I thought of something else that went into the mix. At the Beyond Schumacher Conference I went to a couple of weeks ago there was a woman from Australia that talked about the how if accounting doesn't know how to handle something, it just removes or ignores it. That was partly what got me to thinking about the assumptions behind modern economics.

Hmmmm, nice ambrosia, thanks for the invite. Some of those things I know a bit about, others I do not. Is it possible to pull out the most critical single element in each one and explain that critical element in very, very brief layman's terms?

Linda, How about writing a book?

Linda,

take it easy, take it as it comes!

What do you want a PhD for? What question do you want to resolve? The best way to get a PhD is to solve something minuscule and insignificant -- otherwise, you will probably never finish it. In my first attempt, I tried something really profound (I did that because I was a student, and had the crazy idea of coming up with the topic myself). This time around, I have a little better chance of success, since my supervisor suggested the topic (but it's still a doosey, and besides: I need to pay the rent, too).

The result of your work will probably be: nothing (if EF Schumacher couldn't get much done, what makes you think you can?). But: if you think that it will give your life meaning/purpose/etc. to try, then definitely do it!

Now, where's the tea?

;D nmw

I will see if I Can't gather some visuals today and tackle the first topic on the list, coordination, cooperation and collaboration. I might also prioritize those things or outline them so they fit together better.

OK....back when I first came onto ONet I got enamored with collaboration. I got into a discussion or two that had to do with what it takes to have a collaborative group. Some people I think thought the discussion was too cerebral but I needed to get my head wrapped around it. I have been participating (my participation is probably much better described as amazed voyeurism) in a discussion group with Howard Reingold and some other big thinkers. This diagram was presented there in the last couple of days and is what I am thinking about right now.

Why do I think this is important?

I think that the problems facing the world are way, way, way beyond the scope of being solved by one person's ideas. So what factors do we need to consider, what things need to be fostered to maximize the productivity and creativity of a collaborative group? What tools do we need to maximize participation and minimize friction? I believe these tools need to consider and cross from real life to virtual and back. I believe these tools have to include the finest communication tools available in order to minimize misunderstanding and miscommunication.

I believe with all my heart that the tools that people bring to these collaborations must include social/cultural tools.

I spent much of my life telling myself that people are people are people and on one level I still believe they are, but I have become so totally aware that culture dramatically influences how we think and how we approach even the simplest problem. It is soooooooooooooo hard to get out of the mind set that the way other people think is inferior or backward or wrong. I know that I Can't be bothered anymore with those kinds of arguments even with myself. I just know that I need to develop a set of tools that help me communicate with people regardless of their culture that allow progress to be made in problem solving.

"Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought", "Spiral Dynamics" and "Emotional Intelligence" thinned the fog around some of this as have some discussions with the Abbot at the International Forest Monastery here. We had an incredible discussion about cyclic vs linear views of time and how it might influence views of the future and planning for the future. That conversation has so changed how I look at interactions with the people here.

So, what do we do to maximize collaboration, divergent thinking and creativity? What are things we can do to maximize the quality of the communications we are in?

What are your thoughts on that diagram? I am off to bed. I have a busy week-end ahead of me. I need to start dealing with the things I need to deal with in order to go to Uganda in February.

P.S. I am still looking for a volunteer book repackager/shipper.

Let me add an overriding thought in al of this...

I don't think that we can afford to make many assumptions and I fear that many of the things that we take for granted have inherent assumptions that we re made for us so long ago that we don't even remember or know that they were made or what they were. For example, I want to know when humans got taken out of the worth equation in western economics. I what to know how ethics disappeared as mandatory criteria in relationships and why.

Something I noticed a while ago, in thinking along these same lines, was that we humans oscillate between (a) being certain and (b) being uncertain.

1. When we are certain, we act. We get things done.
2. When we are uncertain, we reflect, and question.

When a person in mode A meets a person in mode B, A says, "Get off your butt!" and B says, "Wait, pause for a moment and consider whether you are on the right track."

When a group of people meet, it is rare that they are all in mode A or all in mode B, even though the meeting might call for a certain mode, like it might be a "work meeting" with a specific goal, or it might be a "brainstorming session" with rules against imposing any goal.

I think coordination and cooperation typically require people to be in the same mode, or at least to get into each other's modes when interacting. Collaboration might allow people to be in different modes, fit together by some kind of two phase communal mode oscillator.

Buddhist Economics has been described as where Economics meets ethics.

I am not sure that this means that Buddhists are more ethical than any other people since they can be just as greedy as any American I have ever met.

What it really means I think is that most Buddhist countries are still developing nations and some of them are growing and developing at a much quicker pace than western nations did. I mean less than 200 years ago Thailand was essentially a feudal state. Because of the rate of change, some things are much more obvious to these people and (and it is a big AND) their cultures aren't based on the same assumptions as western culture.

One of the biggest differentiations pointed out in Buddhist Economics is a denial that maximizing profit is the be all and end all of work.

Schumacher's small treatise in which he coins the term Buddhist Economics starts with

"'Right Livelihood' is one of the requirements of the Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path."

Later

"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 the goods and services needed for a becoming existence."

Modern economics looks at labor as a necessary evil and something that should be minimized in order to maximize profit. It does not consider the inherent worth of work to human beings. These changes came so gradually for westerners that they didn't really see it.....kind of like watching your baby grow up.

At the Beyond Schumacher conference that I attended last month, there was a speaker from Australia, an Australian Professor of Accounting who was presenting a talk on sustainable development. She started out by talking about how accountants are called on to give reports. And sometimes there are factors that are troublesome to attempt to report so they are just ignored. She gave some examples which I quite frankly don't remember because I was too busy thinking about what assumptions were behind the "laws" of economics.

This summer I took on a reading challenge of sorts from Norbert. I started reading Adam Smith's "The Theory of Moral Sentiments". I will admit to you that it was one of only 2 books in my entire life that I can recall starting and not finishing. The other was "Essays and Aphorisms" by Arthur Schopenhauer. Unlike Schopenhauer, I think I am going to have to go back and tackle the Smith.

The man who is considered the father of modern economics which claims pretty much to be amoral if not immoral was first acknowledged as a great thinker for his ethics discourses. What happened?

<ned> On top of having special interest because of its being a business with social focus, has interest to me because it puts out in the open it's ethics. It tries to establish community, dialog and collaboration. It is transparent.

Living in a country where even most windows are not transparent (most Thais think it is novel to consider washing windows) I have come to value transparency more than I even had living in the States where lack of rigorous transparency has led to economic and political debacles of international proportions.

Ok, enough philosophizing for today. I have to go and work on reading those 21+ books on the current reading list (plus Adam Smith and a basic economics text so that I can master the vocabulary)

yeah, sorry about that Linda -- I got bogged down by Adam Smith's "Theory of Moral Senitments" too (haven't finished it either). Two things (besides "other work") prevented me, I guess: the "old fashioned" language; and an unwillingness to deal with sophisticated philosophy (or something like that -- there was simply too little I could use in a practical way). Maybe I'll pick it up again soon (but at present I am really starved for time). I recall the work was cited in a radio program about "customer orientation" (or something like that) -- maybe I might be able to drag out that link someday)....

:) nmw

the father of modern economics which claims pretty much to be amoral if not immoral was first acknowledged as a great thinker for his ethics discourses

Ethics and economics have a lot in common. And in a way, to be amoral you have to be super moral. Kind of like atheism is based on theism. An interesting insight from semantics is that opposites are very similar.

• Hot = +temperature, +extreme, +high, -direction, -righthand
• Cold = +temperature, +extreme, -high, -direction, -righthand
• East = -temperature, -extreme, -high, +direction, +righthand
• West = -temperature, -extreme, -high, +direction, -righthand

Which are the opposites here? Hot has more in common with Cold than it does with East.

(Which always made me wonder if there were two concepts that were farther apart than any others. These would then be poles of the conceptual realm.)

hmm -- that's a nice simplification. I am also very much influenced by binary logic. Note that you should actually have a square NxN matrix (whereby N = number of terms "in the vocabulary" [e.g. excluding stuff like "R2D2", "Kleenex" or "GooTube"]). Nowadays I no longer believe so strongly in the binary stuff. Note that lots of databases (e.g. SAP [for business applications]) actually "define" relations (in other words, they are relational databases). Really complex stuff -- but I guess the real world (if there is such a thing) is also complex.

True Cost Economics

Mark,

That is a fascinating link, and I just spent an hour following lots of further links on that site.

I wish I knew a way to efficiently share my ideas and collaborate with those people. I wish o/net had really clear categories in which discussions took place, and all the people who are really committed to making something happen in that area would participate.

Mark..thanks for the great resource!

Linda said:

Now....how in my old age can I pull all of this stuff together and make sense of it that might even help?

When I think of pulling things together, I think of doing so in the most concrete and detailed way possible. Ayn Rand (yes, I know many people don't like her philosophies) wrote a great book on writing. In it, she says that it's incredibly important to make all abstract ideas concrete. You don't talk about a sunset, then, but you talk about the specific way that the orange of the sun slowly sank in into the deep blue blanket of the darkening sky on the mid-October night. That way, people can see the significance of the sunset in a way that they couldn't have if you'd just said "the sun set that night."

So, when you ask about how you can pull all of these things together, I start thinking about what specific people need this information. After all, the way you go about compiling this information will be different for me than it would be for a Buddhist monk; they way you compile it for Mark is different than you'd compile it for Thailand's King.

All that said, for better or worse, here is my list of questions that might help you "pull all of this stuff together and make sense of it":

1. What is your purpose for compiling this information?
2. What do you want to prove?
3. Who do you want to believe this information?
4. Why do you want them to believe it?
5. What will you need to do to convince them?
6. Once they're convinced, what do you want them to do?

For the most part, it's the same list I give students before having them write a persuasive paper. Deciding these things helps you find your thesis, focus, genre, tone, and goals.

Hope it helps!

Kim, Thanks a bunch...it's nice to have someone help keep me focused...or in my case right now, get me focused.

More musing:

Economics claims to be the most scientific and mathematical of the social sciences. This for a discipline that starts with want, goes on to choice and ends in satisfaction. All of these are value judgments. All of these are influenced by ethics and yet economics speaks of absolutes.

It doesn't really matter what you want, the question is why do you want it.

WHAT can be listed and counted, produced, priced, marketed and sold.

WHY can't be handled so easily.

Buddhist Economics asks precisely that. Why do you want it? And as I read, it doesn't seem to me that Buddhists have a particular corner on the market here. I just think that western societies have been ignoring the real question and "buying" the advertising for a lot longer.

Modern economics has lost sight of those goals. It is focused on self-perpetuation. It has made itself the goal: want (unlimited), choice, consumption, lack of satisfaction so I want, choose, consume....ad infinitum.

In this schema, work becomes a necessary evil to fuel the endless cycle of consumption. In Buddhism, work has a 3-fold definition: is gives the employee 1) a sense of worth and accomplishment; pride in creation, 2) an opportunity to socialize with other adults and learn to work cooperatively with other people and 3) the means to fulfill life needs (NOT WANTS).

In a western schema where labor is viewed as just another cost to be minimized in order to maximize the bottom line, mechanization is introduced that can make the job boring and tedious, offering no sense of accomplishment and no cooperative working together.

In Buddhism there are obligations that the employer has to their employees. These include care and respect and honor.

I guess the next thing I want to share with you is a Buddhist perspective on consumption and wealth. Maybe tomorrow.

If any of you are interested in reading something more on this,

• Buddhist Economics - E. F. Schumacher - a very short treatise. The defining work.
• Buddhist Economics - A Middle Way for the Market Place - Prayudh Payutto - A longer work but still readable in a couple of evenings. Payutto is a leading Thai Buddhist Scholar. He has also written an incredibly interesting and thought provoking book called Toward Sustainable Science also not a long read.

Linda,

how much "economics" have you studied? Do you know the basics (supply and demand curves, market equilibrium, shifts, stuff like that)?

If not, then maybe it would be good to learn some of these things before jumping to conclusions about what economics is or isn't. Note, also, that people like Schumacher and Schumpeter have gone beyond such basic theory -- so I would not say that their models negate the fundamentals in economic theory.

Since you come from the "science" field (and also already have advanced degrees -- and I'm thinking quite a bit of "mathematical chops"), let me suggest getting your hands on a copy of Henderson & Quandt

I have read economics (and am reading more). (I will certainly see if I can find your recommended book.)

Here I was looking at basic assumptions. If a discipline is based on want, choice, and satisfaction, how can it become mathematical and "scientific" with out making HUGE assumptions regarding those things? What are the assumptions? At this point, the assumptions are unstated and that doesn't have everyone playing on an even playing field.

I think that people in the west - ordinary people - have come or are coming to the realization that wants are endless and satisfaction is elusive. If we get more, we want more. But more what for what reason?

Let me take something that I am firsthand familiar with. I love food. I love the wonderful tastes. I love many different tastes. They bring me great pleasure. BUT the point of eating is satisfying hunger and maintaining my body. I over do it (as do many people, particularly in the west). I eat food to satisfy my sensory wants and ignore the damage I do in the excess consumption. There is no doubt that that food tastes good but have I really been satisfied? If you asked my what would bring me satisfaction in life, I don't think it would ever include a single item of food, but I become distracted and waste my time, money, energy and health on consuming food. I am even worse and I satisfy another want of mine, to be liked and appreciated, by luring people into my folly and having grand dinner parties serving exquisite dishes.

To achieve real satisfaction, I have to consider more than wanting, choosing, consuming and being "satisfied". I have to look at value judgments - ethics. I have to know what assumptions are being made on my behalf in economics.

I have this sneaking suspicion that in the current mode of cost / benefit analysis, the costs are being understated and the benefits overstated by making assumptions that may not be valid for all of us. What are they? We need to be transparent here.

All I can say is: start with a simple model, and then slowly work ahead to more complex modeling (e.g. think of how Galileo dropped the stone & the feather)....

Ahhhhh, after a week-end of reading and researching and doing more mundane things like laundry and grocery chopping, I am sitting over my first cup of coffee and looking forward to a work week!

Something I read this week-end got me thinking.

GDP is an index that is used to measure economic growth. GDP is measured however, in many ways. It can be a measure of production, or of expenditure. Depending on the care taken in the accumulation of the data, it can double count. (If a produces $100,000 but in producing bought $40,000 in supplies produced by someone else if we count the $40,000 in both places, the GDP is too large.) Once you have agreed on what it will measure and how you still have the problem of whether the numbers are measuring the kind of growth you want to see. Because of the use of these numbers, they influence how growth and development happen. So the very existence of the index influences what the index measures.

I was starting then to think about the index that is being worked on in Bhutan and some other places in Asia: Gross National Happiness - GNH.

Getting even farther away, what kinds of measurement tools do we need to measure the kind of sustainable development that we are looking for. How do we measure success in the development of sufficiency economies? They undoubtedly need a green number and a human figure. In developing countries, do we need an index of human development? What kinds of development are we looking at? Would it be the same for each country or dependent on the society? What kinds of figures can be agreed on that will be "universal" to allow a measurement of global success? But what is it that we want to measure to show success? Big questions. any one have any suggestions?

One of my economics professors in Mannheim (for whom I did some programming in the late 80's [Input/Output modeling]) specialized in "shadow pricing" -- i.e., elements that are not captured in the "price tags" for goods/services. I would say that the assumption of "complete information" (as a basis for the theory of markets with "perfect competition") is very much open to question -- indeed, information is never complete. You can look at economics as being closer to "pure theory" and the various specializations of "business administration" (e.g. "marketing", "accounting", etc.) as being closer to "applied" and/or "hands on" and/or "real-world".

However, many econometricians are actually quite expert at interpreting the data that is available to them -- and they will usually use several sources to check these against each other. There are quite a few "sources" of "high quality" data in the private sector.

Linda Nowakowski said:

What kinds of figures can be agreed on that will be "universal" to allow a measurement of global success? But what is it that we want to measure to show success? Big questions. any one have any suggestions?

When you've figured out answers to these questions, please tell me and then maybe I can post the results on http:\succès.net...

;D nmw

I had a meeting with the dean today and he confirmed that the University has given me a 100,000 baht per year scholarship to complete my PhD.

He has also indicated to me that I will be attending a conference on Sufficiency Economies in Budapest in October.

Combine these things with the fact that I managed to find air tickets to the conference in Uganda today and also that I am lucky enough to have friends that will front me the money for a month.

Then top the day off with a package in my mailbox. A Re-Psycho Stop Genocide Now shirt! A great CD. A cool English language newspaper!

There is more but that is enough! Life is good.

Congrats!

Me is proud. You does good.

I agree -- that's great, Linda! :D