![]() ![]() In other words, Washington needs to be more like the Dalai Lama. And it means creating real solutions - not just proposing market distortions - for people who cannot find jobs that pay enough to support their families. ![]() It entails pruning back outmoded licensing laws that restrain low-income entrepreneurs. It means lifting poor children out of ineffective schools that leave them unable to compete. That means attacking cronyism that protects the well-connected. We need to combine an effective, reliable safety net for the poor with a hard look at modern barriers to upward mobility. The solution does not lie in the dubious “fair share” class-baiting of politicians. That was before the financial crisis, the Great Recession, and years of federal policies that have done a great deal for the wealthy and well-connected but little to lift up the bottom half. According to research from Pew’s Economic Mobility Project, men in their 30s in 2004 were earning 12 percent less in real terms than their fathers’ generation at the same point in their lives. This is history’s greatest antipoverty achievement.īut while free enterprise keeps expanding globally, its success may be faltering in the United States. and Xavier Sala-i-Martin of Columbia University calculate that the fraction of the world’s population living on a dollar a day - after adjusting for inflation - plummeted by 80 percent between 19. In a remarkable paper, Maxim Pinkovskiy of M.I.T. Historically, free enterprise has done this to astonishing effect. It is creating opportunity for individuals who need it the most. Advocates of free enterprise must remember that the system’s moral core is neither profits nor efficiency. For the Dalai Lama, the key question is whether “we utilize our favorable circumstances, such as our good health or wealth, in positive ways, in helping others.” There is much for Americans to absorb here. Tibetan Buddhists actually count wealth among the four factors in a happy life, along with worldly satisfaction, spirituality and enlightenment. Only activities motivated by a concern for others’ well-being, he declared, could be truly “constructive.” As with any tool, wielding capitalism for good requires deep moral awareness. Markets are instrumental, not intrinsic, for human flourishing. He insisted that while free enterprise could be a blessing, it was not guaranteed to be so. From individual.”īut his second message made it abundantly clear that he did not advocate an every-man-for-himself economy. In his own words: “Where does a happy world start? From government? No. First, his secret to human flourishing is the development of every individual. During our discussions, he returned over and over to two practical yet transcendent points. There was no dissonance, though, because the Dalai Lama’s teaching defies freighted ideological labels. ![]() Some people couldn’t imagine why he would visit us as Vanity Fair asked in a headline, “Why Was the Dalai Lama Hanging Out with the Right-Wing American Enterprise Institute?” That same duality was on display in February when the Dalai Lama joined a two-day summit at my institution, the American Enterprise Institute. Higher consciousness and utter practicality rolled into one. This, I soon learned, is the Dalai Lama in a nutshell: transcendence and pragmatism together. We ate breakfast in silence, and resumed our meditation. Not a minute later, a basket of freshly baked bread made its way down the silent line, followed by a jar of peanut butter with a single knife. It seemed to me that such earthly concerns had no place in the superconscious atmosphere of the monastery. ![]() About an hour had passed when hunger pangs began, but I worked hard to ignore them. Very early one morning during the visit, I was invited to meditate with the monks. From his outpost in the Himalayan foothills, he anchored the Tibetan government until 2011 and continues to serve as a spiritual shepherd for hundreds of millions of people, Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. His Holiness has lived there since being driven from his Tibetan homeland by the Chinese government in 1959. In early 2013, I traveled with two colleagues to Dharamsala, India, to meet with the Dalai Lama. WHAT can Washington, D.C., learn from a Buddhist monk? ![]()
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