Human Expansion

After a long stint of not posting anything, I wanted to share this flow chart that I made last night. (Click to expand!) Essentially I'm pulling from works by Amartya Sen and Dwight H. Perkins ("Development as Freedom" from the former and "Economics of Development" from the latter.)  My reasoning in creating this, besides to use as a study guide for an exam on economic development that is fast-approaching, was to make something that would help visualize the process of human development, which can admittedly be a somewhat vague concept to grasp. So the middle bubble is the main topic: defining what the flow chart is going to be about, and what development itself is: the expansion of freedoms people enjoy.  We say that societies are progressing when they create an environment wherein the inhabitants are better off, or freer, than they were in the past.  But again, this is a very nebulous concept to grasp and so  In the sub-bubbles are four sections to address: Removal of sources of unfreedom, creation of new freedom, economic growth, and political development. Far from what the structure of the chart might imply, these four categories do not progress in isolation of one another. It is simply an artifact of the program that I used to map this that there aren't a dozen relationship lines connecting various bubbles and sub-bubbles to each other. Most of the concepts are pretty straightforward or can be easily explained though a Google search. I will leave you with this though, a quote our professor gave and explained to the class. "Freedom is of a piece." When there is a tear in fabric, it very obviously hurts the effectiveness of the whole cloth.  Yet when the fabric is whole, it can function beautifully. The same can be said of the various forms of freedom.