1973 was a good year for books about scale. Ivan Illich published Tools for Conviviality. E. F. Schumacher, an economist who had spent two decades advising Britain’s National Coal Board, published Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. The oil crisis arrived a few months later and made both look prophetic.
The two books, written independently, overlap in a lot of places. Both argued that modern technology had a built-in bias toward ever-larger scale, and that past a certain size it begins to undermine the human purposes it was supposed to serve. Both proposed tools that ordinary people could own, understand, and repair.
Intermediate technology
Schumacher’s practical proposal was what he called intermediate technology, later usually called appropriate technology. Writing mostly about development in poorer countries, he argued that the choice was not between primitive tools and the most advanced industrial plant. There was a middle range: tools much more productive than traditional ones, but cheap enough, simple enough, and small enough that local people could build, run, and maintain them without depending on distant capital and experts.
He founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group in 1966 to work on this. It still exists, as the charity Practical Action.
Buddhist economics
The book’s best-known chapter, “Buddhist Economics,” asked what economics would look like if it measured well-being instead of consumption. Schumacher argued that work is not just a cost to be minimized but part of how people develop themselves, and that a system which aims for the most consumption from the least work has its priorities backwards. That puts him close to Illich’s case that the best tools enlarge what people can do for themselves.
Fifty years on
Some of the 1973 arguments have dated. Both authors wrote before personal computers, and neither foresaw a world where very small groups could build and share sophisticated software for almost nothing. In one sense that world proves them right: a free, small, repairable tool can now reach anyone. In another it complicates things, because the same networks that let small tools travel also concentrate users onto a handful of very large platforms.
For Counterfoil, Schumacher adds a useful test to Illich’s: is this tool intermediate? Is it more capable than the craft tools it replaces, yet still small and simple enough for the people who use it to understand, maintain, and, if need be, rebuild?
Sources
- Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality.
- Schumacher, E. F. Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. London: Blond & Briggs, 1973.