The Buddha on Wall Street: What’s Wrong with Capitalism and What We Can Do about It (2015) – Vaddhaka Linn

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After his Enlightenment the Buddha set out to help liberate the individual, and create a society free from suffering. The economic resources now exist to offer a realistic possibility of providing everyone with decent food, shelter, work and leisure, to allow each of us to fulfill our potential as human beings, whilst protecting the environment. What is it in the nature of modern capitalism which prevents that happening? Can Buddhism help us build something better than our current economic system, to reduce suffering and help the individual to freedom? In his thought-provoking work The Buddha on Wall Street, Vaddhaka Linn explores answers to these questions by examining our economic world from the moral standpoint established by the Buddha.

If you have more time, watch his lecture ‘Going beyond Capitalism; A Buddhist Perspective (62 minutes). Or, alternatively, watch another lecture (47 minutes) on the Gift Relationship and attitudes towards altruism in modern economics.

Table of Contents of ‘The Buddha on Wall Street’

1. An ‘invisible hand’
2. The gift relationship
3. The decline of community
4. Work
5. Nature and the environment
6. The waste economy
7. The attention economy
8. The happiness industry
9. Inequality
10. The corporation
11. Buddhist voices
12. Concluding thoughts
13. Poem ‘Shopping’
14. Note on classical, neoclassical, and neoliberal economics