Rebecca Wolf

A Labor of Love E.F Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful, a book about economics from a persons point of view as if they mattered. The book is not a calculated dissection of economics in a technical sense. In chapter four, he discusses Buddhist economics and compares their values to the modern days economists ways. He looks into the differences in the way we value work. Schumacher is very valid and I agree with him when he shows us, the modern economists how the Buddhist can help us learn to love our work/labor/jobs again and how it is prevalent that we do so. Modern economists see work as a necessary evil. It is something that is done in sacrifice to gain wages/ money for leisure time and enjoyment. The businesses that employees work for use this to their advantage and have workers do their labor in a certain way to boost production and therefore increase income. Because of this we, the employees work in small minute steps for example, in a factory assembly line. This gives us even more reason to see work as a necessary evil because we have become automated lifeless tools of the business. The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilize and develop his

Rebecca Wolf

faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence (Schumacher, 34). They believe work is something done as a way to enhance a mans craftsmanship. This differs from the modern view because the man himself is not a tool of something bigger than him. The worker instead uses tools as a way to develop a craft, not just a small minuscule task. He gets to create something start to finish and feel the satisfaction of putting his ideas and mental abilities into the task. I truly believe we have lost a lot of creditability for tasks such as these. In the over all scheme of things because we live in a modern world most things are done in small production mindsets. The man who does craftsmanship has lost all value and stability in our economy. If we gave our workers the chance to utilize his faculties/skills he would work in our economy and community to give forth his services. Many modern economists would cringe at this idea but if everyone did this in some form of a job they could appreciate work and it would not be a necessary evil and held at more of a value by workers.

Rebecca Wolf

This would also affect how things were distributed. Local products would hold a better value and economically speaking the modern economist would no longer be relying on for example, over seas production to get what he needs. Buddhists strongly believe that to satisfy human wants from faraway sources rather than from sources nearby signifies failure rather than success (42). I completely agree with this statement. To be locally dependent is to be self-sufficient. Doing this gives us a better understanding of how we are affecting ourselves in the long run. For example, we actually see what mining does to our community instead of it being a far away concept in another land. The Buddhists understand what humans need to work collaboratively to live. They still have the understanding that a country is not a business. They still strive to find the middle ground between mans greed and stagnation of an economy. We need to realize that the people/workers still matter and to do so the Buddhists could show us more than a few pointers.

Rebecca Wolf

Works Cited Schumacher, E. F. "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher." HarperCollins Publishers World Leading Book Publisher. N.p., n.d. Web. 8 Nov. 2013.