“Small is Beautiful”

GNH ideas have been brewing in economic and social science circles for decades — but today, the urgency of actualizing those ideas is gaining momentum. Witness The Sun’s decision to reprint E.F. Schumacher’s 1973 essay, “Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered,” in the October ‘09 issue. Schumacher compares “modern economists” with a Buddhist economic approach, very similar to GNH concepts. Here’s an excerpt:

“The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicty and nonviolence. 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 consumpriton, 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 provide the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.”

Makes sense to me!

– Ginny Sassaman