The Sufficiency Economy at the Edges of Capitalism

The Sufficiency Economy at the Edges of Capitalism

The Sufficiency Economy at the Edges of Capitalism

Peter Calkins

Faculty of Economics, Chiang Mai University

"Capitalist" Western Economics

The first sentence of Parkin and Bade’s

While the progressive addition of welfare dimensions to neoclassical microeconomics and post-Keynesian macroeconomics now means that Western economic thought can no longer be restricted to the term "capitalist", it is still based on a model of monetary self-interest played out on capital-driven markets. Household heads and firm managers at the micro-social level and government policy-makers at the macro-social level are assumed to marshal their land, labor, energy, material, capital, and management resources to create ever-increasing levels of net monetary value, as defined by market prices. Their utility function does not subsume or reflect the utility function of others. They are assumed to dislike work, and to maximize their leisure if given the chance. Although this capital-based, self-centered vision is statistically convenient, it leaves out such non-marketed goods and services as environmental quality, housework, child-rearing at home, and the psychic income that comes from sharing among friends, gift-giving, bargaining, and the joy of work.

Economics, the most popular undergraduate textbook in North America, states: "All economic questions arise because we want more than we can get." The authors add that "everyone ends up with some unsatisfied wants" and "our inability to satisfy all our wants is called scarcity." Based on these premises, Western microeconomics goes on to study the choices that individuals make under scarcity; while macroeconomics studies the growth performance of the national and world economy in creating more goods and services to choose from (GDP/capita).

The Edges of Capitalism

In this paper, we will demonstrate that there is no inherent contradiction between modern economics and the Sufficiency Economy philosophy; the two are fundamentally complementary. We will show, however, that the emphases are different in four ways that pull economics either upward or backward from its extreme edges. The extreme edges of capitalism are

• an inability to solve the key

• a

• a

• an underestimate of

socioeconomic problems of the 21^{st century} self-centered maximizing view of production, consumption and exchange polarization of income distribution human nature

Economics has either failed to solve, or has even caused, an entire array of material, economic, political, sociological and even religious problems in modern society. Lying between the physical world described by

natural science and the social prescriptions of political science, sociology, and religion – economics has backward and forward linkages with other branches of human knowledge and activity. To date these have been largely founded on capital driven markets, so that the environmental, political, social and moral results have been frequently negative or ambiguous.

Table 1. Problems of the 21st Century "Capitalist" World as identified by the main disciplines of human knowledge Natural science	Economics	Political science	Sociology	Religion
Waste	Greed	Corruption	Tyranny	Imposition
Hunger	Risk	Powerlessness	Prejudice	Atheism
Destruction	Short-run thinking	Campaign promises	Despair	Intolerance
Myth	Low human K	Passivism	Illiteracy	Ignorance
Extinction	Theft	Imprisonment	Persecution	Extremism

2

Edge number 1: Unsolved problems of 21st century society