Our chapter-by-chapter reading of David Boyle’s study guide, “Small is Beautiful Revisited…50 Years On” continues, examining Schumacher’s 1973 landmark text in light of our own time. The guide is a spark for generative discussions in classrooms, workplaces, and circles of contemplation. (Each chapter guide is available on our site in addition to a full downloadable PDF.)
Chapter 12 carries a thematic thread of international development from the previous chapter into a focus on intermediate technology. Having established a critique of gigantic technology and an alternative notion of “technology with a human face,” Schumacher brings this idea down into particulars. It underscores several enduring principles of regenerative, place-based economic development: a regional focus for rural livelihoods, an emphasis on lower capital-intensive facilities, and production primarily from local resources for local needs.
As our guide David Boyle explains, Intermediate Technology not only shook up development in the global south, but also had repercussions in the global north, where the lack-luster results of industrial modernity stirred backlash.
Excerpt from the Guide to Chapter 12
“In many places in the world today the poor are getting poorer while the rich are getting richer, and the established processes of foreign aid and development planning appear to be unable to overcome this tendency. In fact, they often seem to promote it, for it is always easier to help those who can help themselves than to help the helpless. Nearly all the so-called developing countries have a modern sector where the patterns of living and working are similar to those of the developed countries, but they also have a non-modern sector, accounting for the vast majority of the total population, where the patterns of living and working are not only profoundly unsatisfactory but also in a process of accelerating decay.”
— E. F. Schumacher, opening lines of Ch. 12
“I first met Fritz Schumacher in 1968 while working in the Science Policy Division of UNESCO. His concept of intermediate technology had become the driving force behind a shift in technological aid to the Third World. In the following decade… centers had sprung up all over the world. Papua New Guinea, Nepal, Ghana, Colombia, and India were only a few… developing small-scale, low-cost technologies. Water wheels, composting privies, solar pumps, bicycle-driven threshers, and other intermediate hardware filled the gap between the primitive hand tools used by most of the people of the world and the hi-tech, high-cost, complex hardware and infrastructure being foisted on these countries by the ‘development experts’…”
— Bill Ellis, general co-coordinator of TRANET, in the 25th anniversary book (1999)
This chapter is an odd one out, in that it is a slightly shortened version of a paper prepared in 1965 for a Conference on the Application of Science and Technology to the Development of Latin America, organized by UNESCO in Santiago, Chile.
“At that time, discussions on economic development almost invariably tended to take technology simply as ‘given’, the question was how to transfer the given technology to those not yet in possession of it,” he wrote at the end of the previous chapter.
The chapter is still structured like a report, with an introduction and headings.
What the Chapter Says…
To start with, he reiterates his conclusions from Chapter 11 that, despite the money and expertise poured into development, most of it only touches the lives of people who live in cities. Mostly, it completely ignores “the vast majority of the total population, where the patterns of living and working are not only profoundly unsatisfactory but also in a process of accelerating decay.”
Schumacher emphasizes that his one concern is entirely with those in what he calls the “non-modern sector”:
“This does not imply… that constructive work in the modern sector should be discontinued, and there can be no doubt that it will continue in any case. But it does imply the conviction that all successes in the modern sector are likely to be illusory unless there is also a healthy growth – or at least a… stability – among the very great numbers of people today whose life is characterized not only by dire poverty but also by hopelessness,”
He denies that the unemployment in rural areas has much to do with population growth, even if that must have some effect. So why can’t they do extra work, he asks rhetorically?
Because, in a free system, more people ought theoretically to mean more paid work and more demand. But for some reason that doesn’t work in the global south:
“It is said that they cannot work because they lack ‘capital’… But what is ‘capital’? It is the product of human work. The lack of capital can explain a low level of productivity, but it cannot explain a lack of work opportunities.”
We know from the last chapter that desperate people in rural areas tend to go into the burgeoning cities: “Rural unemployment produces mass-migration into cities, leading to a rate of urban growth which would tax the resources of even the richest societies” he says. “Rural unemployment becomes urban unemployment.”
Conventional economists are obsessed with productivity and ‘output per man’. But that cannot help the unemployed and underemployed. Because “even poorly paid and relatively unproductive work is better than idleness.”
Because this is a report, and Schumacher’s original purpose was to make clear that he is no single voice ‘crying in the wilderness’, he digs out a number of economists and other officials who agree with key elements of his argument.
“‘Coverage must come before perfection,’ to use the words of Mr Gabriel Ardant,” writes Schumacher. Ardant was a French official and accountant who also wrote books. Ardant wrote ‘A Plan for Full Employment in the Developing Countries’ in International Labour Review, in 1963:
“It is important that there should be enough work for all because that is the only way to eliminate anti-productive reflexes and create a new state of mind – that of a country where labour has become precious and must be put to the best possible use,” he wrote and Schumacher quotes him approvingly.
“An unemployed man is a desperate man and he is practically forced into migration… the provision of work opportunities is the primary need and should be the primary objective of economic planning. Without it, the drift of people into the large cities cannot be mitigated, let alone halted,” he writes, praising Egypt and Japan but criticizing Turkey and India, whose five-year plans typically end with more unemployment than they began with.
To summarize, Schumacher sets the following propositions:
- “That workplaces have to be created in the areas where the people are living now, and not primarily in metropolitan areas into which they tend to migrate.”
- “That these workplaces must be, on average, cheap enough so that they can be created in large numbers without this calling for an unattainable level of capital formation and imports.”
- “That the production methods employed must be relatively simple, so that the demands for high skills are minimized, not only in the production process itself but also in matters of organization, raw material supply, financing, marketing, and so forth.”
- “That production should be mainly from local materials and mainly for local use.”
The next expert Schumacher quotes with approval is the Indian economist Professor Dhananjay Ramchandra Gadgil, in his book, Appropriate Technologies for Indian Industry (SIET Institute, Hyderabad, India, 1964) Gadget makes his key point:
“The advancement of advanced technology in every field is being adequately pursued in the developed countries; the special adaptations and adjustments required in India are not and are not likely to be given attention in any other country. They must, therefore, obtain the highest priority in our plans. Intermediate technology should become a national concern and not, as at present, a neglected field assigned to a small number of specialists, set apart.”
In “What Happened Next“, David Boyle reflects on the legacy of the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now Practical Action), quoting George McRobie (a former E.F. Schumacher lecturer). Weighing the influence of intermediate technology in the richer nations, he gives an insightful summary of the social enterprise movement in the U.K. and U.S. since the ’70s, noting the work of the Democracy Collaborative, founded by Gar Alperovitz (another Schumacher lecturer).
A broad range of intermediate technology material from the ITDG and TRANET is also available to researchers at the Schumacher Center’s physical library.