How Would Buddha Organize Our Cutthroat Modern Economy?

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How Would Buddha Organize Our Cutthroat Modern Economy?

March 19, 2014
by Joshua Holland


Clair Brown, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, taught economics for over 30 years. She often found that the students in her sprawling introductory classes had a hard time reconciling the dominant neoclassical model that she taught with the real world that they experienced from day to day.

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Joshua Holland: One of the materials you offer in your course is a book called Buddhist Economics: A Middle Way for the Market Place. It’s by Prayudh Payutto, a Thai practitioner, and he writes:

| Economics is one science which most clearly integrates the concrete and the abstract. It is the realm in which abstract human values interact most palpably with the material world. If economists were to stop evading the issues of moral values, they would be in a better position to influence the world in a fundamental way. |

What would incorporating moral values into the realm of economics look like in practice?

Clair Brown: I see Buddhist economics as having three legs. One is the capabilities and freedom approach of Amartya Sen, for which he won the Nobel Prize. And he’s a wonderfully deep thinker, in that he explains very carefully what’s wrong with the mainstream neoclassical model. He says that you absolutely have to be able to compare rich people and poor people and their wellbeing, and you absolutely have to care about inequality. He comes from India and his contribution is in development economics, so he says, “What do people get from the economy and from economic growth?” What they want is a better life. He developed an economic model that looks at how well people can live their lives, and that includes very basic things, like their health, their education, their integration into society. We care a lot about the distribution of income within a society. So he developed a model, for which he won the Nobel Prize, which has had an enormous impact.

I see it as the cornerstone of how Buddha would teach economics to undergraduates, but we need to add two things. One is that Amartya Sen didn’t really spend a whole lot of time on sustainability, and there’s been a lot more work done on how we can incorporate sustainability into economics, and that’s called ecological economics. And that’s very important. Then we add one more thing — which is really important to Buddhists — that you relieve suffering. We make that the third leg.

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Holland: But does it fit into a modern, industrialized economy like ours? What would Buddha say about workplace conditions and labor relations? Would a Buddhist economy require a corporate model that’s different from the hierarchical one in which most of us in the United States work?

Brown: I think that the main thing that you need to embrace is “right livelihood,” which is one of the cornerstones of Buddhist economics. That’s basically how you make a living and how you produce goods and services. And the number one rule there is that you harm no one. Now, that’s a pretty big order. That means that you have really strong enforcement of labor standards, not only at home, but abroad because of imports, and you would not allow companies or workers to harm each other or to be harmed. And so right livelihood is a very powerful mandate in Buddhist economics. And as some of my students said, “Wow, it sounds like it’d be impossible to do this. We just do so much harm all the time in our economy.” And it is a challenge. It’s a really big challenge, but that’s one of the things we need to think about: When am I harming others, and what can I do differently? ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://billmoyers.com/2014/03/19/how-would-buddha-organize-our-cutthroat-modern-economy/

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