There is universal agreement that a fundamental source of
wealth is human labour. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to
consider "labour" or work as little more than a necessary evil. From
the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to
be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by
automation. From the point of view from the workman, it is a
"disutility"; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and
comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. Hence the ideal
from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and
the ideal from the point of view from the employee is to have income without
employment.
The consequences of these attitudes both in theory and in practice are, of
course, extremely far-reaching. If the ideal with regard to work is to get rid
of it, every method that "reduces the work load" is a good thing. The
most potent method, short of automation, is the so-called "division of
labour" and the classical example is the pin factory eulogised in Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations. Here it is not a matter of ordinary
specialisation, which mankind has practised from time immemorial, but of
dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts, so that the
final product can be produced at great speed without anyone having had to
contribute more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases, unskilled
movement of his limbs.
The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold:
to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to
overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and
to bring forth goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the
consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a
manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for
the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater
concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a
soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldy
existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be
considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human
existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same
living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and
the bliss of leisure.
From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of mechanisation
which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a man's skill and power
and one that turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave, leaving man in a
position of having to serve the slave. How to tell one from the other? "The
craftsman himself," says Ananda Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to
talk about the modern west as the ancient east, "can always, if allowed to,
draw the delicate distinction between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom
is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to
be woven round them by the craftsmen's fingers; but the power loom is a machine,
and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the
essentially human part of the work." It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist
economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since
the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants
but in the purification of human character. Character, at the same time, is
formed primarily by man's work. And work, properly conducted in conditions of
human dignity and freedom, blesses those who do it and equally their products.
The Indian philosopher and economist J.C. Kumarappa sums the matter up as
follows:
If the nature of the work is properly appreciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the physical body. It nourishes and enlivens the higher man and urges him to produce the best he is capable of. It directs his free will along the proper course and disciplines the animal in him into progressive channels. It furnishes an excellent background for man to display his scale of values and develop his personality.
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 this nourishing and
enlivening factor of disciplined work which nothing can replace. A modern
economist may engage in highly sophisticated calculations on whether full
employment "pays" or whether it might be more "economic" to
run an economy at less than full employment so as to ensure a greater mobility
of labour, a better stability of wages, and so forth. His fundamental criterion
of success is simply the total quantity of goods produced during a given period
of time. "If the marginal urgency of goods is low," says professor
Galbraith in The Affluent Society, "then so is the urgency of
employing the last man or the last million men in the labour foce." And
again: "If...we can afford some unemployment in the interest of
stability--a proposition, incidentally, of impeccably conservative
antecedents--then we can afford to give those who are unemployed the goods that
enable them to sustain their accustomed standard of living."
From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by
considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more
important than creative activity. It means shifting an emphasis from the worker
to the product of work, that is, from the human to the subhuman, a surrender to
the forces of evil.
While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly
interested in liberation. But Buddhism is "The Middle Way" and
therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that
stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment
of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist
economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist's point
of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its
pattern--amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.
For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used to
measuring the "standard of living" by the amount of annual
consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is "better
off" than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this
approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human
well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum well-being with the minimum
of consumption....The ownership and the consumption of goods is a means to an
end, and Buddhist economics is the systematic study of how to attain given ends
with the minimum means.
Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end
and purpose of all economic activity, tasking the factors of production--land,
labour, and capital--as the means. The former, in short, tries to maximize human
satisfactions by the optimal patten of consumption, while the latter tries to
maximize consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort. It is easy to
see that the effort needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the
optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort
needed to sustain a drive for maximum consumption. We need not be surprised,
therefore, that the pressure and strain of living is very much less in, say,
Burma than it is in the United States, in spite of the fact that the amount of
labour-saving machinery used in the former country is only a minute fraction of
the amount used in the latter.
Simplicity and non-violence are obviously closely related. The optimal pattern
of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction by means of a
relatively low rate of consumption, allows people to live without great pressure
and strain and to fulfil the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching:
"Cease to do evil; try to do good." As physical resources are
everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of
resources are obviously less likely to be at each other's throats than people
depending upon a high rate of use. Equally, people who live in highly
self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale
violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade.
From the point of view of Buddhist economics, therefore, production from local
resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life, while
dependence on imports from afar and the consequent need to produce for export to
unknown and distant peoples is highly uneconomic and justifiable only in
exceptional cases, and on a small scale. Just as the modern economist would
admit that a high rate of consumption of transport services between a man's home
and his place of work signifies a misfortune and not a high standard of life, so
the Buddhist economist would hold that to satisfy human wants from faraway
sources rather than from sources nearby signifies failure rather than success.
The former tends to statistics showing an increase in the number of ton/miles
per head of the population carried by a country's transport system as proof of
economic pro-gress, while to the latter--the Buddhist economist--the same
statistics would indicate a highly undesirable deterioration in the pattern
of consumption.
Another striking difference between modern economics and Buddhist economics
arises over the use of natural resources. Bertrand de Jouvenel, the eminent
French political philosopher, has characterised "western man" in words
which may be taken as a fair description of the modern economist:
He tends to count nothing as an expenditure, other than human effort; he does not seem to mind how much mineral mater he wastes and, far worse, how much living matter he destroys. He does not seem to realise at all that human life is a dependent part of an ecosystem of many different forms of life. As the world is ruled from towns where men are cut off from any form of life other than human, the feeling of belonging to an ecosystem is not revived. This results in a harsh and improvident treatment of things upon which we ultimately depend, such as water and trees.
The teaching of the Buddha, on the other hand, enjoins a reverent and
non-violent attitude not only to all sentient beings but also, with great
emphasis, to trees. Every follower of the Budha ought to plant a tree every few
years and look after it until it is safely established, and the Buddhist
economist can demonstrate without difficulty that the universal observation of
this rule would result in a high rate of genuine economic development
independent of any foreign aid. Much of the economic decay of south-east Asia
(as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and
shameful neglect of trees.
Modern economics does not distinguish between renewable and non-renewable
materials, as its very method is to equalise and quantify everything by means of
a money price. Thus, taking various alternative fuels, like coal, oil, wood, or
water-power: the only difference between them recognised by modern economics is
relative cost per equivalent unit. The cheapest is automatically the one to be
preferred, as to do otherwise would be irrational and "uneconomic."
From a Buddhist point of view, of course, this will not do; the essential
difference between non-renewable fuels like coal and oil on the one hand and
renewable fuels like wood and water-power on the other cannot be simply
overlooked. Non-renewable goods must be used only if they are indispensable, and
then only with the greatest care and the most meticulous concern for
conservation. To use them heedlessly or extravagantly is an act of violence, and
while complete non-violence may not be attainable on this earth, there is
nontheless an ineluctable duty on man to aim at the ideal of non-violence in all
he does.
Just as a modern European economist would not consider it a great economic
achievement if all European art treasures were sold to America at attractive
prices, so the Buddhist economicst would insist that a population basing its
economic life on non-renewable fuels is living parasitically, on capital instead
of income. Such a way of life could have no permanence and could therefore be
justified only as a purely temporary expedient. As the world's resources of
non-renewable fuels--coal, oil and natural gas--are exceedingly unevenly
distributed over the globe and undoubtedly limited in quantity, it is clear that
their exploitation at an ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against
nature which must almost inevitably lead to violence between men.
This fact alone might give food for thought even to those people in Buddhist
countries who care nothing for the religious heritage and ardently desire to
embrace materialism of modern economics at the fastest possible speed. Before
they dismiss Buddhist economics as nothing better than a nostalgic dream, they
might wish to consider whether the path of economic development outlined by
modern economics is likely to lead them to places they really want to be.
Towards the end of his courageous book The Challenge of Man's Future,
Professor Harrison Brown of the California Institute of Technology gives the
following appraisal:
Thus we see that, just as industrial society is fundamentally unstable and subject to reversion to agrarian existence, so within it the conditions which offer individual freedom are unstable in their ability to avoid the conditions which impose rigid organisation and totalitarian control. Indeed, when we examine all of the foreseeable difficulties which threaten the survival of industrial civilisation, it is difficult to see how the achievement of stability and the maintenance of individual liberty can be made compatible.
Even if this were dismissed as a long-term view there is the immediate question
of whether "modernisation," as currently practised without regard to
religious and spiritual values, is actually producing agreeable results. As far
as the masses are concerned, the results appear to be disastrous--a collapse of
the rural economy, a rising tide of unemployment in town and country, and the
growth of a city proletariat without nourishment for either body or soul.
It is in the light of both immediate experience and long-term prospects that the
study of Buddhist economics could be recommended even to those who believe that
economic growth is more important than any spiritual or religious values. For it
is not a question of choosing between "modern growth" and "traditional
stagnation." It is a question of finding the right path of development, the
Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and traditional immobility, in
short, of finding "Right Livelihood."
The E.F. Schumacher Society web site is at: www.schumachersociety.org