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New Economics Institute USA celebrates Schumacher

"Prosperity without Growth"

Virginia Isaac

I loved Professor Tim Jackson's book "Prosperity without Growth -Economics for a Finite Planet" published in 2009 -  not least because it reflects and updates many of the themes that my father explored in 'Small is Beautiful' in 1973.  Schumacher often questioned the West's obsession with GDP and lamented the dependency on more and more consumption which didn't necessarily make us any happier or healthier.  He also regularly warned of the dangers of modern society being built on, and increasingly reliant on, non-renewable resources that would inevitably become scarcer and more expensive as time went on.

Professor Jackson - a top sustainability adviser to the UK government - covers all this in a clearly argued and well evidenced fashion.  To quote from the cover leaf -

"Is more economic growth the solution?  Will it deliver prosperity and well-being for a global population projected to reach nine billion?..No one denies that development is essential for the poorer nations.  But in the advanced economies there is mounting evidence that ever-increasing consumption adds little to human happiness and may even impede it"

I was struck that there was no mention of Schumacher in Professor Jackson's book so I wrote to him and asked him why?  I was pleased to get a reply which included -

"But to answer very briefly, yes, my career was profoundly influenced early on by your father’s writings.  I have cited him extensively over the years.  Small is Beautiful was a seminal text for me, and I built my first two books in part from the analysis of what he called the ‘Problem of Production’ in that book."

 While my father did not get everything right, it's so good to see modern academics and thinkers picking up and developing his thinking and bringing them bang up to date for debate today.

 More on this can be found at www.earthscan.co.uk/pwg and www.surrey.ac.uk/resolve

by Carl Amery (2002)

If you were to ask young people in Germany today, or even those of more advanced age about Schumacher, you might get some reference to a couple of racing drivers or perhaps the first SPD leader of the post war period. But Ernst Friedrich Schumacher was much more important than all of them.

His fame, strictly speaking, can be traced to three simple words, SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL, which form the title of his revolutionary work published in 1973. The German Edition was entitled „Die Rückkehr zum menschlichen Maß“. Or „The Return to Human Scale“ This book, along with Meadow’s economic forecast, „The Limits to Growth“ (1972), and Ivan Illich’s critical studies (Deschooling Society 1971) is among the classics of the new environmentally conscious philosophy of economics – the only really original view of the twentieth century.

Schumacher began to warn about the dangers of reckless expansion and the plundering of resources in the 1950’s. He realized the inadequacy of the economic sciences which forced our lives into a flawed model of reality. „We are dealing with facts that are neither contested nor sanctioned but surrounded by a wall of silence. To contest them would expose the proponents of such action to public ridicule. To sanction them, on the other hand, would invite condemnation of the driving forces in today’s society as a crime against humanity. “ Schumacher was a central figure in the movement of the 1970’s that sought to breach this wall of silence by openly questioning the rationality and future viability of current economic and life style practices. Today, thirty years down the road, when one reviews the contents of „Small is Beautiful“, one is fascinated how relevant and up to date they seem. It is no wonder that their thrust has never been seriously rebutted.

It is also no wonder that the contents of „Small is Beautiful „are as revolutionary now as they were then. Thanks to the counteroffensive by the proponents of profit oriented economy nothing has been done to address its concerns.

The most important weapon of this counteroffensive can be seen in the big money think tanks which took over intellectual leadership from the proponents of Real Socialism which ran out of steam in 1989 when the wall came down in Berlin. The influence of these think tanks now permeates academia to the point where it determines the acceptability of dissertation topics in the economics and social sciences faculties of most elite universities. Cynical Neo-Liberalism has put its stamp on the semantics of modern economy and has reduced the alternative constructions of political ecology as they speak to us from every page of Schumacher’s texts to a laughable form of political environmentalism. The level of discussion possible on economic issues has become correspondingly pathetic as the claims of the profit economy on the patience and resources of humanity become increasingly more brazen and arrogant. These developments stand in stark contradiction to the sub title of SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: „A Study of Economics as if People Mattered“.

This is truly a sentiment as fresh and relevant today as it was in 1973.