Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

by Ernst F. Schumacher

An industrial system which uses forty per cent of the world's primary resources to supply less than six per cent of the world's population could be called efficient only if it obtained strikingly successful results in terms of human happiness, well-being, culture, peace, and harmony. I do not need to dwell on the fact that the American system fails to do this, or that there are not the slightest prospects that it could do so if only it achieved a higher rate of growth of production, associated, as it must be, with an even greater call upon the world's finite resources.

The Limits to Growth,

infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.

abhors

derided

whetted,

dire

scramble

derision

hailed

soothsayers

bland

curtailing

Oil is a 'wasting asset', and the faster it is allowed to waste, the shorter is the time available for the development of a new basis of economic existence.

dear.

truism

laymen,

modicum

curtailment

People whose business it is to judge hazards, the insurance companies, are reluctant to insure nuclear power stations anywhere in the world for third party risk, with the result that special legislation has had to be passed whereby the State accepts big liabilities.

thraldom

disquieting.

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.

acute

laden

thalidomide

beset

blandishments

trout

hatcheries

thraldom

the direction should be towards nonviolence rather than violence: towards an harmonious cooperation with nature rather than a warfare against nature; towards the noiseless, lowenergy, elegant, and economical solutions normally applied in nature rather than the noisy, high-energy, brutal, wasteful, and clumsy solutions of our present-day sciences.

'Since planned demand for electricity cannot be satisfied without nuclear power, they consider mankind must develop societies which are less extravagant in their use of electricity and other forms of energy. Moreover, they see the need for this change of direction as immediate and urgent.'

forth

human nature revolts against inhuman technological, organisational, and political patterns, which it experiences as suffocating and debilitating;

the living environment which supports human life aches and groans and gives signs of partial breakdown;

it is clear to anyone fully knowledgeable in the subject matter that the inroads being made into the world's non-renewable resources, particularly those of fossil fuels, are such that serious bottlenecks and virtu...

a way of life that bases itself on materialism, i.e. on permanent, limitless expansionism in a finite environment, cannot last long, and that its life expectation is the shorter the more successfully it pursues its, expansionist objectives.

'The amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs.'

There is a further reason for this. The process of confining productive time to 31 per cent of total social time has had the inevitable effect of taking all normal human pleasure and satisfaction out of the time spent on this work. Virtually all real production has been turned into an inhuman chore which does not enrich a man but empties him. 'From the factory,' it has been said, 'dead matter goes out improved, whereas men there are corrupted and degraded.'

'They want production to be limited to useful things, but they forget that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.' to which we might add: particularly when the processes of production are joyless and boring. All this confirms our suspicion that modern technology, the way it has developed, is developing, and promises further to develop, is showing an increasingly inhuman face, and that we might do well to take stock and reconsider our goals.

dire

As Gandhi said, the poor of the world cannot be helped by mass production, only by production by the masses. The system of mars production, based on sophisticated, highly capital- intensive, high energyinput dependent, and human labour-saving technology, presupposes that you are already rich, for a great deal of capital investment is needed to establish one single workplace.

The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person.

The technology of production by the masses, making use of the best of modern knowledge and experience, is conducive to decentralisation, compatible with the laws of ecology, gentle in its use of scarce re- sources, and designed to serve the human person instead of making him the servant of machines.

bygone

flair

home-comers

people of the forward stampede.

I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for gigantism is to go for self-destruction. And what is the cost of a reorientation? We might remind ourselves that to calculate the cost of survival is perverse. No doubt, a price has to be paid for anything worth while: to redirect technology so that it serves man instead of destroying him requires primarily an effort of the imagination and an abandonment of fear.