This thread seems to be something of an obsession with me. I do hope that doesn't bug you. As verbose as I am, I know that I'm barely scratching the surface. Indeed I'm rambling about the topic.

There are some concepts that have come up that I have some peculiar notions about.

One of those is religion. I was raised in a Christian household, Episcopalian by denomination. And as a teenager I was a Jesus Freak. Nowadays I say that I'm not religious. There's a kernel of truth to that, but it also obscures a lot about how I think about things. I am not anti-religious, certainly. Nevertheless in academic research I think there is a real hazard to splitting the world into the spiritual and things. Of particular concern to me is that things be the object of study and what's spiritual be left to God.

Laing raises many good points about the study of psychology. He writes:

Natural scientific investigations are conducted on objects, or things, or the patterns of relations between things, or on systems of "events." Persons are distinguished from things in that persons experience the world. Thing-events do not experience. Personal events are experiential. Natural scientism is the error of turning persons into things by a process of reification that is not itself part of true natural scientific method. Results derived in this way have to be dequantified and dereified before they can be reassimilated into the realm of human discourse.

Now you can't really do economic research without gathering data. The data are important. Laing suggest that "we should speak of capata rather than data" because the data are taken out of "a constantly elusiuve matrix of happenings."

Mindfulness is a very essential construct to intelligible Buddhist Economics. "Being" not just stuff is central to the project. But there is a strong materialism in most schools of economics, so many economist and academics from many other fields take at a first principle that all that's worth study is stuff.

You might be able to imagine me as a young man in college trying to figure it all out. I was engaged in academic study and trying to understand my "crisis of faith." When I picked up Gregory Bateson's "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" The very first essay really ressonated. Here's something that I thought very important then and still do:

The conservative laws for energy and matter concern substance rather than form. But mental process, ideas, communication, organization, differentiation, pattern, and so on, are matters of form rather than substance.

Bateson introduced me to ways of rigorously studying precisely the sorts of matters of form which so interested me without recourse to religious or spiritual explanation.

I might note that religious and spiritual ideas interest me and often seem to reveal profound truths. But religious language doesn't easily translate or relate to academic discourse outside of religious studies.

From a Christian perspective, Buddhism isn't very easy to relate to as a religion, and yet I think most Christians understand Buddhism as a religion. Schumacher's essay on on Buddhist Economics really is about economics in a way that I think an essay on "Christian Economics" would be much harder to keep to economics.

As far as my religious views go--not very far probably-- Creation Spirituality appears to be the stream of modern Christian thought most harmonious with my academic musings on what Bateson called "matters of form." I understand well that Creation Spirituality is considered a heresy by many of my Christian friends.

So strong is the materialism of Western academics, the physical science metaphors within economics, where human behavior is thought to act so much like billiard balls, that placing human experience at the center, as Buddhist Economics must, is also considered heresy of another sort.

Karen Armstrong was one of this year's TED Prize winners. Here wish is help to make a Charter of Compassion among the Abrahamic religions happen and then to make people aware of the Charter.

Compassion along with mindfulness are important to Buddhism. It maybe that the Abrahamic religions get to compassion at the root by different routes than Buddhism, but there it is.

To a great extent what interests me about economics are the pathologies; otherwise sensible people seem to have confidence in ideas which seem downright crazy to me. For example Chris Blattman links to an interview in the New York Times Magazine with Enrique Pemlosa the former mayor of Bogata. Pemlosa points out something that drives me crazy:

We were building much more for cars’ mobility than children’s happiness.

I quoted Phil Jones as saying that the economy is a communications system with money as it's protocol. R.D. Laing is just one example of someone who has looked at psychology with an eye to taking existence seriously. So in academic psychology there are some examples of looking at pathologies, and especially messed up communication systems.

One of the sources of pathology and suffering among people seems to stem from variations on the theme of "Us and Them." Laing looks at family pathology and observes:

Such family "homeostasis" is the product of reciprocities mediated under the statutes of violence and terror.

In the USA George Lakoff has noted that politics is frequently understood using family metaphors. I suspect that the kinds of understandings psychologists and family therapists have teased out about us and them thinking and the hazards therein, could be quite useful in understanding economic pathologies.

The main point is that compassion stands in stark contrast to violence and terror. Compassion follows logically from mindfulness. Placing experience (being)at the center of economics might be a corrective to the sorts of economic pathologies we observe today.

I think it is quite possible to do academic work in Buddhist Economics without recourse to a religious or spiritual way of thinking and talking about it. I also believe that concepts in Buddhist economics can be related to religious insights of the many major religions, and think that's a good thing. Buddhist Economics cuts against the grain of many widely held and largely unconscious consensus views in both academics and religion, so relating to both sphere is quite a challenge!