E. F. Schumacher
E. F. Schumacher
Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacherwas an internationally influential economic thinker, statistician and economist in Britain, serving as Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board for two decades. His ideas became popularised in much of the English-speaking world during the 1970s. He is best known for his critique of Western economies and his proposals for human-scale, decentralised and appropriate technologies...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth16 August 1911
civilization skills achievement
Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer.
men envy greed
It is doubly chimerical to build peace on economic foundations which, in turn, rest on the systematic cultivation of greed and envy, the very forces which drive men into conflict.
art men ordinary
True art is the intermediary between man's ordinary nature and his higher potentialities.
men substance gross
The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
fundamentals tasks achieve
The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.
men thinking long
Modern economic thinking...is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.
men demand world
The modern world tends to be skeptical about everything that makes demands on man's higher faculties. But it is not at all skeptical about skepticism, which demands hardly anything.
spiritual peace men
Man's needs are infinite, and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material.
spiritual mean men
No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make safe and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime perpetrated by man. The idea that a civilization could sustain itself on such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economical affairs of man as if people did not matter at all.
men long soul
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation to man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations: as long as you have not shown it to be "uneconomic" you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
nature men battle
Modern man talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side
errors intellectual environmental
I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.