CONCEPT

Buddhist Economics

E.F. Schumacher's 1973 framework evaluating economic activity by its effect on the worker and the earth as well as on the product — the intellectual ancestor of Raworth's bilateral insistence that economies be judged by their contribution to thriving, not to throughput.

Buddhist economics is the framework E.F. Schumacher articulated in his essay of the same name (1966, collected in Small Is Beautiful in 1973). The framework rejects the Western economic assumption that consumption is the end of economic activity and work a disutility to be minimized. Instead, it proposes that economic activity be evaluated bilaterally: by the quality of the goods it produces, by the effect of the work on the worker, and by the impact on the community and ecosystem.

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Schumacher drew the framework from his years as an economic advisor in Burma, where Buddhist assumptions about work — as a means of developing character, producing useful goods, and contributing to community — contrasted sharply with the Western assumption that work is a necessary evil traded for consumption. The framework asks not merely "How much did the economy produce?" but "Did the producing contribute to

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