Thanks for the PM Linda - I will see if my library has the book.

Relating back to the Value(s) discussion, if we are a compassionate person caring is one of our "values". If we understand our wellbeing to be dependent upon the wellbeing (ability to contribute) of all others resident in our locality, we can see our self interest in helping others to be contributors - we care about their well being because we value their contribution.

Not sure if I am stating the difference clearly - but it has to do with understanding why we should care.

David Braden's reply has overtones for me of Richard Dawkins "The Selfish Gene" (which I'm currently reading as a follow up to "the Origin of Species") and this is turn may relate particularly closely to Foundation 6.

But I guess it makes more sense to start with one of the earlier foundations.

This is particularly related to David Braden (I think making it a must read for him):

Some reviews (from Amazon)

"The Real Wealth of Nations gives us a template for the better world that we have been so urgently seeking. As practical as it is hopeful, this brilliant book shows how we can build economic systems that meet both our material and spiritual needs. It illuminates the way to a bold and exciting new future."

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Laureate

"The Real Wealth of Nations is a call to action. It is not only politicians, businesses and financial institutions that must change, but rather each one of us must play a role in developing a more caring society. This book is an important tool that can help us make that happen."

Jane Goodall, Ph.D., DBE, Founder, the Jane Goodall Institute, UN Messenger of Peace

"The Real Wealth of Nations is a prescription for an economic system that is both equitable and sustainable. This book should be read and used by everyone who wants a better world!"

Deepak Chopra, author of Life After Death

"In The Real Wealth of Nations, Riane Eisler, long a voice of sanity and clarity in an increasingly confusing world, does what has been desperately needed for a long time: bring back a human-and nature-centric perspective to economics to show how ends and means can be integrated."

Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline

"Riane Eisler shows us how to value economically what is valuable humanly--and what could be more revolutionary than that? To imagine money not as the root of all evil, but the measure of all good, read The Real Wealth of Nations."

Gloria Steinem

"In this brilliant new look at economic systems and how they interact with culture, Riane Eisler has created what is sure to be a classic and--hopefully--world-changing book."

Thom Hartmann, author of Screwed and The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight

"This book should be mandatory reading for every CEO, every economist, every government official, every student, and every citizen of our world."

Jeffrey Hollender, President, Seventh Generation, Inc.

"In The Real Wealth of Nations, Riane Eisler lays out a comprehensive and compelling argument for why we must change national and global priorities about what work, and which workers, we value--including worldwide attitudes towards caring for our children."

Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children's Defense Fund

"An essential tool for government leaders, politicians, economists, and everyone looking for ways to halt environmental destruction, eradicate poverty, stabilize population, and build a better future, The Real Wealth of Nations shows us how to construct a sustainable new economy--and a good quality of life for our children and generations to come."

The Honorable Vigdis Finnbogadóttir, President of Iceland 1980-1996

"The Real Wealth of Nations is a call for nothing less than a ground shift in consciousness. I urge you to read this profound and important book."

Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues

"From third world poverty to climate change, it has become increasingly clear that traditional economic thinking is not only unable to solve today's myriad of problems; it's responsible for many of them. Riane Eisler's brilliant new book expands the scope and practice of economics beyond capitalism and socialism to a new economics in which equity, justice, and environmental sanity prevail. Must reading!"

Morris Dees, Co-founder, Southern Poverty Law Center

"This is a wonderful, hopeful, book not about where we have been economically, but about the potential for economics to reflect what we truly value, quality of life, and quality of the environment."

Daniel Kammen, Co-Director, Berkeley Institute of the Environment, Founding Director, Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, University of California

"Why has conventional economics been so slow to offer compelling, useful responses to our most threatening challenges, such as environmental degradation or raging inequalities? Riane Eisler answers this question, and in doing so, reinvents the dismal science, infusing it with the essential ingredients it needs to get us out the terribly narrow box in which we've been stuck."

Jared Bernstein, Economic Policy Institute, author, All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy

"Visionary social critic Riane Eisler offers readers challenging new ways to think about economics, caring, and ending domination in The Wealth of Nations. Breaking new ground, with keen insight and brilliance she charts the journey to freedom and well-being."

bell hooks, author, All About Love

"Listen to Riane Eisler! No one is better at conveying the urgent message that we must abandon our economic double standard, and start valuing the essential work of caring for and investing in ourselves and our environment."

Ann Crittenden, author, The Price of Motherhood

"When there's a Nobel Prize in Caring, Riane Eisler deserves to be the first recipient. With the skill of a worldclass therapist, she puts the dismal science of economics on the couch, pierces through its double-speak and contradictions, and suggests practical ways for how it can become a powerful tool for humanizing. There can be no better act of caring than giving this book to every politician, civil servant, CEO, professor, and decisionmaker in your life."

Michael Shuman, author, The Small-Mart Revolution

About the Author

Riane Eisler is an eminent social scientist, attorney, and futurist best known as author of the international bestseller The Chalice and The Blade, translated into 21 languages, and the award-winning The Power of Partnership and Tomorrow's Children. Her other books include Sacred Pleasure, a daring re-examination of sexuality and spirituality, and Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life, which statistically documents the key role of the status of women in a nation's general quality of life

Foundation 1 - A full spectrum economic map that includes the household economy, the unpaid community economy, the illegal economy, the government economy and the natural economy.

This is so important for understanding how our economy actually works.

I enjoyed reading Ivan Illich's book "Gender." A bit off-topic, but it seems to me that the discussion of feminism online is often quite contentious. Ivan Illich often provoked criticism, and "Gender" was no exception. One of the points of his book was that modern capitalism made workers genderless. There were many who saw genderlessness as not such a bad thing. But Illich introduces a construct new to me, the gray economy. Things like the work it takes to travel to your place of employment, the special clothing you as a laborer must wear--suits included--grocery shopping and things like that all fall into this gray area of the economy. Illich pointed out that a problem with non-gendered employment is that since the gray economy isn't measured women tend to have greater demands placed upon them. That's bad enough, but all that work isn't counted.

This is almost a caricature of his point.

I noticed in the Wikipedia article the books he wrote between 1978 and 1982 when Gender was published: The Right to Useful Unemployment (1978) Toward a History of Needs (1978) Shadow Work (1981) Gender (1982)

The proposal of a full spectrum map is really important. Looking at Illich's output, suggests this mapping is complicated. Part of the genius of neo-classical economics is deciding what not to pay any attention to. It's almost with the mapping Eisler proscribes she's saying: "Hey wait a minute, some of that stuff you economist say we needn't pay attention to, we really ought to.

I want to read this book. It's been years ago but I enjoyed Eisler's "The Chalice and the Blade."

I will finish this book this evening before I sleep and "The Chalice and the Blade" is on the schedule for tomorrow.

Gender discrimination is certainly a part of the mapping in going from her Domination philosophy to the Caring philosophy. In the Domination philosophy all things feminine and caring are devalued or not valued at all. I suspect if you enjoyed "The Chalice and the Blade" you are going to feel at home with this.

In the Domination philosophy the mode of action is competitive and confrontational while in the Caring philosophy the mode is cooperative and --- caring...

Hi Linda,

best topic by far... I mean that in a caring kind of way.

regards

Liam

My Library system has four copies and I requested the book.

For those of you who do not know, this all started for me five years ago (when I sold my law practice) with The Theory of Relationships and has evolved through these online discussions to think of each relationship we maintain as a bridge over which we exchange value.

I feel like I must share:

"As Gandhi said, we shouldn't mistake what is habitual for what is normal. We were not born with unhealthy habits. We had to learn them. We can unlearn them, and help others to do the same.

"Many of our economic habits were shaped by a warped story of human nature and an economic double standard that gives little or no value to the essential work of caring and caregiving. The measures of productivity we habitually use include market activities that harm our health and natural environment while assigning no value to the life-supporting activities of households and nature. The money that central banks create and circulate bears little relation to any tangible assets. Quarterly corporate reports fail to factor in the health and environmental damage a company's products or activities cause. Government policies, too, are often based on fantasies rather than realities, as dramatically shown by the George W. Bush administration's denial of the urgent need to take action against global warming.

"We have a choice. We can keep complaining about greed, fraud, and cutthroat business practices. We can put up with the daily stress of unsuccessfully juggling jobs and family. We can tell ourselves there's nothing we can do about policies that damage our natural environment, create huge gaps between haves and have-nots, and lead to untold suffering. Or we can join together to help construct a saner, sounder, more caring economics and culture." p 213

we can join together to help construct a saner, sounder, more caring economics and culture

I see that as Organizing to Heal Nature and Produce Abundance and I am eager to explore any other ideas about how to do it.

She has maybe hundreds of ideas on how to do it ... it is the last chapter.

I will be picking up my copy of the book today. The library is next to the Farmer's Market which is one block from the Golden Community Garden. I have a plot there to demonstrate the No Weed - No Water - No Till - Deep Mulch - Drip Irrigated Kitchen Garden as described in the Nice-World site.

We are using a Permaculture technique called sheet mulching which is based on valuing the services nature provides - or - honoring the gift of the least among us. That is the next step past acknowledging all the value created outside the "formal" economy and coming to realize that one thing is related to another and every thing is related to every thing else.

I started in on the book yesterday. I am careful about assigning cause and effect to the situation in which we find ourselves.

Eisler suggests an evolution away from a dominator/servient past toward a partnership future. She assigns blame for the devaluation of caring to the devaluation of women in the dominator culture. I don't dispute her statistics about how we value caring work - I just think we should be careful about assigning cause.

In her case she has moved past the male/female duality to the dominator/partnership duality. Maintaining the duality prevents us from understanding the system as a seamless whole with both dominate/servient relationships and partnership relationships. Both kinds of bridges serve the purpose of delivering value to those who choose to maintain them - although, with better information, people in a dominator relationship might choose a different kind of relationship.

I also have a similar problem with the Buddhist materials you gave me. If suffering derives from the illusion of self, and suffering is alleviated only by achieving the state of non-self (panna) then the world is a duality of those suffering and those not. (I have not finished the paper - and I am sure I am doing violence to Buddhist philosophy). The search to eliminate personal suffering does not seem to offer guidance on how we can deliver the value that the sufferers need in order to improve their lives.

I'll probably really do violence to Buddhist ideas about suffering ;-)

I love the Blues. Recently Koko Taylor died and I was reminded of seeing her perform. I posted a short clip of Koko talking about her craft I found at Youtube. One of the things I liked about the clip was there a little section where Pops Taylor talks. Now I know the Blues isn't to everyone's taste. But I always feel better after hearing the Blues. How could it be that songs about being low-down, out of luck, cheated and broken-hearted should make me feel good? But the Blues makes me feel good.

Attention to suffering of others often makes me feel so bad. I have to watch myself; abuse of and violence towards children is something that's just beyond the pale. There's a part of me that wants to ignore or deny such violence. But ignorance won't stop what needs to be stopped. So attention to such suffering is a first step; one I sometimes have to remind myself to take.

When one attends to suffering sometimes ways to ameliorate, to succor, to resolve come to mind.

Yes in Buddhism enlightenment comes by breaking through the illusion. But the first step is to attend to suffering. The first step is a relationship outside oneself. Attending to suffering is the way towards overcoming suffering. I don't see Buddhism quite so much as a duality of those suffering and those not. Rather I see a focus on relationships toward our common humanity.

Thank you John. A focus on relationships is essential in my analysis.

Getting further into the book, Eisler talks about all cultures being on a continuum between dominator relationships and partnership relationships - that the culture's place on the continuum is a part of a larger context - and that there is a correlation between the place the culture is on the continuum and the value the society places on caring. I think she realizes that where a culture is on the continuum is itself an effect . . . as well as the cause of devaluing caring.

I am thinking this morning about how her description fits with the Spiral Dynamics ideas - specifically the red and blue human responses to a lack of security in the environment. When our physical security is at risk we accept top down dominator relationships in order to survive?

I am also thinking about how the act of caring is affected if we try to "monetize" it. The Nordic socialist model aside, there is a part of caring that is private (a personal responsibility) - not public (a government responsibility) . . . and I am wondering how that fits with my ideas about internal transactions and external transactions? From Organizing to Heal Nature and Produce Abundance:

Every family faces these same choices:

• Cook dinner at home – go out to dinner.
• Clean up ourselves – hire a cleaning service.
• Stay home with the kids – hire day care.
• Grow our own food – buy our food at the market.

Each service we provide for ourself reduces the cash cost of making ends meet – or the amount of cash we must earn in the market to make ends meet. There is an economy of scale in the sense that the bigger the family the more things we can do for ourself. Or, in the case of a Community Investment Enterprise, we extend the benefits beyond the extended family.

Thanks for the commentary, David.

I searched our local library catalogues without success. I guess it's available via college libraries but I no longer have easy access to these.

Perhaps I should request that a copy is ordered for Cambridgeshire Libraries.

Back to touching base (I am getting really tired of reading!)

David Braden I do understand your concern with "assigning cause" but I found it a useful centering point and sometimes I think you need to understand where you might be coming from as well as where you want to go in order to plan the right path.

Caring is I think what I find missing in neoclassical economics and it is what has driven me to where I am. As I look back over the economic history of the west it seems to me that capitalism/industrialization/consumerism have driven/encourages/enabled many things that have broken our communities, encouraged competition at the expense of cooperation, attacked our values and the value of our interactions.

I just finished reading Peak Everything by Richard Heinberg (I haven't completed Plan B 2.0 yet and I put The Chalice and the Sword back on the shelf until I complete this next round of writing.) I also have been reading some works by (get ready for this - it makes Polish names and Thai names look short and easy - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi! The part of his work that I am looking at is around the idea of what he has identified as flow, or finding primarily work in your life where you perform the best and feel the best about it. He talks about finding the best of yourself in this space and incredible satisfaction.

Caring and this kind of internal system of rewards seems to me to be much more sustainable than the life style place we are currently in. As read Heinberg's book, I felt a kinship to him that was as close (maybe closer) than family. I have learned, deep inside me that stuff is not where it's at. I have learned about a deep, DEEP sense of well-being that comes from renewed sense of community and valuing things that matter. I know that scaling back will not be attractive (as Heinberg also laments) but I , like Heinberg, don't know how to communicate that it doesn't have to be ugly. It is different. It is less. It is glorious.

And as I think more and more about it, it is necessary - MANDATORY that we do it and start mindfully thinking about the path soon.

We need to reorient ourselves and start spending our energy on personal relationships, caring, and getting in touch with ourselves, each other and nature rather than stuff, stuff and more stuff. We need to actively think and engage others in how we remake our society so that it is more caring and sustainable.

I believe it can be done, and I believe it will be glorious but if we don't do something soon to make plans, the crisis that could happen would not be pretty.

David Braden and John: Trust me when I say I am not a Buddhist scholar. The Four Nobel truths are listed (blatently stolen from Wikipedia)

1. Life as we know it ultimately is or leads to suffering/uneasiness (dukkha) in one way or another.
2. Suffering is caused by craving or attachments to worldly pleasures of all kinds. This is often expressed as a deluded clinging to a certain sense of existence, to selfhood, or to the things or phenomena that we consider the cause of happiness or unhappiness.
3. Suffering ends when craving ends, when one is freed from desire. This is achieved by eliminating all delusion, thereby reaching a liberated state of Enlightenment (bodhi);
4. Reaching this liberated state is achieved by following the path laid out by the Buddha.

The role of self here (which is perhaps where I have the most doubts or lack of understanding) is that the attachment to some real and separate self is one of the last attachments to go because it is so "in us" but also often causes us the most problems. Pride is the best way I have come up with to describe attachment to self.

If we are all part of a unity, then what is the role of pride or attachment to self? I do struggle with this. There are people around that I do not wish to claim attachment to and hence my desire to be accountable for my own self rather than a single self. It's just one of the areas I work on.

OK...back to reading more Csikszentmihalyi on Good Work and Good Business then on to chaordic organization. I need to get these books read so that when I take off for Seattle and Salt Spring Island next week (YES!!! I am visiting Meron and <Ned> SSI), all my reading will be on my computer.

We agree on the caring - it is in the self interest of everyone in a locality to work toward arrangements for everyone else in that locality (and lots of plants and creatures) to contribute value to the system.

In my own life I have come to a point where I do not desire much in the way of material things but I do not so much focus on the need for others to give up that desire. Rather, there is a basic level of provisioning that is necessary for individual humans to be well, engaged and exploring their potential (thriving?). It is in our mutual interest to make that provisioning (food, clothing, shelter, education and health care) available to everyone in our locality with out regard to whether the "market" has a current use for them.

It seems to me that where one is a member of a group that assures these basic necessities, there would be less urgency about acquisitions.

In the period that Schumacher was writing "Small and Beautiful" and returning to his notions of "Buddhist economics" he became a Roman Catholic. To some extent "Buddhist" was for him a metaphor not always doctrinally Buddhist. Now surely I might be way off-base saying that. But I think that Buddhism was a way to talk about relationships. My analogy to the Blues and attending to suffering in Buddhism was something of this tactic too.

Over the course of your discussion of your work, Linda, you've struggled with definitions and also the importance of measurement. Clearly both are essential to the discipline of economics. What comes to mind first in measurement is the measurement of things, stuff. You can weigh stuff for example. But such a frame of reference kind of gets in the way when attention turns towards qualities. Adding up quantities never quite describes qualities. Indeed I think one of the key insights of Schumacher--and Eisler--is the importance of patterns of relationships in economics. Buddhism provides a method, sort of, to begin to examine relationships instead of the measurement of things.

But this way of framing is very difficult if what you're trying to do is to write and defend a dissertation in a field that might be lumped into the heap of social science.

I wonder if you've heard of Harrison White? Heaven's knows I don't understand much of any of it. But White's career at least points to a school of academic thinking accessible to Western readers of study that attends to relationships rather than turning qualities into things.

But, as you all know I get confused easily. I'm happy to hear you're reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. As David knows I'm frustratingly dense when it comes to the construct of flows. I mean in some way I can grok say water flows, but it's harder for me then translate that into what Csikszentmihalyi means when he talks about flows. There's a relationships between the constructs, I just can't quite make out the shape. Likewise I tend to think that constructal theory in mechanical engineering might inform social structures. And that somehow that constructivism in learning theory is also related to this notion of flows that have are metaphorically linked to physical sciences. I just haven't figured out yet how to make sense of it all.

The shorter version: patterns of relationships tie Eisler's work, Buddhism, and the various academic schools creating new approaches to study.

Those are some very interesting links between concepts from different fields.

From Better Maps:

Your map is the way that the concepts relate to each other. You take all that you know about the world and put it into a model of how things happen and based on that model draw conclusions about how one thing relates to another. Based on your understanding of those relationships you decide to take one action or another – vote democrat or republican. The closer your map is to reality, the better your decisions will play out in reality – if your map is defective, your decisions are unlikely to play out the way you anticipate.

If we are convinced that the problems in the world result from the illusion of self, then we will spend our time searching for oneness.

I particularly liked White's conception that:

an organization can be viewed as patterns of relationships

We individual humans choose what organizations exist - we attribute permanent status to these organizations and believe that they have power independent of the people who choose to maintain them. If we can move past that illusion it becomes clear that we can change the world any way we want. We just need a pattern of relationships that works better for people.

It's kind of obvious to begin with, but I thought to post the link to Eisler's Web page. Like so many Web pages there's a lot there, but it's not always easy to find everything. On the menu is "Partnership Politics" which leads to a series of short papers. I think these papers are particularly useful to get the gist of what the book's about.

I seem to found myself a job as John's link corrector! LOL

John Powers said:

It's kind of obvious to begin with, but I thought to post the link to Eisler's Web page. LIke so many Web pages there's a lot there, but it's not always easy to find everything. On the menu is "Partnership Politics" which leads to a series of short papers. I think these papers are particularly useful to get the gist of what the book's about.

Thank you David. Can't see what's right in front of me.

Just now finished the book. Eisler concludes:

It is in our power to imagine the world we want for ourselves and our children. For most of us, this is a world where our basic needs for food, shelter, and safety, as well as our yearning for nurturing and love, for justice and peace, and for a sense that what we do has meaning and helps others as well as ourselves, are fulfilled. Above all, it is a world where our children survive and thrive.

Of course I agree. It reminded me of this vision of the future.

I will think about it some more but this conclusion is a list of human needs - which I propose as the foundation for human organization. Eisler focuses on the differences between dominator trends in society and partnership trends in society. I am thinking that dominator is more common in a situation of scarcity of the means to fulfill those "basic needs" and partnership trends emerge from an urge to create an abundance for all . . .

Not sure I articulated that thought well - it is getting late.

As I have read this and later Korten, I have always felt it fit with your stuff, David. The dominator and the partnership are on opposite ends of a continuum that I think is really visible.

I think this is two ways of explaining the thrust to the same actions.

I think both are ostensibly to create abundance for all but the definitions of abundance AND all are different.