Something I'm reading now is E. F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Schumacher was a German-born British economist, and this 1973 book would have to be considered his major opus, especially since he died just four years after its publication. Well, it's a worthy work to be remembered for.
In Schumacher's hands economics isn't just the materialist study of money and trade. Instead it's a branch of philosophy, as arguably it was always meant to be. As such he gets into a lot of different topics. His view of education is timely a half century later.
What do the six "large" ideas have in common, besides their non-empirical, metaphysical nature? They all assert that something that had previously been taken to be something of a higher order is really "nothing but" a more subtle manifestation of the "lower"―unless, indeed, the very distinction between higher and lower is denied. Thus man, like the rest of the universe, is really nothing but an accidental collocation of atoms. The difference between a man and a stone is little more than a deceptive appearance. Man's highest cultural achievements are nothing but disguised economic greed or the outflow of sexual frustrations. In any case, it is meaningless to say that man should aim at the "higher" rather than the "lower" because no intelligible meaning can be attached to purely subjective notions like "higher" or "lower," while the word "should" is just a sign of authoritarian megalomania.
Schumacher has broad concerns, and seeing an economist concerned with forces acting on the soul is refreshing.
2 comments:
While I haven't read Small is Beautiful, between your recommendation and the reviews I've looked at it sounds to be one I should be better acquainted with. It also appears it may be a good accompaniment to anthropologist David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years published in 2011. I saved a pdf copy of it to my desktop several years ago, but it's so long (540+ pages) that although I've read sections I can't say I've read it through.
Unfortunately, David Graeber died in 2020 (Bullshit Jobs in 2018 and The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity published posthumously in 2021). He was an anarchist born and raised in that belief by parents who were working class intellectuals living in a union supported housing co-op in NYC. He was the guy who came up with 'We are the 99%'.
Of the many relevant observations he makes about debt is that in one of its earliest historical eras the Mesopotamians created accounts that were based on silver but paid in barley. If the farmers suffered a few years of bad crops they'd be unable to pay their debts and would often run away - becoming nomads or thieves. The difference then was that after 7 years the debt would be forgiven and the farmers could return home. The economist Michael Hudson is a strong supporter of the debt jubilee.
Not being able to easily find relevant quotes what I have found is a reasonably sized series of extracts you might find interesting if you have a spare half hour.
Over the course of modern human history the economy of credit was converted into an economy of compound interest - making many debts unpayable (think of the IMF, for instance). As Graeber said, 'Behind the man with the ledger is a man with a gun'. He was a realist, but not a pessimist - Graeber, and probably Schumacher too, understood people as imaginative, intelligent, playful beings who deserve to be understood as such.
I'm sure I've heard/read the name David Graeber, since it kind of rings a bell and I do read other people who seem like they might be likely to refer to him. That said I know I haven't read him myself and hadn't really made an effort to. It's seeming like maybe I should, though.
He died young by modern standards, still shy of 60. But one of the other books he published in his last years was The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Wikipedia gives a little synopsis and it appears to treat how "public and private bureaucracies, now so intertwined as to be effectively indistinguishable, have become the main mechanisms for Wall Street profits, and describes how bureaucratization brings the threat of violence (through legal and police enforcement) into almost every aspect of daily life in wealthy countries." And golly that does sound familiar.
We may have started on the same road as the Mesopotamians but we've gone quite a bit farther along it. The technology exists to calculate and store data on a person's debt so as to keep that debt being forgotten or really forgiven. And said technology is being used for just that. None of this is an accident.
The man with the gun is definitely there. In fact it seems like those of us in Western countries are getting an opportunity to see how wide-ranging the work of that pair is/ I'm glad to hear that Graeber appreciated people in all their ups and downs. Again, I'll have to acquaint myself more directly with his work.
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