On the question of size Schumacher believes it depends on the issue and purpose. However, he notes a bias in the direction of big and large organizations. If the situation were reversed, he would likely argue in favour of largeness. He gives an example of one’s network of friends (in a time before Facebook): there are only 24 hours in a day and 365 days in an average year meaning we have a limited amount of time to form and develop friendships. He notes that one can develop a huge number of friends but the larger the number the less developed each friendship is due to the time constraints. We usually have a bias that more friends are better than fewer friends but Schumacher argues that is only true to a point after which one can be said not to really have friends but rather acquaintances. The same logic can be applied to acquaintances – at some point they are no longer acquaintances but people who happen to frequently share the same general space. Schumacher argues not against bigness in general but against the uncritical prejudice that bigger is better than smaller. This is important in many issues. For example, the size of an organization, corporation or nation is not important for its viability rather it is the viability of the people in it that determines what a is viable for any organization – size ought to be a secondary consideration depending on the issue. This prejudice also manifests itself in the privileging of goods and things rather than people. For example, the notion that if we just double the budget we can get double the results is an example of favouring things over people (and in treating people as things)
Economics is the intellectual discipline that seems most detrimentally affected by a prejudice in favour of largeness. “What is the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity, standard of living, self-realisation, fulfilment? Is it a matter of goods or of people? Of course it is a matter of people. But people can be themselves only in small comprehensible groups. Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units. If economic thinking cannot grasp this it is useless. If it cannot get beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital accumulation; if it cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness, and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and start afresh.”
To start to look at a new way of looking at economics, Schumacher begins with a re-evaluation of the notion of resources. The first is education because everything that humanity produces we imagine first. In our world there is an imbalance between knowledge in the form of “know-how” and wisdom. Our entire education system seems to be directed at improving the know-how of the population with very little or no wisdom. “Science and engineering produce ‘know-how’; but ‘know-how’ is nothing by itself; it is a means without an end, a mere potentiality, an unfinished sentence. ‘Know-how’ is no more a culture than a piano is music….the task of education would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives…More education can help us only if it produces more wisdom.” By “wisdom,” Schumacher means an understanding of metaphysics and ethics. In our world there are at least six 19th century hegemonic metaphysical ideas that are rarely questioned (1. Natural evolution, 2. Natural selection, 3. Materialism, 4. Freudian psychology, 5. Relativism, 6. Positivism). These ideas are not necessary and make up just one metaphysics and ethics system. Whatever metaphysics and ethics one lives by it colours ones entire world. They are the basic convictions that really have the power to move us – we almost always speak of superficial ideas never (or rarely) looking at the metaphysis of those ideas. Metaphysics is not something that can be proven by logic and facts but it is the way we use logic an facts to make sense of the world. Metaphysics and ethics are only limited by our imagination and the world seems to have lost almost all its imagination. “they transcend the world of facts, they cannot be proved or disproved by ordinary scientific method. But that does not mean they are purely ‘subjective’ or ‘relative’ or mere arbitrary conventions. They must be true to reality…. If they are not true to reality, the adherence to such a set of ideas must inevitably lead to disaster.”
Schumacher reintroduces two metaphysical concepts as practical advice. First, everyone has a teleology, an order of being, grades of significance, our assumed place in the universe. Identifying our teleology is hugely important to consistency of character and as an organizing principle of knowledge. Second, the notions of convergent and divergent problems. Convergent problems are problems of facts, the more effort people put into them the more they converge on a similar solution. Divergent problems are problems of values. If one’s values are different then the more effort one puts into the problem the more divergent the solutions will be. Divergent problems cannot be solved. They must be reconciled. “The true problems of living—in politics, economics, education, marriage, etc.—are always problems of overcoming or reconciling opposites. They are divergent problems and have no solution in the ordinary sense of the word.” The goal that education needs in the modern era is a reintroduction to the study of comparative metaphysics.
The second resource that Schumacher talks about is the proper use of land. This is a metaphysical question. He begins by quoting from ecologists that claim civilizations rise and fall as a result of the quality of the earth and how quickly and to what degree they despoil it. One more practical metaphysical piece of advice is that we must learn to distinguish between ends and means; what can safely be considered a means and what is an end. Anything we do for the sake of just doing it is an end in itself and does not fit with utilitarian calculations. Utilitarian calculations are for determining the best means to get to an end or goal. Schumacher claims that the topsoil and all living creatures are best thought of as ends in themselves and not means to ends. This is meta-economics. In economic theory today, land is a factor of production a mere means to the end of production. As such the despoilation of land is a “cost” of business that can be written off down the road. “Man has not made them [the earth and all living creatures], and it is irrational for him to treat things that he has not made and cannot make and cannot recreate once he has spoilt them, in a manner and spirit as he is entitled to treat things of his own making.” He gives an example of a car and a farm animal and asks: do we not see a difference between the two in terms of ends and means? “In our time, the main danger to the soil, and therewith not only to agriculture but to civilisation as a whole, stems from the townsman’s determination to apply to agriculture the principles of industry….The ideal of industry is to eliminate the living factor, even including the human factor, and to turn the productive process over to machines….the fundamental ‘principles’ of agriculture and of industry, far from being compatible with each other, are in opposition.” He further asks us to consider if our lives can continue with or without agriculture and with or without industry? Certainly, both are better, but one is of a higher order and importance. Education should teach us to see this clearly. The balance between industry and agriculture is a divergent problem – we need to reconcile two opposites. In our world it is seen as a convergent problem: how best to apply industrial techniques to agriculture and as a result we have thrown out the balance.
“[M]an’s management of the land must be primarily oriented towards three goals—health, beauty, and permanence. The fourth goal—the only one accepted by the experts—productivity, will then be attained almost as a by-product. The crude materialist view sees agriculture as ‘essentially directed towards food-production’. A wider view sees agriculture as having to fulfil at least three tasks: [1] –to keep man in touch with living nature, of which he is and remains a highly vulnerable part; [2] –to humanise and ennoble man’s wider habitat; and [3] –to bring forth the foodstuffs and other materials which are needed for a becoming life.”
Without identified higher values the default value in our civilization is profit. Utilitarian economic calculus (such as cost-benefit analysis) becomes the justifying means. In this way everything becomes reduced and flattened to monetary valuations and business calculations. While there is a legitimate place for profit and business calculations it should be clear that it should not be everywhere.