The research arises from my work over nine years with one project supporting asylum seekers and refugees in North East England. It seeks to identify what the key issues of well-being are for asylum seekers and, to examine these alongside some of the theoretical literature on well-being and existing asylum policy. This practitioner research project aims to explore with asylum seekers, their experiences of the UK asylum process. By asking What is the relation between our collective economic wealth and our individual ability to live as we would like? and by incorporating individual freedom as a social commitment into his analysis, Sen allows economics once again, as it did in the time of Adam Smith, to address the social basis of individual well-being and freedom. Values, institutions, development, and freedom are all closely interrelated, and Sen links them together in an elegant analytical framework. Social institutions like markets, political parties, legislatures, the judiciary, and the media contribute to development by enhancing individual freedom and are in turn sustained by social values. Freedom, Sen persuasively argues, is at once the ultimate goal of social and economic arrangements and the most efficient means of realizing general welfare.

The main purpose of development is to spread freedom and its 'thousand charms' to the unfree citizens. Even if they are not technically slaves, they are denied elementary freedom and remain imprisoned in one way or another by economic poverty, social deprivation, political tyranny or cultural authoritarianism. Sen explains how in a world of unprecedented increase in overall opulence, millions of people living in rich and poor countries are still unfree.

In Development as Freedom Amartya Sen quotes the eighteenth century poet William Cowper on freedom: Freedom has a thousand charms to show, That slaves howe'er contented, never know.

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen