Economics as if people mattered
“Every time an economic decision is made, kamma is made, and the process of fruition is immediately set in motion, for better or for worse, for the individual, for society and the environment.”
So said the Ven P A Payutto in his book, Buddhist Economics: A Middle Way for the Market Place (Buddhadhamma Foundation, 1995).
It may have taken the process decades to come to fruition, but the collapse of Lehman Brothers appears to indicate that the greed and excess once celebrated by Michael Douglas’s character in the 1987 film Wall Street are finally bringing the world’s financial markets to their knees.
For years it had seemed that the party would never end. Young people full of potential were drawn to the world of finance and big corporations by fat paychecks and even fatter bonuses even as much more worthwhile work for which they had acquired university degrees suffered from shortages of talent. And as bankers deliver more riches into the pockets of the wealthy via the financial markets while big corporations do the same in the name of “return to shareholders”, the wealth gap widens, not only within countries, but across borders everywhere.
Through all the years of excess, consumption was the mantra, until we are confronted with not only ecological but also economic collapse. Tellingly, Ven Payutto observed in his book: “…non-production can be a useful economic activity. A person who produces very little in materialistic terms may, at the same time, consume much less of the world’s resources and lead a life that is beneficial to the world around him. Such a person is of more value than one who diligently consumes large amounts of the world’s resources while manufacturing goods that are harmful to society. But modern economics could never make such a distinction; it would praise a person who produces and consumes … vast amounts more than one who produces and consumes … little.”
So what now for the world? Ironically, a recession is likely to slow the rate of climate change by slowing the activities that lead to global warming, but that is small comfort to all those who, having lost real income and insecurity after years of corporate pursuit of outsourcing, voluntary retirement and contract work (rather than permanent employment), are suffering even more than the bankers and directors whose fall from grace is still cushioned by payoffs.
There can’t be a better time to apply Buddhist economics. A good start may be for citizenries to urge their governments to adopt their own versions of the Green New Deal, a strategy developed by an expert group in the UK. It’s modelled on the New Deal President Roosevelt launched to rescue the United States from the Great Depression but devised with today’s “triple crunch” of financial crisis, climate change and peak oil in mind.
Financial markets are already floundering, we have already passed peak oil and, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we have only till 2015 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a level that would limit the global rise in temperature to 2°C, bearing in mind anything above that would lead to irreversible and catastrophic changes. There is no time to lose.
Anatman