Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

by Ernst F. Schumacher

The conventional wisdom of what is now taught as economics by-passes the poor, the very people for whom development is really needed. The economics of gigantism and automation is a left-over of nineteenth-century conditions and nineteenth-century thinking and it is totally incapable of solving any of the real problems of today.

'production by the masses, rather than mass production'.

legatee

reliance

inheritors:

seeps

Kierkegaard

lured

thrust

How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality?

belittle;

stemming

hitherto

seeps

bogged

abyss

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

The sciences are being taught without any awareness of the presuppositions of science, of the meaning and significance of scientific laws, and of the place occupied by the natural sciences within the whole cosmos of human thought.

Economics is being taught without any awareness of the view of human nature that underlies present-day economic theory. In fact, many economists are themselves unaware of the fact that such a view is implicit in their teaching and that near...

He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the meaning 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.

striving

obliterate

ontology

epistemology,

G. N. M. Tyrell has put forward the terms 'divergent' and 'convergent' to distinguish problems which cannot be solved by logical reasoning from those that can. Life is being kept going by divergent problems which have to be 'lived' and are solved only in death. Convergent problems on the other hand are man's most useful invention; they do not, as such, exist in reality, but are created by a process of abstraction. When they have been solved, the solution can be written down and passed on to others, who can apply it without needing to reproduce the mental effort necessary to find it. If this were the case with human relations - in family life, economics, politics, education. and so forth - well, I am at a loss how to finish the sentence, There would be no more human relations but only mechanical reactions; life would be a living death. Divergent problems, as it were, force man to strain himself to a level above himself; they demand, and thus provoke the supply of, forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty. goodness, and truth into our lives. It is only with the help of these higher forces that the opposites can be reconciled in the living situation.

enfeebling

spurious

grapple

'Man, whether civilised or savage, is a child of nature - he is not the master of nature. He must conform his actions to certain natural laws if he is to maintain his dominance over his environment. When he tries to circumvent the laws of nature, he usually destroys the natural environment that sustains him. And when his environment deteriorates rapidly, his civilisation declines.

"civilised man has marched across the face of the earth and left a desert in his footprints".

overgrazed

denuded

He killed most of the wildlife and much of the fish and other water life. He permitted erosion to rob his farm land of its productive topsoil. He allowed eroded soil to clog the streams and fill his reservoirs, irrigation canals, and harbours with silt. In many cases, he used and wasted most of the easily mined metals or other needed minerals. Then his civilisation declined amidst the despoliation of his own creation or he moved to new land. There have been from ten to thirty...

the earth is now much more densely populated than it was in earlier times and there are, generally speaking, no new lands to move to;

emancipated

If economical ways could be developed for synthesising food from inorganic raw materials - which is likely to happen sooner or later - man may even be able to become independent of plants, on which he now depends as sources of his food..., 'I personally - and, I suspect, a vast majority of mankind - would shudder at the idea (of a habitat without animals and plants). But millions of inhabitants of "city jungles" of New York, Chicago, London or Tokyo have grown up and spent their whole lives in a practically "azoic" habitat (leaving out rats, mice, cockroaches and other such obnoxious species) and have survived.'

He deplores that 'many rationally unjustifiable' things have been written in recent years - some by very reputable scientists - about the sacredness of natural ecological systems, their inherent stability and the danger of human interference with them'. What is 'rational' and what is 'sacred'? Is man the master of nature or its child? If it becomes 'economical' to synthesise food from inorganic materials - 'which is likely to happen sooner or later' - if we become independent of plants, the connection between topsoil and civilisation will be broken. Or will it? These questions suggest that 'The Proper Use of Land' poses, not a technical nor an economic, but primarily a metaphysical problem. The problem obviously belongs to a higher level of rational thinking than that represented by the last two quotations.

One of the most important tasks for any society is to distinguish between ends and means-toends, and to have some sort of cohesive view and agreement about this. 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.

creepeth

heeded.

ail."

cussedness

It is well known that the demand for food increases relatively slowly with increases in real income. This causes the total incomes earned in agriculture to rise more slowly in comparison with the incomes earned in industry; to maintain the same rate of growth of incomes per head is only possible if there is an adequate rate of decline in the numbers engaged in agriculture."

Great Britain produces some sixty per cent of its food requirements while only three per cent of its working population are working on farms. In the United States, there were still twenty- seven per cent of the nation's workers in agriculture at the end of World War I, and fourteen per cent at the end of World War II: the estimate for 1971 shows only 4·4 per cent. These declines in the proportion of workers engaged in agriculture are generally associated with a massive flight from the land and a burgeoning of cities.

dweller

heedless

abhors

callous

sparsely

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.