Schumacher

This is E.F. Schumacher's final speech, made in Switzerland in 1976. I know that it is really long, but it is definitely worth reading.

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The first thing when we think about what we call the Third World or the developing countries, or to put it more simply about the poor, the first thing we ought to realize is that they are real. They are actual people, as real as you and I, except that they can do things which you and I can't do 

Mr. McNamara, the President of the World Bank, published some statistics recently. Something in the order of 500 million people in this world, he said, have less than $50 a year. But they are surviving. They have a know-how that we don't have. They are real, and we must not think of them as poor little souls, and luckily we come along and we are going to develop them. 

No, they are survival artists and it is quite certain that if there should be a real resources crisis, or a real ecological crisis, in this world, these people will survive. Whether you and I will survive is much more doubtful. India will survive, though whether Bombay will survive is more doubtful. That New York will survive is an impossibility. Probably the same applies for London or Tokyo, and an awful number of other cities. 

You cannot help a person if you yourself don't understand how that person manages to exist at all. This came to my attention quite a long time ago, a quarter of a century ago, when I first visited Burma and then India. I realized that they were able to do things that we could not do. But if I, as an economic magician, could double the income, the average income per head, in Burma from the 20 pounds it was at that time to 40 pounds, if I could do that without destroying the secret pattern of life which enabled them to live, then I would have turned Burma, I am sure, into the nearest thing to paradise we know. 

But coming from England I realized that we couldn't even survive on 200 pounds per person. If I doubled the income of Burma from 20 pounds to 40 pounds, whilst changing the pattern from the traditional Burmese pattern to the English pattern, then I would have turned Burma into the world's worst slum. Yet I listened to all the economists, and all the people who talked about development aid, and nobody ever talked about this particular factor, this pattern. They went into these countries like a bull into a china shop. They said, 'Step aside, now we will show you how to live properly when you are really rich.' The poor people of Burma stood on the sidelines and said, 'But we are not rich, so what you are showing us is of no interest to us, except the few people in our own countries who are already rich.'
So in Burma, more than twenty years ago, I concluded that overseas development aid really was a process where you collect money from the poor people in rich countries, to give it to the rich people in poor countries. Nobody intended this, but there was a blindness about this pattern of living which enables the poor to survive. And so we offered our goods which of course only people already rich and powerful could take. 

Then I went to southern India. I was a lucky person because the right question occurred to my mind. Everything begins with a question, and the right question was, 'What sort of technology would be appropriate for rural India?' Surely not the technology of Pittsburgh, of Sheffield, or of Dortmund or of Tokyo. 

Fate has given me the name of a shoemaker. If you want to be a good shoemaker, it is not enough to make good shoes and to know all about making good shoes, you also have to know a lot about feet. Because the aim of the shoe is to fit the foot. But most of us never thought about this. 

There used to be a story about a country that unduly indulged in central planning. They had developed the finest boot the world has ever seen and they ordered 500 million pairs of the boot, all the same size. Well, that is what we tend to do, because we don't really think of the poor being real: we think that we have the answer. 

When I had asked myself this question, 'What would be the appropriate technology for rural India or rural Latin America or maybe the city slums?' I came to a very simple provisional answer. That technology would indeed be really much more intelligent, efficient, scientific if you like, than the low level technology employed there, which kept them very poor. But it should be very, very much simpler, very much cheaper, very much easier to maintain than the highly sophisticated technology of the modern West. In other words it would be an intermediate technology, somewhere in between. And I asked myself another question, 'Why do they not use an intermediate technology? Why do they not use boots that fit their feet?' And then I realized that intermediated technology was not to be found. I realized that in terms of available technology, either it was very very low or it was very very high; but the middle had disappeared. I therefore came to the conclusion that there was a tendency in technological development which I called 'the law of the disappearing middle'. (This only, I am sorry to say, applies to technology, so it is not a hopeful message for middle-aged gentlemen.) 

You can verify this proposition if you go to a bookshop where there you can get the latest publications and you can get the classics. But anything published in 1965 is out of print, it is unobtainable. 

I was a farm labourer in northern England some 35 years ago. We farmed very efficiently a 300-acre farm with mainly animal drawn equipment, which if you were able to buy it today would cost something of the order of $10,000. Not a single piece of that equipment is available today. It has disappeared. It has been replaced by, of course, far more sophisticated, powerful mechanized equipment, which would not cost $10,000 but $150,000. 

And what does this mean? Oh, we say this is progress. Yes, for some people it is progress. But it means that more and more people are excluded because maybe you and I could raise $10,000, once we had a farm, but the number who can raise $150,000 to equip the farm is very much lower. 

Not so long ago I was invited to visit one of the most illustrious research and development institutions in England, where they develop textile machinery. The director showed me everything. These textile machines are so wonderful. They can do anything, at an unbelievable speed. So since there is a little boy in every man, I was utterly astonished and utterly delighted. And I asked, 'How much is such a machine?' I was told, 'Well, that machine would be 100,000 pounds.' And then I said to the director, 'It seems to me that you now can do everything.' He said, 'Yes, we can do everything now.' I said, 'Well then, why do you not stop?' So he said, 'Stop? Go against progress? Stop?' I said, 'This is a very expensive establishment. Why do we not say: Now, basta, enough.' So he said, 'I am surrounded by all these clever young people and they can still make an improvement here and a further refinement there. What is wrong with that?' And I said, 'Nothing is wrong with it except then this machine which now costs 100,000 pounds will cost 150,000 pounds.' 'Are you against progress?' 'No,' I said, 'I am not against progress, but I am worried. Even now most of mankind is excluded. And when it is even more expensive, an even greater proportion is excluded.' 

Our institutions are swarming with people who are wringing their hands about the overwhelming power of multinational companies. And at the same time applauding the technological development which makes production so complex and so colossally costly that only the multinational companies can carry it. This is the predicament not only of the developing countries but also of our own countries now. The middle way, which is also the democratic way that gives the little people some independence and what the you call 'doing one's own thing': that is being destroyed. And therefore we have throughout the world this atmosphere of tension, even of hatred. 

There is little point in attacking the multinationals when the whole of society is bumbling along led by engineers and scientists who then introduce another complication, another speeding up. Well that is their job. But we as a society have not got enough philosophy or humanity to call a stop when a stop is indicated. Or at least to try and counterbalance it. 

Now this fellow who took me through this resource establishment is a very thoughtful man and when I told him what I was worried about, he did then stop walking. And he said, 'But what can I do? If I go to the top man and say, "I think it is time to stop," he will say, "Yes, you have been looking a little bit jaded and you'd better take a holiday," and if I insist he will say, "I am grateful that you have given me notice so early. I already have in mind a very able successor." So I cannot stop.' 

'Of course you cannot stop, but you can realize what you are doing, that this is not simply an interesting and productive and self-creating technological development, but it is a force that forms society, and forms it so that fewer and fewer peopled can be real people. At least you must be concerned with creating some counter-force to balance it up.'
So he said, 'And what would that be?' I said, 'Why do you not at least take 10% of your bright, innovating, creative engineers, and say to them, "do not make this complicated machine even more complicated. Do not make this expensive machine even more expensive. What about the mass of mankind? They have got nothing. Take the simplest textile equipment and see whether you are not clever enough to make a much better job of it. To make it much more productive so that people can make a decent living. This would be enough." ' 

I am afraid he has not done it. But this question has now come up throughout the world. The question is being asked, which I asked myself in another context twenty years ago in southern India, 'What is the appropriate technology to meet the very urgent problems that we are confronted with?' And people are coming to the conclusion: we do not have an appropriate technology for these problems. 

What are these problems? Well, we do not have an appropriate technology for energy. Everybody agrees on that now. We are totally dependent on non-renewable sources of fuel, and that, of course, is really capital which we are consuming, it is not income. If we go along as before there will be an end to it. 

We do not have a technology that is particularly kind to living nature around us, and so we have to take thought and concern about an ecologically sound technology. That has now become generally understood. But more questions are being raised. 'Do we really have an appropriate technology from a human point of view?' Well, I know many countries and I have talked to many people who are exposed to our technology as factory workers and so on. And I have had the experience that it is not very wise to ask them if they enjoy their work, or if you ask them, do not wait for the answer. 

It is interesting to go back in history. Last year was not only the bicentenary of the United states, it was also the bicentenary of the appearance of a book by Adam Smith called The Wealth of Nations -- the basis of economics. Adam Smith said in effect, 'By that which a person does all day long, he is formed. His work forms him. And if you give him mindless work, he becomes a mindless person. And he cannot be a good citizen, he cannot be a good father in the family, or mother for that matter.' And then surprisingly -- or not surprisingly -- Adam smith goes on, 'But to become totally reduced through mindless work is the fate of the great majority of the people in all progressive countries.' 

He did not say, 'This is terrible, they must not do it.' No, he had much the same mentality: 'Well, that is too bad, but that is the price we have to pay.' And we all know that the human being has a marvellous fortitude in tolerating the sufferings of others. And even today we say to one another, 'This is not so bad. Of course most of this work is not enjoyable, but it's got to be done, and they actually enjoy it. Of course, I would not enjoy it.' Well, I was a manual worker for quite a few years, but I did not suffer as much as many of my friends are suffering, because I always could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I always knew I would not have to do it all my life. I can tell you, if I had thought that I would have to do it all my life there would have been trouble. 

No, we have not got an appropriate technology from a human point of view. The sub-title of my book Small is Beautiful was 'Economics as if people mattered'. We do not approach economics primarily from the point of view of people; we approach it from the point of view of the production of goods, and the people as a kind of afterthought. Of course, if they become redundant, well, we have to pay them redundancy pay. If they have no opportunity of using their skills, then we have to retrain them. If the work is so noisy that they lose their hearing, well then we have to put something around their ears. They are factors of production. And this is the kind of industry we are now carrying into the so-called developing countries. 

We are doing it at a time when in our heart of hearts we know that this kind of industry has no future. Nature cannot stand it, the resource endowment of the world cannot stand it, and the human being cannot stand it. 

Already half of all the hospital beds in Britain and the United States are occupied by people whose problems are mental not physical. This kind of industry has no future. If the society that claims to be the biggest and richest and has an income per head twice that of Britain, namely the United States of America, if they have not solved the problems of harmony, of the city, of poverty, they are not on the right road. So what shall we do? 

When we begin to suspect that we are not on the right road, then of course we get a lot of fanatics. And a fanatic is a person who, when he senses that he is doing the wrong thing, redoubles his efforts. We have plenty of those. I call them people of the forward stampede. They have a slogan, and blazoned on their banner is 'a breakthrough a day keeps the crisis away'. They are stampeding us into greater and greater violence. 

But now there is another great ground-swell of people whom I call the 'home-comers', who say, 'Well really, the purpose of our existence on this earth cannot be to destroy it. The purpose of our existence can't be to work ourselves silly and to end up in a lunatic asylum. Let's reconsider it.' 

I want to make the point that these people exist, in my experience, in all societies, and the people of the forward stampede also exist in all societies. I was recently on the other side of the Iron Curtain, where they explained to me at great length that their system was so much better than our system. And finally they said, 'In any case, the Western economies are like an express train hurtling at ever increasing speed towards an abyss.' Then there was a short pause, and they added, ' But we shall overtake you.' 

That is the automatism of 'progress'. That is the rivalry. It is a kind of fraud. And so it is necessary for us to step back and have a new look, and at least to create some sort of counterweight. 

Initially, with regard to the Third World, the so-called developing countries, some friends of mine said, 'Well, let's do something about this', and we set up an organization which we called the Intermediate Technology Development Group Ltd., not to kill off the high technology, because we couldn't do that anyhow, but to fill this gap, this middle that has disappeared. And perhaps thereby to make it possible to overcome the fateful polarization which modern technology has produced, under which the rich become richer and the poor become more desperate, and society disintegrates -- something that you can observe on a world scale, and you can also observe in all big countries. Small countries are more beautiful. 

The polarization is now so great that you can keep the consequences plastered over only with enormous welfare expenditure. Welfare will keep people afloat, but does not integrate them in society. And in the United States, for example, you have many people who are third generation welfare recipients. 

And even the great United States has come to the conclusion that with the present easily available technology, we cannot solve the problem. So they have set up a national centre for appropriate technology, not for the developing countries, but for the United States. They said, 'We must rethink technology, and try to make it appropriate to our actual problems.' These problems are not simply more and more production. The actual problems are the reintegration of a sizable proportion of the total population into the mainstream of society. 

Similar things are happening in all advanced countries. So now we are in the position of talking about appropriate or intermediate technology in a much more convincing way. When people in the Third World say to me, 'Well, if it is such a good thing, why don't you do it?' I say, "Yes, we do do it.' 

What is this new look at technology? We have to ask the right questions. Is it relevant to the real problems we have? I will give an example. Some of my French friends may be hurt by it, and our English friends, but nobody else. Let's ask the question about the appropriateness of technology in connection with Concorde. 

The proper question to ask is, 'Is it a very intelligent development in terms of the energy situation of the world?' You have to give the answer, I don't. Because that is a big problem. Is it a good thing in terms of environmental quality? It may be, of course; people may say the environment is greatly improved by the sonic boom. Is it appropriate technology in terms of fighting world poverty? Does it help the poor? Is it an appropriate technology from a democratic point of view? Perhaps getting a greater equality among people? 

You can take every single problem of this society, and you have to ask, is the technological development appropriate? Or is it some sort of little boy's engineer dream? We can do it, so let's do it. 

These questions now have to be faced, and I am glad to say in more and more counties there are now groups who normally sail under the name of something like 'technology assessment'. They are calling companies to order and asking: 'This development, you have assessed it in terms of power or glory or profitability, but that is not good enough. So let's ask, is it relevant to the real problems of mankind?' 

We could go on for a long, long time talking about this. I just give you the outcome of our work in terms of ideas when we set up this organization twelve years ago. It was created out of nothing. There is no money behind it. Just a few ideas. We have now in Britain something of the order of a thousand people, highly qualified people, working in various parts of society with us on the creation of an appropriate technology. 

You have to go a bit further than the word intermediate. We gradually came to four criteria. What is lacking is a small-scale technology, we know how to do things on a big scale. But if we only know how to do things on a big scale for a big market, then our industry will go into the big cities and we have, as we can observe all over the world, another polarization – vast congestion in a few places and enormous emptiness elsewhere. Again, you only have to look across the Atlantic at countries represented here like Canada or the United States, and you find precisely this polarization. 

Many communities in North America are coming to the Intermediate Technology Group and saying, ‘ We have become colonies of the big metropolitan areas! We don’t want to be colonies, we want to be ourselves. We want to have our own society, not simply provide raw materials for Chicago. We want to have jobs in Montana. We are like a Third World country in Montana. That is a fact. Out of a hundred graduates from our universities, eighty-five cannot find a job in Montana, they have to go to the big cities. Why can’t we have jobs in Montana? Because we haven’t got the appropriate technology. The big technology only fits into the big concentrations of populations. Are we really so limited that we can’t create an appropriate small-scale technology?’ That is question number one. 

Question number two. Of course you have to go to a big city if your processes of production are so complex that you need the highest experts by the hundreds. You can’t find them in Montana or in Regina. So you go to Toronto, you go to Chicago. So can’t we create a technology which is not so complex? It takes better engineers – even a third rate engineer can make a complicated thing even more complicated. It takes a bit of genius to recapture the basics and simplicity. 

The highly complex technology does not fit into the rural areas of the world and so this polarization will go on unless we make it our business to create such a technology.
Number three is what I have already talked about: the cost per workplace. The costliness of capital equipment has been skyrocketing, so, as I said before, there are increasingly only the multinational companies left who can afford to create workplaces, and the little people are left out. And if there are unemployed, it is just too bad. Can’t we make it our business to create a technology which is cheap per worker? This requires entirely new thinking. 

And the fourth point is slightly different. I know I may arouse some opposition when I say this. Modern technology has become increasingly violent. Violence is not just a matter of one person hitting another person over the head, it is employing violent means. We have this in agriculture, where we scatter around very violent chemicals, we call them pesticides, which means killer substances. On this thin living film of the earth on which all life depends we are scattering millions of tons of killer substances. Whatever you may think, it is a violent technology. And the spirit of violent technology has invaded the medical profession. So much so that we claim that a very high percentage of illnesses are induced by the doctor. The only advice we can give anybody is to avoid the doctor when you are ill. 

Of course the greatest readiness to resort to violence we are now experiencing in our attempts to cope with the energy problem, where we are prepared to put into the world large amounts of plutonium, a substance of a really unbelievable ghastliness, which the good Lord never made. He knew where to stop. It is a man-made thing. And it will be there for all time: the half-life radioactivity for plutonium is 24,400 years. In fact, before it is really harmless it takes a matter of 3 million years. 

All this readiness to apply extremely violent processes to that sacred and unbelievably complex system called nature. We don’t know what we are doing. 

Of course we have wonderful scientists, who give us assurance that all is well, don’t worry. This is the blind leading the blind with a vengeance. It is not necessary to be violent. We know that in agriculture, in medicine, in energy, in any other subject you may care to think of, there are people who are very often called, or used to be called cranks, who know how to produce enough food, how to keep healthy, without any violent methods. All this is possible, but it hasn’t had any support at all from governments, and very little either from academia, or business. 

Governments everywhere put a great deal of money into agriculture, which goes into chemicals and mechanization, but the organic farmer who is showing what is possible without chemicals, he gets no help. And when it comes to most academics, they simply get angry when they are told that there are methods that are more elegant than the violence of their chemicals. 

These are the four criteria that have crystallized out of this work. We don’t feel we are unsuccessful, although we don’t represent anything, we don’t have power, we have little money. We have had a certain influence because we are happy to work with everybody or anybody. I am often challenged and asked, ‘Do you work with academia?’ I say, ‘No, not with academia!’ ‘Do you work with business?’ ‘I don’t work with business.’ ‘Do you work with governments?’ ‘No, no! You can’t work with them because they are all committed to that monster technology.’ ‘Well, whom do you work with?’ I work with people from business, academia and government. In the vast and seemingly monolithic structures we have individuals who come to us and say, ‘What you are doing is interesting.’ And they are carrying it into their companies and into government departments, and even into the universities. 

I would say that part of the job we have is to try and persuade people that they should give some thought, some systematic thought to it. In this connection we say, ‘Look, even the most wonderfully designed ocean steamer carries lifeboats, not because some statistician has predicted that the steamer will run into an iceberg, but because icebergs have occasionally been seen. Isn’t it time that the modern world provided some lifeboats?’ Of course you don’t put all your money into the lifeboat, you don’t put all your research and development into the exploration of small, simple and non-violent technology. You have to go on making a living, but 5% or 10% could be so spent. 

Some businesses are doing it. And if a big business comes and says, ‘I will give this thinking a chance,’ they have never felt sorry. They suddenly realized that really the construction of the universe is far more benign than they ever thought. You don’t have to be so violent. We are now quite intelligent enough to create appropriate technologies, if we really think before we act, and think in these wider terms. 

In order to do anything, we find that it is necessary, as I said before to take a very co-operative attitude in the various panels and working parties we have set up in the Intermediate Technology Development Group. We try to achieve in every one of these organizations what we call the ABCD combination. 

That is just so that you should remember it more easily. A stands for the administration, people from government. Let’s have some of them on the working group, as persons, not representing governments. They know how to pull the strings, and they control a lot of money; they are the tax-gatherers and spenders. That is the A factor, Administrators. 

B stands for business. Now the business intelligence is the intelligence, the discipline, to make things viable so that they can survive. To create a thing that cannot survive is a waste of time. We need this intelligence. 

The C factor are the communicators. The people of the word, research people, people who have got time to think and to write. They solve problems, and there are plenty to be solved. But never let them act alone, because they are playful little souls. They like a problem, whether it be a chess problem or a problem that means something, and when they have solved it they mark it ‘top secret’ and file it away somewhere and turn to the next problem. But if the B factor is sitting next to them, the business man, he says, ‘We spent money on this. We must now bring it out and make it viable.’ So this is a very healthy combination. 

And D are the democratic organizations of society, they are the labour union people, the women’s organizations, the ecological people; happily every country is full of them. You don’t want to do this in an elitist way, and wherever you succeed in getting ABCD together, as persons, they have a good time. They really enjoy it, because initially they have a very low opinion of each other, very low. And then they realize that they are actually all quite intelligent and useful people. Wherever we succeeded in getting the ABCD combination we found that things became possible that everybody thought were quite impossible. 

All I can say is, the whole thing doesn’t cost a great deal of money, and people who join it enjoy it.