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).