Small Is Beautiful..by E. F. Schumacher...for your economic education.

Small Is Beautiful

Is the title of a series of books by E. F. Schumacher. The original 1973 publication is a collection of essays that brought Schumacher's ideas to a wider audience, at a critical time in history. It was released soon after the effects of the 1973 energy crisis shook the world and dealt with the crisis and various emerging trends (like globalization) in an unusual fashion.


In the first chapter of 'Small Is Beautiful', "The Problem of Production", Schumacher points out that our economy is unsustainable. The natural resources (especially fossil fuels), are treated as expendable income, when in fact they should be treated as capital, since they are not renewable and thus subject to eventual depletion. He further points out that similarly, the capacity of nature to resist pollution is limited as well. He concludes that government effort must be concentrated on reaching sustainable development, because relatively minor improvements like education for leisure or technology transfer to the Third World countries will not solve the underlying problem of unsustainable economy.

quotes:

Systems are never more no less than incarnations of man's most basic attitudes. . . . General evidence of material progress would suggest that the modern private enterprise system is--or has been--the most perfect instrument for the pursuit of personal enrichment. The modern private enterprise system ingeniously employs the human urges of greed and envy as its motive power, but manages to overcome the most blatant deficiencies of laissez-faire by means of Keynesian economic management, a bit of redistributive taxation, and the 'countervailing power' of the trade unions.


"Can such a system conceivably deal with the problems we are now having to face? The answer is self-evident: greed and envy demand continuous and limitless economic growth of a material kind, without proper regard for conservation, and this type of growth cannot possibly fit into a finite environment. We must therefore study the essential nature of the private enterprise system and the possibilities of evolving an alternative system which might fit the new situation."


BUDDHIST ECONOMICS by E. F. Schumacher
>>>>snip
There is universal agreement that a fundamental source of wealth is human labour. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to consider "labour" or work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it can not be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a "disutility"; to work is to make a sacrifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. 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 consequences of these attitudes both in theory and in practice are, of course, extremely far-reaching. If the ideal with regard to work is to get rid of it, every method that "reduces the work load" is a good thing. The most potent method, short of automation, is the so-called "division of labour" and the classical example is the pin factory eulogised in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 4 Here it is not a matter of ordinary specialisation, which mankind has practiced from time immemorial, but of dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts, so that the final product can be produced at great speed without anyone having had to contribute more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases, unskilled movement of his limbs.>>>>snip
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I don't adhere to all of his work but he is someone that was ahead of his time and
is considered one the most influential thinkers after WWII in the world
So if you are not aware of him or his works here is a good start.

Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_is_Beautiful .......on his book
Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Schumacher .........his life
Links: http://www.schumachersociety.org/buddhist_economics/english.html :Buddhist Economics
Links: http://www.schumachersociety.org/about.html ...the foundation in america

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It is no accident that successful businessmen are often astonishingly primitive; they live in a world made primitive by this process of reduction . Their judgments on actions dictated by a more comprehensive outlook on the meaning and purpose of life are generally quite worthless. EF Schumacher (pg. 255 - Small is Beautiful)


Neatly sums up our government since Reagan.

Looking beyond the usual arguments of capitalism and socialism.

To Quote
Theodore Roszak. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roszak_(scholar)


"Schumacher's work belongs to that subterranean tradition of organic and decentralist economics whose major spokesmen include Prince Kropotkin, Gustave Landauer, Tolstoy, William, Morris, Gandhi, Lewis Mumford, and most recently, Alex Comfort, Paul Goodman, and Murray Bookchin.

It is the tradition we might call anarchism, if we mean by that much abused word a libertarian political economy that distinguishes itself from orthodox socialism and capitalism by insisting that the scale of organization must be treated as an independent and primary problem.

The tradition, while closely affiliated with socialist values, nonetheless prefers mixed to 'pure' economics systems. It is therefore hospitable to many forms of free enterprise and private ownership, provided always that the size of private enterprise is not so large as to divorce ownership from personal involvement, which is, of course, now the rule in most of the world's administered capitalisms."

In large-scale enterprise, private ownership is a fiction for the purpose of enabling functionless owners to live parasitically on the labor of others. EF Schumacher (pg. 267 - Small is Beautiful)

I can't remember anything about corporations, but I think he would find them yet worse than private owners.

about the economic system he created for his fictional Martian settlement in the Red/Green/Blue Mars series. Excellent stories by the way and I always loved the idea of the economic system the characters try to create for Mars.

I found a couple of references on the web that mention the link.

http://www.eng.ox.ac.uk/~kneabz/teaching/seh/post_prelims.pdf

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=6&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.historycooperative.org%2Fjournals%2Fwhq%2F34.1%2Fabbott.html&ei=W1Y6RuHlGYnSggS4p4H9Ag&usg=AFrqEzdhX89Rn-GSBaHjauv61pDUqWfRvQ&sig2=Fh6uJqCll6Ls0_NNJTIuHQa

Reading the Mars trilogy is what made me become a market socialist.

My copy says the chapter 'Buddhist Economics' comes from a book published in 1966 - but the military took over Burma in 1962. He seems to praise Burma nevertheless, not making any distinction between before and after - which has always made me wonder if he knew much about the practice of what was going on in Burma.

In 1955 Schumacher travelled to Burma as an economic consultant. While there, he developed the set of principles he called "Buddhist economics," based on the belief that individuals needed good work for proper human development. He also proclaimed that "production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life." He traveled throughout many Third World countries, encouraging local governments to create self-reliant economies.

K&R

Sort of like I do for Frank Lloyd Wright -- that most architects are essentially fascists.

I can admire the house, but there's no way in hell I'd live in it.

In many ways his ideas about "decentralization" have been applied in ways that are very harmful to the environment.

In the hands of the wealthy his ideas go sour very quickly. We get people like Amory Lovins using up more natural resources than any lower income resident of New York City, and plagues of jet setters who claim to be environmentalists infecting places like Aspen, Jackson Hole, Sun Valley, etc.

Somehow many back-to-the-land sorts who idolize Schumacher always end up in the pretty places, and not back to the abandoned farm houses of the Midwestern plains, or the abandoned factories of the rust belt.

They simply become consumers of a different stripe -- trading in their Budweiser and SUV and suburban house for a boutique beer, a Toyota Prius, and a log house in the forest with all new shiny stainless steel appliances in the kitchen.

that the current fascists you seem to favour, like to pitch them, as via advertising.
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. At least not overnight. But the rest of society will flourish as never before. Are you by any chance an SUV owner?

Even so, it seems to me that your intentions in trivialising and disparaging the progressive endeavours of many monied folk do yu no credit.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=94431&mesg_id=94639

My car is old, rarely used, and has spider webs and lichen growing all over it. I always have to wash the dust off the windows before I drive or I can't see through the glass. I sort of like that look, it expresses my disdain for automobiles.

I disparge ignorance, wealthy or poor. There are too many people who think they are "centered" when, in fact they are merely ignorant.

When Schumacher says "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 were possible): the “whole man” in fact, may have little detailed knowledge of facts and theories, he may treasure the Encyclopædia Britannica because “she knows and he needn’t”, but he will be truly in touch with the centre. well a lot of people take that as permission to be ignorant.

In many circumstances if you can't do the math, if you don't know the science, your uninformed of opinion is of no value, and may actually cause great harm.

There are too many fools running around spouting crap inspired by their misinformed reading of E. F. Schumacher.

I desire that people think -- use their brains. It does not trivialize anything to criticize people who don't think, who are comfortable believing they are environmentalists when in fact they are the same sort of poison upon this earth as any other affluent consumer.

I count myself among those affluent consumers. I'm not a semi-homeless kid living on twenty dollars a week as I once was. That kid I was had very little impact on the earth's environment compared to most Americans. But I'm not going to attribute any false grace to that. There isn't anyone living in poverty who doesn't desire to have at least a few of the creature comforts affluent resource hogging Americans enjoy, and there is no "Small is Beautiful" economy that will bring them those things.

Schumacher's vision is essentially a utopian fantasy, a William Morris "News from Nowhere" kind of thing, and not a road map.

'Never cared much about what does me credit, so there you are.

vision of man's capabilities and destiny.

You seem to be a sad sort of a soul, who appears to have ignored the fascinating insights Schumacher affords us in his book, some of which are currently being realised before our eyes. I remember Aldous Huxley quoting an insight of an oriental spiritual writer, to the effect that when a pig eats an acorn, it neither considers its origin or its fate. I don't think it's a smart idea for us to follow suit, do you? And what do you counsel for the betterment of mankind. Nothing? Just more of the same? While mocking people who try to make a difference?

How could anyone who read that book at that time, not now be struck by, indeed in awe of, his prescience concerning the finite nature of the world's resources; and how it is not a good idea to send a commodity or an article to Australia from the UK, to be processed there and then returned 12,000 to 15,000 miles across the globe as the finished article.

Or how it was all but futile sending money as foreign aid to third-world countries for use in a capital-intensive fashion, i.e on capital equipment, more or less advanced machinery and technology, returning maybe large profits to the owners of the factories, but ensuring minmal employment of the people of that country.

Thankfully, perhaps inspired by Schumacher, I believe there is at least one charitable organisation endeavouring to support the general population of the poorest countries, by funneling funds into labour-intensive kinds of work. As he further pointed out, quite apart from the indispensable livelihood it provides, work, is in itself a very necessary function for the well-being of human beings.

One need only reflect on the literally "idle rich", who have inherited large fortunes, and the sorry state many often tend to sink into in terms of alcoholism, drug-addiction, and just plain unhappiness; even when as young adults, with their life before them.

I'm very well educated, thank you. Oh, and an organic gardener with a big compost heap.

I've recognized, however, that the supposed dignity of labor and suffering is often used to justify oppression.

It's just a sad fact of life.

Maybe the meek shall inherit this earth, but only after they've joined a mean-ass union and kicked their oppressors in the 'nads.

Political and economic empowerment: How do you achieve that in populations that have always been powerless in the face of invasion and colonization? What right do you have, as an affluent westerner to claim that the means by which you achieved your own empowerment are somehow no longer valid, that something has changed, and no, you can't take that path, and you are never going to get something so simple as a gas cookstove and clean running water in your kitchen. Why is it that you'll have to make do with this funny stove that burns sticks, and get your water from a community well powered by kids running on a treadmill. (It's good exercise for the little brown people, don't you know...)

The hard fact is that for the population the world has today, not to mention the population it will have in the future, we have to figure out how to make extreme sorts of urbanization work in a humane way, or billions of people are simply going to die. The earth has not the carrying capacity to support some agrarian ideal of dispersed and low density populations and non centralized resource utilization. But it may have the capacity to support people in small urban apartments, with a bus or subway stop and a nice green park just a short walk away.

Yes, read Schumacher, there are utopias worth reaching for, but it is usually a very messy business getting there and the author of the utopia doesn't have to explain how it was achieved.

Schumacher's utopia, applied to our current rather dire circumstances is one where industry collapses, billions of people die, and the one-in-four survivors tend lovingly to their gardens and looms and mud bricks drying in the sun.

I'm a sad sort of soul whenever I imagine that future, and not a far better future of dynamic, industrial, and very urban humanism.

Schumacher wrote from the perspective of a stable environment. We probably lost the opportunity to achieve that in the 'seventies. Now we are going to have to cope with things like rising sea levels and changing climate displacing the people of entire nations, and that's not the sort of thing any "Small is Beautiful" philosophy can cope with. Those who try to live by those rules will find themselves excluding dying, suffering people from their little beautiful lifeboats, and contributing nothing to the betterment of mankind with their "think global, act local" mantras.

Nature is not gentle, and we are not isolated from the usual population smackdowns all plague species such as our own must suffer. We have to find our sustainable niche on this planet quickly, and the niche Schumacher proposes simply isn't big enough to hold all of us.

If this makes me a pig eating the acorns, well at least I won't go hungry...

assertions, unsurprisingly non-sequiturs, for logical inferences.

"Yes, read Schumacher, there are utopias worth reaching for, but it is usually a very messy business getting there and the author of the utopia doesn't have to explain how it was achieved."

You customarily use the term, "Utopia" in the common sense of being a pie-in-the-sky aspiration, but here you claim that "there are Utopias worth reaching for"! Elsewhere, you presume to inform us that there's no time for progressive, eco-friendly policies, all mankind has to huddle in cities, post haste, and work like blazes to feed that dynamism that so turns you on, or the environmental catastrophes that your much-preferred 'status quo' is creating for mankind, will overtake us.

So, after your confused references to Utopias, you then proceed to tell us that getting to such worth-while utopias "is usually a very messy business". Well, that puts the kybosh on that, then, doesn't it. No sense at all in making the effort. What we must aspire to needs to be neat, easy and aseptic.

I don't want to be pedantic, but you then get your tenses confused and the meaning of the whole sentence is impenetrable. "The author of the utopia doesn't have to explain how it was achieved", you continue. Which Utopia was achieved? Who suggested that the author must explain this unknown Utopia that was apparently achieved (notwithstanding its being utopian). Did you mean that he SHOULD have explained how it COULD be achieved? If so, I suggest you re-read the book. I've adverted to one or two quite seminal measures that he proposed, which however you poo-hooed as patronising. You sound like the kind of leftie who thinks it's patronising to begin teaching practical skills, instead of academic ones, at the secondary-school level, to youngsters who are often very gifted with manual skills and not at all apt for academic studies.

You fail to appreciate that manual aptitudes are in no wise inferior to academic aptitudes. However, they are very different, and if you fail to respect the former, you blight the lives of people with God-given manual skills, all in the name of a perverse intellectual snobbery, which means that many young people grow up believing that they are second-class people with third-rate skills. BECAUSE THAT IS THE WAY OUR SOCIETY LIKES IT. And your patronising pals want to reinforce it, by claiming that they have the same right to a full academic education at secondary level as the egg-heads. Well, in the same way, academic kids have the same right to spend their time training in practical skills, metalwork, woodwork, domestic science/cookery, etc., but it would also be a waste of their particular skills.

I can build a house with my own hands -- all of it -- the foundation, the plumbing, the electrical, the roof. I can load an eighteen wheeler (articulated lorry, whatever...), I can fix cars. I can cut rock, lay rough hand-cut slate floors on a mortar bed... I can grow, store and can food.

A good half of the jobs I've ever had were as skilled and semi-skilled labor. Oh yeah, I have a university degree too, a very good one.

Your own underestimation of peoples' intellectual capabilities is utterly astonishing to me. The vast majority of people are pretty smart, I see it every day -- a guy who has been a field worker or a manual laborer all of his life has grandkids who are doctors and lawyers and other sorts of professionals. So obviously the smarts have always been there, but not the opportunity.

I grant you that many people do not have the intelligence to do some kinds of work, but working with people in many sorts of jobs, it is only a rare thing that I meet someone who seems to have topped out in their ability and potential doing some manual labor like picking strawberries, busing tables, or cleaning motel rooms.

And you have the bloody cheekiness to pick at the construction of my reply, which indicates to me that you believe you have the intellectual aptitude to judge me, when clearly you do not. Call me an impressionist, call my posts gestalts, if it helps you to understand what I'm about. I'm writing of my own emotional reaction to Schumacher and the posts here, not some school exam essay on Schumacher's theory and proposals.

If you can't grasp that, well, I think the "Small is Beautiful" economic model as it has been developed by people who call themselves "greens" and such is an utter crock -- yet another sort of tie-dye fascism, often with racist undertones.

Here, I'll play a game with you: Would you trade places with any random person on this earth?

Probably not, because the circumstances of any random person on this earth are probably pretty awful compared to those of someone who has the opportunity to sit around extolling Schumacher on the internet.

I know that I'm here where I am mostly by dumb stupid luck. If I'd been born in almost any other circumstance, at any other time, I would have almost certainly been a crazy person dead before his thirtieth birthday if not childhood, another forgotten person who died for lack of access to modern medical care.

Lucky me, I was born to white middle class parents in the United States, and there was a community of family and friends who wanted me to succeed, and a society in which that was possible. Everyone should have that.

that wants an old farmhouse in the Midwest, preferably without a whole lot of renovation. So I guess I run truer to Schumacher's original ideals. :-)

on edit: subject didn't match up to text

You'll really like Herman Daly.

http://dieoff.org/page88.htm

It's in my library. I'll look it up and read it again.

I remember vividly that it opened my eyes to a lot of things back in the day. I think I read it first in the 80s. Thanks for the reminder!