Buddhist Economics - Beyond capitalism

10 Mar 2010

The capitalist approach of life is to focus more fundamentally on the underlying motivation of buying and consuming so many resources for a good quality of life. Though our society often seeks to buy happiness, materialism very frequently fails to satisfy, and may even increase the level of stress in life.

It has been widely getting accepted that "the making of money and the accumulation of things should not smother the purity of the self, the life of the mind, the cohesion of the family, or the good of the society.

The traditional view of West
Western economists themselves, like most specialists, normally suffer from a kind of metaphysical blindness, assuming that theirs is a science of absolute and invariable truths, without any presuppositions. Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from "metaphysics" or "values" as the law of gravitation.

Human being vs. labour
There is universal agreement that a fundamental source of wealth is human labour. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to consider "labour" or work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it can not be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a "disutility"; to work is to make a sacrifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.

Hence the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment.

The Buddhist prospective
While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is "The Middle Way" and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them.

Simplicity and non-violence
The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern—amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

The violence is of various forms from operating butchery (blue collar) to being a bossy manager (white collar) who force his subordinates to work extra hours or made them under pressure by providing stiff targets. The violence is intrinsic driving force under capitalism.

The myth of measuring mere consumption as standard of living
For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the "standard of living" by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is "better off" than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.

Right Livelihood
"Right Livelihood" is one of the requirements of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path. It is clear, therefore, that there must be such a thing as Buddhist economics.

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.

From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of mechanisation which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a man’s skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of having to serve the slave.

It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man’s work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products.

Simplicity promotes non-violence
Simplicity and non-violence are obviously closely related. The optimal pattern of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction by means of a relatively low rate of consumption, allows people to live without great pressure and strain and to fulfill the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching: “Cease to do evil; try to do good.”

As physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other’s throats than people depending upon a high rate of use. Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade.

Gross National Happiness (GNH) Vs Gross National Product (GNP)
There is dialog among the intellectuals in the world to measure country’s wellbeing by Gross National Happiness (GNH) instead of Gross National Product (GNP).

The idea of GNH is to encourage a rethinking of what is important in people’s lives: should the success of a nation be judged by its ability to produce and consume, or should it be based on the quality of life in that country, the happiness of its people, however difficult that might be to measure in practice?

This unorthodox approach is a serious attempt to question the values of unbridled economic progress, and foreground the importance of maintaining a balance between tradition and modernisation.

The kingdom of Bhutan already measures its wellbeing by Gross National Happiness (GNH) and this new criteria is getting wider acceptance in Asian countries.

References
- Gross National Happiness and altruistic economics
- Buddhist Economics
- The E. F. Schumacher Society

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