As if you have time to click on lots of links ;-) I put links in in case you might be interested not with the expectation of clicking.

Your BBA program is a wonderful professional program. In the NY Times there's an article about a program at Binghampton University called the New Humanities Initiative. Basically it's an effort to combine the sciences and humanities. And your BBA program really achieves that sort of integration.

Finding a way to make your PhD work meaningful to the broader discipline is a real challenge; at least here I'm still stuck on taking the Buddhism out of Buddhist Economics ;-)

I enjoy reading Dani Rodrik's weblog. LOL much of what's on the Internet is too smart for me to really follow. Rodrik seems a natural blogger with short posts and a conversational style, unlike much of the economic blogging that available. Rodrik posted Re-uniting development economics. He sees a consensus emerging among macro and micro development economists on policy, but a methodological divergence.

So that problem isn't the same as the problem you're tackling of how to make Buddhist Economics a place at the larger table of the study of economics, but some of the outlines of the challenges seem similar. Anyway I found his attempt to get macro and micro economists to see that they have much in common nice.

Obviously one of the big challenges for your work is to find a method that fits well with the discipline without--well--loosing the essential insights of Buddhist economics.

Somewhere along the line you probably heard of the book Pigs for the Ancestors. I'm really far afield here, but somehow how Roy Rappaport managed to merge his hard materialism with the a sympathetic study of people's beliefs seems very smart. Rappaport made a distinction "between how a people interpret their ecological niche and how their reality actually exists." He used the terms "cognized environment" and "operational environment."

My probably unjustified "hit" on conventional Economics is that economist believe they are studying an objective operational environment, but, no, that environment is loaded with all sorts of assumptions, myths, beliefs, and stories.

I liked that Scientific American article about the economics of climate change and especially the point that many decisions that economists must make are based on ethical judgments not economic verities.

You make the point that Buddhist Economics is "in many ways, a regional, cultural concept that is fully shrouded in Buddhism." LOL well I think you are ahead of the game simply for that observation. Economists, it seems to me, aren't very good at looking for what Rappaport called the "cognized environment." It's important if only to be more realistic (scientific) about the operational environment. The operational environment even if not the focus of your study cannot be ignored.

You've identified the purpose of the economy is for people to make happy lives--well you've figured out that happiness is somehow essential to economics. Buddhist economics takes seriously not just what is "out there" but also what is "in here." I agree that Americans like me wonder what Buddhism could possibly have to do with economics? But there are many Americans like us who know that meaning, perhaps a consistency with what is "out there" and what is "in here," is vital. Economics seems somehow off the rail because as a discipline practiced here doesn't seem to acknowledge the importance of this. Buddhist Economics takes seriously this quality of knowledge.

Shoot I babble on so long. Let me just put up a link to a paper by Jeff Vail The New Map: Terrorism and the Decline of the Nation-State in a Post-Cartesian World (PDF). I like the title, especially the "Post-Cartesian World" bit.

One of the reasons I find the work you are doing so important is that so many challenges we face require a better study of economics; we need economics which can enable human happiness. Vail's piece simply highlights some of the current challenges we face. We've reached the point where "More!" isn't a good answer. Ha! But what is a good answer for today?