E. F. Schumacher And Buddhist Economics

David Morris of the Institute for Local Self Reliance introduced me to E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful in the mid-nineties. I said that I hadn’t read it because the title made me think it was probably smarmy.

It isn’t, and Schumacher was not a smarmy guy. He made tough choices in his life. He left his native Germany in the thirties because he objected to the Third Reich. He was an agnostic who converted to Catholicism. You try telling all your snobby free-thinking friends you’re becoming a mackerel snapper.

Schumacher’s economics is contrarian, and tough-minded. The bottom line is that people are more important than goods. People need food, shelter, meaning, and a hospitable natural environment. Western economics subordinates people to goods, using indices that measure total activity, ignoring moral judgement, to diagnose an economy’s robustness. Subordinating people to goods means tolerating less than complete employment and temporary layoffs, to say nothing of worker stress, and occupations that use only a fraction of a worker’s capabilities. A fraction of the workforce, a fraction of each worker. An economy in which production is paramount tries to minimize human labor, but is promiscuous in its use of fuel, material, and machinery. What do we make things for, though? Why do we have economies?

The truth is, and Schumacher would say, that production and commerce should be means to providing humans with "a becoming existence" -- a nice phrase of Schumacher's. If we need to feed and shelter ourselves, we should discover the most elegant way to do so, the way that uses the least material or capital, the way that uses machinery to enhances our skills instead of replacing them. Providing for ourselves in that elegant way will, in Schumacher’s description of the function of work, “give a man (sic) a chance to utilize and develop his faculties (and) enable him to overcome his egocenteredness by joining with other people in a common task.”

An economy like that would ultimately solve problems of pollution and fuel shortage, and avoid exacerbating damages we’ve already caused. Most attractively, we would realize finally what it really means to be this extravagantly intelligent ape.

The White Elephant Exception

The Beacon is prolific this year, and we’re losing a lot of apples because we can’t keep up. Barbara and I pick them and gather windfalls, with -- say -- six person hours going to gathering and sorting maybe five bushels. Thursday night I had a serious juicing session, cutting apples, tossing spoiled pieces, and running pieces, mostly quarters, through the Champion juicer. Three hours yielded a little less than two gallons.

It was discouraging to see what value the apples put on my labor. Sometime in the future, I’ll network with other urban apple growers, and use larger equipment, saving time. Better planning may shorten the time we spend gathering by getting me up in the tree early, and avoiding windfalls, which are more likely to spoil, and require more time spent sorting. I may get ahead of the curve this year with the grapes and the Haralson, whose apples are supposed to be better after a light frost.

But what is labor worth? A former career had me driving and dispatching interstate buses. With a motor coach, you can take forty-five people and their luggage one mile for less than a dollar, assuming four-buck diesel. Let’s have the bus break down a mile from the terminal, and walk the passengers and their luggage in at two miles per hour. Let’s be generous, and say the fuel cost a whole dollar. Split the dollar forty-five ways. That’s about four point forty-four cents per hour.

The comparison is absurd, because no one could live in this economy on four cents an hour, but there are people, some in desparate circumstances, some in non-cash economies, who live on less. The poorest Americans are richer than two thirds of the world’s people, and increasingly that two thirds is are aware of how well we live. Saying that many of them are indignant would probably not be putting it too strongly. (No comment on class issues within the US, beyond a prediction that the reality I just described will reduce wealth unevenly.)

The US amounts to five percent of the world’s population, and we use something like a quarter of its wealth, sometimes frivolously, often carelessly. I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’d like to beg an indulgence from the people whose share of the world’s goods helps keep me in the pleasant style to which I have become accustomed.

We’ve built an infrastructure that demands a disproportionate share of the Earth’s wealth. If we live, henceforth, with utmost rectitude and thrift, individuals will still have the cost of operating within this extravagant playground. Give us a generation or two to learn to live well and change our way of life. Some of us have a vision of how all human beings can live harmonious and becoming lives into the distant future.