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

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PLOWBOY: This is a rather simplistic way of looking at things, isn't it?

SCHUMACHER: Of course. My work with developing nations quickly showed me the fallacy of this line of thought. You simply cannot assume that raising a country's GNP will raise the standard of living of every individual in that country. In actual fact, the development programs that have been implemented in the emerging nations during the past few decades have almost universally produced quite a different result. They have substantially increased the incomes of a fortunate small minority and drastically lowered the incomes of the rest. And not only lowered their incomes, but destroyed their culture and plunged them from poverty into misery.

PLOWBOY: How? Why?

SCHUMACHER: Because of our preoccupation with—and greed for and envy of—steadily increasing material wealth as measured by a country's gross national product. The systematic cultivation of this greed and envy makes us anxious to increase a developing nation's GNP as rapidly as possible. Which leads us—usually erroneously—to insist that we equip the emerging country with only the latest and the highest mass-production technology available.

"This country wants goods," we say, "so let's not fool around with small-scale production. Let's build it some factories that will really pour out the merchandise . . . and the faster they turn out those products, the better."

But this is probably the last thing the emerging nation needs. You can't just drop a highly automated factory into a very poor country and expect it to run itself.

That sophisticated plant is not a magic self-contained wealth machine. It's more like the small visible tip of a vast submerged iceberg. If it is to function properly it needs the support of trained technicians, energy and transportation and communication systems, standardized raw materials, and an efficient distribution network for the great quantities of finished goods that eventually will spew from its production line. It needs a thousand things that are taken for granted in the United States or Germany or Japan . . . but which simply do not exist in the country you are working with except, perhaps, in rudimentary form in a few of its biggest cities. So you build the new factories in those cities.

And in the beginning, you put them into operation as best you can by importing the hightechnology support they need. But this sophisticated support is costly so, as soon as possible, you develop your own refineries and pipelines and training schools and all the other things you need to make those first few factories function the way they're supposed to.

And pretty soon the mere logistics of figuring out the paychecks for all your new factory hands and refinery operators and school teachers and of scheduling shipments in and out of the plants become complicated. So you decide that you might as well handle the growing mountain of paperwork in the most efficient way possible and you import a few computers and set up yet another school for computer operators. And so on and so forth.

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