Indeed, hence choice is an indication of where decency can be found. When i go to the grocery store, i don’t ask for “decent” juice, but simply for juice. Manufacturers have every motivation to make their products “decent” in order to compete and increase their market share. Making choice indicative of decency/quality considering the conditions/alternatives simplifies the transaction as all you have to do is to pay the price and leave. The satisfaction and sensual joy of drinking the juice is the closest it can get to a decent life considering the purpose of this particular product.
This very much accords with my own conclusions. The question becomes how is that supportive culture maintained?
That’s the hard question, isn’t it? I personally think that in the ancient world, it was mythology as maintained and taught by religious/cultural traditions that served that purpose. Those social mechanisms have been replaced (largely) by entertainment — fiction, video, and so forth. Well, what’s the ethical and cultural values being reinforced in that space?
There’s a kind of meta-cultural problem in modern society to me: There’s an assumption that culture doesn’t really matter (or even exist). Everything is just personal preferences, nothing more. But it does matter in elections, in lawmaking, in law enforcement, and in economic decision-making up and down the line. Not to mention foreign policy and such.
A concrete example I can think of is the difference between American and Japanese capitalism. The differences in how the two economic systems operate is driven largely by cultural differences, I think. For example, in Japan the practice of laying off workers during economic downturns in order to reduce the overall labor costs is considered unethical. In America it’s considered a good time to reduce the overall wages of a company’s workforce by laying off the higher-earning workers and replacing them with new people. These practices could be seen as parts of two different economic systems, but to me it’s really just the expression of different cultural values.
You are correct that everyone that chooses to engage in free exchange comes with different endowments: skills, work ethic, inclination, savings, etc. Whether kamma is a sufficient explanation for these things is irelevant to this discussion. We should look on all beings with kindness and compassion. People that lack wealth are definitely not excluded from a market system as long as they have the physical ability and willingness to do helpful work.
All market-oriented economies are filled with the stories of immigrants arriving with nothing but the clothes on their back and within a generation being prosperous members of the community. My brother-in-law was so poor that when he went to school he had to ride the train for 17 hours sitting on the floor of the bathroom, since he couldn’t afford a seat. Now he is a well-off entrepreneur in California with multiple businesses.
Interesting that you picked the most gruesome of all the suttas to make your point! I could be wrong, but I don’t think the Buddha taught phasso, manosañcetanā, or viññāṇa are necessities for life but rather the fuel for ongoing rebirth. Please check me on that. Nevertheless, I think that food, clothing, medicine, and shelter are a reasonable list of requisites for laypeople.
Only the most desperate few of a society have nothing to contribute economically and thus insufficient ability to earn the requisites for themselves. Fortunately for these people, the suttas provide the most perfect and wonderful way for them to meet these basic needs: generosity. Freely giving to those in need is a blessing for both the giver and receiver. Any system that attempts to shortcut this process replaces nobility for expropriation based on violence. It is a violation of the first and second precepts and should be rejected. What is needed is not a new system, but a recommitment to honoring the ethical system of the suttas.
I am very much enjoying our conversation, and I thank you for this respectful exchange of ideas. It is quite different than these kinds of discussions in other places.
1 Like
I’m happy for your brother-in-law that he escaped his life of poverty, but as someone who has lived among the working poor from birth, I can assure you that his success had little to do with his physical ability and willingness to do helpful work. I suspect there were other factors that led to his becoming a well-off entrepreneur with multiple businesses. Especially in California.
I can tell stories of poverty and hard work that would peel paint off of old factory walls, but none of them end with material wealth. Dharma wealth, but not material wealth. This is because, among other things not worth getting into, I chose the path that I’ve taken. But I’ve personally known hundreds of people who are where they are simply because there aren’t enough chairs for them to sit on in the economic musical chair game that is American capitalism.
2 Likes
I’m glad for your relative’s luck but you should be aware his case the exception and not the rule.
If market-based capitalism were to really be enough to reward work within a lifetime or one generation to the point of bringing everyone to a relatively equal level of initial endowment you would see a much larger share of African descendants in the wealthy classes of Brazil, USA, etc - after all, since the end of slavery all they indeed did was to work a lot and hard! What to say about all those Mexicans then? 
It is no mystery that hard work has not so much to do with prosperity and fairness and I am a bit disappointed you used that card in this conversation.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/09/working-long-and-hard-it-may-do-more-harm-than-good
https://medium.com/@pricelindy/hard-work-does-not-equal-success-692fa1cde1df
I really would like this conversation to try to explore how we could address the real issues we have in front of us such as this related with the fact that the system as it stands is very much broken when it comes with the initial endowments individuals see themselves to pursue the perfectly efficient solution markets are promised to us to deliver.
When I brought up the for nutriments as a potential framework for pursuing a fair access to resources and goods I was trying to move beyond the mere four requisites. To me the four requisites alone are simply a bare minimum.
And yes, you understood the sutta well and there is nothing gruesome in it.
The idea here is not to think of a solution to enable everyone to only access the bare minimum and get awakened.
That would be as delusional as the militaristic approaches to socialism that resulted in failure and misery.
Hence, I still insist on us trying to explore what kind of approach could be take for individuals to be given a fair go at the beginning of their lives in terms of initial endowment needed for them to access, via markets if you wish, an efficient amount of goods and services that will allow them to perpetuate their samsaric existence as human beings.
Did you consider my idea of parents having to acquire rights to birth a child?
Or maybe the opposite, every child being given access to a certain amount of money sufficient for it to pursue an ethical life while transacting in markets to access the four sustenances needed for perpetuating its human existence?
2 Likes
Hi Viveka,
May I say, thank you so much for looking for a positive direction for discussion. It is only because of you and fellow-moderators that we can have this discussion at all, so please accept my gratitude! 
In a previous comment you mentioned about modelling good behavior, and again, may I thank you for modelling good behavior, in that you hold me to the same standard as anyone else on this forum. I am very far from perfect, and I appreciate the feedback.
Turning the conversation into a PM is certainly one option. However, since your message was phrased as a suggestion, may I be so bold as to respond to it as such, rather than immediately taking the course you suggest.
For myself, I see these inquiries as modelling an important dimension of leadership: the ability to admit one’s inadequacies and seek out informed advice. This is especially important for senior monastics, as all too often we are treated with excessive reverence and our opinions treated as sacrosanct. I am well aware that my thoughts on economics are nowhere near as informed as my thoughts on the suttas or meditation. But I regard these questions as matters of urgent moral necessity, and I want to ensure that I am informed.
In addition, I think it is critical to model discussion on matters of real-world relevance. I understand that such discussions may easily devolve into pointless ranting, and as any review of my history will show, I always avoid such threads. However I don’t think that is the case here. The discussion has proceeded well, with a small number of informed and intelligent people, making often excellent points, and illuminating my ignorance in many useful ways.
That a small number of people take part is, to my mind, a feature, not a bug. Many people may either be not interested or not competent to take part, and they haven’t. That’s how it should be.
In a previous comment you asked about the relevance to the EBTs. Well, this is not an essay. I’m not trying to explain the relevance of EBTs to modern economic problems. I’m trying to understand what those problems are.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that these are things of great interest and relevance within the context of the Buddha’s teachings. The core precept is to avoid taking life. If I was to ask about killing a cockroach, that would obviously fall under a discussion of the first precept. But if I am participating in an economic system that is responsible for the death of billions of creatures, in what way does that moral responsibility apply? It seems to me this is not just a moral question, it is the moral question.
In addition to the general question of avoiding killing and harming in general, specific issues that we have been discussing come up repeatedly in the Suttas. The injustice of privilege is a basic feature of the Buddha’s critique of caste. The Kutadanta Sutta (DN 5) endorses a pro-social economic policy, and emphasizes the responsibility of elites, illustrating what happens when elites are selfish. The Agganna Sutta (DN 27) speaks of the interdependence of humanity and nature, the way that private ownership of land sparks the decline of human society, and how crime originates in deprivation and ownership of land rather than intrinsic evil. the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta (DN 26) looks at how the moral implications of such decline lead to the collapse of society, with the breakdown at last of the fundamental precept on killing. The Buddha’s approach to organizing community to counteract such ills emphasizes consensus decision making, personal maturity and responsibility, communal property, and so on, all of which are features of an anarchist collective.
I could keep going, but like I said, this is not an essay, it’s an exploration.
I’d like to continue the public discussion as-is, and would beg your indulgence in this matter. However, if the discussion deteriorates and becomes toxic, I agree, a private context would be better.
7 Likes
No worries.
Just as a note though, to all users, that this is an ‘exception’ rather than a rule. Every topic is relevant and valid in their creators eyes 
So we as Mods retain the right to make certain exceptions with regards to the guidelines, especially in circumstances of experienced leaders of this community using it exactly in the terms Ven @sujato explains above.
In order to facilitate and clarify this, from the perspective of other users, we could label such explorations ‘Sujatos Questions’. I’ll edit the topic titles to reflect this 
No human system can be perfect, but we do our best to steer a middle course 
Your assistance in this is most appreciated 
3 Likes
Indeed, I was speaking loosely. I should have said, “Humanity would have been better off continuing to grow our own food and living a subsistence lifestyle.”
I mean, the language is weirdly technocratic, but it’s a great idea.
I think that such assessments suffer from a confirmation bias. They assess standard of living according to what economics can measure, i.e. by what has entered into a market. But in former times much more of life was lived outside of markets, where economics cannot see.
If I grow a patch of tomatoes in my back yard, and when they ripen, stop buying tomatoes from the store, the effect on the GDP is disastrous! OMG, they don’t have money for tomatoes! But from my point of view, I get to eat tomatoes that are more delicious, more nutritious, free of chemicals, and imbued with joy of meaning: I grew these!
I think people in simpler times lived a perfectly nice life. There was food and space and clean water. We shouldn’t judge them by modern standards, nor by the modern poor, whose lands have been taken, water has been drained and polluted, dignity stripped, and culture decimated.
What I said was this:
Can you provide some evidence to the contrary? Obviously there were wars and famine from time to time. But I have never seen any evidence for poverty as we see it today, with millions condemned to lives of hunger and deprivation.
I mean, I think part of mythology has been split into entertainment. But there is also a huge secular mythology in politics, with the pageants and legends and sacred texts.
Right, as if that itself is not a culture.
We met in Ventura, and there was one little cultural difference there that I really noticed. When I taught a retreat, the retreatants were asked to bring their own food. That way was efficient: there was no worry about preparation or safety, no need to cater for everyone’s preferences or allergies. I get it. But there was something important missing. In Buddhist events everywhere, the sharing of food is a joyful ritual that binds people together and builds community. That was suddenly gone. And if you didn’t know it, you wouldn’t even notice.
Me too!
4 Likes
Thank you so much, and please do feel free to intervene again if you, or the other mods, feel the conversation is too off-book. Be warned, I have more questions!
3 Likes
The story of every individual is different, and as you say, there are a host of factors in each person’s story. That said, it is the norm for people to work their way up in economic terms, far from the exception. In relatively free market countries like the United States, most people start their careers in the bottom 20%, but fewer than 1% of people remain there. In fact, the majority of people that start in the bottom 20% spend at least some of their career in the TOP 20%. Essentially nobody in developed countries goes hungry. Indeed, the bottom 20% are more likely to be obese than the highest 20%. None of this can be said about command economies.
My phrasing was poor: I meant, the externalities generated by farming.
The need for balance and respect in the interests of humanity and nature in farming is addressed in the Jatakas, for example one of my favorites, the Ruru Jātaka.
1 Like
My brother-in-law did better than most, but it is not true that it is an exception. As I mentioned to Charles Patton, in the US fewer than 1% of people that start in the bottom 20% remain there. I have not claimed that market economies lead to equality. I don’t think that is a proper goal for any economic system. There are many reasons for disparities between demographic groups. I strongly recommend Thomas Sowell’s Discrimination and Disparities. I’m sorry that you are disappointed that I would point toward hard work as important for economic success. Of course, it is hardly sufficient. My parents-in-law worked their fingers to the bone while remaining in deep, grinding poverty for most of their adult lives. The had the misfortune of living in a socialist country.
I think the idea of requiring parents to get a license to have a child extremely sad. I don’t think that economic success should be a ticket to having children. I think giving children an initial endowment is a lovely idea, as long as it is a gift that has been given freely and without state coercion.
1 Like
This is an important point. I have fond recollections of spending summer holidays on farms in my childhood, and more recently have spent time in the Thai countryside. Though I realise I am viewing these memories though a lens of relative comfort, it’s clear that the security having a family dwelling, and land to fall back on is very different from working in a city, and living in a rented apartment.
I’d also observe that money-based comparisons of the poor in developed countries and the averages in less developed countries misses the point of how it feels to be that poor person.
One of the things I’ve noticed over my lifetime is how “luxury” items are now relatively cheap compared to basic necessities such as groceries, electricity, and housing. Living on a minimum wage here means spending most of it (and sometimes borrowing) to provide those necessities. So, if we were going to use a money measure to compare situations in different places a more useful measure would be the proportion of income that goes on necessities.
2 Likes
During the period I was thinking about the issues @Viveka raised above, I happened upon a post from Ven @Khemarato.bhikkhu and followed the links through. In his new course on Buddhist Ethics I found a section on Economics:
Economics
Ajahn Jayasaro talks about his vision for economicsA reminder of the true cost of our fear.
As a non-economist I should do these prescribed readings to try and inform myself, but even without doing so, I now appreciate that these discussions are being conducted against the background of a Buddhist ethical framework, with the longterm goal of developing an ethical critique and eventually proposing a Buddhist model of ethical Economics.
7 Likes
Well, as someone who has occupied the social strata of America about which you are opining, I have to say your figures sound like a fairy tale. Everyone I’ve known is either working poor or lower middle class. Many of their families have degraded economically over the past two generations, not improved. This was largely because of the loss of blue collar manufacturing industries that paid well. They were replaced with poverty-wage industries and retail, mostly. We have a thriving underclass, as a result. Did you know that 12% of Americans receive SNAP benefits in 2019?
3 Likes
it would be great if you could provide a source for those claims. And be very specific about the timeframe at which those stats were collected and how much of that holds true across all other market-based capitalist economies in the planet.
Also, it would be nice to identify whether the 10-12 million of illegal immigrants providing a lot of value through their hard work and labor and coming to the markets with practically negative initial endowments were or not factored in these numbers! 
Hmm, that is odd! So what is in your view the proper goal for an economic system?
I struggle to conceive anything greater or more important than exactly meeting with equality the needs of the individuals in the society. This is to me the only goal worth being pursued by a political and economic system.
What is the alternative? To build pyramids? Or see which country creates the first trillionaire?
Or maybe, it may be a hidden fact that we are a sentient species enslaved by a much more powerful alien race, or maybe a very powerful pantheon of gods or demigods, who have shark loaned us technology and every single market-based capitalist economy is working towards repaying them somehow in the future!
4 Likes
I think you are fighting a straw man here mate!
No one is pushing for command economy and throughout the conversation we have been classifying militaristic attempts to achieve equality via socialism as inherently flawed.
I did raise the topic of socialist calculation problem to enrich the conversation and point that in the socialist thinking realm there is also no consensus on what is the best approach for individuals to transact and acquire the services and goods they need. Even among socialists, the wining hypothesis is that markets will do the trick, as per the Chinese case!
The only caveat being that a market solution under a truly socialist ideal will have much less room for pernicious things like predominance of financial capital and pursuit of accumulation purely for the sake of accumulation - which by the way the Buddha of EBTs also saw as unskillful!
Also, by making sure the means of production are indirectly ultimately owned by everyone potentially a more fair and egalitarian solution will be achieved for real problem of assumption and requirement that agents participating in a market come to it with a bare minimum in terms of initial endowement.
I respect your perception of socialism as a byproduct of the accounts from your relatives. But I encourage you to let down your guard, there is no hidden agenda here of brewing a revolution developing some sort of military-ruled communist state combining the worst of Marxist-Leninism and under the flag Buddhism!
3 Likes
“Wealth” is subjective. Thousands of years ago humans led simpler lives. They foraged, fished, hunted, and grew the food they needed to eat, they found or built shelter, they clothed themselves against the elements, and they lived among kin amid a culture that provided them with meaning and purpose. They also lacked electricity, vaccines, and treatments for diseases that today have been eradicated. They also faced periodic famine, were vulnerable to the weather, and lived on average only until their forties, sometimes with painful and debilitating disorders that today are treatable even in very remote parts of the world.
To the extent no human being alive today will ever get Small Pox, everyone in the world right now is wealthier than all of humanity just a hundred years ago.
Today people have electricity, sophisticated medical treatments, modern transportation, communication, and hand-held computers. The smart phone would seem like a fantasy, even to futurists fifty years ago. The poorest person on the planet today has more access to medical treatments than the richest person alive five hundred years ago. A third of Europe’s population died in the Great Plague of the 1300s!
On the other hand, as Ajahn Sujato has pointed out, human life today is in some ways very “poor.” Humans are wasting the environment in ways that threaten their own existence. Huge public works projects such as Chinese dam construction in Southeast Asia are destroying the environment and obliterating entire cultures.
So what is “wealth” is subjective and contextual. The nice thing about today is that many people have choices. Millions of humans (not all) can choose among a variety of lifestyles. Much better than the Khmer Rouge, which proclaimed “Year Zero,” and decreed that everyone under its control had to return to a “simpler” life.
2 Likes
In the moderator’s defense, this modeling could also have been achieved (equally?) by posting publicly your ignorance and questions and then inviting those interested to participate in a private thread.
But it is interesting to note, on a meta level, how the thread itself is an example of inequality: The founder asks for and is granted an indulgence by the mods where an exception would certainly not have been granted to a new member. Is this “wealth”? What role does “leadership” have in an “equal” society?
Because this exercise in privilege hasn’t been a totally bad thing. The conversation, as noted, has been quite positive so far — no doubt also due to the respect afforded to Ajahn. Perhaps the rule is that any topic is “on topic” as long as the replies are respectful?
In which case: may all threads be “on topic!” 
5 Likes