Zen Economics

Zen Economics addresses the background philosophical issues around economics, science and technology to place them in context and then applies the results to work and labor, income and wealth distribution, environmental crisis and animal rights. Zen enters as absence, as radical humility toward what is knowable and what is known. This view derives from years spent with the base texts of existential philosophy, from correspondence between Martin Heidegger and D.T. Suzuki around the relationship between Heidegger’s ontology and Zen and from Buddhism as a practical, non-deistic, philosophy of life. The book ends with a political program that emerges from four decades of political activism.

Rob Urie is an artist, political economist and musician currently working and living in New York. After living as an artist and founding and co-founding several punk rock bands in New York in the early 1980s Rob completed his education, earning a B.S. degree in Economics and Philosophy from Albright College and an M.S. degree in Economics from The University of North Carolina. Subsequently, Rob held a series of quasi- academic jobs, including Director of Quantitative Research, in the Asset Management business before starting a successful Global-Macro mutual fund and writing a globally distributed blog on finance and political economy. A recovered awareness of the catastrophic consequences of global finance in particular, and Western capitalism more broadly, led Rob to leave the Asset Management business in 2011. He currently lives, writes and paints with his wife Erika in upper Manhattan.