Throughout the year since the Conference’s last convening in Chartham, England, in June of 2008, members of the Economics Conference collaborated to create a structure for serious inquiry into the themes of labor and income, true price and the structure and role of associations. Prior to arrival participants studied six research papers on these topics written by Dr. Christopher Houghton Budd, Marc Desaules, Arthur Edwards and Marc Theurillat that formed the foundation of the discourse and are intended for future publication.

The meeting opened by contemplating economics as a field that cannot be understood with rational thought. Learning to think newly “with that which flies away from the Earth,” a reference from Steiner in which he speaks of the anatomy of the human brain, became the task of our work together. Against the backdrop of Steiner’s bizarre yet brilliant example of the tailor to illustrate the inevitably negative effect of egoism in economics, we considered the necessity of raising our thought to a level of ‘enlarged egoism’ to include the needs of all of humanity. 

Without egoism in economics, it becomes possible for price to function as a barometer of economic health. True price, a pivotal axiom in Steiner’s analysis, emerges when “the producer is able to care for himself and his dependents for as long as it takes him to produce a like product.” However, “hidden” in modern economics is the hindrance to this effect in that much of humanity works for a wage. That is, work is done for one’s self instead of one’s fellows. Income and labor must be separated in order for economic conditions to yield true prices. Sole proprietorship was considered as a modern example of labor being separate from income in that income is derived ultimately from the owner’s capital account, not a wage. What if people stopped working for a wage and began to express their capacities in self-employment? Could this be the golden lining that offers new meaning to rising unemployment? 

Economic sustainability is, in fact, completely dependent upon human altruism. In one of the sessions, Basic Income, a concept and movement to grant state-issued base level income to all citizens, currently being considered in parts of Europe, was described in the context of human will. The idea of providing income such that people can be freed to “pursue their bliss,” with its control by state mandate and emphasis on self-interested pursuits, was directly opposed to Steiner’s notion of economic altruism. Rather, by working in association as a means of developing insight into the other’s needs, true price as a measure of what is needed between human beings, becomes an instrument for guiding human will.