Economics and the Dharma:
coming to realize that all profit is loss

Rodney Stevenson with
Khensur Rinpoche

A small stone dropped in a stream can change the course of a river.  For me, the stone was a political science course I wanted to take in my sophomore year. The class was full and I couldn’t get in, so I signed up for Principles of Economics – it was available and didn’t meet too early in the day. Assistant Professor James Pate was entertaining – bright, engaging, and animated – actually very animated.  Sometimes he would jump up on a desk and wave his arms showing how lines on a graph would move about. I was captivated; I took another of his courses, and another, and another … and ended up with a B.A. in economics. I went to graduate school, got a Ph.D. in economics, spent some time in Washington D.C., and then became a Professor of Business at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. A year after I was granted tenure, I met Geshe Lhundrub Sopa.

Economics from an Economist’s Perspective
I was drawn to economics because it addressed concerns of human wellbeing and because of the rigor of its analytical methods. Economics focuses on issues of how we navigate a world where demand is insatiable but production is limited. The discipline maintains three central presumptions about human nature: people are egocentric – they are more concerned with their own wellbeing than with the wellbeing of others; people are materialistic – they believe happiness comes from what they possess and consume; and people are never satisfied – they always want more, believing that having more will make them happier. Though demand is unbounded, supply is limited by scarce resources and technological constraints. A major problem of economics is how to achieve the highest overall level of satisfaction given the production constraints …

We depend on each other to obtain what we need – none of us is self-sufficient. Our economic interdependence manifests through markets. It is in the market where we earn income and it is from the market that we obtain what we consume. Markets are driven by profits and limited by what people are willing to buy. To the extent to which economists would encourage charity, their advice would tend to be limited to those who consume and not the firms that produce. …

Slowly I started to understand that satisfaction is a state of mind, not a state of accumulation. Economics could provide some advice on improving holdings, but it offered none on how to develop a satisfied mind. The three principal aspects of the economics path – self-centeredness, materialism, and greed – offered scant direction for mental transformation.

As the year progressed I began to pay attention to spirituality. …

This article is an excerpt of the full article printed in Mandala

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