1. half page describe whose claim(s) you find more compelling. Be sure to outline why you find it more compelling and why the alternative view is less convincing.

note please write Schumacher is more compelling.

A ( v Schumacher. Small is beautiful. Chapter 5. A question of size.pdf Q Search Page 1 of 8 Zoom Share Highlight Rotate Markup Sea View It is in the light of both immediate experience and long-term prospects that the study of Buddhist economics could be recommended even to those who believe that economic growth is more important than any spiritual or religious values. For it is not a question of choosing be- tween "modern growth" and "traditional stagnation." It is 5 a question of finding the right path of development, the Middle Way between materialist heedlessness and tradi- tionalist immobility, in short, of finding "Right Liveli- hood." A Question of Size Schumacher, E. F. (1973) . Small is beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered. London: Blond and Briggs. (Part I/Chapter 5: A question of size) Choose sidebar display Jon an interpretation of history which the beginning was the family; then fami- ies got together and formed tribes; then a number of tribes formed a nation; then a number of nations formed a "Union" or "United States" of this or that; and that, finally, we could look forward to a single World Govern- ment. Ever since I heard this plausible story I have taken a special interest in the process, but could not help notic- ing that the opposite seemed to be happening: a prolifer- ation of nation-states. The United Nations Organisation started some twenty-five years ago with some sixty members; now there are more than twice as many, and the number is still growing. In my youth, this process of proliferation was called "Balkanisation" and was thought to be a very bad thing. Although everybody said it was bad, it has now been going on merrily for over fifty years, in most parts of the world. Large units tend to break up into smaller units. This phenomenon, so mockingly the opposite of what I had been taught, whether we approve of it or not, should at least not pass unnoticed. 67 66Second, I was brought up on the theory that in order to such a manner that it became, in fact, a federation of be prosperous a country had to be big-the bigger the fairly reasonably sized firms. In the British National Coal better. This also seemed quite plausible. Look at what Board, one of the biggest firms of Western Europe, some- Churchill called "the pumpernickel principalities" of Ger- thing very similar was attempted under the chairmanship many before Bismarck; and then look at the Bismarckian of Lord Robens; strenuous efforts were made to evolve a Reich. Is it not true that the great prosperity of Germany structure which would maintain the unity of one big or- became possible only through this unification? All the ganisation and at the same time create the "climate" or same, the German-speaking Swiss and the German-speak- feeling of there being a federation of numerous "quasi- ing Austrians, who did not join, did just as well economi- firms." The monolith was transformed into a well-coordi- cally, and if we make a list of all the most prosperous nated assembly of lively, semi-autonomous units, each countries in the world, we find that most of them are very with its own drive and sense of achievement. While many small; whereas a list of all the biggest countries in the theoreticians-who may not be too closely in touch with world shows most of them to be very poor indeed. Here real life-are still engaging in the idolatry of large size, again, there is food for thought. with practical people in the actual world there is a tre- And third, I was brought up on the theory of the mendous longing and striving to profit, if at all possible, "economies of scale"-that with industries and firms, just from the convenience, humanity, and manageability of as with nations, there is an irresistible trend, dictated by smallness. This, also, is a tendency which anyone can eas- modern technology, for units to become ever bigger. Now, ily observe for himself. it is quite true that today there are more large organisa- Let us now approach our subject from another angle tions and probably also bigger organisations than ever be- and ask what is actually needed. In the affairs of men, fore in history; but the number of small units is also there always appears to be a need for at least two things growing and certainly not declining in countries like Brit- simultaneously, which, on the face of it, seem to be incom- ain and the United States, and many of these small units patible and to exclude one another. We always need both are highly prosperous and provide society with most of freedom and order. We need the freedom of lots and lots the really fruitful new developments. Again, it is not alto- of small, autonomous units, and, at the same time, the gether easy to reconcile theory and practice, and the situ- orderliness of large-scale, possibly global, unity and coor- ation as regards this whole issue of size is certainly dination. When it comes to action, we obviously need puzzling to anyone brought up on these three concurrent small units, because action is a highly personal affair, and theories. one cannot be in touch with more than a very limited Even today, we are generally told that gigantic organi- number of persons at any one time. But when it comes to sations are inescapably necessary; but when we look the world of ideas, to principles or to ethics, to the indivi- closely we can notice that as soon as great size has been sibility of peace and also of ecology, we need to recognise created there is often a strenuous attempt to attain small- the unity of mankind and base our actions upon this rec- ness within bigness. The great achievement of Mr. Sloan ognition. Or to put it differently, it is true that all men are of General Motors was to structure this gigantic firm in brothers, but it is also true that in our active personal 69 68relationships we can, in fact, be brothers to only a few of them, and we are called upon to show more brotherliness trying to teach? It then becomes immediately apparent to them than we could possibly show to the whole of man- that certain things can only be taught in a very intimate kind. We all know people who freely talk about the broth- circle, whereas other things can obviously be taught en erhood of man while treating their neighbours as masse, via the air, via television, via teaching machines, and so on. enemies, just as we also know people who have, in fact, excellent relations with all their neighbours while har- What scale is appropriate? It depends on what we are bouring, at the same time, appalling prejudices about all trying to do. The question of scale is extremely crucial human groups outside their particular circle. today, in political, social and economic affairs just as in What I wish to emphasise is the duality of the human almost everything else. What, for instance, is the appro- requirement when it comes to the question of size: there priate size of a city? And also, one might ask, what is the is no single answer. For his different purposes man needs appropriate size of a country? Now these are serious and many different structures, both small ones and large difficult questions. It is not possible to programme a com- ones, some exclusive and some comprehensive. Yet peo- puter and get the answer. The really serious matters of ple find it most difficult to keep two seemingly opposite life cannot be calculated. We cannot directly calculate necessities of truth in their minds at the same time. They what is right; but we jolly well know what is wrong! We always tend to clamour for a final solution, as if in actual can recognise right and wrong at the extremes, although life there could ever be a final solution other than death. we cannot normally judge them finely enough to say: For constructive work; the principal task is always the res- "This ought to be five per cent more," or "that ought to be five per cent less." toration of some kind of balance. Today, we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism. It is therefore Take the question of size of a city. While one cannot necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness-where this judge these things with precision, I think it is fairly safe to applies. (If there were a prevailing idolatry of smallness, say that the upper limit of what is desirable for the size of irrespective of subject or purpose, one would have to try a city is probably something of the order of half a million and exercise influence in the opposite direction.) inhabitants. It is quite clear that above such a size nothing The question of scale might be put in another way: is added to the virtue of the city. In places like London, or what is needed in all these matters is to discriminate, to Tokyo, or New York, the millions do not add to the city's get things sorted out. For every activity there is a certain real value but merely create enormous problems and pro- appropriate scale, and the more active and intimate the duce human degradation. So probably the order of mag- activity, the smaller the number of people that can take nitude of 500,000 inhabitants could be looked upon as part, the greater is the number of such relationship ar- the upper limit. The question of the lower limit of a real rangements that need to be established. Take teaching: city is much more difficult to judge. The finest cities in one listens to all sorts of extraordinary debates about the history have been very small by twentieth-century stan- superiority of the teaching machine over some other dards. The instruments and institutions of city culture forms of teaching. Well, let us discriminate: what are we depend, no doubt, on a certain accumulation of wealth. But how much wealth has to be accumulated depends on 70 71the type of culture pursued. Philosophy, the arts and reli- ing become footloose; it is the result of that marvellous gion cost very, very little money. Other types of what mobility of labour which economists treasure above all claims to be "high culture"-space research of ultra-mod- else. ern physics-cost a lot of money, but are somewhat re- Everything in this world has to have a structure, other- mote from the real needs of men. wise it is chaos. Before the advent of mass transport and I raise the question of the proper size of cities both for mass communications, the structure was simply there, be- its own sake but also because it is, to my mind, the most cause people were relatively immobile. People who relevant point when we come to consider the size of na- wanted to move did so; witness the flood of saints from tions. Ireland moving all over Europe. There were communica- The idolatry of giantism that I have talked about is pos- tions, there was mobility, but no footlooseness. Now, a sibly one of the causes and certainly one of the effects of great deal of structure has collapsed, and a country is like modern technology, particularly in matters of transport a big cargo ship in which the load is in no way secured. It and communications. A highly developed transport and tilts, and all the load slips over, and the ship founders. communications system has one immensely powerful ef- One of the chief elements of structure for the whole of mankind is of course the state. And one of the chief ele- fect: it makes people footloose. Millions of people start moving about, deserting the rural ments or instruments of structuralisation (if I may use that term), is frontiers, national frontiers. Now previously, areas and the smaller towns to follow the city lights, to go to before this technological intervention, the relevance of the big city, causing a pathological growth. Take the country frontiers was almost exclusively political and dynastic; in which all this is perhaps most exemplified-the United frontiers were delimitations of political power, determin- States. Sociologists are studying the problem of "megalo- ing how many people you could raise for war. Economists polis." The word "metropolis" is no longer big enough; fought against such frontiers becoming economic bar- hence "megalopolis." They freely talk about the polarisa- riers-hence the ideology of free trade. But, then, people tion of the population of the United States into three im- and things were not footloose; transport was expensive mense megalopolitan areas: one extending from Boston to enough so that movements, both of people and of goods, Washington, a continuous built-up area, with sixty million were never more than marginal. Trade in the pre-indus- people; one around Chicago, another sixty million; and one trial era was not a trade in essentials, but a trade in pre- on the West Coast, from San Francisco to San Diego, again a cious stones, precious metals, luxury goods, spices continuous built-up area with sixty million people; the rest and-unhappily-slaves. The basic requirements of life of the country being left practically empty; deserted pro- had of course to be indigenously produced. And the vincial towns, and the land cultivated with vast tractors, movement of populations, except in periods of disaster, combine harvesters, and immense amounts of chemicals. was confined to persons who had a very special reason to If this is somebody's conception of the future of the move, such as the Irish saints or the scholars of the Uni- United States, it is hardly a future worth having. But versity of Paris. whether we like it or not, this is the result of people hav- But now everything and everybody has become mobile. 72 73All structures are threatened, and all structures are vul- than to move within the frontiers of his country. The fac- nerable to an extent that they have never been before. tor of footlooseness is, therefore, the more serious, the Economics, which Lord Keynes had hoped would settle bigger the country. Its destructive effects can be traced down as a modest occupation similar to dentistry, sud- both in the rich and in the poor countries. In the rich denly becomes the most important subject of all. Eco- countries such as the United States of America, it pro- nomic policies absorb almost the entire attention of duces, as already mentioned, "megalopolis." It also pro- government, and at the same time become ever more im- duces a rapidly increasing and ever more intractable. potent. The simplest things, which only fifty years ago problem of "drop-outs," of people, who, having become one could do without difficulty, cannot get done any footloose, cannot find a place anywhere in society. Di- more. The richer a society, the more impossible it be- rectly connected with this, it produces an appalling prob- comes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay- lem of crime, alienation, stress, social breakdown, right off. Economics has become such a thraldom that it down to the level of the family. In the poor countries, absorbs almost the whole of foreign policy. People say, again most severely in the largest ones, it produces mass "Ah yes, we don't like to go with these people, but we migration into cities, mass unemployment, and, as vitality depend on them economically so we must humour them." is drained out of rural areas, the threat of famine. The It tends to absorb the whole of ethics and to take prece- result is a "dual society" without any inner cohesion, sub- dence over all other human considerations. Now, quite ject to a maximum of political instability. clearly, this is a pathological development, which has, of As an illustration, let me take the case of Peru. The course, many roots, but one of its clearly visible roots lies capital city, Lima, situated on the Pacific coast, had a pop- in the great achievements of modern technology in terms ulation of 175,000 in the early 1920s, just fifty years ago. of transport and communications. Its population is now approaching three million. The While people, with an easy-going kind of logic, believe once beautiful Spanish city is now infested by slums, sur- that fast transport and instantaneous communications rounded by misery-belts that are crawling up the Andes. open up a new dimension of freedom (which they do in But this is not all. People are arriving from the rural areas some rather trivial respects), they overlook the fact that at the rate of a thousand a day-and nobody knows what these achievements also tend to destroy freedom, by mak- to do with them. The social or psychological structure of ing everything extremely vulnerable and extremely inse- life in the hinterland has collapsed; people have become cure, unless conscious policies are developed and footloose and arrive in the capital city at the rate of a conscious action is taken to mitigate the destructive effects thousand a day to squat on some empty land, against the of these technological developments: police who come to beat them out, to build their mud Now, these destructive effects are obviously most severe hovels and look for a job. And nobody knows what to do about in large countries, because, as we have seen, frontiers pro- them. Nobody knows how to stop the drift. duce "structure," and it is a much bigger decision for Imagine that in 1864 Bismarck had annexed the whole someone to cross a frontier, to uproot himself from his of Denmark instead of only a small part of it, and that native land and try and put down roots in another land, nothing had happened since. The Danes would be an 74 75ethnic minority in Germany, perhaps struggling to main- tain their language by becoming bilingual, the ofcial lan- guage of course being German. Only by thoroughly Germanising themselves could they avoid becoming sec- ond-class citizens. There would be an irresistible drift of the most ambitious and enterprising Danes, thoroughly . Germanised, to the mainland in the south, and what then would be the status of Copenhagen? That of a remote - provincial city. Or imagine Belgium as part of France. What would be the status of Brussels? Again, that of an unimportant provincial city. I don't have to enlarge (m it. Imagine now that Denmark a part of Germany, and Bel- gium a part of France, suddenly turned what \"is now charmingly called "hats\" wanting independence. There would be endless, heated. arguments that these \"non- countries" could not be economically viable, that their de- sire for independence was, to quote a famous political commentator, \"adolescent emotionalism, political naivety, phoney economics, and sheer bare-faced opportunism." How can one talk about the economics of small inde- pendent countries? How can one discuss a problem that is a non-problem? There is no such thing as the viability of ' states or of nations, there is only a problem of viability of people: people, actual persons like you and me, are viable when they can stand on their own feet and earn their keep. You do not make non-viable people viable by put- ' ting large numbers of them into one huge community, and you do not make viable people non-viable by splitting _ a large community into a number of smaller, more inti- mate, more coherent and more manageable groups. All this is perfectly obvious and there is absolutely nothing to argueabout. Some people ask: "What happens when a country, composed of one rich province and several poor ones, falls apart because the rich province seoedes?\" Most probably thetanswer is: \"Nothing very much happens.\" 76 The rich will continue to be rich and the r will - tmue to be poor. "But if, before secession, fhogrich pig:- mce had subsidised the poor, what happens then?\" Well then, of course, the subsidy might stop. But the rich rarely subsidise the poor; more ofmn they exploit them They may not do so directly so much as through the terms of trade. They may obscure the situation a little by a certain redistribution of tax revenue or small-scale char- ity, but the last thing they want to do is secede from the poor. - 7 - The normal case is quite different, namely that the poor'provmces wish to separate from the rich, and that the rich want to hold on because they know that exploita- tion of the poor within one's own frontiers is innitely easier than exploitation of the poor beyond them. Now if a poor province wishes to secede at the risk of losing some substdies, what attitude should one take? blot that we have to decide this, but what should we think about it? Is it not a wish to be applauded and re- spected? Do we not want people to stand on their own feet. as free and self-reliant men? So again this is a \"non- problem." I would assert therefore that there is no prob- lem of viability, as all experience shows. If a country wrshes to export all over the world, and import from all over the world, it has never been held that it had to annex the whole world in order to do so. ' What about the absolute necessi of havin a lar ' - ternal market? This again is anqoptical illgsion get]; meaning of \"large\" is conceived in terms of political boundaries. Needless to say. a prosperous market is better thana poor one, but whether that market is outside the political boundaries or inside, makes on the whole very little difference.- lam not aware. for instance, that Ger- many, m order to export a large number of Volkswagens to the Umted States, a very prosperous market, could 77 only do so after annexing the United States. But it does make a lot of difference if a poor community or province nds itself politically tied to or ruled by a rich community or province. Why? Because. in a mobile, footloose soaety the law of disequilibrium is innitely stronger than the s'o-called law of equilibrium. Nothmgsucceeds like suc- cess, and nothing stagnates like stagnation. The successful province drains the life 'out of the unsuccessful, and With- out protection against the strong, the weak have no chance; either they remain weak or they must migrate and join the strong; they cannot effectively help them- 1 . scrim\" important problem in the second half of the twentieth centu is the geographical distribution of pop- ulation, the qugtion of \"regionalism.\" But regionalism, not in the sense of combining a lot of states into free- trade systems, but in the opposite sense of developing all the regions within each country. This, in fact, Is the most important subject on the agenda of all the larger coun- tries today. And a lot of the nationalism of small nations today, and the desire for Self-government and so-called independence, is simply a logical and rational response_to the need for regional development. In the poor countries in particular there is no hope for the poor unless there ts successful regional development, a development effort outside the capital city covering all the rural areas wher- 0 le ha n to be. . _ _ EVE; ghpefforfgnot brought forth, their only chome is either to remain in their miserable condition-where they are, or tomigrate into the big city where their condition will be even more miserable. It is a strange phenomenon indeed that the conventional wisdom of present-day ecof nomics can do nothing to help the poor. . . , _ _ Invariably it proves that only such pohczes are viable as have in fact the result of making those already rich and - 78 powerful, richer and more powerful. It proves that indus- trial development only pays if it is as near as possible to the capital city or another very large town, and not in the rural areas. It proves that large projects are invariably more economic than small ones, and it proves that capi- tal-intensive projects are invariably to be preferred as against labour-intensive ones. The economic calculus, as applied by present-day economics, forces the industrialist to eliminate the human factor because machines do not make mistakes, which people do. Hence the enormous ef- . fort at automation and the drive for ever-larger units. This means thatthose who have nothing to sell but their labour remain in the weakest possible bargaining position. The conventional wisdom of what is now taught as eco- nomics by-passes the poor, the very people for whom de- velopment is really needed. The economics of giantism . and automation is a left-over of nineteenth-century con- ditions and nineteenth-century thinking and it is totally incapable of solving any of the real problems of today. An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods(the goods will look after themselvesl). It could be summed up in the phrase, \"production by the masses, rather than mass production." What was impossible, how- - ever, in the nineteenth century, is possible now. And what was in factif not necessarily at least understandably- neglected in the nineteenth century is unbelievably ur- gent now. That is, the conscious utilisation of our enormous technological and scientic potential for the , ght against misery and human degradationa ght in intimate contact with actual people, with individuals, fam- ilies, small groups, rather than states and other anony- _ mous abstractions. And this presupposes a political and organisational structure that can provide this intimacy. What is the meaning of democracy, freedom, human 79 dignity, standard of living, self-realisation, fulfilment? Is it a matter of goods, or of people? Of course it is a matter of people. But people can be themselves only in small com- prehensible groups. Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with a mul- tiplicity of small-scale units. If economic thinking cannot grasp this it is useless. If it cannot get beyond its vast ab- stractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capi- tal/output ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital accumulation; if it cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustra- tion, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness, and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and start afresh. Are there not indeed enough "signs of the times" to indicate that a new start is needed? 80