Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen
Published 1999 · 366 pages · 119,941 words · about 8 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics & Society
How hard is Development as Freedom to read?
Development as Freedom scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Economic and philosophical vocabulary. Accessible for an academic work.
- Sentence structure: 38 out of 100
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Philosophical framework applied to concrete development questions.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Rich with data, historical examples, and careful argumentation.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Systematic, thesis-driven argument.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- Freedom as the central organizing concept. Analytical rather than metaphorical.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Earnest, measured academic tone.
- Resolution withholding: 100 out of 100
- Sen provides a clear framework and policy implications.
- Structural complexity: 30 out of 100
- Twelve chapters building a systematic philosophical and economic argument.
How Development as Freedom is regarded
Development as Freedom holds a literary regard score of 83 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.