Missing the Economic Big Picture
According to a Buddhist proverb, "“When the philosopher points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.” By focusing on individual free-trade agreements or on closing national borders to immigrants, rather than on managing market capitalism itself, we are looking at the finger and missing the moon.
BERKELEY – I recently heard former World Trade Organization Director-General Pascal Lamy paraphrasing a classic Buddhist proverb, wherein China’s Sixth Buddhist Patriarch Huineng tells the nun Wu Jincang: “When the philosopher points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.” Lamy added that, “Market capitalism is the moon. Globalization is the finger.”