Small is beautiful
The year 1998 marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of “Small Is Beautiful,” the influential book by British economist E. F. Schumacher. To celebrate the anniversary, the publishers reissued the book in a format that included remarks from people who were deeply affected when they first read Schumacher’s work and who still admire the author’s main goals. I was honored to be among those invited to comment. While some sections deal only with issues specific to Britain in the early 1970s, I believe the book’s essential thesis is as profound and pertinent as ever.
Schumacher wrote that there is an optimal size, an appropriately human scale, for every human activity. In an age of globalization and mega-merger-mania, human-scale enterprises sometimes appear to be on the losing side of history. However, there is growing evidence that in many areas smaller is better. As a former teacher, I am convinced that smaller schools and smaller class sizes are more effective than larger ones. They may cost more, but the best things in life, including a good education, are never free. Smaller communities and smaller companies can be more efficient and more humane at the same time—as long as they are not crushed by political and economic bullies. Smaller bureaucracies, both government and corporate, can also be more efficient and humane.
By safeguarding natural resources and by operating at an appropriate scale, we will produce an important side effect: The developing world will approach levels of self-sufficiency that no foreign aid program could ever replicate. Too often, as Schumacher points out, the developed nations intrude with multi-thousand-dollar, bigger-is-better technology, destroying the developing nation’s way of life and rendering ordinary people more desperate and helpless than ever. Replacing their traditional skill and wisdom, the strange new methods destroy their sense of self-worth.
However, they do need technological help. For example, cooking with wood is destroying forests and causing respiratory disease. The average village woman in India inhales the equivalent of many packs of cigarette smoke a day.
The best foreign aid, Schumacher tells us, comes in the form of ten-dollar to one-hundred-dollar technology, which builds on self-sufficiency and indigenous skills. By funding simple devices like solar cookers, wind or photovoltaic power-generating systems and other sustainable technologies, we would be providing a much-needed antidote to the wasted money and harmful practices of large-scale lending institutions.
A quarter-century after the publication of Schumacher’s famous book, his ideas may at last be permeating the groundwater of global thinking. Even the giant automobile manufacturers are shifting their research toward more durable vehicles, which run on very small amounts of fossil fuel. In Schumacher’s words, such developments hold out “the possibility of evolving a new life-style, with new methods of production and new patterns of consumption: a life-style based on permanence.”
