Is Growth Always a Good Thing?
According to the metrics that measure economic health it is. According to the financial pundits it is. According to nearly every politician it is. In fact, growth appears to be our major vital sign when it comes to the economy, according to, well, nearly everyone. Most of us, from economists to arm chair experts, to even the clueless, have come to take this with a grain a salt. Whether it is the Nasdaq, S&P 500, or Dow, growth is good and only a fool would argue this.
However, E. F. Schumacher, a German Rhodes Scholar who served as the economic adviser to the United Kingdom Control Commission of Germany and chief economist for Britain’s National Coal Board, is no fool. And, he would beg to differ. In fact, in his book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, he would agree that growth is only one metric of several that can define a healthy economy. If we focus too closely on it and ignore other vital factors, it may prove to be detrimental and promote a growing but unhealthy and gluttonous economy. Much like praising an achy jointed diabetic for good lipids, focusing on only one aspect may in fact be disastrous. Furthermore, to continually fuel this growth, it requires that we often put away our principles and temper outlandish and unhealthy behaviors to buy, buy, buy as our consumerism is the fuel for this growth; the more the better.
Or in the words of British Economist John Maynard Keynes:
“For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still.”
In other words, greed is king and the health of the economy is more important than our own health, so put away the latter to fuel the former – at least for the meantime. Growth is the almighty and everything else is an afterthought. The question remains as to how we magically stop, as described by Keynes, but that is one of the many issues of massive growth fueled by outlandish consumerism. What we see here, as Schumacher reminds us, is the cultivation of greed:
“If human vices such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures.”
Fueling the economy or building ridiculous monstrosities?
It’s not Politics
For most, this is the part where the political banter and fighting enters. This is not a political issue. As the forward and first quote in the book illustrates quite nicely and succinctly, nearly all current politicians on both ends of the spectrum have pushed hard for unchained economic growth, as illustrated by the words of Larry Summers, chief economic adviser to Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton:
“We cannot and will not accept any ‘speed limit’ on American economic growth. It is the task of economic policy to grow the economy as rapidly, sustainably, and inclusively as possible.”
Growth has been the unifying principle between the elephant and the donkey – both blue and red – regardless of other policies and how much the two get into heated battles while spending time in the cages at the Washington Zoo. These principles are unhinged from politics, though each side will cry overbearing socialist or greedy capitalist when any similar discussion arises, these conversations play no role here. Turning things into a binary, one side or the other, black and white conversation, is the strategy of those who serve merely to destroy any semblance of productive conversation, as illustrated by the political discussion abounding throughout society these days, and as reminded by Schumacher in Small is Beautiful. Attempts to turn divergent problems into black and white convergent problems are rarely successful. In his words “to have to grapple with divergent problems tends to be exhausting, worrying, and wearisome. Hence people try to avoid it and to run away from it.”
“G. N. M. Tyrell has put forward the terms ‘divergent’ and ‘convergent’ to distinguish problems which cannot be solved by logical reasoning from those that can. Life is being kept going by divergent problems which have to be ‘lived’ and are solved only in death. Convergent problems on the other hand are man’s most useful invention; they do not, as such, exist in reality, but are created by a process of abstraction.”
The Growth of Massive Corporations Neglects People
Schumacher attacks utilizing growth as a the only vital sign of the economy on all ends, especially how it has led to the growth of soulless and soul-sucking, heartless, and monolithic companies with layers upon layers of administrators with undefinable job descriptions who merely serve to separate us from any actual decision makers, leaving us in a purgatory of mind-numbing uncertainly with uncertain goals and more uncertain and constantly changing expectations. This array of callous camouflaged disorder is much like the dark show Corporate, which is remarkably close to the truth. One of the most memorable episodes portrays an enthusiastic worker who is praised for making the bullet points of his presentation of an arms deal actual bullets (yet, the managers and CEO don’t actually know his name, so the CEO makes up names for him every time they cross paths). Though he crushes the presentation, they question the font, and he spends the next several excruciating days worried about his font choice, as opposed to the actual presentation content.
In other episodes the workers are cheerfully told they are “tools”, while others discuss their goals to fill the void of emptiness that has been created inside of them from corporate life. When one worker is asked why his shirt is untucked, he responds, “because life is meaningless and nothing we do matters.” Hilariously dark, but eerily consistent with most of our experiences in the corporate world. Take corporate medicine for instance, where they turn taking care of patients into a strictly financial growth paradigm you can visibly watch the souls eviscerated from nurses and physicians as their lives turn into a meaningless drone where nothing they do matters, except raising revenues of their billion dollar company to support the salaries of those on top who pull in tens of millions of dollars for their administrative work (I have experienced this firsthand and it is frightening).
This goes far beyond corporate medicine, and is more prevalent in the rest of the business world, where production and growth of these companies begins to bury the workers.
“What becomes of man if the process of production ‘takes away from work any hint of humanity, making of it a merely mechanical activity’? The worker himself is turned into a perversion of a free being.”
Nowadays, these changes have hit most aspects of the work force, and continue to threaten the medical field and patients that are supposed to be cared for, leaving in its path a surge of depression and suicide (quote). We lost count of how many physicians took their lives at my prior medical system but the rumor was that five took their lives in the last year alone that I was there.
The Effect on Our Health
“Every science is beneficial within its proper limits but becomes evil and destructive as soon as it transgresses them.”
While years ago, before treating patients and dedicating my life to helping improve people’s health and their desire to care about their health, I would have written off this book in a heartbeat. As a consultant in Chicago, I would have quickly said growth solves everything. However, while there are many benefits to a thriving and productive economy, a constant focus on growth seems to favor dollar signs and GDP over people. Schumacher saw this as a threat to bury the character, morals, and ethics that should always accompany business and societal decisions.
“The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.”
He hits the nail on the head when it comes to health, as many, if not most, healthy activities are not “economic” in that they do not feed the almighty growth. A rapidly growing economy has no room for wasting time exercising, cooking our own meals, reading used books that cost several dollars, spending hours per day going for walks, and spending quality time with our families – these are times where we should be shopping, buying, and consuming dammit, otherwise growth will slow!
“If an activity has been branded as uneconomic, its right to existence is not merely questioned but energetically denied. Anything that is found to be an impediment to economic growth is a shameful thing, and if people cling to it, they are thought of as either saboteurs or fools.”
And this is where Schumacher makes his greatest contribution. Schumacher explains that we are optimizing for one thing, more money for less work, while companies are optimizing for greater profits, i.e. more production while paying less. We can optimize for several things at the same time, but not too many. When we only optimize for output and money, we judge the economy by its growth. This is simply an artifact of what we have been conditioned to optimize for. We could have just as easily have optimized for other aspects of life, besides money or economic growth. For instance, a society could optimize for economic growth, while also optimizing for health and wellness of its people. Schumacher, like myself, would argue that if we optimize strictly for economic growth, we actually harm our mental and physical health and wellness. In other words, we start to trade other aspects of our life purely for economic gain. Along this logic, sacrifices must be made when we solely optimize for growth, and these personal sacrifices may help the monolithic companies grow, but not necessarily help us, as the workers and members of society.
A great example of this is described in Strong Towns by Charles Marohn, where poorly constructed houses are churned out in suburbia to create artificial growth, fed by multi-lane high-speed roads unsafe for pedestrians or bike traffic, leaving a cluster of residents without safe walking access to anything. I would also argue that this has effects on our psyche and mental health, but that is an entirely different issue and discussion (coming soon). This “growth” looks good on paper, but is anything but good for the local economy and the local residents, who spend significant time sitting in their car simply to get home. Moreover, providing infrastructure for this sprawl adds significant financial stress for future generations that will have to pay for this once it starts to break down, since expensive roads, pipes, wires, and drainage going great distances to these suburban hot beds is extremely unfeasible financially in the long term. Some would even call it extremely fiscally irresponsible – but short-term growth sure does look good when viewed in isolation.
The Spillover
Consumerism has led to additional negative health effects, as previously discussed, and this has spilled over heavily into the medical field. As psychologist Kima Cargill tells us in her must-read The Psychology of Overeating, if we are programmed to consume as much as possible in one domain of our life, it is unreasonable to think this will spill over into other, if not all, areas of our lives. Eventually, over-consuming goods leads to over-consuming food, and the over-consumption of both has generally been fueled by massive companies and their marketing firms for decades with their primary goal being growth at all costs. Both will leave us less healthy and happy physically and mentally. As Zygmunt Bauman similarly tells us in Work, Consumerism, and the New Poor, “A consumption society would not take lightly a call to delay gratification. A consumer society is a society of credit cards, not savings books. It is a ‘now’ society. A wanting society, not a waiting society.”
In Cargill’s words:
“What is missing from this framework is thinking about all types of consumption as a unified construct: culturally, economically, existentially, and biologically; that is, thinking about food and overeating not just as a dietary issue, but as one that resides in the context of the consumption of material goods, luxury experiences, alcohol and drug use, evolutionary behaviors, and all forms of acquisition.”
We must ask ourselves, whether an economy that relies on spending and not saving healthy for us, or is it merely an economy that promotes chasing a value that makes a small minority of the population richer? Are we freely trading our health and wellbeing for economic growth? These questions beg additional divergent questions as to why we do not judge a healthy economy on several metrics that expand beyond the simple number in the Dow, Nasdaq, or S+P 500.
Any metric that tends to turn us into addicted consumers constantly desiring the latest and greatest will tend to have detrimental effects on our health, a fact that is playing out all around us as obesity continues to permeate throughout society like a virulent plaque and preventable diseases like diabetes and prediabetes continue to climb, now affecting 1 in 3 adults. The growth of the GDP may be a “good” thing, but how do we consider these numbers and include an assessment of their growth as part of the equation?
In other words, we need a lifestyle that considers multiple metrics of human and societal health and happiness, but such a nuanced discussion is difficult, as Schumacher tells us:
“Now, this is indeed a tall order, not because a new life-style to meet these critical requirements and facts is impossible to conceive, but because the present consumer society is like a drug addict who, no matter how miserable he may feel, finds it extremely difficult to get off the hook. The problem children of the world – from this point of view and in spite of many other considerations that could be adduced – are the rich societies and not the poor.”
We are a society that is told to buy, consume, don’t think just buy more, grow, grow, grow, and pretend this has nothing to do with our health. For instance, during the Covid-19 lockdown outdoor running tracks, gyms, and outdoor gardens were closed without any focus on resiliency, while outlet stores were open and filled with shoppers. Restaurants were closed but fast food chains remained open and the local Krispy Kreme had a three-mile line for its buy-one-get-one-free-sale. (As a side note, this illustrates just how ludicrous our fights are over minute dietary details as if these are the main cause of poor health.)
If we stop and think for a minute, pondering whether growth is always a good thing – which the late Schumacher desperately wishes we did – we may find ourselves and our society a lot healthier and happier. This constant push for growth, buying, spending, and anxiety-provoking fear of missing out places us squarely in a hamster wheel where we cannot even stop for a minute else we will fall behind. Schumacher saw these issues decades ago, and we are now living in a state of perpetual perceived acceleration:
“You cannot stand still, they say; standing still means going down; you must go forward; there is nothing wrong with modern technology except that it is as yet incomplete: let us complete it.”
Avoiding Growth without Thought
The dangers of excessive growth are pervasive in all fields, acting like a cancer. All growth is not good growth, and this was well-known even far before Schumacher’s time by physicians, philosophers, scientists, gardeners, and even architects. Though this flies in the face of the current economic mantra, growth like unhindered cancerous weeds is not good growth, especially for their neighboring fruit-bearing plants. Even Louis Sullivan, the famous and revolutionary architect who mentored Frank Lloyd Wright saw similar issues when the field of architecture witnessed the growth of skyscrapers around the turn of the twentieth century:
“What is the chief characteristic of the tall office building? It is lofty … It must be tall, every inch of it tall … a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation … without a single dissenting line.”
Sullivan knew the seduction of the growth of buildings to new heights could threaten their beauty and integrity, so he preached that architects must continue to focus on every finite aspect of these buildings, no matter how large they grew. His buildings show this firsthand with their delicate and finite detail. Thoughtful growth is key, and our economy and bodies are no different.
Louis Sullivan, one of the greatest architects the world has seen, focused on form and function and every finite detail. He knew how thoughtful we had to be the larger we grew.
Within Small is Beautiful are difficult questions with no absolutes nor correct answers, sure to anger many readers who prefer to think in absolutes, especially when it comes to societal or political angles (obviously all growth is not bad and not growing is certainly not necessarily good). These are divergent problems at their best. However, we need to at least ask these thoughtful questions that require thoughtful answers before we can figure out how to grow as a society and economy while preserving our mental and physical health. We need calculated and intelligent growth that takes into account multiple aspects of our lives as individuals and our health as a society. We need an economy that is optimized for us, as opposed to simple growth.
Readers, of course, will likely not agree with all points made in Small is Beautiful, but Schumacher at least forces us to ask ourselves some important questions about our environment, goals, and our health.
Oh, and he wrote the masterpiece in 1977.
Some of the best quotes from the book:
“Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side.”
“The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.”
“The modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy, and these are not accidental features but the very causes of its expansionist success. The question is whether such causes can be effective for long or whether they carry within themselves the seeds of destruction.”
“If human vices: such as greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable result is nothing less than a collapse of intelligence. A man driven by greed or envy loses the power of seeing things as they really are, of seeing things in their roundness and wholeness, and his very successes become failures.”
“The Gross National Product may rise rapidly: as measured by statisticians but not as experienced by actual people, who find themselves oppressed by increasing frustration, alienation, insecurity, and so forth. After a while. even the Gross National Product refuses to rise any further, not because of scientific or technological failure, but because of a creeping paralysis of non-co-operation, as expressed in various types of escapism on the part, not only of the oppressed and exploited, but even of highly privileged groups.”
“What becomes of man if the process of production ‘takes away from work any hint of humanity, making of it a merely mechanical activity’? The worker himself is turned into a perversion of a free being.”
“That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of ‘bread and circuses’ can compensate for the damage done -these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence -because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”
“They enable us to see the hollowness and fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of material ends, to the neglect of the spiritual.”
“If an activity has been branded as uneconomic, its right to existence is not merely questioned but energetically denied. Anything that is found to be an impediment to economic growth is a shameful thing, and if people cling to it, they are thought of as either saboteurs or fools.”
“Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of 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.”
Removal of responsibility:
“The buyer is essentially a bargain hunter; he is not concerned with the origin of the goods or the conditions under which they have been produced. His sole concern is to obtain the bat value for his money.”
“Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself. It would be ‘uneconomic’ for a wealthy seller to reduce his prices to poor customers merely because they are in need, or for a wealthy buyer to pay an extra price merely because the supplier is poor. Equally, it would be ‘uneconomic’ for a buyer to give preference to home-produced goods if imported goods are cheaper. He does not, and is not expected to, accept responsibility for the country’s balance of payments.”
“Every science is beneficial within its proper limits but becomes evil and destructive as soon as it transgresses them.”
“Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal: it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.”
“Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.”
“The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.”
“Economics has become such a thraldom that it absorbs almost the whole of foreign policy. People say, ‘Ah yes, we don’t like to go with these people, but we depend on them economically so we must humour them.’ It tends to absorb the whole of ethics and to take precedence over all other human considerations.”
“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.”
“G. N. M. Tyrell has put forward the terms ‘divergent’ and ‘convergent’ to distinguish problems which cannot be solved by logical reasoning from those that can. Life is being kept going by divergent problems which have to be ‘lived’ and are solved only in death. Convergent problems on the other hand are man’s most useful invention; they do not, as such, exist in reality, but are created by a process of abstraction.”
“Divergent problems, as it were, force man to strain himself to a level above himself; they demand, and thus provoke the supply of, forces from a higher level, thus bringing love, beauty, goodness, and truth into our lives. It is only with the help of these higher forces that the opposites can be reconciled in the living situation.”
“Dealing exclusively with convergent problems does not lead into life but away from it.”
“To have to grapple with divergent problems tends to be exhausting, worrying, and wearisome. Hence people try to avoid it and to run away from it.”
“They require a bit of brainwork. even difficult brainwork, but they do not call for this straining and stretching to a higher level which is the specific challenge of a divergent problem, a problem in which irreconcilable opposites have to be reconciled. It is only the latter that are the real stuff of life.”
“The problems of education are merely reflections of the deepest problems of our age. They cannot be solved by organization, administration, or the expenditure of money, even though the importance of all these is not denied. We are suffering from a metaphysical disease, and the cure must therefore be meta-physical. Education which fails to clarify our central convictions is mere training or indulgence. For it is our central convictions that are in disorder, and, as long as the present anti-metaphysical temper persists.”
“Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.”
“All the same, it is still the dominant belief today that, whatever may have happened with earlier civilisations, our own modem, western civilisation has emancipated itself from dependence upon nature.”
“There are many activities which are totally uneconomic, but they are carried on for their own sake. The economists have an easy way of dealing with them: they divide all human activities between ‘production’ and ‘consumption’. Anything we do under the head of ‘production’ is subject to the economic calculus, and anything we do under the heading of ‘consumption’ is not. But real life is very refractory to such classifications, because man-as-producer and man-as-consumer is in fact the same man, who is always producing and consuming all the same time.”
“What man-as-producer can afford is one thing; what man-as-consumer can afford is quite another thing. But since the two are the same man, the question of what man -or society -can really afford gives rise to endless confusion.”
“Precisely because there is more involved in ‘agricultural operations’ than the production of incomes and the lowering of costs: what is involved is the whole relationship between man and nature, the whole life-style of a society, the health, happiness and harmony of man, as well as the beauty of his habitat. If all these things are left out of the experts’ considerations, man himself is left out – even if our experts try to bring him in, as it were, after the event, by pleading that the community should pay for the ‘social consequences’ of their policies.”
“We can say that man’s management of the land must be primarily orientated towards three goals -health, beauty, and permanence. The fourth goal – the only one accepted by the experts – productivity, wilt 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:
-to keep man in touch with living nature, of which he is and remains a highly vulnerable part;
-to humanise and ennoble man’s wider habitat; and
-to bring forth the foodstuffs and other materials which are needed for a becoming life.
“I agree with Mr Herber’s assertion that ‘reconciliation of man with the natural world is no longer merely desirable, it has become a necessity’. And this cannot be achieved by tourism, sightseeing, or other leisure-time activities, but only by changing the structure of agriculture in a direction exactly opposite to that proposed by Dr Mansholt and supported by the experts quoted above: instead of searching for means to accelerate the drift out of agriculture, we should be searching for policies to reconstruct rural culture, to open the land for the gainful occupation to larger numbers of people, whether it be on a full-time or a part-time basis, and to orientate all our actions on the land towards the threefold ideal of health, beauty, and permanence.”
“Health, beauty and permanence are hardly even respectable subjects for discussion, and this is yet another example of the disregard of human values – and this means a disregard of man – which inevitably results from the idolatry of economism.”
“Here again, both the trend of things and the advice of the experts is in the exactly opposite direction -towards the industrialisation and depersonalisation of agriculture, towards concentration, specialisation, and any kind of material waste that promises to save labour. As a result, the wider human habitat, far from being humanised and ennobled by man’s agricultural activities, becomes standardised to dreariness or even degraded to ugliness.”
“All this is being done because man-as-producer cannot afford ‘the luxury of not acting economically’, and therefore cannot produce the very necessary ‘luxuries’ -like health, beauty, and permanence – which man-as-consumer desires more than anything else. It would cost too much; and the richer we become, the less we can ‘afford’.”
“This is the philosophy of the townsman. alienated from living nature, who promotes his own scale of priorities by arguing in economic terms that we cannot ‘afford’ any other. In fact, any society can afford to look after its land and keep it healthy and beautiful in perpetuity. There are no technical difficulties and there is no lack of relevant knowledge. There is no need to consult economic experts when the question is one of priorities.”
“We are committing future generations to tackle a problem which we do not know how to handle.’ Finally, the report issues a very clear warning.”
“The amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs.”
“A great part of the modern neurosis may be due to this very fact; for the human being, defined by Thomas Aquinas as a being with brains and hands, enjoys nothing more than to be creatively, usefully, productively engaged with both his hands and his brains. Today, a person has to be wealthy to be able to enjoy this simple thing, this very great luxury: he has to be able to afford space and good tools; he has to be-lucky enough to find a good teacher and plenty of free time to learn and practise. He really has to be rich enough not to need a job: for the number of jobs that would be satisfactory in these respects is very small indeed.”
“Virtually all real production has been turned into an inhuman chore which does not enrich a man but empties him. ‘From the factory,’ it has been said, ‘dead matter goes out improved, whereas men there are corrupted and degraded.’”
“We may say, therefore, that modern technology has deprived man of the kind of work that he enjoys most, creative, useful work with hands and brains, and given him plenty of work of a fragmented kind, most of which he does not enjoy at all. It has multiplied the number of people who are exceedingly busy doing kinds of work which, if it is productive at all, is so only in an indirect or ’roundabout’ way, and much of which would not be necessary at all if technology were rather less modern.”
“All this confirms our suspicion that modern technology, the way it has developed, is developing, and promises further to develop, is showing an increasingly inhuman face, and that we might do well to take stock and reconsider our goals.”
“Now, this is indeed a tall order, not because a new life-style to meet these critical requirements and facts is impossible to conceive, but because the present consumer society is like a drug addict who, no matter how miserable he may feel, finds it extremely difficult to get off the hook. The problem children of the world – from this point of view and in spite of many other considerations that could be adduced -are the rich societies and not the poor.”
“Any third-rate engineer or researcher can increase complexity; but it takes a certain flair of real insight to make things simple again.”
“You cannot stand still, they say; standing still means going down; you must go forward; there is nothing wrong with modern technology except that it is as yet incomplete: let us complete it.”
“You cannot stand still, they say; standing still means going down; you must go forward; there is nothing wrong with modern technology except that it is as yet incomplete: let us complete it.”
“For it takes a good deal of courage to say ‘no’ to the fashions and fascinations of the age and to question the presuppositions of a civilisation which appears destined to conquer the whole world; the requisite strength can be derived only from deep convictions.”
“It is widely accepted that politics is too important a matter to be left to experts.”
“No doubt, a price has to be paid for anything worthwhile: to redirect technology so that it serves man instead of destroying him requires primarily an effort of the imagination and an abandonment of fear.”
“Economic development is primarily a question of getting more work done. For this, there are four essential conditions. First, there must be motivation; second, there must be some know-how; third, there must be some capital; and fourth, there must be an outlet: additional output requires additional markets.”
“Great damage to human dignity has resulted from the misguided attempt of the social sciences to adopt and imitate the methods of the natural sciences.”
“Within the limits of the physical laws of nature, we are still masters of our individual and collective destiny, for good or ill.”
“In contrast, most of the sociologists and psychologists insistently warn us of its inherent dangers -dangers to the integrity of the individual when he feels as nothing more than a small cog in a vast machine and when the human relationships of his daily working life become increasingly dehumanised; dangers also to efficiency and productivity, stemming from ever-growing Parkinsonian bureaucracies.”
“Modern literature, at the same time, paints frightening pictures of a brave new world sharply divided between us and them, torn by mutual suspicion, with a hatred of authority from below and a contempt of people from above. The masses react to their rulers in a spirit of sullen irresponsibility, while the rulers vainly try to keep things moving by precise organisation and coordination, fiscal inducements, incentives, endless exhortations and threats.”
“Loyalty can grow only from the smaller units to the larger (and higher) ones, not the other way round -and loyalty is an essential element in the health of any organisation.”
“If our intellectual leaders treat work as nothing but a necessary evil soon to be abolished as far as the majority is concerned, the urge to minimise it right away is hardly a surprising reaction, and the problem of motivation becomes insoluble.”
“Discovering a middle axiom is always a considerable achievement. To preach is easy so also is issuing instructions. But it is difficult indeed for top management to carry through its creative ideas without impairing the freedom and responsibility of the lower formations.”
“the whole crux of economic life -and indeed of life in general -is that it constantly requires the living reconciliation of opposites which, in strict logic, are irreconcilable. In macro-economics (the management of whole societies) it is necessary always to have both planning and freedom -not by way of a weak and lifeless compromise, but by a free recognition of the legitimacy of and need for both.”
“The answer is self-evident: greed and envy demand continuous and limitless economic growth of a material kind, without proper regard for conservation, and this type of growth cannot possibly fit into a finite environment.”
“No great private fortunes can be gained from small-scale enterprises, yet its social utility is enormous.”
“In other words, everybody claims to achieve freedom by his own ‘system’ and accuses every other ‘system’ as inevitably entailing tyranny, totalitarianism, or anarchy leading to both.”
Leo Tolstoy:
“I sit on a man’s back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.”
Murray Bookchin:
“The city man in a modern metropolis has reached a degree of anonymity, social atomisation and spiritual isolation that is virtually unprecedented in human history.”
“Reconciliation of man with the natural world is no longer merely desirable, it has become a necessity.”
Gandhi:
“Every machine that helps every individual has a place, but there should be no place for machines that concentrate power in a few hands and turn the masses into mere machine minders, if indeed they do not make them unemployed.”
American ecologists Tom Dale & Vernon Gill Carter:
“Civilised man was nearly always able to become master of his environment temporarily. His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary master ship was permanent. He thought of himself as ‘master of the world’, while failing to understand fully the laws of nature.”
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