Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (Vintage classics)

by Ernst F. Schumacher

If the nuclear age brings new dangers; if the advance of genetic engineering opens the doors to new abuses; if commercialism brings new temptations – the answer must be more and better education.

the task of education would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives.

At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom.

More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom.

The essence of education, I suggested, is the transmission of values, but values do not help us to pick our way through life unless they have become our own...

The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty and chaotic.

When a thing is intelligible you have a sense of participation; when a thing is unintelligible you have a sense of estrangement.

We know how to do many things, but do we know what to do?

What, then, is education? It is the transmission of ideas which enable man to choose between one thing and another, or, to quote Ortega again, ‘to live a life which is something above meaningless tragedy or inward disgrace.’

a purely scientific education cannot do this for us because it deals only with ideas of know-how, whereas we need to understand why things are as they are and what we are to do with our lives.

Historians know that metaphysical errors can lead to death. R. G. Collingwood wrote: ‘The Patristic diagnosis of the decay of Greco-Roman civilisation ascribes that event to a metaphysical disease . . . It was not barbarian attacks that destroyed the Greco-Roman world . . . The cause was a metaphysical cause. The “pagan” world was failing to keep alive its own fundamental convictions, they (the patristic writers) said, because owing to faults in metaphysical analysis it had become confused as to what these convictions were . . . If metaphysics had been a mere luxury of the intellect, this would not have mattered.’ This passage can be applied, without change, to present-day civilisation. We have become confused as to what our convictions really are.

Our reason has become beclouded by an extraordinary, blind and unreasonable faith in a set of fantastic and life-destroying ideas inherited from the nineteenth century.

Education cannot help us as long as it accords no place to metaphysics. Whether the subjects taught are subjects of science or of the humanities, if the teaching does not lead to a clarification of metaphysics, that is to say, of our fundamental convictions, it cannot educate a man and, consequently, cannot be of real value to society.

What is at fault is not specialisation, but the lack of depth with which the subjects are usually presented, and the absence of metaphysical awareness.

Political thinking must necessarily become confused and end in ‘double-talk’ if there is a continued refusal to admit the serious study of the metaphysical and ethical problems involved.

All subjects, no matter how specialised, are connected with a centre; they are like rays emanating from a sun. The centre is constituted by our most basic convictions, by those ideas which really have the power to move us. In other words, the centre consists of metaphysics and ethics, of ideas that – whether we like it or not – transcend the world of facts.

Education can help us only if it produces ‘whole men’. The truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even the man who knows all the details of all subjects (if such a thing is possible): the ‘whole man’, in fact, may have little detailed knowledge of facts and theories, he may treasure the Encyclopaedia Britannica because ‘she knows and he needn’t’, but he will be truly in touch with the centre. He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the menacing and purpose of his life. He may not be able to explain these matters in words, but the conduct of his life will show a certain sureness of touch which stems from his inner clarity.

All human activity is a striving after something thought of as good. This is not more than a tautology, but it helps us to ask the right question: ‘Good for whom?’ Good for the striving person.

the heart is often more intelligent than the mind

Dealing exclusively with convergent problems does not lead into life but away from it.

The task of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction.

Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence.

Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.

‘Man, whether civilised or savage, is a child of nature – he is not the master of nature.

‘The Proper Use of Land’ poses, not a technical nor an economic, but primarily a metaphysical problem.

Is the land merely a means of production or is it something more, something that is an end in itself? And when I say ‘land’, I include the creatures upon it.

There are large-scale farmers, horticulturists, food manufacturers and fruit growers today who would never think of consuming any of their own products. ‘Luckily,’ they say, ‘we have enough money to be able to afford to buy products which have been organically grown, without the use of poisons.’

The higher animals have an economic value because of their utility; but they have a meta-economic value in themselves.

It is a metaphysical error, likely to produce the gravest practical consequences, to equate ‘car’ and ‘animal’ on account of their utility, while failing to recognise the most fundamental difference between them, that of ‘level of being’.

‘To him (the Burmese) men are men, and animals are animals, and men are far the higher. But he does not deduce from this that man’s superiority gives him permission to ill-treat or kill animals. It is just the reverse. It is because man is so much higher than the animal that he can and must observe towards animals the very greatest care, feel for them the very greatest compassion, be good to them in every way he can. The Burmese’s motto should be noblesse oblige. He knows the meaning, he knows not the words.’3

St Thomas Aquinas wrote: ‘It is evident that if a man practises a compassionate affection for animals, he is all the more disposed to feel compassion for his fellowmen.’

In our time, the main danger to the soil, and therewith not only to agriculture but to civilisation as a whole, stems from the townsman’s determination to supply to agriculture the principles of industry.

I agree with Mr Herber’s assertion that ‘reconciliation of man with the natural world is no longer merely desirable, it has become a necessity’.

instead of searching for means to accelerate the drift out of agriculture, we should be searching for policies to reconstruct rural culture, to open the land for the gainful occupation to larger numbers of people, whether it be on a full-time or a part-time basis, and to orientate all our actions on the land towards the threefold ideal of health, beauty, and permanence.

If ‘beauty is the splendour of truth’, agriculture cannot fulfil its second task, which is to humanise and ennoble man’s wider habitat, unless it clings faithfully and assiduously to the truths revealed by nature’s living processes.

Nothing could be clearer. If agriculture does not pay, it is just a ‘declining enterprise’.

We know too much about ecology today to have any excuse for the many abuses that are currently going on in the management of the land, in the management of animals, in food storage, food processing, and in heedless urbanisation.

THE MOST STRIKING thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.

For the 5.6 per cent of the world population which live in the United States require something of the order of forty per cent of the world’s primary resources to keep going.

‘I cannot conceive,’ he says, ‘a successful economy without growth.’ But if the United States’ economy cannot conceivably be successful without further rapid growth, and if that growth depends on being able to draw ever-increasing resources from the rest of the world, what about the other 94.4 per cent of mankind which are so far ‘behind’ America?

If a high-growth economy is needed to fight the battle against pollution, which itself appears to be the result of high growth, what hope is there of ever breaking out of this extraordinary circle?

it does not require more than a simple act of insight to realise that infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.

Industrialisation is spreading right across the world and is being carried forward mainly by the power of oil. Does anybody assume that this process would suddenly cease? If not, it might be worth our while to consider, purely arithmetically, how long it could continue.

When information is incomplete, changes should stay close to the natural processes which have in their favour the indisputable evidence of having supported life for a very long time”.’

A new ‘dimension’ is given also by the fact that while man now can – and does – create radioactive elements, there is nothing he can do to reduce their radioactivity once he has created them.

Carbon-14 has a half-title of 5,900 years, which means that it takes nearly 6,000 years for its radioactivity to decline to one-half of what it was before.

what is a safe place, let us say, for the enormous amounts of radioactive waste products created by nuclear reactors?

The real development is yet to come, on a scale which few people are capable of imagining. If this is really going to happen, there will be a continuous traffic in radioactive substances from the ‘hot’ chemical plants to the nuclear stations and back again; from the stations to waste-processing plants; and from there to disposal sites. A serious accident, whether during transport or production, can cause a major catastrophe; and the radiation levels throughout the world will rise relentlessly from generation to generation.

Y sí que pasó unos años después :(

Even an economist might well ask: what is the point of economic progress, a so-called higher standard of living, when the earth, the only earth we have, is being contaminated by substances which may cause malformations in our children or grandchildren?

Only a social psychologist could hope to explain why the possessors of the most terrible weapons in history have sought to spread the necessary industry to produce them . . . Fortunately, . . . power reactors are still fairly scarce.’