Questioner: Adam Smith, who is considered to be the father of modern economics, said that economics is a science of wealth; he places primary importance upon money and not on man. Alfred Marshall, another economist, said that economics is a study of material welfare; there he puts importance on man and his welfare, and not on money. So, how should welfare be assessed? Is it only a material thing, or is there something more to it?
Acharya Prashant (AP): Ultimately, welfare or wellness is an experience within the experiencer. Irrespective of where the object of that experience lies, the experience is always within. You might be experiencing pleasure from a great building in front of your eyes, but the building outside is in itself not the pleasure; the pleasure that you are experiencing is a subjective thing happening, obviously, within the subject. So, whether it is something as tangible as a building or something less tangible, like a thought or a memory, the experience that you draw from it is always internal. The object might be external, or apparently not so external, but the feeling of wellness is always internal.
So, when we talk of human welfare, we are essentially talking of something within the human being. The human being might say that the cause of wellness or lack of wellness lies outside of himself, but still the effect is always experienced within, right? Now, this experience within has been observed to be only partially a function of the conditions outside. There is ample proof. Japan is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and the Japanese have been empirically known to be one of the unhappiest people on the planet. That by no means implies that material wealth is inversely correlated with internal wellness. We also have examples of highly impoverished nations where the people are internally unwell because of the poverty outside; material poverty, therefore, is a known reason for a lack of internal wellness. At the same time, material abundance is not a known reason for internal wellness.
