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

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

PLOWBOY: That all seems logical enough.

SCHUMACHER: Oh there's no flaw to this logic at all . . . once we've made the original error of concentrating only on goods and their production.

PLOWBOY: We've been concentrating on goods when we should have been thinking about people!

SCHUMACHER: Precisely. So let's think a little about some of those people and see what has happened to them while we were getting our factories set up. I'll give you an actual example: The people of one poor country I know used to support 5,000 shoemakers. And many other individuals earned a living by supplying hand tools, leather, cotton laces, wooden lasts, and other materials to those craftsmen.

The government of the country then imported two plastic injection molding machines that cost close to a hundred thousand dollars. And since the country had no plastic industry to support such equipment, all the PVC used in them had to be—and still has to be—imported too. But the molded plastic shoes cost less than the leather ones they now replace and they wear longer too. In the long run the poor nation is better off, isn't it?

No, unfortunately, it is not. The new factory employs 40 well-paid people but it has put more than 5,000 out of work. The PVC for the plant must still be imported, and that adversely affects the poor country's balance of payments . . . which it can ill afford. There is now a smaller market within the nation for the native leather, cotton, and other materials which used to go into shoes . . . so the farmers who live there now earn less too. All in all, there has been a real loss of income for the country. A few—forty—people are making more money than they ever did before. But 5,000 have plunged from poverty into misery.

PLOWBOY: Is this an unusual situation?

SCHUMACHER: Not at all. We see this pattern develop time and again in the emerging nations that are newly equipped with automated factories. The machines of mass production soon begin to dump goods into a country's hinterland so fast that the economic structure of the nation's rural areas is destroyed. The peasants then abandon the land and flock to the cities in hopes of finding jobs. But, of course, only a very few of them are able to fit into the highly technological production system that has been set up. The rest become slum dwellers, sell themselves as prostitutes, resort to crime, swell the welfare rolls, and so on.

PLOWBOY: Yes, I know. One variation or another of this same story has been taking place in nearly every developing country in the world.

SCHUMACHER: And not just in the poor countries, but in the rich ones too. In fact in some highly advanced nations, such as the United States, this displacement of people from the rural areas and the smaller towns to the big cities has—if anything—been worse. It has caused what can only be called a "pathological growth" of a few areas.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print