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  • From: <pbunch@cox.net>
  • To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing <livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Economics as if People Mattered
  • Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:55:47 -0700

Schumacher is a very important thinker. The whole concept of sustainable
development (and de-development) leading to a steady state
economy is the only really acceptable view of the future. I also reread this
book recently and was very impressed with it.


---- Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net> wrote:
>
> After a market day we count the take and, no matter how well we do, we try
> to figure how this much work is justified. Then I come across a piece like
> this.
>
> paul tradingpost@lobo.net
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> Economics as if People Mattered
> http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/19-0
> by Grace Lee Boggs Sunday, September 19, 2010
>
>
> As I‘ve been following President Obama's desperate efforts to devise a
> popular Jobs programs in order to avoid his party's defeat in the November
> election, I've also been re-reading (and urging others to read) "Buddhist
> Economics" by E.F. Schumacher.
>
> I first read this amazingly timely article in 1969 when my friend, Henry
> Geiger, featured it in Manas, his little 8-page weekly with only 2500
> subscribers. Robert M. Hutchins, the internationally renowned University of
> Chicago President, called them "the 2,500 most interesting people in the
> world."
>
> Schumacher (1911-1977) was a British economist who served as Chief Economic
> Advisor to the UK National Coal Board. In 1973 he explained Buddhist
> Economics and advocated small, appropriate technologies in a little book
> titled Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. The Times
> Literary Supplement ranked it among the "100 most influential books
> published since World War II. "
>
> I only met Schumacher once (in Ann Arbor in 1976), but I have long believed
> that one day his profoundly human approach to economics would be recognized
> as the alternative to our dehumanizing and increasingly unsustainable
> economic system.
>
> That day has come!
>
> In "Buddhist Economics" Schumacher explains why mass joblessness is
> inevitable as long as Work is viewed as Labor, because both employers and
> employees, each for their own reasons, are constantly seeking to reduce or
> eliminate it.
>
> "The modern economist," he writes, ‘ 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 cannot 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 eulogized in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations....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."
>
> By contrast, Buddhist economics is based on recognizing the role that Work
> plays in human development: "to give man (sic) a chance to utilize and
> develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centeredness by
> joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods
> and services needed for a becoming existence."
>
> Therefore, "to organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless,
> boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short
> of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with
> people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of
> attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally,
> to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a
> complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence,
> namely, that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living
> process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the
> bliss of leisure."
>
> You can find "Buddhist Economics" on the web. Reading it will open up both
> your heart and your mind. See also my June 20-26 column, "Maybe Jobs aren't
> what we need" by Frank Joyce. It's on the Boggs Center website
> www.boggscenter.org/
>
> Grace Lee Boggs has been an activist for more than 60 years and is the
> author of the autobiography Living for Change.
>
>
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