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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] What is Appropriate Technology?
  • Date: Thu, 25 Mar 2004 13:04:19 -0700


What is Appropriate Technology?
http://www.villageearth.org/pages/AT_Library/index.htm

Schumacher's famous introduction of the concept of "intermediate" (or
"appropriate") technology has had a major impact on current thinking in the
development field. Schumacher was a founder of the Intermediate Technology
Development Group.

For Schumacher, solutions to the world's problems must embody the four
qualities of smallness, simplicity, capital-saving, and non-violence. To that
end he is a leading advocate of "appropriate technology" as a partial answer
to global problems of food and energy shortages, alienation, and poverty. In
the developing countries, designed particularly to suit agricultural
conditions that are different from those in the industrialized countries,
this technology should be superior to the primitive forms of the past. Yet it
should also be simpler, cheaper, and all but independent of the energy
requirements of today's technology of the rich. "One can also call it
'self-help' or 'people's technology"' says Schumacher.

"The task, then, is to bring into existence millions of new workplaces in the
rural areas and small towns. That modern industry, as it has arisen in the
developed countries, cannot possibly fulfill this task should be perfectly
obvious. It has arisen in societies which are rich in capital and short of
labor and therefore cannot possibly be appropriate for societies short of
capital and rich in labor. The real task may be formulated in four
propositions:

1) Workplaces have to be created in the areas where the people are living
now, and not primarily in metropolitan areas into which they tend to migrate.

2) These workplaces must be, on the average, cheap enough so that they can be
created in large numbers without this calling for an unattainable level of
capital formation and imports.

3) The production methods employed must be relatively simple, so that the
demands for high skills are minimized, not only in the production process
itself but also in matters of organization, raw material supply, financing,
marketing, and so forth.

4) Production should be mainly from local materials and mainly for local use."

Schumacher on technological complexity: "Any third-rate engineer can make a
machine or a process more complex; afterwards, it takes a first-rate engineer
to make it simple again." An excellent book.




  • [Livingontheland] What is Appropriate Technology?, Tradingpost, 03/25/2004

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