“Buddhist Economics” is the title of chapter three of E.F. Schumacher’s book, This I Believe. In this chapter, Schumacher answers the question, “how do Buddhists work in the world today if the world is governed by Christian, egocentric countries?”
Of course Buddhist countries wish to remain faithful to their heritage of sharing the wealth and being collectivistic:
Such countries believe they can model their economic development plans in accordance with modern economics, and they call upon modern economists from so-called “advanced” countries to advise them, to formulate the policies to be pursued, and to construct the grand design for development, the five-year-plan, or whatever it may be called. No one seems to think that a Buddhist way of life would call for a Buddhist Economics, just as the modern materialist way of life has brought forth modern economics (35).
The traditional, spiritual Buddhist point of view believes the function of work has three specific elements: (1) “To give the man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties;”
(2) “to enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by joining with other people in a common task,” and (3) “to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence” (36). In Western countries, however, we see work to be a competition to put our rivals out of business. The company that shows more strength and is less “lazy” about its goals will ultimately succeed.
In Buddhist economics, on the other hand, organizing work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker is a disgrace, because it shows the rest of the world the boss is more concerned with goods and the company’s profit than the employees’ well-being. Of course, Buddhists see being lazy and not working as just as stultifying as an assembly line. In comparison to Western economics, Buddhists think that humans need to balance work and leisure. However, in the U.S. and other Western economies, people usually overwork themselves to get to the top in order to impress superiors. Anything else is considered a sign of weakness. Such an attitude, itself, is a sign of social anxiety, since a person who is not working to advance him or herself will be looked down upon by employers and even by colleagues, friends, and neighbors.
On the other hand, according to Schumacher, taking a break, after mixing work and play the goal at hand will be reached quicker. From a Buddhist point of view: “If a man has no chance of obtaining work he is in a desperate position, not simply because he lacks an income but because he lacks the nourishing and enlivening factor of disciplined work which nothing can replace” (37). Just as too much work is bad, too little work is bad.
In Western societies, people over-work to where they stress themselves out in order to impress their boss all the time. This attitude causes anxiety. Society’s expectations of workers can make them feel like total failures. This is when work is starting to do more harm than good.
While doing my senior seminar project on the origins of stress and anxiety, I come to the hypothesis that people are stressed because our society’s notion of work puts too many pressures and expectations on all of us. But this is what our society expects and demands. A Buddhist economist would see a family with two children and both parents working as horrendous, because he can see what this leads to: “I have to go to work, go to AAA and pay bills, go to the post office and mail twenty checks, pay rent today, buy dinner, and pick up Molly and Aaron from Daycare.” How do you think the person who just said this feels after all of this is done? Worn out and exhausted. All we care about in the West is profit. Not just in money, but in intelligence as well. Everyone expects a person to be good in everything and never make mistakes, and this wears people out, says Schumacher.
Although I agree with what Schumacher says up to this point, I am critical of what Schumacher’s position in regard to women in the modern workforce. According to the Buddhist attitude toward women in the work force, “Employment would be for everyone who needs an ‘outside’ job, and women usually do not need an outside job,” and large-scale employment of women would be seen as an economic catastrophe. To Schumacher, letting a mother work in a factory would be as uneconomic in Buddhist economics as employing a skilled worker as a soldier in Western economics.
I do not agree with what Schumacher says about women in the workforce. We must remember how the women’s movement came about in the first place here in the United States and then in the West in general- World War II put many women at work outside the home. Schumacher, in contrast, does not talk about how and why women were needed as factory workers during World War II- because their husbands or boyfriends were at war, and, so, women had to be hired to work in the factories to fill the spots once dominated by men.
Schumacher should know that this was the first major use of female labor since the early 1900s in the United States, when the first labor laws were being passed. These labor laws demanded that working conditions should improve. Then came World War II, and women were needed in the factories to make weapons for the war effort. And since the labor laws had been passed and conditions of factory work had improved, many women actually enjoyed their new experiences, and in the next generation gave inspiration to the women’s movement in the late 1960s and 70s. These women also got inspired by the Civil Rights movement. So, if a Westerner would be able to explain all of this, in detail, to a “Buddhist economist,” then he would probably understand with good reason the difference between the Western economy and the Buddhist idea of economics.
So, in contrast to Schumacher, I do think it is good that women can get out of the home and now can work almost anywhere they want.
What interests me most about Schumacher’s discussion is when he states that Buddhist economics believes in having things only as good as they need to be. Buddhist economics would ask “if I already have one good shirt, why should I have another?” On the other hand, this would frighten the Western economist, since this would be bad for the economy as a whole and we are so entrenched with the idea that more of a good thing is better. Planned obsolescence, common in the U.S., is not a very new idea. As early as the 1800s, ships over here were built to only last a short time, since their model would be obsolete in a few years anyway. On the other hand, this attitude would scare a Buddhist economist. The Buddhist economist is intent on building things that can be used as long as possible, so it does not have to be replaced every three or four years. Buddhist economics considers the quality of goods, while Western economics considers the quantity of goods (39).
That last paragraph states that it seems quality of goods is what the Buddhist economist cares rather than the quantity of goods. On the other hand that same Buddhist economist might not care about the quantity of natural resources needed to produce those goods. However, in the West, we now think that using so much coal and oil, which are not renewable forms of energy, is not such a good idea, when renewable resources such as wind and solar power are around and can be used. So in this case, the Western economist cares about the quality, not only the quantity of natural resources. The possibilities renewable energy can bring cannot be overlooked.
In the end, Schumacher says, “it is in the light of both immediate experience and long-term prospects that the study of Buddhist economics could not be recommended even to those who believe economic growth is more important than spiritual values” (42). I hope the U.S. and the rest of the West will eventually learn some of the best of the Buddhist perspective, and that the Buddhist economics will learn from the best that Western economics has to offer. Any form of economics should set up its own rules, regulations, and ethical standards, and follow them.
