By
E.F.
Schumacher
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."
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