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From the bookshelf: Development as Freedom
A great many people (including myself) have become involved in the open educational resources movement out of an attraction to the mission–out of the sense that sharing educational materials openly is a good thing and can help people on a global level. There is not a more passionate, well-reasoned, and compelling description of the role that increased opportunity (including educational opportunity) plays in global development than Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom.
It’s definitely a book about economics, so be prepared from some relatively dry technical discussions of economic issues, but the book is imbued a strong moral argument that you don’t measure development by wealth but rather by the opportunities and freedoms that people have to make choices regarding their lives. From the introduction:
Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states. Despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies elementary freedoms to to vast numbers–perhaps even the majority–of people. Sometimes the lack of substantive freedoms relates directly to economic poverty, which robs people of the freedom to satisfy hunger, or to achieve sufficient nutrition, or to obtain remedies for treatable illnesses, or the opportunity to be adequately clothed or sheltered, or to enjoy clean water or sanitary facilities. In other cases, the unfreedom links closely to the lack of public facilities and social care, such as the absence of epidemiological programs, or of organized arrangements for health care or educational facilities, or of effective institutions for maintenance of local peace and order. In still other cases, the violation of freedoms results directly from a denial of political and civil liberties by authoritarian regimes and from imposed restrictions on the freedom to participate in the social, political and economic life of the community.
Sharing educational materials openly is an opportunity to feel that one has directly made the world a little less unfree, and perhaps provided some tools for others to make it even less so.
