The Schumacher Center's online collection of lectures and publications represent some of the foremost voices on a new economics. Included are the Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures, launched in 1981 with Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson as speakers and continuing annually since then. Learn more...
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineIn the following article, Schumacher discusses a method for achieving greater international co-operation. War, he believes, has underlying economic causes which are partly due to faulty thinking- praising the rich and powerful surplus countries and condemning the weak deficit countries. In order to achieve world peace, Fritz argues that is essential that world trade be organized on a multilateral rather than bilateral basis, and that order would be maintained by a central banking and clearing system which would ensure that all short-term imbalances tend towards long-term balance.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineIn this 1962 publication for the Society for Democratic Integration in Industry, E. F. Schumacher attempts to define the nature of our society and to examine its significant institutions in the light of the Gospel. He argues that modern industrial society, in spite of its labour-saving devices, has not given people more time to devote to their spiritual tasks. Instead, it encourages greed, envy and avarice– magnifying individual egotism in direct opposition to the teachings of the Gospel. He argues that the ideas of personal freedom and personal responsibility are today more firmly established than ever before and that we must foster and develop within ourselves a genuine understanding of the situation which confronts us, and to build conviction, determination and persuasiveness upon such understanding.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineSwann believes that we have a long, long road before us, and none of our efforts will be successful until we have found the keys with which to unite the needs and problems of the “ordinary citizen” at the local level to the national and international problems of peace. He argues that we must, eventually, begin to face more forthrightly the social and economic problems that surround us and find ways of utilizing our knowledge of nonviolence to apply directly to these problems.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineIn this 1965 article, E. F. Schumacher outlines a radical new approach to solve the twin problems that developing countries are faced with—unemployment and poverty. He recognizes the need for an intermediate level of technology based on the needs and skills possessed by individuals in districts or regions troubled with a large labour surplus rather than utilizing technologies that are devised primarily for the purpose of saving labour. Schumacher argues that projects on the level of Western technology leave the people helpless and disheartened: it does not "fit" into their way of life and remains outside their power of self-help. He concludes that an "intermediate technology" can help the helpless to help themselves, and that it would require a great organizing effort to implement.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineFritz Schumacher's classic essay"Buddhist Economics" is widely understood as a call for an economics of peace. In the essay Schumacher imagines a multitude of vibrant, self-sufficient villages which, from their secure sense of community and place, work together in peace and cooperation. In 1973 it was collected with other essays by Ernest Friedrich Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. The book went on to be translated into 27 different languages and in 1995 was named by the Times Literary Supplement (London) as one of the hundred most influential books written after World War II. The following version of "Buddhist Economics" is available in multiple translations.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineFritz Schumacher's classic essay"Buddhist Economics" is widely understood as a call for an economics of peace. In the essay Schumacher imagines a multitude of vibrant, self-sufficient villages which, from their secure sense of community and place, work together in peace and cooperation. In 1973 it was collected with other essays by Ernest Friedrich Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. The book went on to be translated into 27 different languages and in 1995 was named by the Times Literary Supplement (London) as one of the hundred most influential books written after World War II. The following version of "Buddhist Economics" is in English.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineIn Swann's opinion, only an economic program can reach to the heart of the world peace problem. Our vision, he believes, should be a cooperative vision focused upon the task of bringing justice through non-violent means through. He describes a Fund that would provide for individuals, organizations, and businesses anywhere in the world to invest in those who have been neglected by governmental and private financial institutions, but constitute the backbone of any successful ‘self-help’ program to eliminate poverty and injustice. These ideas later inspired the creation of the SHARE Microcredit Program.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineThis report by Fay Bennett describes the 1968 trip to Israel including Slater King and Robert Swann as well as five others who became the core group in the formation of New Communities Inc, the first community land trust in the country. It shows how the group took on the lease agreements of the Jewish National Fund to separate out ownership of land from ownership of buildings. It also discusses the organizational structures of agricultural enterprises in Israel— private, communal as a kibbutz, moshav with private ownership of farms but and cooperative marketing, and the Moshav Shitufi with private ownership of homes and cooperative ownership of the farm. It was the moshav shitufi that the group recommended as a structure for New Communities.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextlline"Hundred of thousand of rural Southern families, lacking both occupational skills and access to adequate social services, face a bleak pair of options: continuing grinding poverty in their present location, or relief rolls in an urban ghetto. The project described here offers a third alternative: a viable new community with a range of occupational and educational choices, services sufficient to the needs of the rural poor, and a framework for democratic participation and control."
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineMany countries have been adopting the ecocide technology of United States agriculture where short-term productive success has obscured the long-term disastrous effects on the soil, the environment, and the health of animals and humans. In his essay Swann suggests both the scientific and moral approach to this problem: to recognize that land and resources can only be used, not owned; and that they should be held in trust, rather than exploited for the advantage of any individual, group of individuals, or nation. He also argues that along with control of land and resources, control of the power of credit creation is at the heart of any economic political system and that unless the power to create money or credit is decentralized or democratized, there cannot be any real decentralization of power.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineIn this essay Robert Swann and Shimon Gottschalk summarize the first 26 months of New Communities, Inc.—the first community land trust located in Southwest Georgia—and the original design for the "Rural New Town Idea". They discuss the direct relationship between rural poverty and the "urban crisis," a crisis that has resulted in large part from the migration of hundreds of thousands of families from the land to the cities during the last quarter century, and how the land trust model reduces individual economic insecurity by eliminating land speculation, absentee land ownership, and systems of tenancy whereby the user of the land is victimized.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineIn this report, Hansch critically examines the WIR-Cooperative and explains the operations and transactions of the WIR credit system. Founded in 1934, WIR (now the WIR Bank) was a cooperative association of small to medium size, independent Swiss businesses for the purpose of mobilizing their own credit potentialities without using commercial banks as intermediaries. As a self-help measure, Hansch argues that a business circle cooperative is successful in protecting the small, independent businesses and business owners against the constantly increasing pressure from large, financially strong competitors.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineIn his essay, Swan explains how the combination of land reform and appropriate technology is the best, if not the only, alternative to the Keynesian prescription for unemployment. Community Land Trusts can provide the natural resources which are the basic conditions for all employment.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineIt has been universally recognized that every human being born into this world has to work not merely to keep themselves alive but to strive towards perfection. It might be said, that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees, and the ideal of the employee to have income without work. The question is: Can the pursuit of these two ideals, undertaken with the ingenuity and energy of modern science and technology, produce—or maintain—a sane society? All this, Schumacher believe, hangs together - smallness, simplicity, and non-violence, all related to the human scale, all related to the humanization of human work, all conducive to the re-integration of the human being into the productive process, so that they can feel alive, creative, happy—in short, a real person—even while working for a living.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineIn 1967 Robert Swann and Slater King established the first community land trust in Albany, GA. The publication of this guide established the term community land trusts, and paved the way for community land trust projects across the US and internationally. The guide describes how communities can use these tools to gain control of the development process in their own neighborhoods. They can be used equally well in urban or rural areas, especially in conjunction with a local community development corporation – themselves innovations of poor communities for their own development.
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ADD ANYTHINGDecentralism, Democratizing Money, Land Access and Community Land Trusts, Peace and Nonviolent ActionanemptytextllineIn this essay Robert Swann describes the programs of the International Independence Institute in Ashby, Massachusetts. Swann was its Director until 1980 when he left the Institute to found the Schumacher Center with Susan Witt. The Institute was a non-profit, educational organization dedicated to the revitalization of economic and community life in the deprived barrios, ghettos, and rural areas of the world by the creative use of economic and social instruments such as micro-credit loans and community land trusts.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineAll over the world today, men and women are struggling to regain power over their own lives, and independence cannot be achieved, argues Swann, without control over the institutions of credit creation as well as land and natural resources. This function of money or credit creation is a crucially vital function for the economic health of a community or region. One of the purposes of the International Independence Institute is to assist in establishing models of local credit institutions. To accomplish this task, one of the important elements is to create credit infrastructures that help to build confidence and competence among ordinary people in the handling of money, making loans, and allocating resources.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineIn this talk originally published by The Catholic Housing Aid Society, E. F. Schumacher addresses an immense and intolerable paradox: the housing problem in an affluent society. Through exploring numerous theories, Schumacher determines private land ownership to be the root of the problem. He closes by calling for a reorientation towards a much more decentralized pattern, a greater autonomy and self-reliance of small communities and, a much more flexible, just and rational use of land – as the social costs of inadequate housing immensely outweigh the real costs of adequate housing.
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextlline"Picture an international monetary system which constantly maintains its value- i.e., no inflation! It's not just an idea. It's actually being tried out in certain shops and even banks in Exeter and Durham, New Hampshire!"
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ADD ANYTHINGanemptytextllineIn this essay Swann discusses the elements that are required to created a regional integration strategy with its emphasis on the local community, and transformation of the purely private profit system in order to make it serve the needs of the community and region. Such a strategy would release new energy, imagination and power around the concept of local control and local participation in economic decision making.