Dr. E. F. Schumacher: Author of the Book Small is Beautiful

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And then I happened onto a book about Buddhism and that was what I was looking for. I dropped everything else and read all I could find on the subject. And I kept noticing repeated references to a school that had been set up in Burma, sometime around 1900, from which a great revival of Buddhism had gone out to the world. So I thought to myself, "I must go to that school." But I was a family man who had migrated from Germany to England and it was just not possible for me to uproot myself again and go to Burma. These things have a way of working themselves out, however, and in 1955 1 was requested by the Burmese Government to come and advise the Prime Minister there. So I went and while I was in Burma I studied at that school.

There, for the first time, I realized that you do not find clarity in the mind . . . but in the heart. And the heart will not speak to you unless you quiet yourself and liberate yourself from such masters as greed and envy. But if you can do this you will find, in the stillness that follows, insights of wisdom that are obtainable in no other way. You will begin to see things as they really are. You will become enlightened. The Buddhists call this vipassana.

Well I don't claim to have attained vipassana, but I did come away from Burma with a different view of things. And in the beginning, as I saw my life in this new light, I was very unhappy. The things I had been doing had ceased to make sense.

But then I realized that "life must go on" . . . that I must apply my new insights to what had become my life's work. And as I struggled to do that, I gave various lectures and wrote papers. And they were compiled eventually into the book, Small Is Beautiful.

So I did not set out to change economic theory. I set out to find the answers to the metaphysical questions that bothered me.Small Is Beautiful just happened to be one of the outcomes of that very personal quest.

PLOWBOY: Well the fruit of that quest does seem to have influenced your thinking. One of the most famous chapters in your book is titled "Buddhist Economics".

SCHUMACHER: Yes, but that's purely incidental. I could have derived the same ideas from the teachings of the Christian, Judaic, Islamic, or any other great religious tradition. I have spent many, many years studying them and I find that the great religious traditions are all fundamentally the same. And now that I know this it no longer bothers me that religion has become split up in so many ways. I joined the Roman Catholic Church because it was the most practical one for me . . . not because it was better than any of the others.

PLOWBOY: As I understand it, your 1955 trip to Burma, and the travels which followed, were also educational to you in other ways.

SCHUMACHER: Yes, they taught me many things. I learned, for instance, that statistics can be very misleading. I had looked at the figures before going to Burma and found that it was one of the poorest countries in the world, with an annual per-capita income of only $50. And being totally ignorant, I expected to find poverty there as I had never seen it before. Instead, I found the happiest people I'd ever met. They were well-fed, beautifully dressed, and lived in houses that were suited to the climate. And they had time! They had no laborsaving machinery, but they had great bags of time in which to relax and be happy. There seemed to be no strain in Burma. The people there were the most joyous you could possibly encounter. They were living life as it should be lived. This contrasted sharply with what I found in the United States and Germany. There, in the two countries most cluttered with laborsaving machinery, life was a constant agitation. I loved America but I was bothered by the terrible pressure, the nervous strain, the number of people on psychiatrists' couches. England, I realized, was somewhere in the middle. It was industrialized, but its equipment was not as modern and not as laborsaving as the machines in Germany or the United States. And its pace was really quite agreeable. Kindly and safe. This led me to formulate an idea that I was tempted to release as the first law of economics: The amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of laborsaving machinery it employs.

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