PD Draft Submission Comment

COMMENTS ON THE DRAFT REPORT OF THE PRODUCTIVITY COMMISSION REPORT ON THE DISABILITY DISCRIMINATION ACT Jack Frisch j.frisch@unsw.edu.au Sen-Nussbaum Capabilities Approach Comments on Epstein Further Thoughts on Economics Relevant to Disability Sen-Nussbaum Box 2.4 refers to four ways of assessing social welfare, adapted from Gupta. In excluding the Sen/Nussbaum’s capabilities approach and in ignoring Amartya Sen’s critique of the utilitarian and libertarian approaches and Martha Nussbaum’s critique of the Rawlsian approach, the Commission ignores the two authors who place disability to the foreground in both their critique and in their constructions. The exclusion is a serious oversight since Sen is (I believe) the only economist awarded the Economics Nobel Prize specifically for his contribution to welfare economics i.e. assessing social welfare, and Nussbaum is one of the most serious and well-respected philosophers in the world today. Sen argues that both the utilitarian and libertarian approaches are both special cases based on limited information and arbitrary weightings and that the capabilities approach is more general than either, even if the democratic choice procedure is “somewhat messy” (p. 79 Development as Freedom). This is not the place to summarise his views, but I refer the Commission to the most accessible discussion of Sen’s critique in his Development as Freedom, particularly Chapter 3, “Freedom and the Foundations ...