begin to understand the impact of their decisions on all actors in society. This implies that, in addition to informing policy through detailed academic research, the adoption of freedom as a collective concept in academic disciplines may have a magnified effect by subconsciously framing how students legitimise human behaviour. This implication is perhaps even more important than the immediate impact on policy as it engenders a common understanding of what freedom represents and creates a platform for generating widespread social movements against the challenges we face.

Typically, freedom has been defined and interpreted as an individual concept. This has manifested in academic disciplines analysing the impacts of human behaviour, and exogenous phenomena, on individual capabilities and rights. However, this singular understanding of freedom is unsuitable for the collective challenges we face. In order to work towards effectively using academic disciplines to create community action against these problems, we need to recalibrate the meaning of freedom towards a more collective view that incorporates the capabilities of both current and future generations. I hope that this recalibration of freedom is able to be adopted quickly; the impending escalation of climate change, and the current difficulties of accepting responsibility over who should implement solutions, makes it necessary to develop new understandings of what freedom actually means and how it relates to intergenerational equity. Although it is undoubtedly only one change of many that will be required to adequately address the immense challenges we face, recalibrating our concept of freedom and formally recognising the capabilities of future generations could have lasting impacts on decisions for decades to come.

References:

Bell, C., Devarajan, S. and Gersbach, H. (2003). The Long Run Economic Costs of AIDS: Theory and Application to South Africa. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3152.

Parker, L. 2019. Make a healthy climate a legal right that extends to future generations. Available: https://www.economist.com/open-future/2019/09/17/make-a-healthy-climate-a-legal-right-that-extends-to-future-generations

Robeyns, I. (2017). Wellbeing, Freedom and Social Justice: The Capability Approach Re-examined. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers.

Sen, A. (1979). Equality of What? [Lecture]. Stanford University.

Wang, L., Malhotra, D. and Murnighan, J.K. (2011). Economics, Education and Greed. Academy of Management Learning & Education 10, No. 4: 643–660.