never won emmy's but were real to me.

For the first installment of my new series about my favorite people, I figured I'd write about the guy who gave me the name I use for most of my endeavors these days. Actually, he didn't give it to me, I stole it, and for all I know his kids are going to sue me one day. These are the risks you run.

E. F. Schumacher coined the phrase "small is beautiful" in a book of the same name. I bought this book because I liked the name so much. It's subtitled "a study of economics as if people mattered" which agreed with my sympathies at the time. This book was just lefty enough to draw my high school brain into the world of economics, which until then had seemed like the ultimate evil. It drew me in right from the start, and ignited an interest in a way of thinking that, along with a few other books which I'm sure I will eventually write about, shaped my thinking more than anything other.

So what did I hate so much about economics? At the time, I subscribed to socialism as a political philosophy. By that I mean I hated teachers and loved arguing and being a little shit disturber. I got into it the way most kids do I guess. I hated mostly all the kids in my school, I was punk rock, a skateboarder, and a vociferous reader. It was pretty much in the cards. One day I found a copy of a zine (my introduction to the concept) about how awful school was and how the administration were fascists hell bent on creating perfect little kid-bots who would tuck in their shirts and not ask questions. I was hooked immediately. There was information on how to join the collective publishing team in the back. basically, you go to this common room at the university at this time, so I went to the next meeting. The group was made up of kids from 3 different schools, all silly rebels like me. These kids ended up being my first real adult (ish) social group, and it was the first time I ever felt like I fit in. After the meeting I went to one kid's house, named Amanda with a few others and I smoked pot for the first time. What a world. The group had a de facto leader named Tom, who was leader by dint of his absolute confidence that he was the leader. The guy came from a fairly well to do home (as radical leftists tend to) and even at his age, which was older than most of us by at least a few years, had made his mind up that he was going to be a revolutionary socialist and dedicate his whole life to the poor workers. It seemed terribly romantic to me at the time. We formed the Guelph chapter of the International socialists, and I somehow ended up on the "steering committee" which was pretty much just Tom's favorites. We were a pretty successful little group of shit disturbers and brought to the task the enthusiasm that rarely exists outside of the world of 14 year old kids (which most of us were). Our biggest triumph was a citywide walkout of all high schools, the pretext for which was some proposed cut to funding which would raise tuition, but we all knew it was more an excuse to organize a big protest. We were able to effectively shut all the schools down for that day and had thousands of kids marching through the streets of downtown Guelph chanting whatever the popular slogans were at that time (hey hey, ho ho, x and y have got to go!). This eventually led to me being hounded out of that school, which gave me more time to devote to politics, and increasingly, doing drugs.

The drugs eventually started getting in the way of the politics, as any sXe kid will tell you. Not because I was too lazy or stoned to go to meetings, we went to meetings all the time. By this point we had secured enough signatures from students at the university to get our own room there (this from a group composed 90% of high school kids, and led by 3 of us, all under 17) but when us stoners got stoned, we would read other books besides the IS material and the international worker newspaper. We talked about other subjects, we made our own zines and kept politics out because this was to be a reflection of our little group. We started bands and sang about things besides politics. I hate to think that drugs helped me mature, there's something really sad about that, but they did certainly get me out of the routine I was in long enough to realize that it wasn't really the content of what we were doing that I agreed with, it was the social atmosphere and the fun of causing trouble. My break with the group came at one of our fundraising newspaper sales, which we used to try to bring new people into the group. I had a conversation with a man who asked me this question "I work for a small businessman, it's just the two of us, and he pays me what he can afford to pay me, and he created the job, which I wouldn't have otherwise. How am I being exploited in this scenario?" I actually said "I don't know" this wasn't the obvious exploitation of some greedy monopoly character, this was a guy with a job that he liked, and paid what he thought was a fair wage. Another member came over and spewed some kind of "well, we all know capitalism is exploitative by it's very nature" line, textbook stuff really. It sure didn't convince the man, and i realized it didn't convince me. I didn't know where I stood anymore. On one hand, my emotional connection to socialism was such a close one. It meant so many things to me, but intellectually it just didn't add up. It must be what kids who are raised religious feel like when they start going "wait a second, how do we know all this stuff is true again? Because of one book?" It was a crisis time for me and unfortunately I turned to my other vice of the time, which my other ex-politico stoner friends were more than happy to help me with. I spent a good 6 months in anti-intellectual bliss. Breaking down every notion I ever held onto. At it's peak, I was so LSD'd up all the time that anything was just as true or false to me as anything else, there was nothing to believe because everything was interconnected this and whatnot and the tree of life etc... It was a fun little sojourn from reality, but like all drug fueled utopias, it turned dark.

This was when I quit doing drugs (well, those drugs at least). My social group disbanded, and I, having broken down in a typically Cartesian fashion my whole belief system had to start fresh. I started with Science and mathematics, which were in some ways my first loves. I reintroduced myself to music through spending time volunteering at the university radio station and playing jazz, which represented some kind of opposite to whatever it is I had been involved in before. And slowly but surely started to form an identity again. Then I stumbled onto "small is beautiful".

The reason I gave this long back story is that I suppose I want more to explain why Schumacher is important to me. Wikipedia does a perfectly good job of providing the bare facts, so I there's no real need for me to expend too much energy just to tell you about the man. I do have a real passion for his work though, and maybe if I can provide some context, well... I hope that it might make more sense to you too.

So I bought the book based on the title, but also because of the enigma that economics represented for me. As mostly everyone knows, Karl Marx is the granddaddy of all socialists and his major work, capital, is a book of economic analysis, but in opposition to all other economic theory. I had dredged the massive tome years earlier in a vain attempt to prove to myself how smart and serious I was, and had gleaned just enough economic theory to feel comfortable talking like an expert about it. I had no need for any other work of economics because, well, this was Marx, and goddamnit the book is so huge. When I saw the subtitle to Schumacher's book, it seemed like a great place to start learning what other people had to say about my old hero's subject. I started reading small is beautiful in a coffee shop near the bookstore, and I am not lying when I tell you I read the whole thing in one sitting.

So who is this guy Schumacher?

The short story is that he's a statistical economist who, when working for a British coal company (I believe it was coal) in Burma had a revelation about the nature of capitalism in third world countries. There existed a huge disparity in the levels of technology between the developed world he knew in England and the third world, as would be expected. The general idea that existed at the time in international development (I think it's still pretty much the mainstream) was that we need to export as much of our technology as possible to get these people up to speed with the way things are done in the rich countries. It's not an evil idea, and it certainly makes some intuitive sense. The problem that Schumacher (henceforth referred to as "Fritz") saw was that importing some new, advanced technology into a country doesn't mean that that country can simply adopt it and begin using it the way that the rich countries do. The developed world has evolved along with this technology and as such it is (for the most part) appropriate to their economies and to their way of life. This was far from true in Burma.

Take for example, a tire factory. Some beneficent leader of a rich country might give millions in aid to a poor country and have their resident economist decide that because they have a lot of rubber trees they should make tires and sell them on the world market. Lot's of export capital flows in, people get rich, trickles down to the poor, yadda yadda. This would work fine if there was a large workforce available locally to staff the factory, sufficient food production and other basic necessities to support that concentration of workers in that area, infrastructure to transport the raw materials to the factory, and the tires away, local technicians who could service and repair the machinery, not to mention available parts and materials to keep it running and maybe a hundred other important factors. None of these, of course, existed. So the tire factory is set up with millions in development aid (or worse yet, loans) and fails miserably. This pattern has repeated again and again and Fritz couldn't deal with it anymore. What was missing was any kind of concern, or interest at all really, in how these people actually lived. What did they need in their day to day lives? A tractor isn't going to help subsistence farmers who are tilling the soil with bones, but maybe a decent hoe or shovel might. Maybe a wheelbarrow? These things were cheap and plentiful in England, yet in many places they were virtually nonexistent. what about a simple water pump? What about a spinning wheel or a loom? These were technologies that had long become obsolete in the developed world, and as such, were of no interest to the western development experts who were deciding where the money would be spent.

He coined the term intermediate technology, and it's brother appropriate technology to describe his method of development. He would much rather see a less advanced tool brought into a society if would legitimately help, than a newer, flashier one which the recipients won't learn how to build, fix, and incorporate into their lives. He expands on this concept in the most beautiful ways, I suggest that you pick up the book if you can find it.

The concept of appropriate technology, and his ideas about the virtues of smaller scale projects could be applied in other ways too. For example, he found that small business people in a particular part of India he was working couldn't secure bank loans to expand their businesses. These were really small businesses, like a food cart or a local tailor who had become successful enough that they wanted to expand, but their needs were small, too small for the banks to take notice. Nobody could get a loan of say $500. The banks gave out loans of $20,000 to larger businesses but had no setup to approve such a small amount of money. His solution was to setup small business collectives which could be made up of many such small businesspeople. With a modest startup which he provided, the cooperative banking collective became both a great tool for helping small scale development, and a quite successful little enterprise of it's own, charging reasonable interest and quickly paying back the initial investment to become self sustaining.

These sorts of ideas were very new to me. I hadn't really shaken off my distrust of capitalism in general, but here was this man, an economist, a player for the bad guys' team, working fully within the world of the free market to achieve what were ultimately the things that we had wanted to win through global socialist revolution. He was vastly improving the lives of the worlds poorest and least powerful people. And underlying it all was this philosophy that really could be applied to anything. Do what is appropriate to the needs of the situation, don't try to force the situation to fit your preconceived notions of what it should or shouldn't need. I can think of very few more fundamental tenets of my current belief system.

The funny thing, in retrospect, is that even now that I've moved on so far from my younger self's socialist world view, I can see how being a radical leftist was absolutely appropriate to my situation. Before that I was just an angry kid who knew he hated school, even if he was somewhat good at it. Although I think that small shifts in one's world view and moderation are great tools for living, sometimes you need a huge revolution to get you on the right track. If I hadn't jumped so wholeheartedly into Marx, Trotsky and Tom's managerie of misfit kids, I wouldn't understand the world as deeply as I do now. I doubt if I would have been so attracted to a book on economics, and maybe I'd just be a middle of the road liberal democrat now, with half formed ideas about social justice forming a background to a more or less status quo take on the world. Maybe Fritz Schumacher's smallness revolution wouldn't have had the same weight for me if I hadn't been so enamored of the hugeness of Marx's worldwide revolution.

It's oddly appropriate how things worked out.