On “Small Is Beautiful” by E. F. Schumacher *****

I have been waiting years to read this book but have never gotten around ot it. I first became familier with it through my father, when I was a child. He would talk about it quite often. In those younger days, I was enthused and amazed by technology and by anything big. My father, however, typically disagreed.

Years later, during my first quarter in college, I took a class called Engineering and Technology, which ended up being more about the intersection between environmentalism and science than about hard-core engineering. The textbook for that class was a collection of essays that had come out of a conference at which E. F. Schumacher was one of the speakers. His imprint was all over the book (along with others such as Barry Commoner and Jeremy Rifkin)--and I finally discovered what my dad had been talking about and why he believed what he believed and came to see much as he did.

My father died a few weeks ago, and one of the items I saved for myself was this book from his library. It has all his notes and highlighting in it—rather extensive for general nonfiction—so reading the book was also in some ways like reading my father's thoughts on the work, taking me back to what he was thinking when I was around eight or ten.

One thing that struck me about the work, written in the early 1970s as it was, is how economically “socialist” it is at the same time as being “Christian,” a combination that receives much less attention in the post-Reagan United States than perhaps existed before, and one that I see little of in the church I attend now, wherein free market capitalism as being identified with “God's proper way” has become rather expected. I think that sad, given that Christianity should not be politically left or right. (My dad was not one typically to link himself to one political persuasion, though in his later years, even he seemed to espouse much of the Republican right positioning, something he broke from again in the last months of his life.) Things, as far as the link between faith and politics or economics, were definitely different in the 1970s.

Schumacher is not writing a Christian book, however. He is an economist, who also happens to be a Christian and whose creed often becomes part of his reasoning—but he also draws on Eastern philosophy and Buddhism. These sort of ideas impact his thinking. The book, as a whole, is written for a lay audience, which makes it easy to read but which also makes it perhaps a bit less persuasive than it might have been with extensive graphs, charts, figures, tables, and data. As such, one comes away feeling as if one is getting the simplified version of his reasoning, which in turn makes it seem at times like perhaps his arguments lack actual substance behind them. But at about three hundred pages, that is to be expected; a hard economics book would hardly have appealed to the general audience for which Schumacher is writing.

The gist of the book is that technology should be appropriate to the purpose for which it is being created and proposed rather than being blindly pushed upon society. In this sense, Schumacher's work falls in line with lots of other technological critics (a book published where I work, Not So Fast, makes various similar arguments). Technology (and indeed economics), in other words, should serve the needs of real people rather than economic statistics. What good does a high GNP do if most people are unemployed? But if GNP is growing, most economists would classify that economy as doing well or improving. This, Schumacher says, is the wrong measure—especially for developing economies. There, technology to scale is actually going to be of more value in lifting people out of poverty. Farms don't need motorized combines that are going to do the labor of fifty workers if one hundred people need jobs; rather, the technology provided should be one that will give those people some sort of living. That is real improvement, more than the supposed gains to productivity and profit. And for a first-world power attempting to aid third-world communities, such “appropriate” technologies are often cheaper to provide.

Schumacher also spends time writing about the faux value of nuclear power, which he sees as more costly than just about any energy technology. Indeed, he sees the energy sector as a whole as being built around faux economics. The long-term cost of such technology is not taken into account when determining the profit taken. If there is no place to store nuclear waste, then it is not a technology that we want. Similarly, while oil and coal may be useful, they are not replaceable, which means that they should be used carefully and selectively. Schumacher, in other words, is making his argument from the point of view of scarcity rather than of discoverability or continuing technological advance. Conservatives, by contrast, would typically make the argument that while new oil will continue to be discovered. This latter view is the one that has, for now, been proven correct. We seem to always find more sources. The problem, however, is that at some point, we won't. At some point, it will be gone. That may be hundreds of years away, though.

Schumacher also makes the argument that small businesses are better than large ones. He sees businesses of more than 350 people as having lost their human face. Those that keep below this threshold are likely to be better citizens and better run. Larger companies are best divided into smaller divisions to take advantage of smaller size. Along with this argument is one that Schumacher makes with regard to profit—namely that the assumption that company profit is an inherent good. In this view, government (and its accompanying taxes) interfere with private enterprise, but those taxes go toward paying for capital that a company uses (such as roads). Instead, he argues, larger companies should in fact be nationalized so that the profit, gained in part of public capital, is shared with the public. This does not mean that government should run said companies but rather that there should be a kind of board that ensures such companies are fairly run for the general public good. It's an interesting argument, though one wonders how it would work in a multinational context. Schumacher's answer to that question is an unsatisfying single paragraph that equates to essentially “we'll figure it out.”

Still, Schumacher's ideas are enjoyable as being a bit out of the box. The work has had quite a bit of “influence” apparently on the world of economics, and yet I don't really see that its ideas have been widely applied. One wonders what would happen if they were.