The work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum takes an important place in a feminist critique of how wealth and well-being are measured in today’s economies. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been the central measure of economic success since the 1930s. While it measures only monetary transactions related to the production of goods and services, it has been used to evaluate the overall efficacy of the economy in providing for people’s well-being. Ironically, the founding father of GDP, Simon Kuznets, warned that treating GDP as an indicator of general well-being would be inaccurate and dangerous. After all, an economy’s output and people’s income level can at best be a means to a good life, but it does not define that life.

In many ways, having GDP and economic growth guide our economies is counter to long-term well-being and social equality. Sen and Nussbaum provide an alternative framework for measuring an economy’s success by making human life an end in itself. (1) In their capability-focused approach, well-being is assessed based on a person’s “opportunities, resources, rights (entitlements) and the valuable functionings (doings and beings)” which are made possible thanks to the combination of available resources and social systems. (2) In their understanding of economic success, monetary interests are thus secondary to the reverence for life and nature. In order to design more effective economic systems, they argue, we need a fuller spectrum of indicators, such as healthcare, housing, security, meaningful relationships, and more. (3)

(1) Lourdes Beneria, Gunseli Berik, and Maria Floro. “The Study of Women and Gender in Economics” in Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered, (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 55.  

(2) Milena I. Kremakova, “Too Soft for Economics, Too Rigid for Sociology, or Just Right? The Productive Ambiguities of Sen’s Capability Approach.” European Journal of Sociology 3 (2013): 396.

(3) Ibid.