Books and travels: Small Is Beautiful. economics.

I didn't bring a good, long book to my flight. As much as I usually prefer to buy books used, there is something exciting about buying a book in the airport bookstore just before I take off on a new adventure. I did not anticipate that the international terminal that I checked into would only have books in Spanish.

The short book that I had brought (and read before) was The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz. A very good book, but a short read. After checking spanish bookstore after spanish bookstore I settled on Deepak Chopra's Buddha.

I had a six hour wait in the airport before my shuttle. I only know a little Spanish, so the book kept putting me to sleep. I was getting pretty desperate for any book in English.

Before I scoured everyone for a good book attempting a book trade. Estrella didn't have a book so I offered her the Deepak Chopra book. Later she told me that she had been looking at this same book earlier, but hadn't bought it. She did really want the book. I found someone else to give The Four Agreements to. The last day before I left, my friend Willie told me he had an extra book.

The book he gave me was Small is Beautiful: economics as if people mattered. I started the book on my flight back--with an 11 hour layover in Mexico City. I made a friend in the Mexico City airport and we talked for the majority of my layover. The book pulled me through the toughest part of my layover, the end, and kept me awake.

I can tell that this is going to be one of those books that helps me to look deeper and understand more about some of my life philosophies. Books often give us a language to express what we believe. I am excited to be able to add these theories into my world.

I love what this book has to say so far about economics. The author talks about the birth of Economics as a science and therefore the limits. I like that he mentions that perhaps Economics as a science is better if limited to quantitative measurements rather than qualitative. Quality is difficult to measure especially if we don't factor out creativity from the value. Then we end up with mass produced goods and people who become tools instead of craftsman. It is difficult to feel one has a personal purpose in life when one is a replaceable, unskilled tool.

Economics are out of balance when there is no cap. More, more, more production requires more consumption, creates more waste, while mechanization takes "jobs" . . . it creates quite a downfall for a community. The creation of the Megalopolis further throw the countryside out of balance. There is an optimal population for a given location to support.

This book takes the approach of Buddhist economics. The author states, however, that it is more about spirituality, that this could be said in the language of any religion. It is about each person as a person, not a strawman.

An excerpt from p. 57 & 58

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 economists 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 thee 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 of well-being with the minimum of consumption. Thus, if the purpose of clothing is a certain amount of temperature comfort and an attractive appearance, the task is to attain this purpose with the smallest possible effort, that is, with the smallest annual destruction of cloth and with the help of designs that involve the smallest possible toil. The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. . .it would be the height of folly to make material so that it should wear out quickly and the height o barbarity to make anything ugly, shabby, or mean . . .