We return to our refreshed study guide, “Small is Beautiful Revisited…50 Years On,” which revisits Schumacher’s 1973 landmark of ecological economics.
Chapter by chapter, the guide makes for generative discussions, and is making its way into college classrooms, workplaces, and places of worship. All chapter guides are available on our site (plus a downloadable PDF).
Chapter 4 is a reworking of Schumacher’s essay “Buddhist Economics,” first published in 1966 and derived from his experience in Burma, now Myanmar, in 1955. As our guide David Boyle writes, the chapter alone conveys much of the essence of Small is Beautiful.
Even those committed to a just, regenerative economic future may at times question: Why small? Why local? “Buddhist Economics” provides a durable answer, located in the idea of human scale. (Every place of human habitation, Marie Cirillo said, “is a microcosm of Earth”). If the goal of economic life is to produce the goods and services “needed for a becoming existence,” where else to begin?
Excerpt from the Guide to Chapter 4
The choice of Buddhism for this purpose is purely incidental; the teachings of Christianity, Islam, or Judaism could have been used just as well as those of any other of the great Eastern traditions…
— E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, Chapter 4.
When Schumacher was an economist working for the British government, he was sent to Burma to advise the people and their government on how to develop economically using technologic, scientific, advanced techniques of ‘progress.’ After a few months he realized that the Burmese did not need this Western style of development and technological agriculture. They had their own perfectly good economic system, which he called ‘Buddhist economics.’ When he returned to Great Britain, he wrote the essay, ‘Buddhist Economics,’ and gave it to his fellow economists in the government. They said: ‘Mr Schumacher, economics is all very well, but what does Buddhism have to do with it?’ Schumacher replied: ‘Economics without Buddhism, i.e. without spiritual, human, and ecological values, is like sex without love.
— Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence magazine (from the 25th anniv. edition, 1999).
In some ways, this chapter on Buddhist economics is the very heart of the book. It starts with the somewhat ’shocking’ idea that Buddhism has an economic policy – though, in fact, all the great world religions do, once you strip away the stuff about sheep and goats.
What is more, they are all remarkably similar.
What the Chapter Says…
At the heart of the chapter is the issue about work – and how modern economists assume that work – or ‘labor’ – is ‘a necessary evil’:
From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a ‘disutility’; to work is to make a sacrifice of one’s leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice. Hence the ideal from the point of view of the employer is to have output without employees, and the ideal from the point of view of the employee is to have income without employment…
Neither of these work effectively, of course. In fact – simply because modern economics regards work as drudgery – then that is precisely what it tends to become, often in the name of ‘efficiency’ or ‘modernization’…
Here, it is not a matter of ordinary specialization, which mankind has practised from time immemorial, but of dividing up every complete process of production into minute parts, so that the final product can be produced at great speed without anyone having had to contribute more than a totally insignificant and, in most cases, unskilled movement of his limbs…
On the other hand, Buddhism suggests that there are three vital functions of work:
- To give people the chance to use and develop their faculties.
- To enable them to overcome their egocentred-ness by joining with other people in a common task.
- To make the goods and services happen “which are needed for a becoming existence”.
Next, Schumacher quotes the artist and writer Ananda Coomaraswamy, who was a craftsman in the tradition of John Ruskin and William Morris, as well as someone who was trying to translate the art world of India and his native Ceylon to the English art world, and vice versa. He was married four times and his first wife was the great Distributist weaver and designer Ethel Mairet, a pioneer of natural dyes. He drew what he called a “a delicate distinction between the machine and the tool”: “The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsmen’s fingers; but the power loom is a machine, and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work.”
Schumacher contrasts this with John Kenneth Galbraith’s book The Affluent Society, whether it might be more ‘economic’ to run an economy at less than full employment so as to ensure a greater mobility of labor, and better stability of wages: “His fundamental criterion of success is simply the total quantity of goods produced during a given period…”
From a Buddhist point of view, he says, this is getting things upside down – as if goods were “more important than people and consumption […] more important than creative activity”.
It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, a surrender to the forces of evil. The very start of Buddhist economic planning would be a planning for full employment, and the primary purpose of this would in fact be employment for everyone who needs an ‘outside’ job: it would not be the maximization of employment nor the maximization of production…
Buddhism is about liberation, says Schumacher: “Buddhism is ‘The Middle Way’ and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern – amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results….”
The problem for Schumacher is that the world is now hopelessly materialistic:
When we examine all of the foreseeable difficulties which threaten the survival of industrial civilization, it is difficult to see how the achievement of stability and the maintenance of individual liberty can be made compatible. Even if this were dismissed as a long-term view there is the immediate question of whether ‘modernization’, as currently practised without regard to religious and spiritual values, is actually producing agreeable results. As far as the masses are concerned. the results appear to be disastrous – a collapse of the rural economy, a rising tide of unemployment in town and country, and the growth of a city proletariat without nourishment for either body or soul…
In “What Happened Next,” David Boyle tells us, “The great thing about Small is Beautiful is that it looks excitedly towards a smaller scale, more humane future. It embraces life.”