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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Economics as if People Mattered
  • Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2010 20:25:57 -0600


After a market day we count the take and, no matter how well we do, we try to
figure how this much work is justified. Then I come across a piece like this.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Economics as if People Mattered
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/19-0
by Grace Lee Boggs Sunday, September 19, 2010


As I‘ve been following President Obama's desperate efforts to devise a
popular Jobs programs in order to avoid his party's defeat in the November
election, I've also been re-reading (and urging others to read) "Buddhist
Economics" by E.F. Schumacher.

I first read this amazingly timely article in 1969 when my friend, Henry
Geiger, featured it in Manas, his little 8-page weekly with only 2500
subscribers. Robert M. Hutchins, the internationally renowned University of
Chicago President, called them "the 2,500 most interesting people in the
world."

Schumacher (1911-1977) was a British economist who served as Chief Economic
Advisor to the UK National Coal Board. In 1973 he explained Buddhist
Economics and advocated small, appropriate technologies in a little book
titled Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. The Times
Literary Supplement ranked it among the "100 most influential books published
since World War II. "

I only met Schumacher once (in Ann Arbor in 1976), but I have long believed
that one day his profoundly human approach to economics would be recognized
as the alternative to our dehumanizing and increasingly unsustainable
economic system.

That day has come!

In "Buddhist Economics" Schumacher explains why mass joblessness is
inevitable as long as Work is viewed as Labor, because both employers and
employees, each for their own reasons, are constantly seeking to reduce or
eliminate it.

"The modern economist," he writes, ‘ 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 of 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 of 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
eulogized in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations....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."

By contrast, Buddhist economics is based on recognizing the role that Work
plays in human development: "to give man (sic) a chance to utilize and
develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by
joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and
services needed for a becoming existence."

Therefore, "to organize 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 worldly 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."

You can find "Buddhist Economics" on the web. Reading it will open up both
your heart and your mind. See also my June 20-26 column, "Maybe Jobs aren't
what we need" by Frank Joyce. It's on the Boggs Center website
www.boggscenter.org/

Grace Lee Boggs has been an activist for more than 60 years and is the author
of the autobiography Living for Change.






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