In the founding 1966 essay, Schumacher explicitly declines to engage with the methodological dispute, writing "We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology," while also describing conventional economists as suffering from "a kind of metaphysical blindness" in treating their discipline as free of values and presuppositions. This leaves open whether Buddhist economics offers testable alternative propositions about economic behavior or is primarily a value framework for critiquing conventional economics from outside its methodology.
What would resolve this A body of Buddhist-economics scholarship stating falsifiable propositions or formal models comparable to mainstream economic theory, rather than normative restatements of Buddhist ethical principles applied to economic life.
OpenE. F. Schumacher, Buddhist Economics (Schumacher, 1966 essay)