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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Schumacher's 'Buddhist economy'
  • Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 10:38:48 -0600


Big, bad world
Schumacher's 'Buddhist economy' inspired environmentalists 30 years ago, but
how valid is his concept today, asks Martin Hodgson
Wednesday August 27, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/waste/story/0,12188,1029694,00.html
It is 30 years since the publication of a slim volume of articles and essays
titled Small is Beautiful - a key text of the nascent environmental
movement. The year 1973 was a timely one for radical environmental thinking.
The first UN conference on sustainable development had been held the
previous year, and soon after, within months of each other, Greenpeace,
Friends of the Earth and the UK Green party were founded.

Small is Beautiful rapidly became a bestseller, and its author, EF
Schumacher, was feted by international leaders and counterculture activists
alike. Today, Schumacher is less well known, but the ideas he popularised
helped shape modern environmentalism, development theory and the global
justice movement.

Equal parts economic analysis, spiritual tract and radical manifesto, the
book reflected the contradictory nature of its author - a patrician academic
who was also passionately interested in Eastern philosophy. What bound his
work was a central belief that modern society had lost touch with basic
human needs and values - and in doing so had failed both the planet and its
people.

In the name of profit and technological progress, Schumacher argued, modern
economic policies had created rampant inefficiency, environmental
degradation and dehumanising labour conditions. "Ever bigger machines,
entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever
greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they
are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and
technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and
beautiful," he wrote.

The remedy he proposed - a holistic approach to human society, which
stressed small scale, localised solutions - flew in the face of economic
orthodoxies of the time: "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."

Western campaigners and governments in the developing world took up his
arguments. But today, amid the wholesale imposition of globalisation and
free trade, Schumacher's vision of self-sufficient local economies seems
quaint and anachronistic. So is small still beautiful?

Born in Bonn in 1911, Schumacher emigrated to England in 1936. He became a
British citizen in 1946 and in 1950 became economic adviser to the National
Coal Board. For the next 20 years he worked at the heart of the British
economic establishment, but visits to India and Burma led him to doubt
technocratic certainties. He concluded that the imposition of a Western
model of development had bypassed the rural poor. Industrialisation and
megaprojects created vast wealth for a few, but left the masses trapped in
spiritual and material poverty.

The antidote he called "Buddhist economics" - "a middle way between
materialist heedlessness and traditionalist immobility".

Instead of mass production and mechanisation, industry in the developing
world should be on a "human scale". Cheap, locally developed solutions would
be more effective than imported technologies and have less environmental
impact.

In 1966, Schumacher founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group
(ITDG), and his work inspired non-government organisations around the world.
Today the group supports hundreds of projects, from donkey plough workshops
in Sudan to micro-hydroelectric schemes in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Peru.

But Small is Beautiful was never accepted by mainstream economists, who see
it as an impractical model for development. The Oxford economist Wilfred
Beckerman published a riposte to Schumacher titled Small is Stupid.

Local management of resources has become commonplace in mainstream
economics, but localisation and self-sufficiency are not always efficient or
even practical, says Julian Morris, director of free-market think-tank the
International Policy Network. "Most of the people in the world who currently
don't have electricity would benefit from having it. The important thing is
to get them electricity in the most efficient and costeffective matter, and
avoid pollution. For that, we're not talking about local solutions, but
solutions that come from the economies of scale," he says.

"It comes down to whether or not you believe in technological progress and
growth," says Philip Stott, professor emeritus in bio-geography at the
University of London. "I believe that technology and growth can
fundamentally be equated with good."

According to Stott, Schumacher's followers idealise a primitive past while
ignoring the benefits of scientific progress. They risk condescension in
their attitudes towards the developing world. "There is an element of
neo-colonialism - they are trying to regress parts of the world that should
be progressing," he says.

But science and technology have not improved basic living conditions for
much of humanity, argues Cowan Coventry, chief executive of the ITDG. "Given
the dramatic [scientific] advances of the past 40 years, why is it that the
number of people living in poverty continues to increase? Why do we find
that 2 billion still don't have access to electricity?"

Schumacher's followers may have failed to take up the wider implications of
Small is Beautiful, says Coventry. Despite the tight focus implied in the
title, Schumacher proposed an overhaul of the way the global economy is run.
"People saw the beauty of local endeavour, but they never really grappled
with the bigger issues of how to change macro policies."

Meanwhile, the march of trade liberalisation threatens small-scale
manufacture in developing countries, while small-scale agriculture is
swamped by subsidised imports.

"We're seeing the same economic model. It's business as usual," says Spencer
Fitzgibbon, a member of the Green party national executive. Governments
still place their faith in technological advances instead of considering
economic re-organisation, he says.

Schumacher's view of mechanisation finds its parallel in today's debates
over GM crops and nanotechnology. Once again, hi-tech solutions are being
boosted when their benefits are still unclear, argues Coventry. "Extravagant
claims are often made about new technologies and their benefits for
developing countries. We're sceptical about those claims, especially when
they're made by corporate interests. The big question is, can new technology
bridge the divide between the haves and the have nots?" It is the same
question that Schumacher put 30 years ago.

"Small is Beautiful is a book of many good ideas, and they are more and more
relevant today," says Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence, where many of
Schumacher's essays first appeared.

"Schumacher was called a crank, and he quite happily agreed. But what is a
crank? It's a small element in a machine that makes revolutions."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003




  • [Livingontheland] Schumacher's 'Buddhist economy', Tradingpost, 09/03/2003

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