On the Other Website

FYI, there’s some dirt being dug up on President Obama’s nominee for Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development, Department of Housing and Urban Development. It involves an alleged Zen priest/management consultant, so I put it on the other blog.

Some of you might enjoy an article on Buddhist economics I published last week. I may write more about this in the future when I’ve had more time to look into it.

4 thoughts on “On the Other Website

  1. Could be. Not a Zen thing, though. I’ve been a Zen student on and off for 21 years now, and I never heard of it.

  2. Glad to hear you finally got around to Schumacher. I’d mentioned “Small is Beautiful” here some months ago and had taken the apparent lack of recognition as lack of familiarity. It was a formative book for me and stresses economic independence rather than dependence on centralized, non-redundant (i.e. too-big-to-fail) institutions, bureaucracies, or hierarchy.

    That book was way ahead of its time in 1973 when I first read it. More recently I re-read it and also “Guide for the Perplexed” which elaborates on the Buddhist underpinnings of the economic theory laid out in Small is Beautiful.

    I’ve always regretted that this book had not gotten more recognition given that economic systems thusly based would have been immunized from the sort of shenanigans-from-the-top in the form of corporations too big to fail. We just chose not to listen to what might have helped.

    Even today the manic drive towards monopoly proceeds unabated as failed banks used even their bailout money to consume smaller, better-managed financial institutions. Antitrust legislation has always been there for a reason and we forget even the solutions of the past, or lack the courage to re-enact them for the same reasons they had always been needed.

    Leading economist Ravi Batra believes that we have only seen the leading edge of the recession thus far. He suggests that because the real causes have not been addressed that the worst is yet to come, predicting that the bottom will be late 2010. He considers actions taken thus far as woefully inadequate and only band-aids.

    I am waiting for the practices that got us into this mess to be regualted out of existence.

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