Much, if not all, of modern economics is focused on the perspective of quantity in our world. We are said to be better off if we have more money or less poverty. We are said to said to be wealthy if we have lots of possessions as opposed to a few. A business is thought to be successful if it produces lots of widgets and makes high profits. Rarely does economics, however, talk about well-being and happiness and never does it talk about sufficiency. Yet if economics is really supposed to aid in promoting the well-being of humankind (which I think it is) then it needs to shift its focus from being a purely quantitative science to a qualitative science. This qualitative perspective would focus on managing resources to foster human sufficiency….to foster freedom of choice and freedom of expression. This doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t have businesses and workers and a functioning market system but it does mean that the economy would be geared towards empowering people to choose freely who they want to BE, instead of simply focusing on what they need to consume.
Sufficiency Economics3 Comments
3 Comments
Shifting the focus really would be something. Totally agree with you John!!!!!
Comment by Judy — February 10, 2012 at 1:47 pm
Interesting paradigm discussion. When people changed the discussion from food is scarce to food is plentiful and can be moved – world hunger began to diminish through the Hunger Project and many more like it..
Calling things the War on Drugs and Ware on Poverty, etc. has only served to increase these things.
Paradigms are powerful things.
I’ve always gravitated back to “Abundance is not about how much you have It’s about how little you need” – it always reminds me that abundance or sufficiency is a perception and perceptions are reality for the person how has them.
We have friends who are billionaires and sometimes I think that is mostly because their sense of sufficiency has always been out of whack and they could never experience sufficiency in anything they did – and many of these folks will break all the rules to get more money and yet have a deep-seated belief that if the worst thing happens, it won’t be enough. Many have come to believe that they themselves will be fine but it won’t be enough to sustain their family, and their children and grandchildren.
In a rare interview, Einstein stated that he thought one of the most important questions was, “Is it safe?” because if people perceived that their safety was threatened then they would fortify the doors and windows and spend every dollar on keeping themselves and their family safe. But if it is in fact “safe” then we will pursue things further up on Maslow’s hierarchy, self-actualize, help others, live a life of service, and not spend a second looking over our shoulders.
So the question on this blog is “is it enough?”
We love a simulation called “Win as Much as You Can” because in that simulation groups are tested to see what their definition of winning really is and how far that definition extends – me myself, the group, all the groups, the world? of course its not often that people will define “winning” as beyond their own skin – and the enlightened person might define it as their immediate group – but it takes a paradigm shift to change that reality.
So the question on this blog could be “Is it enough for all of us?”
Sufficiency is the condition where everyone on the planet perceives that they need nothing.
Buddha taught that desire is the enemy of the people. Desire stirs wanting and leads to a perception of insufficiency.
So in Buddha’s world, wanting is the culprit – in the absence of wanting, sufficiency can exist.
If we follow the lead of the “hunger project” and avoid the examples of “war on….” then our job is to demonstrate through facts that THERE IS MORE THAN ENOUGH – more than enough food, more than enough shelter, more than enough oil, more than enough of everything that we could reasonably need to be happy. We must convince ourselves through facts that we believe are reliable that there is more than enough. And then enlist others in a national network like the “hunger project” that presents the case that there is more than enough.
Does that mean that we’re saying the homeless are OK? No. We’re just saying that there is more than enough if everyone cooperates to go around. There are sufficient resources, sufficient food, sufficient houses, sufficient money – to go around. In the hunger project, once a sufficient “critical mass” believed this to be true, food started to move around the world from places where it wasn’t needed to places where it was.
Thanks to John was being the visionary that recognizes the need for a new paradigm. A way of looking at things that creates a new possibility. What a contribution that is in today’s world!
Comment by Michael — February 16, 2012 at 3:41 pm
We think alike. I wrote this back in 2008
Sufficiency Capitalism TM – The People’s New World Order
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/13/629531/-Sufficiency-Capitalism-TM-The-People-s-New-World-Order
IT IS HOW I RAN MY BUSINESSES before retiring.
INTRODUCTION
They laughed at the Wright Brothers, too.
In our new world, where physicists are hired to create Wall Street trading models, where lightly collateralized day traders are allowed to buy huge volumes of equity on a promise, and the internet enables loan officers to scoop as many debtors as time allows and then make small commissions on volume when they whisk their debtor bundles directly into Wall Street’s designer hedge funds, the jaundiced eyes of so-called economists will laugh and jeer at the simplicity and seeming altruism of Sufficiency Capitalism.
Comment by L Kidder — April 26, 2012 at 2:17 pm