Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveJustice philosophy idea

The capability approach, developed by the economist Amartya Sen, judges how well people live by what they are actually able to do and be, not only by how much money or resources they have.

Amartya Sen / Martha Nussbaum

PhilosophyMindHealth

The story behind the card

The same income can mean very different lives depending on health, safety, education, disability, gender, transport and social freedom: a wheelchair user needs more resources than others to get around the same city. Sen set out the idea in a 1979 lecture, 'Equality of What?', and developed it through the 1980s. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum extended it in 2000 into a list of ten central capabilities, such as health, play and a say in political decisions, that she argued every government should secure. The approach also shaped the United Nations Human Development Index, created in 1990 by the economist Mahbub ul Haq with Sen, which ranks countries by health and education as well as income.

Türkçe oku
İktisatçı Amartya Sen'in geliştirdiği kabiliyet (yapabilirlik) yaklaşımı, insanların ne kadar iyi yaşadığını yalnızca paralarına ya da kaynaklarına bakarak değil, gerçekte neler yapabildiklerine ve nasıl bir hayat sürebildiklerine bakarak ölçer.

Aynı gelir; sağlığa, güvenliğe, eğitime, engelliliğe, cinsiyete, ulaşıma ve toplumsal özgürlüklere göre çok farklı hayatlar anlamına gelebilir: Tekerlekli sandalye kullanan biri, aynı şehirde dolaşabilmek için başkalarından daha fazla kaynağa ihtiyaç duyar. Sen bu fikri 1979'da “Neyin Eşitliği?” başlıklı bir konferansta ortaya koydu ve 1980'ler boyunca geliştirdi. Felsefeci Martha Nussbaum 2000'de yaklaşımı genişletti ve her devletin güvence altına alması gerektiğini savunduğu on temel kabiliyetten oluşan bir liste hazırladı; sağlık, oyun ve siyasi kararlarda söz sahibi olmak bunlardan bazılarıdır. Yaklaşım, 1990'da iktisatçı Mahbub ul Haq'ın Sen'le birlikte geliştirdiği Birleşmiş Milletler İnsani Gelişme Endeksi'ne de yön verdi; bu endeks ülkeleri gelirin yanında sağlık ve eğitime göre de sıralar.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Capability approach
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DrivePhilosophy

A sound mind in a sound body.

The phrase comes from the tenth Satire of the Roman poet Juvenal, written in the early 2nd century AD. The poem mocks people who pray for wealth, power, fame, beauty or a long life, since such wishes often bring ruin. If you must pray, Juvenal says, ask for “mens sana in corpore sano”, a sound mind in a sound body, and a brave heart that does not fear death. It later became a motto of sport, and in Turkey its Turkish form is often credited to Atatürk, the republic's founder.

Latin, Roman ProverbRead card
DrivePhilosophy

He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.

English quotation books have called this an “Arabian proverb” since at least the 1860s; Tryon Edwards's A Dictionary of Thoughts (1891) is one, but these books give no Arabic original, so the label is best taken loosely. The idea is widely shared: good health gives people the strength to plan and to recover from setbacks. Turkish says “Her şeyin başı sağlık”, health comes first, and when a glass breaks people say “Sağlık olsun”: never mind, as long as everyone is well.

Spanish, Arabic variants ProverbRead card
StillnessHealth

While you sleep, the brain strengthens what you learned during the day. This process, called memory consolidation, works both on facts, such as names and dates, and on skills, such as playing a piece of music. After a short or broken night, the brain holds on to new learning less well.

Memory consolidation is the slow process that turns a fresh, fragile memory into a lasting one, and much of it happens during sleep. In 1997 the German researchers Werner Plihal and Jan Born showed that different parts of the night help different kinds of memory. Twenty healthy men learned lists of word pairs and practised mirror tracing, drawing a shape while watching only its reflection. Recall of the word pairs improved most over the first half of the night, when deep, slow-wave sleep dominates, while the drawing skill improved most over the second half, when REM sleep, the stage of vivid dreams, lasts longer. Researchers think that during sleep the brain replays the day's experiences and moves new memories from temporary storage in the hippocampus, deep in the brain, into longer-lasting networks in its outer layer, the cortex.

Harvard Medical SchoolRead card
DriveHealth

Some benefits of exercise begin on the day you do it, according to US guidance promoted by the CDC. After a single session of moderate or vigorous activity, such as a brisk walk, blood pressure can fall, anxiety can ease, and sleep that night and some kinds of thinking can improve.

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is the United States' national public health agency, founded in Atlanta in 1946. Its advice on exercise follows the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, whose second edition, published in 2018, drew on a review of the previous decade's research. Earlier advice had focused on preventing disease over the years; the new edition also listed benefits people can feel at once. Besides easing anxiety and lowering blood pressure, a single session helps the body respond to insulin, the hormone that moves sugar from the blood into cells. Most of these effects grow with regular activity, while others, such as fitness, strength and a lasting fall in blood pressure, take weeks or months. The guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week.

CDCRead card
DriveHealth

Regular physical activity protects the heart, lifts mood, eases anxiety and improves sleep, according to the World Health Organization. These benefits do not depend on losing weight: people of every shape and size gain them, even when nothing changes on the scales or in the mirror.

The World Health Organization counts any movement that uses energy as physical activity: walking, cycling, sport, active play, housework and physical work. Its 2020 guidelines advise adults to do 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week, such as brisk walking, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity, such as running, plus muscle-strengthening exercise on at least two days. In 2022 about 31% of adults worldwide, some 1.8 billion people, fell short of that. Weight is a poor guide to these benefits. The US Physical Activity Guidelines state that they are generally independent of body weight, and a 2014 analysis of ten studies found that fit people who were overweight or obese had death rates similar to fit people of normal weight, while unfit people had about twice the risk, whatever their weight.

WHORead card
Next card in the archiveKintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer dusted with gold, silver or platinum, so the repaired cracks shine instead of being hidden and become part of the object's history.Read next →