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

by Ernst F. Schumacher

But even that orthodoxy is now being challenged. Markets today are neither free nor are they always efficient; they exacerbate wealth differentials and accelerate environmental degradation. As the pendulum swings back to the idea of regulated, planned and properly controlled markets,

Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle

with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.

we are estranged from reality and inclined to treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves.

In industry, we can interest ourselves in the evolution of small-scale technology, relatively non-violent technology, ‘technology with a human face’, so that people have a chance to enjoy themselves while they are working, instead of working solely for their pay packet and hoping, usually forlornly, for enjoyment solely during their leisure time.

In industry, again – and, surely, industry is the pace-setter of modern life – we can interest ourselves in new forms of partnership between management and men, even forms of common ownership.

An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth – in short, materialism – does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.

The modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy, and these are not accidental features but the very causes of its expansionist success.

The question is whether such causes can be effective for long or whether they carry within themselves the seeds of destruction.

If human vices such as greed or envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures. If whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed achieve astonishing things but they become increasingly incapable of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence.

I suggest that the foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modern sense, because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man.

No-one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.

From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence. We must study the economics of permanence.

Permanence is incompatible with a predatory attitude which rejoices in the fact that ‘what were luxuries for our fathers have become necessities for us’.

The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace.

Scientific or technological ‘solutions’ which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction.

Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful. Peace, as has often been said, is indivisible – how then could peace be built on a foundation of reckless science and violent technology?

What is it that we really require from the scientists and technologists? I should answer: We need methods and equipment which are

– cheap enough so that they are accessible to virtually everyone; – suitable for small-scale application; and – compatible with man’s need for creativity.

Next to the family, it is work and the relationships established by work that are the true foundations of society. If the foundations are unsound, how could society be sound? And if society is sick, how could it fail to be a danger to peace?

Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations.’

The neglect, indeed the rejection, of wisdom has gone so far that most of our intellectuals have not even the faintest idea what the term could mean.

The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.

They enable us to see the hollowness and

fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of material ends, to the neglect of the spiritual.

‘There must be recognition of the existence of the soul apart from the body, and of its permanent nature, and this recognition must amount to a living faith; and, in the last resort, non-violence does not avail those who do not possess a living faith in the God of Love’.

To the extent that economic thinking is based on the market, it takes the sacredness out of life, because there can be nothing sacred in something that has a price.

Not surprisingly, therefore, if economic thinking pervades the whole of society, even simple non-economic values like beauty, health, or cleanliness can survive only if they prove to be ‘economic’.

Hence the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment.

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.

It is clear, therefore, that Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilisation not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character.

Simplicity and non-violence are obviously closely related.

The optimal pattern of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction by means of a relatively low rate of consumption, allows people to live without great pressure and strain and to fulfil the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching: ‘Cease to do evil; try to do good.’

That is, the conscious utilisation of our enormous technological and scientific potential for the fight against misery and human degradation – a fight in intimate contact with actual people, with individuals, families, small groups, rather than states and other anonymous abstractions.

If economic thinking cannot grasp this it is useless. If it cannot get beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital accumulation; if it cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and start afresh.

To do so, 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 way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds.

All traditional philosophy is an attempt to create an orderly system of ideas by which to live and to interpret the world.

‘Philosophy as the Greeks conceived it,’ writes Professor Kuhn, ‘is one single effort of the human mind to interpret the system of signs and so to relate man to the world as a comprehensive order within which a place is assigned to him.’

The classical-Christian culture of the late Middle ...

with a very complete and astonishingly coherent interp...

This system, however, has been shattered and fragmented, and the result is bewilderment and estrangement, never more dramatically put than by Kierkegaard in the middle of last century:

Those that bring forth new ideas are seldom ruled by them.

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,

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.

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’.

but he will be truly in touch with the centre. He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions,