Buddhist Economics

December 12, 2016
Brown, a University of California, Berkeley professor of economics, believes the primary concern of the free market is profit and prosperity, but such a gain must be weighed against the crises that it produces, including income inequality, climate damage, poverty, and overpopulation. For a country to be prosperous, she writes, it is commonly assumed that free market economics will provide the best outcome to its citizens. Buddhist economics, on the other hand, requires a different metric: shared prosperity through minimizing suffering and striving toward equality of well-being for all. Brown explains the Buddhist economic world as quasi-utopian: the end of poverty, universal healthcare, humane working conditions, proper recognition of human rights, efforts to stop and perhaps even reverse climate damage. Not to be written off as an idealist, she offers concrete suggestions for the implementation of a Buddhist economic program and metrics to assess progress towards equity and stability. Such suggestions include a redistribution of wealth in society (naturally, the rich must simplify and give up their luxuries), a restructuring of preexisting markets, and new regulations and taxes (such as carbon and pollution taxes). Though she treads familiar ground in her criticism of free market economics, Brown’s economic program is compelling and stimulating, asking readers to consider both how they contribute to contemporary conditions and how they can break out of them. Agent: Lisa Adams, Garamond Agency

December 15, 2016
In a Hobbesian marketplace full of predators and lambs, an economist offers a case for being a little nicer--and more mindful. A primary tenet of Buddhism is that, given that all life involves suffering, we are at our best when minimizing another's travails. In the economic sense, this involves a chain of Pareto improvements--transactions, that is, in which everyone is left better off than before. That's the ideal, seldom realized. In Buddhist economics, one hopes for the same all-around benefit. To gauge how it works in a particular society, writes Brown (Director, Center for Work, Technology, and Society/Univ. of California), "we look at the distribution of well-being across its population, including equal access to opportunity." Such an economy hinges on a recognition of the primacy of public goods, including ready access to education and other human-capital resources, and it requires a full reckoning of what an economist would call externalities: the costs of pollution attendant in burning a gallon of gas. In this calculus, the old laws of supply and demand yield to a new understanding, to "new prices and outputs that reflect our new interdependent values." Naturally, such an understanding also involves a redistribution of wealth within Western economies and from richer to poorer countries, a kind of large-scale international socialism. Lest anyone dismiss Brown's program as pure pie in the sky--though there is that--she offers the example of the Buddhist country of Bhutan, which "introduced the idea of using a Gross National Happiness (GNH) index in place of GDP to measure the nation's prosperity and well-being." And with lessened suffering and a few more dollars in the pocket, why wouldn't one be measurably happier? Brown's portrait of an ideal market is speculative in the ordinary sense of the word, but, even if likely to be dismissed by the financier class, it makes for an attractive prospectus.

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