Sahlins describes all economics as ethnocentric for two basic reasons. First, economists view other societies' economies through the prism of their own understanding. In particular, Western economists rely on the Western concept of the scarcity of material goods to analyze and rate the relative success of non-Western societies. Second, every economy reflects the cultural beliefs of the society that creates it. Therefore, every economy is ethnocentric because every cultural group is necessarily ethnocentric. This paper agrees with Sahlins that all economies are ethnocentric as well as his reasons for why that is so.
Sahlins defines an affluent society as "one in which all the people's material wants are easily satisfied" (1972, p. 1). But the "people's material wants" are culturally and sociologically determined. Sahlins uses the great divide of East and West to explain his definition. For example, he notes that, traditionally, Western economists such as John Galbraith have argued that people have infinite wants with only finite ways of achieving them. Sahlins believes that such economists view their economic systems as based on the idea of scarcity.
On the other hand, relying on the Buddhist believe in Zen, Sahlins argues that the people in Eastern societies view their needs as finite and few. Therefore, such societies view the available resources as adequate or even abundant (1972, p. 2). Sahlins' use of the Western-Eastern dichotomy has become less clear in recent decades, given the rapid industrialization of several Asian economies, such as Japan and Korea. For example, the Japanese economy, although Eastern, now bears a greater resemblance to a Western economy than it does to the economy of a tribal village in Papua New Guinea, for example. But the dichotomy between industrial and subsistence economies remains.
A capitalist economy, at least as capitalism is practiced today in the West, is driven by its ...