The Plowboy Interview

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Time and again, Dr. E.F. Schumacher's lntermediate Technology group has discovered that an overwhelming percentage of the world's peoples control so little capital that they simply cannot afford the expensive and complicated high technologies of the Western world. An inexpensive and simple ""middle"" technology, however, can immeasurably improve their lives.

DR. E.F. SCHUMACHER

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher—the son of a university economics professor—was born in Bonn, Germany in 1911. He was educated in Bonn and Berlin and, in 1930, became a Rhodes scholar to England's Oxford University. Schumacher also attended Columbia University in the United States.

In 1937, during Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Schumacher emigrated to England and during the next few years worked at various jobs in the fields of journalism, business, and farming. He became a British citizen in 1946.

It was also in 1946 that Schumacher began a four year stint as economic advisor to the United Kingdom Control Commission in Germany . . . a group which played a major role in paving the way for the post-World War II German economic recovery.

Schumacher left the Control Commission in 1950 to become the chief economist for Britain's National Coal Board . . . a nationalized industry and the largest business in the United Kingdom. He would serve on that board for the next 20 years. . . twenty years that would also see him develop his idea of "economics as if people mattered".

The economic theory for which Schumacher is now becoming increasingly famous started to form in his mind in 1955, when he hegan a series of visits to Burma, India, and other developing countries. The trips were set up so that Schumacher could consult with the leaders of such nations and assist in determining exactly what kind of help they needed from the industrialized West.

"It soon became clear," Schumacher says, "that most of the traditional 'aid' programs were really only a means of collecting mone y fromthe poor people in rich countries to give to the rich people in poor countries." He was also dismayed to learn that most aid programs offered variations of just one quick and easy "solution": Replace your primitive hoes with our tractors, fertilizers, pesticides, and computers.

"But the developing nations did not have the industrial base they needed to support such technologically advanced systems," points out Schumacher "Which meant that this 'answer' we were trying—indeed, are still trying to force down their throats—was no real answer at all. To make the high technology we give them work, they need to make a tremendous capital investment—which they do not have—in fuels and fertilizers and pesticides and spare parts and training programs and complicated machinery . . . almost none of which are now available in such countries. If they want these high technology systems and equipment—and we do teach them to want them—there is only one place they can get such things: from us, and at our prices. What we are doing, you see, is offering the developing nations no real solution at all. We are merely, showing them how to trade one form of bondage for another. "