The Buddha & The Blockchain

Buddhist Economics was first coined by E. F. Schumacher, an English heterodox economist. A protege of John Maynard Keynes, Schumacher’s essay ‘Buddhist Economics’ was first published in 1966 in Asia: A Handbook and republished in the collection Small Is Beautiful (1973).
At its core, Buddist economics considers the difference between money and wealth, something that the philosopher Alan Watts expounded upon at length. He noted that societies often invented and used symbols extensively. Concluding that humans confused ‘reality as is’ with their own interpretation via the use of symbolic language, he noted that:
Money is a measure of wealth, and we invent money as we invent the Fahrenheit scale of temperature or the avoirdupois measure of weight… By contrast with money, true wealth is the sum of energy, technical intelligence, and raw materials.
Contrasting Views
Buddhist economics works on different tenets, compared to Western schools of thought. Bitcoin, being both disruptive and enjoying tremendous potential and growth in emerging economies, is highly relevant to discussing Buddhist economics. The major difference lies in the views on consumption and growth.
In Buddhist economics, optimal consumption leads to an optimal consumption pattern and beneficial lifestyle, where ethical behaviour is balanced against consumption needs and right conduct. In the growth economics of Western schools of thought, more consumption is viewed as a positive development, with consumption to be the outcome of all economic activity, taking factors of production – land, labour and capital – as the means.

This post was published at Coin Republic on OCTOBER 16, 2014.