The addition of the additional rows of the table had to wait for the weather here. It's the rainy season and when the storms get bad, I lose my satellite connection. Last night was very stormy. I took my shower on the back of a motorcycle coming home from my Thai class.

I finished Peter's article last night and can't imagine how I have missed it before this. Ajarn Apichai will be in this afternoon and I guess I am going to have to invite him to dinner so I can have some time to talk.

Peter's chart and the rest of the paper is giving real "intellectual" form to the reactions and feelings and half clear ideas I have had. I don't know that I was off base but rather, since I hadn't been challenged to write it, hadn't put it to words and he has done it so well.

On another thread that I had been directed to by David Braden I found a reference to a paper by Russell Ackoff. I read the paper and really, REALLY connected with it and went following Dr. Ackoff. I found a great link to a webcast he did with the National Center for State courts on the use of systems thinking in the justice system. It is what looks to be 4 hours of webcast in a one day presentation.

I think that uch of my life can be summarized by a phrase that many of the Asoke people use on me - "You think too much!"

OK...back to thinking.... :-D

I'm here in South Florida to attend my niece Annie's wedding. It's so lovely to see everyone. To my delight I have Internet access too:-)

This chart is quite useful. One of the strong points of Buddhist economics, and really heterodox economics of all sorts, is to help us to examine the presumptions we bring to the study of economics. In the Neo-liberal City Journal is a piece, Economics Does Not Lie by Guy Sorman. Sorman argues that Economics now is a science. His argument seems to be that the competition between capitalism and socialism was a sort of empirical experiment and the results are in and the data reveal that socialism sucks, or something like that.

What I don't agree with in Sorman's reasoning is that because recent history might be viewed as a sort of a scientific experiment that economics can be therefore viewed as science. Sorman presents ten propositions that economics as science holds. To me they seem value propositions. One of my great interests, not just in economics, but in the social and behavioral sciences in general, is learning how to deal with value propositions in formal and rigorous ways. It isn't at all clear to me that we currently have ways of talking about and studying qualities and values that we can appropriately call "science."

Consider one of Gorman's essential propositions:

The best measure of a good economy is its growth. Unlike other proposed measures (happiness, for example), economic growth can be determined objectively: it is the rate of increase in a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) over a given period.

Growth is good and scientific because growth can be measured objectively. Yikes! Is this really considered good science? Quantitative measures are essential to scientific study of course, but no amount of quantity will ever determine pattern or quality.

I think that a reason that Amartya Sen has contributed so much to the study of economics is that he's straddled differing value systems. He has worked within Western academic settings, but his background provides a contrasting value system. Two perspectives allow a pincer move. Buddhist Economics along with Neoliberal economics provide a way to approach the territory we're paying attention in two directions. The multiple ways of explanation are better in the sense that two heads are better than one. Our underlying assumptions direct our attention to what's really out there. Buddhist Economics can help to correct the blind spots which result from an attachment to a particular value system.

Guy Sorman confuses ideology with science. The ten propositions he lays out are useful for study, but are not like scientific laws. It seems quite dangerous to imagine his propositions in that way too. I mean dangerous literally. When Neoliberalism as viewed as eternal truth, violence in defense of truth seems justified.

Thanks for your reference to that article, John. To be quite crude, I had to fight not throwing up in reading it. I wrote a response that will never see the light of day in the "selected responses."

I like your image of the power of cross cultural view points. I need to consider it deeper.

This is a work in progress but I wanted to put it out there for discussion.

Economics as If People Mattered?

That is kind of where all of this Buddhist Economics stuff started. Schumacher was an acknowledged fan of Mohandas Karamchand Ghandi. (Look for more history of the development of Ghandi’s beliefs and of Schumacher’s understanding of Buddhist Economics.)

It seems that Schumacher might have gotten things regarding Buddhism confused although it could happen considering the similarities between Hinduism and Buddhism. Historically, Schumacher’s 1955 trip to Burma as an economic consultant lead to his writing of his treatise on Buddhist Economics. By this time, Ghandi had already been assassinated and his ideas on local development and the use of appropriate technology well understood. Schumacher’s synthesis of the ideas into a unified whole have been responsible for influencing several generations of Buddhist Economists and I believe the King Of Thailand in his development of the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy of development.

I am a lecturer in the Faculty of Management Science here at Ubon Ratchathani University. I have been teaching a class entitled “Different Economics Paradigms for Business Management.’’ The faculty has a stated mission of framing its program in Buddhist Economics.

Although the first paper on Buddhist Economics was written in English and the second in Thai and translated to English, the only textbook on Buddhist Economics has been written in Thai and is only now being translated.

When I first heard about Buddhist Economics I was taken by it. It is indeed economics as if people mattered. Not many regular lay people here in Thailand can understand why someone from The US would be interested in Buddhist Economics and Sufficiency Economy.

It is hard to explain the beauty of Buddhist Economics to people who are living in developing nations (Thailand, Burma, Kenya and Uganda) where they are busy striving to be like western nations and have all that western nations have. Maybe you have to have lived in that out of bounds, over the edge capitalist, consumerism to understand the problems with it. To really understand that it is not satisfying. It is not economics that develops well-being. It develops production with negative externalities like water pollution, air pollution, global warming, deforestation, over use of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizer. It promotes a society where people have lost sight of who they are and what makes life valuable and worth living. It promotes a life style that is not healthy, stressful and not sustainable even if just on mental emotional terms.

Very often talks on Buddhist Economics are loaded with Buddhist catch phrases: sila, sammhadi, panna. Even the use of the term “Middle Way” while it is meaningful and carries a huge depth of meaning for a Buddhist, is empty for a Christian or a Muslim. That is not to say that there is nothing in Buddhist Economics that can and perhaps should speak to people outside of Buddhism, it just means that we need to think of how to communicate this so that it can push Adam Smith off the highway.

I have joked with Ajarn Apichai that I felt sometimes like I was called to take the Buddhism out of Buddhist Economics. I have worked for 2 years now to figure out how to explain this to westerners who know no Buddhism.

This week-end as I was reading an essay entitled “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath no Limits.” By Wendell Berry I had a flicker of light. It led me back to a couple of power point slides I had made for a lecture this week.

The light made it clear to me that these slides are graphing the wrong thing.

They are looking only at units of production and maximizing units and efficiency while never considering the real reason the “stuff” is being produced.

Economics is a social science. I don’t think that most economists would be unhappy if people just dropped the social part but the fact remains that it has to do with the actions of people. Neo-classic economics holds that man makes his economic decisions about what will be produced, how it will be produced and for whom it is being produced with a traditional model that has a lot of very basic assumptions:

With just this list we can go through and point to each of the fields of heterodox economics that has developed because of the total inadequacy of this model based on its oversimplified model.

Individual actors? What about families and groups, companies and governments?

Limited activities? Only production, exchange in markets and consumption by households? What about production for self use or care of communities, be they families or more extended communities where we volunteer? What about all of that “consumption” by business and government (the fiscal 2009 US budget is 3 TRILLION dollars while the US GDP estimate for 2010 is 13 TRILLION).

Restricted behavior? Where is charity work? When was the last time you heard an American indicate that they were satisfied? Everything is motivated by self-interest? What happened to all of the work done for the common good? And let’s not even start on perfect rationality with perfect information. What was the movie I watched the other night call “Thank You for Smoking”? Current marketing, advertising and lobbying lays aside the concept of perfect information.

Randy Pausch, a former professor at Carnegie Mellon University has a well distributed video lecture on time management. He indicated in that video that there is one economic term that every single person needs to understand and that is Opportunity Cost. He doesn’t talk about how many computers you have to give up producing for ever unit of food you decide to produce. He talks about the fact that once you have spent an hour of time doing something, you can never have that hour back.

That put all of this into perspective for me.

Economics is theoretically about how to provide people with well being in a climate of scarce goods. We are looking at the wrong thing!

I have no doubt that people have unlimited desires and wants but people do not have unlimited needs. Many of the problems existing in the west today are a function of catering to wants rather than needs. Obesity, hypertension, heart attacks, stress etc.

We all are really pretty simple and really pretty much alike. We want to live happy fulfilling lives. We want to raise our families in peace and be able to provide them what they need. When we provide children with all that they want rather than what they need, we are criticized as overindulging and spoiling them. But when we make faster cars that stressed people can drive while talking on their cell phones and watching TV in the car - that is called progress.

Let’s talk about production possibility curves that show the more critical trade offs….work and making more money to buy more stuff for time: quality time with ourselves, our families and our communities.

How do we rework economics and management science so that it helps provide people with blue prints for leading more enjoyable, less excessive and sustainable lives? We have to have compelling presentations if we want all of those people in the west who are used to making purely rational decisions, based on self-interest with perfect information to change their ways.

I certainly didn't mean to make you sick by posting the link to Guy Sorman's piece. One of the reasons I did is because the ten principles he lays out are a neat compendium of neo-classical economics. One way or another you'll have to address it and Peter Daniel's chart is quite a smart approach. But my main reason for posting it was Sorman's confidence that economics is a science.

Just what social science should look like is a subject I've been wondering about for a long time. While so much study seems flawed and sloppy, certainly not all of it is. What disturbed me about Paul Ehrlich's piece in Seed about cultural evolution is he seemed to present his little research project as an example of good social science research. What he seems oblivious to is that over the years numerous serious scholars have plowed the soil and have uncovered the many obstacles to study as well as useful approaches around them.

I'm hardly against an approach to economics as a social science. Indeed, what I hope for is better social science and for that to happen scholars must be careful about fundamentals. It's not enough for a biologist to come to the study of culture and society with with biological metaphors. Surely the fundamentals of biology cannot be denied, but they are insufficient for the study of culture.

I surf around for articles on Buddhist economics as well as for conversations about economics in general. I really have little academic training in any subject. So when I look at scholarship, there's much that falls outside my frame for attention. Some of the articles I see are looking to Buddhist economics as a way to capture another perspective with the intention to improve neo-classical economics. Whereas others recognize that there are worldviews embedded in the differing approaches, i.e. neo-classical economics and Buddhist economics, such that ideas cannot be carelessly mixed and matched without more fundamental changes resulting in the larger or more fundamental systems of worldviews.

A paper of this latter sort is one you probably already are aware of because it's from the 1990's, The Practice of Buddhist Economics? by Simon Zadek. I mention the article partly to point to Zadek as an academic who has taken seriously your question:

How do we rework economics and management science so that it helps provide people with blue prints for leading more enjoyable, less excessive and sustainable lives?

I didn't copy the rest of that paragraph straight away; let me do that now:

We have to have compelling presentations if we want all of those people in the west who are used to making purely rational decisions, based on self-interest with perfect information to change their ways.

I wonder if you were being sarcastic about Western views of economics?

Ah, James Surowiecki's The Financial Page in this week's The New Yorker The Permission Problem is right on the front page of the Web site. It's one example of cracks in the rational actor presumption of the Chicago School. This week at the TPM Cafe they're discussing James K. Galbraith's new book The Predator State The whole discussion is interesting, but Galbraith's intro is very good. The point is that contradictions in neo-classical economic approaches are adding up.

The other part about compelling presentations is really important. It leads me to think about the nature of your research program. On one hand all the questions I have about theory come to mind, and on the other hand pragmatic questions lean towards a narrow thesis. I do think that comparative work of one sort or another is useful, but I very much like your intention to work on project in a real-life context. The hard part of course is having the theory in mind--new and strange as it is--while at the same time focusing on practical problems.

As always, sorry for being so wordy. Let me just put out a couple more links with little discussion. What Kind of Open Money Do We Need? is a good discussion in a Ning community with some familiar faces. Also if you have a chance scan through the wiki. Also you may not have heard that Randy Pausch passed away in late July. Anyone who hasn't yet seen his "last lecture" the link is here (among other places).

I always write as if people have lots of free time to surf online. I know of course that's not the case. Another thing I often do is to try to join two quite disparate subjects into some--often very questionable--thesis. That's what I often do, and I'm afraid what I plan right now.

I was leafing through Business Week at lunch. The issue is dedicated to Business@Work. Sometimes work really sucks ;-) Some of the articles really got my juices flowing, just perfect reading for lunch. My mother used to find my morning reading of the paper quite amusing. She correctly saw that I take some sort of perverse pleasure in outrage. And in the Business Week articles, stepping back I see I took some pleasure in them too.

Okay so that's one topic. I don't think it really important to link through to Business Week, although you might find some of the articles fun. The second topic is a bit more serious about the dramatic rise of the illicit economy in a blog post by Nils Gilman, The Politics of Deviant Globalization.

What if anything do these two things have in common? The simplest and most direct answer is probably just that I read them in the same day. But there seems something else I want to try to tease out.

Last week I was very impressed by the TPM Book Club discussion of James K. Galbraith's book "The Predator State." Very early on in the Bush administration I was shocked and disturbed by the abrogation of international rules. For example after the Asian financial crisis Larry Summers recognized that unregulated banks in such places as island of the Caribbean had been a factor in the meltdown. The USA with Summer's leadership worked out agreements with European Banks and others to tighten the rules about money transfers between such unregulated banks. Before 9/11 under Bush, there was a real pull-back from this position. After 9/11, the same week, Treasury Secretary O'Neil was on the Newshour saying there would be no regulation. That's just one of hundreds of such moves that left me confused and angry.

The TPM Book Club discussion helped me to understand how much of my thinking was shaped by rather traditional liberal positions. But also how far my positions had shifted. I still admire Galbraith. Surely his ideas about economics rest on much firmer foundation than mine. But it seems that Galbraith imagines that a strong modern state is possible and desirable. I'm not so sure about either count now, and it's not just the relentless rightest attack on the efficacy of government that gives me pause.

Some of the Stories in Business Week about work are funny in an absurdist way. Work as a way of life, at least in the corporate world, seems a sick joke. The back page of Business Week is a column by Jack and Suzy Welch. Jack Welch is widely regarded in business circles because he was at the helm when GE went from a $14 billion company to a $400 billion company. In the day he was known as "Netron Jack" for firing so many people but leaving the buildings standing. Back in the day calling a CEO "Chainsaw" was a complement.

Linda, I suspect that you, like so many others in this region, might have found such adoration of CEOs a little grating too. We watched as companies in the Pittsburgh region were plundered into bankruptcies in the 1980's, with pensions and promises broken, all the while outside CEOs were racking money into mountains and calling it their own.

Suzy Welch knows something about winning as does Jack the bomb. Who cares about losers, certainly not them! Needless to say, I don't admire either of them. But did find this week's column amusing.

[Question]: What do you think about the Google model of HR management, with its flexible work schedules and employee empowerment?

They don't think much of it because of course power is from the top down. "Superior players earn empowerment." It's the winning that counts baby, and don't forget to get out your shives and to hide the evidence. The way the game is played, is eat them or be eaten. Now, I take the Google guys Larry and Sergey's, "Don't be evil!" with a grain of salt, but The Welch's "Be evil!" makes me sick.

The trouble is, well, the Welch strategy works. It's not so far from a point Gilman makes about illicit tycoons:

Contrary to what the bien-pensants claim, most so-called failing states don't want to get fixed. In many of these zones, the local powers that be are quite content with these novel, informal political arrangements. It allows them to make fabulous amounts of money running globe-spanning commercial empires, while being recognized as the "big men" within the communities that they care about.

What's the way out of this mess? Through the Bush years I basically thought that a competent Federal government was an important answer. Not just a competent US government but international compacts between competent governments to reduce predation by licit and illicit enterprises. I can hear Jack and Suzy smirking with laughter: "You thought the rules had something to do with winning; ha ha ha ha ha ha..."

John Robb from whose blog I found the link to Nils Gilman's piece talks about Resilient Communities. I'm still rather attached to my liberal ways of thinking, especially Keynesian instruments like the Tobin Tax or even Keynes' Bancor interest me. You'd think I'd learn sooner or later that when something interests me and nobody else, it probably isn't as important as I think. Then again, resilient communities strike me as very important now, especially in trying to cope with my lessening confidence in state actors.

Buddhist economics, I suspect, has much to say about the development of resilient communities. But when one begins thinking at the community scale, it's immediately obvious that a grand plan is replaced by a multitude of plans.

Who gets the credit for "Think globally, Act locally" varies. I tend to credit Rene Dubos. Dubos believed that local success needed vibrant conversation across communities. It is not enough to act locally but we must also think globally. Acting locally does not mean indifference to the communities of the world, indeed our actions are shaped in communication with them.

We sure do live in interesting times. At times I despair. Asoke community living is a powerful model; one that sometimes brings me back from the brink. Surely it cannot be translated intact to American communities, but just as surely the model has much to say to Americans who are intent on building resilience in our communities. Perhaps, such models can even be an inspiration to those featured in Business Week, if judging from the reports correctly, where working in corporate life has become too absurd.

Hijacking your thread again. Please tell me to stop when it's a problem.

Today I read a piece that got me to thinking about ethics and economics, but really I've been thinking about the subject ever since you introduced me to Buddhist economics. The piece today revolves around this news:

Lt. Colonel Diane M. Zierhoffer, a US Army psychologist who ordered the illegal torture of a juvenile, Mohammad Jawad, invoked her right not to incriminate herself and refused to testify in the case of Mohammad Jawad. bmaz is filling in at Emptywheel while Marcy Wheeler, the regular proprietor of the blog, winds her way to the Democratic National Convention as a road trip vacation with her husband.

Zierhoffer is the first psychologist to refuse to testify in the Gitmo trials, but probably not the last. In any case the involvement of psychologists in torture has become a subject of interest for the American Psychological Association, especially after the publication of Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals earlier this summer. bmaz's post also points out how the American Anthropological Association is concerned about ethics in regard to anthropologist involved in Human Terrain Teams.

Social scientists have long been concerned about ethics. Psychologists and anthropologists can cause direct harm to persons or groups of people, and ethical guidelines have been fashioned to prevent or minimize such harm. No one would argue that an economist cannot cause harm to people. But the types of havoc an economist might wreck seems much less "personal" than for psychologists and anthropologists.

In my own personal news thread, "Our Own Metaphor," I've been discussing a book on a 1968 conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation. In the 1991 afterword, Mary Catherine Bateson discusses her father's reluctance to endorse action to effect change. M. C. Bateson believes that his rejection comes out of Gregory Bateson's experiences in WWII working in psychological warfare. M.C. Bateson's mother, Margret Mead did too, but was far less reticient about encouraging action against environmental and human problems.

bmaz's post references a rather narrow ethical problem, basically: Is it ethical for a psychologist to use her training and methods to systematically harm a person by directing torture? Or Is it ethical for an anthropologist to use his training and methods to identify persons for disappearance and subjected to torture? Understandably, the professional associations have a few qualms about the propriety of this sort of stuff for their profession.

The discussions about ethics and social science during WWII were sometimes public, for example the Conferences on Science, Philosophy and Religion, and the scope of the discussions broader.

I'm probably just ignorant, but I don't know of many discussions among economists about ethics with similar breadth happening presently. Thinking about it the discussions between Jeffery Sachs and William Easterly along with other interested parties seems to qualify somewhat. But these discussions seem more about policy than ethics. It's as if there is a presumed ethical agreement underlying most Western economic thinking so no questions about ethics are needed. One exception is Joseph Stiglitz, at least in Google searches combining economics + ethics his name come up a lot.

Ethics, Economic Advice, and Economic Policy by Stiglitz is an example of the sort of paper combining ethics and economics I should think there should be more of.

I like policy discussions. But it strikes me as odd to find so few articles on economics which address ethics. I do hope that debates among members of the APA and AAA about ethical parameters of psychologists and anthropologists in the terror wars gets some attention. I also hope that such debate might cross over to economics.

There's a short take on Easterly and Sachs at Ethnograph.com (scroll down a little) entitled "Jeffery Sachs, William Easterly and Bronislaw Malinowski???" The author draws a distinction from Malinowski's ethnographic work between subsistence ethics and impersonal market ethics:

[I]t is questionable whether encouraging hoe-wielding farmers embedded in subsistence ethics to compete in maize markets with price-setting Iowa agri-business is an effective poverty alleviation strategy. The capitalist Iowa farmer, and the Tanzanian subsistence farmer reflect fundamentally different types of social organization and attitude towards markets. Just ask Malinowski.

Economic ethics is central to Buddhist Economics and the discussion of ethics is makes Buddhist Economics very relevant to the advancement of economics in the West.

Maybe I am pulling a "John" here. :-D

It is the end of the semester - tomorrow is the final day of class. Yesterday in Economics class we were reviewing and summarizing Buddhist Economics and the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy.

The main goal of Buddhism is the elimination of suffering for ourselves and every living being. And one of the things that the Buddha said was that poverty is suffering. Not having the basic necessities of life is suffering - lack of food, clothing, shelter and medicine. As such, the elimination of poverty falls as a major responsibility of every Buddhist, personally and as a society.

We were talking about what a world run on Buddhist economics would look like compared to this one. We kind of all agreed that developed nations would have much simpler lives than now, Africans would have more and we were split on whether Thais would have more or less. As part of that exercise, we were discussing how much each of us consume. This student said 200 baht a day, that one said 100. I said in a normal week I spend 215 baht - a bit less than $10. The part that is hidden in that equation is when I go and buy books (Mark has just shipped my most recent splurge that in toto cost almost $600.) and my penchant for traveling - I have been in 9 countries on 4 continents in the past 3 years. We got to talking about why I like to travel. We talked about learning by doing - how real life experience is so much stronger a teacher than a book. I had a not insignificant number of my students who went to the US in March, April and May on work/travel programs. Their impressions of the US after living there were much different than before they went. They had fascinating experiences/opinions on US consumption from the food is not healthy to they just plain serve too much.

Back on track!

In a society working with Buddhist economics, it is interesting to think about what macro economics looks like. Macro economics ostensibly looks at the role of government in assisting in the economic process. It focuses on maximization of profit (maximization of consumption), minimization of unemployment and equalization of wealth distribution. You can see how well that is working in the US by just looking at the Gini Indices.

The 56th worst Gini index of 127 reported countries. Altogether, pretty shameful!

The economic predicament that the US currently finds itself in, which is spreading around the world like a pandemic, is even identified by mainline Republicans as a result of unbridled greed. A greed that has been allowed to flourish because of intentional governmental non-intervention. A situation exacerbated by the government deregulating and and the government turning a blind eye on clearly risky bad behavior. Governmental action (or inaction) that has led to a situation where the risks that were taken and allowed in greed for phenomenal profits have now become an externality to be paid for by the public at large. The people who made 7 digit bonuses during the "boom" are walking away free and clear. Is it any wonder that the American public doesn't think a bail-out would be fair?

Buddhist economics lifts the concept of saving for protection in the future! It lifts the use of wisdom and safety. It focuses on THE MIDDLE WAY! Not too much -- not too little.

I believe that a Buddhist Macroeconomics model would focus on elimination of poverty. Work toward the guarantee of adequate food, clothing, shelter and medicine for each citizen. Without employer paid insurance, medical care is out of the reach of most Americans. This financial crisis threatens the possibility secure shelter.

What has happened in the west where advertising has come to call the direction of our lives? Intentionally targeting and selling credit to people who do not need and can not handle the debt with fine print terms that increase the yields for the lender if people have the predictable problems in handling the debt How honest and ethical is that? How compassionate?

As my students have heard every day of the class for the last month, ethics is everything.

I know that YouTube isn't really available for you Linda but I just listened to a snippet of E. F. Schumacher speaking on Buddhist Economics. This week my attention has been focused on the economic meltdown going on here in the USA. All of that sort of puts a frown on my face, so I was delighted to laugh aloud at Schumacher's comments.

At the end of the clip he said that he entitled his book "Buddhist Economics" but might as well have called it "Christian Economics;" but then "nobody would have read it." That's not the only funny in his talk and I was delighted to hear such sensible talk with such good humor.

Another thing that interested me was the date: 1977. LOL my life is rather a string a failures, but I do believe I've been pretty earnest all along. So it's a bit startling to hear him talk about energy, because of course that's the way I was talking then too.

Ethics are tricky. It's not that people uniformly agree about ethics. Apparently Hitler was fond of Schopenhauer. I find Schopenhauer interesting too, especially his contention of compassion as the basis of morality. This is quite different from the more utilitarian considerations or categorical imperatives, far more common in ordinary American thoughts on morality.

I find Umair Haque strategies for business quite interesting because in one way or another I think he's looking to root enterprise in ethics. But also it seems to me he takes ethics for granted rather than to spell them out.

Going back to Schumacher that he might as well have called it "Christian Economics" I wonder.

Recently I've been trying to cogitate about Rene Girard and memetic desire. Something about becoming enlightened is that things fall into place. Nothing is in place for me ;-) Brian McDonald sums up the relationship of mememtic desire to scapegoating:

While mimetic violence divides each against each, scapegoating violence unites all against one. Thus the destruction of the scapegoat produces a genuinely unifying experience, the peace and relief of which makes such a profound impact that, over time, the hated scapegoat is turned into a god, and the community tries to perpetuate the peace-bringing effect of this original lynching by commemorating it ritually and sacrificially. Ultimately this ritualized violence becomes the basis for religion, mythology, kingship, and the establishment of those differences in role and status that are so essential to bring about internal peace. (Differentiation cuts down on mimetic rivalry since only “equals” can compete for the same object.)

For Girard the Gospel makes us question the sacred scapegoating and in his view would reasonably turn us to Christianity. But many find Girad's theories of great merit without the Christianity.

I bring Girard's ideas up because a Christian Economics coming out of them wouldn't seem to have compassion at the base of ethics, nevertheless compassion seems a reasonable expression of the consequence of his line of thinking.

Christian theologian Walter Wink has also explored the terrain of ideas about redemptive violence. I find in his summation of the Ennuma Elish a familiar sort of ethical stance expressed by many Americans in this election cycle:

Religion exists to legitimate power and privilege. Life is combat. Any form of order is preferable to chaos, according to this myth. Ours is neither a perfect nor perfectible world; it is theatre of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong. Peace through war, security through strength: these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the Domination System is founded in every society.

From my point of view it seems that compassion is the basis of ethics in Buddhist economics. I think the problem that Schumacher would have found if he had chosen to write "Christian Economics" is the basis of morality would have been much more contentious. It seems from such Christian thinkers as Girard and Wink, a compassionate economics might be derived. But both thinkers seem at the edges of Christian thinking and in Wink's case at least a case made that in broad brushes what passes for Christianity in Sunday Schools mirrors more closely Babylonian myth.

Of course there are so many who want ethics without religion, and for many for whom economics and religion seem at cross purposes. Ethics, I don't believe, are something that can be discovered empirically in nature. The are products of human invention and our relationships spanning time.

Search "Christian Economics" and rather quickly you'll encounter Gary North. The ethical base of North's Christian Economics in many ways offends my sense of morality. While there are so many things most people everywhere consider wrong, ethics are hardly as common sense as we might think. So it is quite challenging to root economics upon ethics, although I don't have a better idea.

Just a quick note for now...the first graduating class from the International BBA program finished classes today and the lower classmen had a party for them. I just got home and it is quite late.

Thank you so much for the Schumacher link. I spent all afternoon at the university watching many, many of the videos of him speaking. I was enthralled.

I have made the comment that if we could find a way to bring Schumacher back from the grave we could have all of the big names in the foundational work of Buddhist Economics here for our conference. You have given me a way to do that I hope. I contacted the Schumacher Society this afternoon to see if they can send me all of the videos and give us permission to show them at the conference. It would be awesome. Especially if we can get them early enough to translate them to Thai.

We got another big injection of cash into the conference so we will be able to have simultaneous translation which will allow a lot more Thais to attend and maybe come to understand what foreigners think is so inspiring about Buddhist Economics!

Tomorrow morning I will tackle the other links. No more homework to grade, no more lectures and Power Points to prepare, no more wiki to maintain...ahhhh...can't wait till the exams are graded. And final grades are submitted.

A repair to the Wink Link

Made it through all of your interesting links.

I think that Christian ethics can be found without all of that deep deconstruction and reconstruction etc.

Obviously the starting point would have to be the 10 commandments.

You then step to the New Testament and you easily find the compassion link in Jesus: The golden rule (also found in forms in other religious and secular forms); "...He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her".

The piece of the puzzle that I believe is required that I do not find or have not yet found in western or Christian culture is the interrelatedness of all things.

(I have been trying to teach my students some Buddhist symbols to try to give them visual ways to remember things)

This interrelatedness is what incorporates nature into the mixture and in Judeo-Christian traditions, man is see having dominion over nature. I believe that this can be looked at in terms of a loving God who although there is dominion, with the dominion comes responsibility and stewardship as well. It is just a much harder sell.

Off to bed.

Thanks for engaging with me in my ramblings, John.

I had a funny dream just before waking this morning. Perhaps the dream might be called "The Erotic Chapel." The gist of the dream is that I was visiting village church in Spain and learning the story of it while inside the lovely sanctuary space.

The story went that in the early 1970's the village was still divided along Nationalist and Republican lines with all authority vested those aligned in the Franco Nationalist camp. The church decided to build a new sanctuary and use the humble original space for community gathering. The building was a community effort and everyone wanted to make it beautiful.

From the time of breaking ground the place seemed to arouse amorous feelings among everyone who worked there. And as it was a community effort men and women were falling in love across sectarian divisions. That in it own way intensified sectarian feelings, yet the work went on.

One Nationalist boss so consumed by his contempt for Republican workers insisted on setting roof tiles without them. He enlisted his wife and sister to help. The two women in summer cotton dresses were kneeling on a board on a steep section of the roof, but the roof was not too high off the ground. A Republican workman seeing the progress and knowing the heaviness of the work. Ascended a ladder with a stack of tiles. The women saw him and were pleased for the help smiled and joked with him.

The man had rather too heavy a load and took a moment to steady himself as he stepped from the ladder onto the roof. As he did he noticed the women kneeling, more particularly he saw their round butts draped over with their white cotton dresses. Paying a bit too much attention to the women's bottoms as he walked up to the plank where they knelt, he lost his balance. The stack of tiles scattered and slid down the roof, as the man slid too. Trying to right himself his pants came undone at his waist--I know the geometry of this isn't right but it was a dream. The man slid right off the roof landing on his back. He was dazed but not seriously hurt nevertheless his pants were down to his knees and genitals exposed.

The women were laughing. But the Nationalist boss enraged rushed down the roof and ladder to pummel the man. Approaching the man yelling that he had told the man not to help and saying: "You don't even have enough respect to wear underwear!" But as he dropped to the ground to wrestle the man the humor of the scene, the fact that the man was unhurt caught him and he joined in the laughter.

So in the dream having learned how building it had brought love to all who toiled in the effort, I walked along the path by the chapel. Along the edge of it were pretty flowers planted and a stretch of lawn. It was a bright sunny day and youngsters were lolling about on the grass. They struck me as especially beautiful and I imagined they were the children and grandchildren of the Republicans and Nationalists who had fallen in love building their lovely church.

Apropos of nothing :-) and of course telling a dream is always much less than dreaming, still I awoke today with a smile.

Man...You dreams are way more interesting, intense and detailed than mine. And I usually forget what I was dreaming instantly anyhow. Can I pay money to participate in your dreams???? ;-)

When I was a little boy I used to have nightmares. As I got older I was pretty relieved not to remember my dreams very much. Basically that's the case, it's pretty rare that I remember dreams mostly just disconnected parts of them. This one charmed me. I think that it was set in Spain came from watching the presidential debate last night. McCain had last week refused to say that he'd meet with the Spanish President if elected and that came up in the debate.

When I was in 9th grade we were reading Romeo and Juliet in English class. That was the same year (1968) that Franco Zeffirelli's film came out and believe it or not our little English class got on a bus to go to the theater to watch it. Wow! That movie sure left an impression on me. So it was strange that only recently I saw Brother Sun, Sister Moon. The soundtrack was sung by Donovan and the movie tried to link the philosophy of St. Frances Assisi to hippies. I think my dream had a bit of the flavor of that movie.

There are very romantic strains in Christianity.

Which gets me around to the fact that this thread is Buddhist Economics. Schumacher's comment that he might as well have called it "Christian Economics" got me thinking; well and of course writing in my stream of consciousness way. I'm wondering where to put that without disturbing this thread. I think I'll put it over at my personal news.

Eek! The idea of Christian economics is really slow going for me. Trying to do something akin to the remarkable table that you posted created by Peter Daniels comparing and contrasting conventional economics with Buddhist economics is beyond me. I think Schumacher was smart to reject the idea of calling his work on economics "Christian economics." But seeing how Buddhist economics has developed into a real discipline, a related Christian economics seems worth envisioning. Gary North's Christian economics diverges sharply from Buddhist economics. It's a version of Christian economics in opposition to Buddhist economics. Perhaps such opposition is inevitable, but I still think it worthwhile to at least try envisioning a sort of Christian economics at least as ecumenical as Buddhist economics has developed.

Your observation that what is lacking in Christian culture is: "is the interrelatedness of all things." There are many Christian symbols of interrelatedness. One theological category is the Body of Christ. Christ is the head in this symbolism, and it does seem that interrelatedness almost always is envisioned in a hierarchical way.

An exception to this sort of hierarchical thinking is Creation Spirituality. This review of Matthew Fox's book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ provides a brief overview of the book. More succinctly the blurb from the Library Journal at Amazon includes:

Fox calls for a return to mysticism (an experiential, nondualistic, "right-brain" way) and a shift in focus from the historical Jesus to a pantheistically understood "Cosmic Christ" who is continually incarnated in all creation.

Matthew Fox's ideas are very controversial and could hardly be called conventional. But his scholarship is very deep and I think successfully is able to demonstrate that ideas of Creation Spirituality are an ancient stream within Christianity.

I've really loved re-reading "The Secular City." I've also found Google Book Search a really valuable new online tool. So I went there to see if the chapter "Work and Play in the Secular City" was available. Sadly, no. As controversial as Cox's book is, I think it's pretty much within the mainstream of Protestant Christian theology. Much of what Fox says in the book seems compatible with what I know of Creation Spirituality. However, he is clearly not in step with the sort of mysticism that Fox proposes in the Cosmic Christ. I'm interested to read more by Cox. He's still around and has written extensively.

You might be interested in reading a 1999 article in The Atlantic by Cox entitled The Market as God. Also there's a link I wanted to share where the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York weigh in on the market bailout.

Sorry to clutter up this thread. But this topic has been occupying me for the last little while. I'm impressed when I read online writing by young American political activist, how Christian it so often seems. Or to put it another way how much in common their vision seems to have with Buddhist economics. As you know I'm not a believer, but this similarity seems very important. I guess what I'm wanting is a cosmopolitan economics which seems like Buddhist economics.

One final link is an essay by bell hooks Toward a Worldwide Culture of Love. A Buddhist perspective, but one which feels quite compatible with Christianity, at least in my imagination of Christianity.