Dearest, John,

Thank you so much for sharing the Harper's article by Wendell Berry.

I have engaged with David Braden for a long while now and I have always stumbled on his denial of scarcity. This article helped me understand at a deep level why, and now I have only to try to lift that understanding out of the depths to a place where I can explain it. :-)

Economics likes to talk about making decisions on how to use scarce resources for unlimited WANTS. I doubt not that man has developed a taste for unlimited wants. However, our needs are limited. Even when those unlimited wants exceed the limited needs and often destroy or at least damage us in the process. And yet the things that make us human and social creatures are in fact unlimited. Loving, caring and beauty have no bounds; because my mother loved my father didn't mean that she cared an iota less for me or any of my brothers and sisters. People have died from over indulging in even necessities (obesity and its hazards) but I have never heard of anyone who died from being loved too much.

In one of the Randy Pausch lectures, he talks about the one economic term that he felt everyone should really understand: opportunity cost. His reasoning was related to time management. Once you have used an hour of time for one thing, you can never get it back. It is a recognition of the limits of our time.

I find that the times that cause me the most stress are times when I don't recognize the limits around me and very often they are the limits of my time. There are only so many things that you can fit into 24 hours.

One of the things that I am slowly (very slowly) understanding is a Thai thing that drives me crazy. It drives me crazy I think because I still have that western efficiency mentality that tries to maximize production. It tries to stretch time. It doesn't stop and recognize that sometimes people need time to to bathe themselves in those unlimited resources of love and caring - of relating to people and taking care of each other. Someday, maybe, I will learn how to do that.

This is a slide form one of my lectures this last week. I need to think about how I change this to measure well-being if I spend all of my TIME making computers OR I spend all of my TIME cultivating those unlimited resources. Perhaps plotting computers versus community?

What is the opportunity cost of spending time with your family? Or maybe it would be better to ask was is the cost of making 1 computer in terms of your family life?

Can I use time and community in these common graphs to better describe what Buddhist Economics is? Economics where people matter...?