2.12: A visualisation of the core conceptual elements

We have now covered enough ground in understanding the core concepts of the capability approach to construct a visualisation of these concepts. Figure 2.1 below gives a graphical representation of the different elements of the capability approach, and how they relate. Note that the arrows do not indicate normative importance but rather indicate which parts of this conceptual system are determinants of, or have an influence on, other parts.

Let us start our description where economists generally start (and often also end): with resources. In the capability approach, the term ‘resources’ is interpreted in a broader sense than the understanding of that term elsewhere in the social sciences. Economics and the quantitative empirical social sciences have traditionally focussed on material resources only: either income and wealth, or else on the consumption that these financial means (or unpaid production) generated. One important lesson learnt from feminist economics is that about half of economic production happens outside the market and the formal economy, which is the reason why the box at the far left in Figure 2.1 also includes resources created by non-market production (Folbre 2008; Folbre and Bittman 2004).

Both the resources and the consumption could be conceptualised as capability inputs: they are the means to the opportunities to be the person one wants to be, and do what one has reason to value doing. The means do not all have the same power to generate capabilities; this depends on a person’s conversion factors, as well as the structural constraints that she faces. Those structural constraints can have a great influence on the conversion factors as well as on the capability sets directly.

From this visualisation, we can also see the difference between the social conversion factors and the structural constraints. The structural constraints affect a person’s set of conversion factors, including the social conversion factors she faces. But recall that those conversion factors tell us something about the degree to which people can turn resources into capabilities. Conversion factors are thus, conceptually and empirically, closely related to the capability inputs — that is, the resources that are needed to generate capabilities. Structural constraints affect conversion factors, but can also affect a person’s capability set without impacting on the conversion of resources in capabilities. For example, if a certain set of social norms characterizes a group in society as not having the same moral status as others, then this affects the capabilities of the members of that group directly, not merely in terms of what they can get out of their resources. A good example is gay people, a significant percentage of whom are not worse off in financial terms than straight people, but they often cannot express their sexual orientation in public, at the risk of humiliation, aggression, or even risking their jobs or their lives.

Another part of the visualisation to pay attention to is the choice that people make given the capability set they have. These choices are always constrained in some sense, and the question is which types of constraints a particular capability theory will take into account. Also, the term ‘choice’ is used here in a very thin (or, as philosophers say, ‘weak’) sense: it is not assumed that elaborate thinking and weighing is done before we decide which capabilities to use and realise into functionings. In fact, we have ample evidence from psychology that there are many other factors that influence the decisions we make, including how hungry or tired we are, the people in our company, or the amount of time we have to make a decision (Ariely 2010; Kahneman 2011). Most capability theories will have an (implicit) theory of choice: they will have views on the extent to which people’s past history (which includes the structural constraints they faced in their personal past) as well as societal processes, such as preference formation mechanisms, influence the choices that we make from the opportunities that are available to us.

The last element of the visualisation is the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one’s functionings and capability levels each person will have. Of course, this does not mean that we need to attribute ethical significance to those levels of satisfaction; rather, the point in the visualisation is that satisfaction with one’s functionings and capability levels is not the same thing as those capability sets and combination of functionings achievements themselves. For now, we will concentrate on deepening our understanding of the capability approach itself, but in section 3.8, we will engage in more depth with the question whether we should look at functionings and capabilities, rather than satisfaction, or some other mental metrics, such as happiness.

Figure 2.1 A stylised visualisation of the core concepts of capability theories

Source: Based on Robeyns (2005b), updated and expanded.

Two remarks are important. First, this is a stylized visualisation, and also a simplification. It is meant to help us see the different elements of the capability approach and how they relate; it is not a fine-grained and exhaustive picture of all the elements that determine a person’s capability set. One important limitation is that this is not a dynamic visualisation and that many arrows, indicating relationships between various parts, are not present.⁴¹ In addition, the choices we make from our capability set at one point in time, will be determinants of our resources and our capability set in the future. Another important limitation of this visualisation is that it gives us only the resources, capabilities, functionings and satisfaction of one person, but, as was mentioned before, capability sets are interdependent; hence choices made from one person’s capability set will lead to changes in another person’s capability set.

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41 In reality, almost everything is related to almost everything else in one way or another, but putting all those arrows on a visualisation would make it completely uninformative. After all, the task of scholarship is to abstract away from distracting details to see more clearly.