Comment 21 on Mindfulness

At the core the three questions the emperor asks in Tolstoy's story are about opportunity costs. The answers the emperor discovers are very local.

When I read your first entry many of the links that came to mind had to do basically with issues of the Internet and society. I'm not sure really why I didn't post that response; well one reason is I didn't finish it. But another reason I think is the difficulty I have in trying to understand ethics in a time when communication is global.

Last year around this time of year I was in the garden. Probably I was doing something like breaking the iris stems off and pulling weeds in any case my butt was on the ground. I was thinking and my thoughts traveled to something I'd read about global warming and the extinction of all flowering plants. Ha, at that moment the extinction of all people seemed like a minor matter compared to plants. Under the shade of a mulberry tree and surrounded by so many plants and flowers, my grief was palpable.

Voltaire ended "Candide" with:

We must cultivate our garden.

In one way or another I try to live ethically. Like most things I'm not so good at it. But I think that my understanding of what it is I am to do is local in the ways that both Tolstoy and Voltaire suggest. The challenge of global climate change is that it's global. What to do and an individual may be local, but the big global nature of it really can't be ignored.

Since reading Laing, I seem to be on a Sixties kick and just pulled out my copy of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

Technology is running ahead of me and I can't keep up. Global climate change as a result of human technology is quite terrifying. And it's unsettling to rest hope to avert catastrophe for all life on the planet in further development of technology.

Schumacher's essay Buddhist Economics is remarkable for its clarity about such a number of topics in such a short space; quite unlike my prolix ramblings! One topic is the distinction between tools and machines:

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.

My reading is probably hopelessly out of date. I'm not a particularly good reader to begin with, but it's also true that it seems to take me years to draw out meaning from the books that seem to me to contain good clues for discovering knowledge that makes a difference. I think I did read "Deschooling Society" by Ivan Illich back in the day (It was first published in 1971) but I don't have a copy of the book. I do have his book Gender. From what I can gather this book was not well received, especially by feminists. It is out of print as is Shadow Work.

From "Gender" is this description of shadow work:

Unlike the production of goods and services, shadow work is performed by the consumer of commodities, specifically , the consuming household. I call shadow work and labor by which the consumer transforms a purchased commodity into a usable good. I designate as shadow work the time, toil, and effort that must be expended in order to add to any purchased commodity the value without which it is unfit for use. Therefore, shadow work names an activity in which people must engage to whatever degree they attempt to satisfy their needs by means of commodities.

It technology seems both our downfall and possible salvation the distinction which Schumacher points to between tools which enhance our skills and power and machines which turn our work into being mechanical slaves seems very important. Machines are incapable of ethical judgments but it seems the continued existence of life depends upon ethical judgments.

Shadow work seems related to your musings on opportunity costs. When you talk about efficiency my thoughts turn towards prices, something economists are want to study. Price seems to me not the best approach to take a stab at this. One problems is that shadow work is not priced, and so even its existence seems questionable to mainstream economists.

Stirling Newberry was someone I wanted to link to when I first read your post. Partly because he was on something of a tear over at The Agonist. But searching Newberry's posts at The Agonist is a pain and I got frustrated. I like to figure out how to access his writings better, and will try invent some ways. If you are interested this essay titled "The Progressive Century" provides an introduction to some of his major economic themes. But in regards to your discussion of opportunity costs and my trying to relate them to shadow work, I'm looking for some recent writing on the current monetary crisis and can't seem to find it.

Newberry points out that American monetary wealth is premised on housing. Unlike gold that can be rounded up and put somewhere like Fort Knox housing prices depend on a care and feeding which gold does not. Suburban house prices require inexpensive gasoline for people who live in suburban houses to get to work. As gas prices increase the value of the suburban houses are put under pressure. That Americans have so leveraged their monetary wealth, this pressure becomes unbearable to the economy as a whole.

Okay, I don't quite get all the nuances that Newberry includes, but that's the gist I want to point to. Our monetary wealth here in the USA depends upon shadow work, driving to work is a form of shadow work, but the very existence of shadow work is something which economists have tended to ignore.

When Schumacher begins from the thesis:

"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.

he proceeds towards a trenchant critique of economics. We've been paying attention to the wrong things all along! Small and local makes sense, but still I'm having trouble mapping that prescription to the global challenges, especially anthropomorphic climate change, which are so pressing.

Globalization is a tough topic. I'm happy that a few economist blog because it allows someone as unschooled as I am to listen in on the conversations. I've had Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution for a long time. Lately I notice I've not been bothering to read it. I do read Dani Rodrik regularly. Rodrik has been pointing to the problems with applying empirical evidence from micro economic study to policy at the macro economic level in numerous posts. In this post Rodrik takes on Cowen:

The trouble is that the moment you take the experiment (Rodrik links to a study on bed nets by Cowen) from Western Kenya and want to use it to inform policy in another setting, you need to make all kind of additional, not rigorously tested assumptions (about how similar or dissimilar the settings are and how these affect the likely outcomes). By the time the evidence is used, it has become as "soft" as many other kinds of evidence that development economists traditionally rely on.

I've babbled on too much, but the point I'm trying to make is that while Buddhist Economics certainly doesn't automatically tell us the answers about what to do, the beginning premises provide a direction. They also provide a needed contrast to examine the beginning premises of more conventional economics.

Much of what has been felt safe to ignore in economics now no longer seems so even to conventional economists. The good news about that is it seems the time is ripe for discussions about the fundamental premises upon which study proceeds. The rules of the game are up for discussion and Buddhist Economics has much of relevance to give to the discussions.