Speaking of rambling posts--lol. I've been thinking about this one for a few days. Spring is excruciatingly beautiful I find. But I also spend days digging and it makes me tired, too tired to write--well sort of what I write doesn't seem to make much sense even to me.

I'm looking over what I wrote last night and didn't post. There are several threads to it and links, but weaving all the threads together wasn't coming to me last night and isn't obvious to me now. So I'll just ramble a little tonight.

My favorite story about mindfulness is Three Questions by Leo Tolstoy. Something I like about it is the action revolves around and emperor, and I like to imagine I am of some consequence and imagine most people do too.

This is a story that Buddhist tell and yet there is no "outer layer" of Buddhism to distract others from the deeper meaning. In the West, teaching stories are not so commonly used as in other cultures, at least stories are told over and over so that a person hears them as a child, a young adult, adult and elder. Such stories don't lie flat on the page.

I'm rather stuck of the notion of taking Buddhism out of Buddhist economics ;-) I do understand the problem of broader acceptance, and in a sense transmuting culturally embedded constructs into other cultures.

But here's where I'm feeling a bit stuck on it: Something that has interested me quite a lot over time is why are theories in the behavioral or social sciences so poor? Economists seem to think that Economics is the most scientific of all the social sciences. A liability for me is that I'm not very good, or very knowledgeable about maths. I often find that economists seem so morally certain about positions which seem quite morally suspect to me and offer numbers to back them up. Is morality a sort of calculus?

Well, something about Cartesian coordinates and working out problems with the Calculus, is the ability to simplify problems by ignoring some things and paying attention to others.

I like Tolstoy's story because the important questions are about what to pay attention to and the answers have nothing to do with numbers.

That said, I do like science very much. Science is a very good and important way of knowing, so I don't begrudge economists employing the scientific method.

Teachers here in the West are want to say that education "is both an art and a science." Medical doctors say much the same, indeed many professions hold this balancing act as central to what they do. I rather wish that Economics did to.

John Broome has an interesting article in this month's Scientific American, The Ethics of Climate Change: Pay Now or Pay More Later?. In it he argues that economists in trying to draw up plans about what to do about climate change cannot escape making ethical judgments.

The problem as I see it is that Economics as the discipline exists today hasn't honed the skills needed to make ethical judgments. I think one of the reasons that Buddhist Economics jumped out at you is because you sense the deficit about economics as a discipline in this regard too, and Buddhist Economics perhaps provides a paradigm of better ways to imagine the study of Economics.

I haven't used one link that I packed in yesterday's unposted reply to this thread yet. LOL, so you know I've got more rambling to do, but I'll save it for later.

The simple point of this post is that the distraction of Buddhist Economics doesn't simply seem to me to be the Buddhist part. The other part is how Economics is envisioned as a discipline here in the West. The problem is more general to all the social or behavioral sciences. And the solution seems to me probably in dancing with both the art and science of things.