Wise Economics, say, Peter Drucker, yet equally in

I had never heard of E. F. Schumacher before reading this book. After reading it I am ready to nominate him for the Nobel prize in economics, or at least for the Peter Kropotkin memorial founmin pen.

The introduction by Theodore Roszak identifies Schumacher as a former Rhodes scholar, an economic adviser to the British Control Commission in postwar Germany, a director of the Scott Bader Company (about which more later), and, for 20 years prior to 1971, the top economist and head of planning for Britain's nationalized coal industrymost reputable vits indeed. But that is not the end of it. Schumacher is also, according to Roszak, a member of "that subterranean tradition of organic and decentralized economics... we might call anarchista, if we mean by that much abused word a libertarian political economy that distinguishes itself from orthodox socialism and capitalism by Insisting that the scale of organization

ust be treated as an independent and primary problem." And Roszak goes en: "It would be no exaggeration to call him (Schumacher] the Keynes of postIndustrial society."

Roszak's build-up both intrigued me and put me off. I tend to be leery both of anarchists and of anyone placed on a pedestal as high as Keynes'. I needn't have worried. Schumacher turns out to be an eminently practical, sensible and eloquent chap, as versant in the subtleties of large-scale business management

touch with the down-to-earth realities of a simple Indian village. His book is a most unusual economic treatise, enormously broad in scope, pithily weaving together threads from Galbraith and Gandhi, capitalism and Buddhism, science and psychology. The reader is left wishing that somehow an economist of Schumacher's vision could be scooped from his subterranean hideaway and ushered into the White House disguised as Arthur Burns.

Schumacher's point is that the foremost concern of economics should be people, not goods. People do need goods, of course, but they need much more to utilize and develop their facilities through meaningful work. If this sounds like a simple-indeed almost simplistic-premise, its implications are nonetheless far-reaching. An economy that makes work meaningless, stultifying and nerve-wracking is not doing people very much good, even if it raises their level of consumption. The same is true for an economy that constantly replaces workers with machines.

The Gross National Product may rise rapidly, as measured by statisticians but not as experienced by actual people, who find themselves oppressed by increasing frustration, alienation, insecurity, and so forth. After a while, even the Gross National Product refuses to rise any further, not because of scientific or technological failure, but because of a creeping paralysis of non-cooperation, as expressed in various types of escapism on the part, not only of the oppressed and exploited, but even of highly privileged groups.

Another of Schumacher's primary themes is that Western economics some time ago abandoned wisdom, by which he means a sense of man's place in the universe. Most economists proudly accept the notion that the problem of production has been solved. But has it?

We are, at an ever-accelerating rate, squandering at least three kinds of irreplaceable assets-treating them, in economic terms, as income when they should be considered as capital: fuels, the tolerance margins of nature, and the psychological stability of man. Thus if the rich nations continue stripping the world of its nonrenewable energy sources at approximately their present rate, and if the poor nations only slightly increase their current rate of sumption, we will be 1) out a fuels in a relatively short time, and awash in pollution the likes of which have never been seen. In addition the scramble for diminishing resources will become a major source of international conflict, if it hasn't already. How does wisdom, or the lack of it, figure into this?

From an economic point of view the central concept of wisdom is permanence. Nothing makes economic sense unless its continuance for a long time can be projected without running into absurdities.

Yet what is economics currently counseling?

Far from being interested in studying the possibilities of alternative methods of production and patterns of living-so as to get off the collision course on which we are moving with ever-increasing speed-we happily talk of unlimited progress along the beaten track, of "education for leisure" in the rich countries, and of "the transfer of technology" to the poor

countries.

In much the same vein Schumacher contends that economics has become a science of measurement, but has forgotten what really ought to be measured. Economic decisions, both macro and micro, are made by quantifying goods at some ephemeral market value, with little or no consideration given to qualitative differences. A dollar's worth of hotel accommodations is presumed to be economically equal to a dollar's worth of petroleum, even though the latter is a nonrenewable primary resource, the depletion of which has vast consequences. Some "goods" that never appear on the market are left entirely out of economic calculations-clean air, for example, or a person's satisfaction with his work. And the calculations on which economic decisions are based are always short-range and narrow:

decision-maker asks what will be momentarily profitable for him, not what will be beneficial for a larger com by over the long run.

are two philosophic premises nd all this. One is that only an er-increasing production of goods will lead to human tranquility. The othor is that such ever-increasing production can only be achieved through glori fication of the cardinal sins. Thus Keynes was moved to write in 1930:

For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair, for foul is useful and fair is not. rice and usury and precaution

be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.

chumacher this is dangerous nonsense, possibly valid in the 1930s but certainly no longer so. Avarice will not lead to daylight; only restraint can. Fair is useful and foul is not. Greed builds ap a never-ending spiral of wants that must inevitably exceed the earth's ability to provide. What we need are not bold Nixonian promises of energy self-sufficiency by 1980 but a return to wisdom, a reorientation toward an economics of permanence.

What would such a reorientation consist of? A deemphasis on quantitative growth, but for Schumacher that is only one of several ingredients. The basic ground rule of a "wise" economics would be that work, technology and ownership patterns should be on a human scale. Jobs would be designed so that people could productively, creatively use their hands and brains. ("Even children would be allowed to make themselves useful, even old people.") Science and technology would stress the development of first-class tools rather than labor-displacing machinery.

Economic enterprises would be scaled and structured in such a way as to reconcile the convenience, humanity and manageability of small production units with the need for planning and coordination. Ownership would be tailored to the nature of the enterprise. For small-scale enterprises individual or family ownership would be appropriate. For medium-size enterprises cooperative ownership by workers makes sense. For large-scale enterprises some form of social ownership would be proper. The guiding principle would be

that proprietary rights should accompany actual involvement in an enterprise wherever possible, and where this is impractical they should inhere in a broad community whose prime interest is not the reaping of uneamed gains.

The reader is probably thinking: all this sounds splendid, but it's a starryeyed dream, a vision of some armchair anarchist who has never met a payroll. Perhaps. But Schumacher is persuasive precisely because his theories are grounded in long experience. At the British Coal Board the problem was to convert an enormous governmentowned monopoly into a confederation of human-scale units. Self-contained "quasi-firms" were set up for 17 saperate mining regions. Additional “quasifirms" were established for transport, brickworks and other diverse activities. "The monolith was transformed into a well-coordinated assembly of lively, semi-autonomous units, each with its own drive and sense of achievement," Schumacher writes. If all is not bliss at the Coal Board-the recent miners' strike would indicate that it is not-the fault, Schumacher would presumably argue, lies with national leaders and their policies rather than with the decentralized structure of the enterprise. The Scott Bader Company began in 1920 as a family-owned plastics business; by 1950 it was a prosperous me dium-size firm employing 161 persons. Ernest Bader decided to introduce “revolutionary changes" in ownership and organization. He set up the Scott Bader Commonwealth, in which he vested ownership of the company. Over the next few years the members of the Commonwealth, which is to say the workers of the company, drew up a constitution setting forth several basic rules. The directors of the company would be appointed by and fully ac countable to the Commonwealth. The company would be limited to approximately 350 persons; if there was a demand for growth beyond that point, it would be met by setting up new firms organized along Bader lines. Since members of the Commonwealth would be partners, not hired hands, they could not be dismissed by their COpartners for any reason other than gross personal misconduct. The highest paid

worker within the company would receive no more than seven times the pay of the lowest. Of the profits taken out by the Commonwealth, half would go for bonuses to workers within the company and the other half for charitable purposes outside the company. Finally none of the products of the company would be sold to customers known to use them for war-related purposes.

When Bader and his colleagues introduced these changes it was freely predicted that the firm would soon collapse. In fact says Schumacher the company "went from strength to strength, although difficulties, even crises and setbacks, were by no means absent. In the highly competitive setting within which the firm is operating, it has, between 1951 and 1971, "increased its sales and profits enormously; large bonuses have been distributed to the staff," and an equal amount has been donated by the Commonwealth to charitable purposes outside; and several small new firms have been set up.” If his is anarchism it seems functional enough. The trick, as with any vision of a better society, is getting from here to there. Schumacher's blueprint for medium-size firms is Baderization; this presupposes, of course, the existence or creation of entrepreneurs as enlightened as Mr. Bader. For large-scale industries Schumacher proposes that the public convert its present right, embodied in the tax laws, to 48 percent of corporate profits, to half ownership without a corporate income tax. He warns, however, in some strong criticism of doctrinnaire British socialists, that public ownership, or public halfownership, is not an end in itself but merely a means to the end of a humanized economy. In addition Schumacher urges a much higher degree of indicative planning, so that economic decisions are not made entirely on the basis of what is best for each individual enterprise, but incorporate elements of a broader wisdom.

It would be easy to nitpick at many of the details and ramifications of Schumacher's tour d'horizon. I choose instead to nominate him for a prize of some stature. And why not? The most recent economists to win the Nobel prize have been measurers, tinkerers, growth addicts. It's time to turn the spotlight around, to start digging out some subterranean wisdom before we are all buried under a billowing cloud of madness and sludge.

Peter Barnes