Economic Wisdom
August 14, 2009
Dear Friends,
This Sunday, August 16th, would have been Fritz Schumacher's 98th birthday.
In honor of this occasion we have included a selection of our favorite
quotes from "Small is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered."
Even thirty-five years after the publication of this text, one can see that
Schumacher's seminal collection of essays is filled with pertinent and
appropriate wisdom for today's economic climate. You can access our
complete list of quotes, sorted by chapter, at:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/about/efs_quotes.htm
Best wishes,
Susan Witt, Sarah Hearn, Stefan Apse, and Kate Poole
E.F. Schumacher Society Staff
140 Jug End Road
Great Barrington, MA 01230, USA
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org
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Fuller, Hildegarde Hannum, Eric Harris-Braun, Constance Packard, Will Raap,
Joseph Stanislaw, Nancy Jack Todd, Charles Turner.
Board of Founders: Ian Baldwin, David Ehrenfeld, Satish Kumar, John
McClaughry, and Kirkpatrick Sale.
Advisory Board: Tanya Berry, Wendell Berry, Lisa Byers, Olivia Dreier, Hazel
Henderson, Wes Jackson, Amory Lovins, John McKnight, David Orr, Michael
Shuman, Cathrine Sneed, Lewis Solomon, John Todd, Greg Watson, and Arthur
Zajonc.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A Selection of Favorite Quotes from "Small is Beautiful: Economics as If
People Mattered"
Now that man has acquired the physical means of self-obliteration, the
question of peace obviously looms larger than ever before in human history.
And how could peace be built without some assurance of permanence with
regard to our economic life? (10)
From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence.
We must study an economics of permanence. (19)
Character, at the same time, is formed primarily by a man's work. And work,
properly conducted in conditions of human dignity and freedom, blesses those
who do it equally their products. (39)
As the world's resources of non-renewable fuels—coal, oil, and natural
gas—are exceedingly unevenly distributed over the globe and undoubtedly
limited in quantity, it is clear that their exploitation at an
ever-increasing rate is an act of violence against nature which must almost
inevitably lead to violence between men. (44)
When people ask for education…I think what they are really looking for is
ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them.
When a thing is intelligible you have a sense of participation; when a thing
is unintelligible you have a sense of estrangement. (63)
What is to take the place of the soul and life-destroying metaphysics
inherited from the nineteenth century? The task of our generation, I have no
doubt, is one of metaphysical reconstruction… Our task – and the task of all
education – is to understand the present world, the world in which we live
and make our choices. (79)
It might be said that energy is for the mechanical world what consciousness
is for the human world. If energy fails, everything fails. (98)
…we should be searching for policies to reconstruct rural culture, to open
the land for the gainful occupation to larger numbers of people, whether it
be on a full-time or a part-time bases, and to orientate all our actions on
the land towards the threefold ideal of health, beauty and permanence.
(114)
[Scientists] must work on public opinion, so that the politicians, depending
on public opinion, will free themselves from the thralldom of economism and
attend to the things that really matter. What matters, as I said, is the
direction of research, that the direction should be towards non-violence
rather than violence; towards an harmonious cooperation with nature rather
than a warfare against nature; towards the noiseless, low-energy, elegant
and economical solutions normally applied in nature rather than the noisy,
high-energy, brutal, wasteful, and clumsy solutions of our present-day
sciences. (116)
In the simple question of how we treat the land, next to people our most
precious resource, our entire way of life is involved, and before our
policies with regard to the land will really be changed, there will have to
be a great deal of philosophical, not to say religious, change. It is not a
question of what we can afford but of what we choose to spend our money on.
If we could return to a generous recognition of meta-economic values, our
landscapes would become healthy and beautiful again and our people would
regain the dignity of man… (116-7)
Taking stock, we can say that we possess a vast accumulation of new
knowledge, splendid scientific techniques to increase it further and immense
experience in its application. All this is truth of a kind. This truthful
knowledge, as such, does not commit us to a technology of giantism,
supersonic speed, violence, and the destruction of human work-enjoyment.
The use we have made of our knowledge is only one of its possible uses and,
as is now becoming ever more apparent, often an unwise and destructive use.
(124)
Although we are in possession of all requisite knowledge, it still requires
a systematic, creative effort to bring this technology into active existence
and make it generally visible and available. It is my experience that it is
rather more difficult to recapture directness and simplicity than to advance
in the direction of ever more sophistication and complexity. Any third-rate
engineer or researcher can increase complexity; but it takes a certain flair
of real insight to make things simple again. (127)
Yet it remains an unalterable truth that, just as a sound mind depends on a
sound body, so the health of the cities depends on the health of the rural
areas. The cities, with all their wealth, are merely secondary producers,
while primary production, the precondition of all economic life, takes place
in the countryside. (170)
Economic development is something much wider and deeper than economics, let
alone econometrics. Its roots lie outside the economic sphere, in education,
organization, discipline and, beyond that, in political independence and a
national consciousness of self-reliance. (170)
Economics, and even more so applied economics, is not an exact science; it
is in fact, or ought to be, something much greater: a branch of wisdom.
(201)
Ideals can rarely be attained in the real world, but they are none-the-less
meaningful. They imply that any departure from the ideal has to be
specially argued and justified. (208)
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.
(222)
In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers,
modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type
of society that mutilates man. (248)
There has never been a time, in any society in any part of the world,
without its sages and teachers to challenge materialism and plead for a
different order of priorities…Today, however, this message reaches us not
solely from the sages and saints but from the actual course of physical
events. It speaks to us in the language of terrorism, genocide, breakdown,
pollution, exhaustion. (248-9)
Everywhere people ask: "What can I actually do?" The answer is as simple as
it is disconcerting: we can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in
order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or
technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but
it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind. (252)
Page numbers refer to the following edition: Small is Beautiful: Economics
as if People Mattered, 25 years later…with commentaries by E.F. Schumacher.
Hartley & Marks Publishers, Inc., 1999.
