"While the materialist is mainly interested in good, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation.  But Buddhism is the 'Middle Way' and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being.  It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them.  They keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and nonviolence.  From an economist's point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern -- amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

"For the modern economist, this is very difficult to understand.  he is used to measuring the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' than a man who consumes less.  A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption." -- E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered