Buddhism and Economics

…or perhaps I won’t be too busy to post. We can relax the assumption that I would spend some time sleeping this week…


Apropos of my mention of Buddhism in an earlier post, battlepanda asserts:

Instead of focusing on love and hate, for one's friends and enemies respectively, Buddhism focuses on suffering and mercy, which is the alleviation of suffering. It is the only religion I know of that aligns with utilitarian elements

In the light of this, it occurs to me that Buddhism is related to economics. A rational Buddhist is like the hypothetical social planner that economists use to generate social optima in welfare models, because maximizing social welfare is equivalent to maximizing good karma. (That is, the social planner is maximizing his or her own good karma by acting to maximize social welfare. There might be a problem, though, because some interpretations of Buddhism argue that, while good karma is better than bad karma, it’s even better to have no karma at all.)

OK, maybe that’s just an excuse to write about Buddhism in a blog that’s focused on economics. I don’t really need an excuse, but I will be posting about Buddhism occasionally.

Interestingly, the phrase “Buddhism and economics” (in quotation marks) gets 102 results in Google, with apparently only a little bit of redundancy. I haven’t looked at any of them yet.