E. F. Schumacher

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, known as E. F. Schumacher, was a German-born British statistician and economist whose work asked economics to begin with people, places, and limits. He was born in Bonn, Germany, on 16 August 1911, the son of a professor of political economy. He studied in Bonn and Berlin, then went to England in 1930 as a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford. He later studied at Columbia University in New York City, earning a diploma in economics, and worked in business, farming, and journalism before his public career took shape.

Schumacher’s life was marked by the upheavals of the mid-twentieth century. He moved back to England before the outbreak of World War II, but during the war he was interned on an isolated English farm as an “enemy alien.” While there, between sessions working in the fields, he wrote a paper called “Multilateral Clearing.” John Maynard Keynes recognized his ability and helped secure his release. Schumacher went on to help the British government with economic and financial mobilization during the war, and Keynes found him a position at Oxford University.

After the war, Schumacher worked as an economic adviser to, and later Chief Statistician for, the British Control Commission, which was charged with rebuilding the German economy. From 1950 to 1970 he served as Chief Economic Adviser to the British National Coal Board, one of the world’s largest organizations, with 800,000 employees. In that role he argued that coal, rather than petroleum, should supply the energy needs of the world’s population. He saw oil as finite, feared its depletion and rising cost, and worried that the richest and cheapest reserves lay in some of the world’s most unstable countries. He also predicted the rise of OPEC and many of the problems of nuclear power.

His thinking changed further after a 1955 visit to Burma as an economic consultant. There he developed what he called “Buddhist economics,” based on the belief that people need good work for proper human development and that “production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life.” He traveled through many Third World countries, urging local governments to build self-reliant economies. Influenced by figures including Mahatma Gandhi, J. C. Kumarappa, Leopold Kohr, John Ruskin, John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Gautama Buddha, and the Catholic Church, he became a leading voice for human-scale, decentralized, ecologically suitable technology. In 1966 he founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group, now known as Practical Action.

Schumacher reached his widest audience with Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, published in 1973. The book, a collection of essays finished in the house of his friend Leopold Kohr, argued that technological production cannot be considered solved if it recklessly erodes finite natural capital and deprives future generations of its benefits. In 1976 he received the Prix européen de l’essai Charles Veillon for the book, and in 1995 The Times Literary Supplement ranked it among the 100 most influential books published since World War II. His 1977 book, A Guide for the Perplexed, critiqued materialistic scientism and examined the nature and organization of knowledge. Schumacher’s words still speak because they join economics to scale, work, ecology, and responsibility, plain questions that remain hard to set aside.