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

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PLOWBOY: But why were the Burmese you met so happy? How could they take so much joy from life when they were so poor?

SCHUMACHER: I asked myself that question. Which led me to a closer inspection of all the conditions we call "poverty". And I quickly realized that the sheer amount of money an individual earns in a year does not necessarily tell you how happy that person is.

During the Great Depression, for example, I saw unemployed workers in England whose whole gait showed they were broken men. Yet their actual cash income from unemployment insurance was more than the income of a Spanish peasant whose eyes shone with manliness, who greeted you with open arms, and who asked you into his hovel to share everything he had.

Eventually I decided that the absolute bottom level of existence—where you don't have enough to even begin to keep body and soul together—should be called misery. The next level upwhere people can reach the fullness of humanity but in a modest and frugal way with nothing really to spare—is actually what should be known as poverty. Then comes sufficiency. . . where you do have something to spare. This was the normal condition of Western Europe for centuries during the latter half of the Middle Ages when, as we know, great cathedrals were built and many advances were made in the arts and sciences. And finally, there is surfeit. . . which is limitless.

PLOWBOY: And if you had your choice?

SCHUMACHER: I would say that the bottom layer of misery and the top layer of surfeit are both very unhealthy. But between sufficiency and poverty, I don't really argue which is better.

PLOWBOY: That's not what our prevalent economic theory tells us. It very clearly states that more is always better.

SCHUMACHER: Oh yes. The implicit doctrine of development, which has been drummed into our ears for the last half century or so and upon which all of modern society is founded, holds up material wealth as the be-all, end-all of existence. "Do you want to be happy?" it asks. "Then become rich. And do you want to be happier still? Then become even richer. In fact you have not only the right to become rich . . . but the duty! The faster the better. And what is rich? Why material possessions—goods!—of course. The more and the bigger of everything you possess—and the faster you do it!—the better off you'll be. There is no such thing as `enough'. You must always have more, more, more!"

This tenet of life, if anything, is applied even more stringently to nations than to individuals. Which is why we now have this terrible fetish of measuring the gross national product of a country and dividing it by the number of people who live there to get the average income per head. And that figure then becomes the final indicator of the nation's status in the world . . . while the prime object of admiration is not the income level that has already been attained, but its current rate of growth. In other words, more is always better . . . and it's even better yet if you can get that "more" faster than the next country.

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