All right. Perhaps we can begin to settle again. Now that just ties into the recording. All right. Resume the business. All right. All right, we're ready for questions if people wish to settle down.

[02:53]

You have any questions? All right. Quiet. Could you start again? I think we're just quiet enough. I have a question about the planetary network, and I would like to ask Dr. Schumacher, that I think it's important to clarify the difference between what we find out to be decentralization, for example, the structure on the bottom side of the quay, and that the opposite thing that comes to mind is really what we call a slug, it certainly has to do with the land industrial, and it certainly has to do with the dark, and it certainly has to do with the food industry, and I think decentralization comes from some place,

[04:09]

which is called a big national authority, and those are some places, which might be regional or local partners, and I would like you to explain the slug, the political reliance of knowledge in that context, the political context of decentralization. So the political process or political context in which decentralization can occur. I think there's a divergent kind of overlap between the slug and the slug. I just want to be clear that there's a slug context that's explained, and I think there's a regional one, but I would like to hear Dr. Schumacher's comment on that. As we all know, life is kept going by pairs of opposites, like small and big,

[05:12]

and when one of the two becomes overemphasized, you have to emphasize the other one. If the world had got stuck because lots of subsistence farmers or subsistence workers were doing their own thing and nothing ever happened, I would say bigger is beautiful. But now that we are told the inevitable trend is towards bigger and bigger organizations, I find that most people are left out. They're bypassed. And therefore, at least as a title of a book, I say small is beautiful. Let's look in the other direction. What are the political consequences of creating small-scale technology? Well, they're very obvious, that the great majority of people are given a chance, given a chance of an independent, upstanding existence, that they can answer back, that they don't have to depend on the people already rich and powerful.

[06:17]

Now that applies to the third world. With their development so far, they've become more dependent on the rich countries than less. They could become more independent. The first law of modern society to the great majority of people is, thou shalt adapt yourself. Adapt yourself to the requirements of the big system, which leaves a number of slots into one of which you have to fit, whether you like it or not. It's not a very nice situation for most of them. So they wouldn't have to adapt themselves because technology has been adapted to them. I think it would make a better society and a more democratic society. Yes? I'm curious, in a practical matter, if you could suggest decentralizing,

[07:20]

let's say a gigantic industry like the automobile industry, which is centered in one area, and hundreds of thousands of workers there, with a peripheral industry throughout, and the entire complex of an area like Detroit, for example, all they do is take the cost of the automobile. As a practical matter, how would you decentralize those plants? They'll keep production enough to keep workers employed. Let's say half and half, a profitable enterprise for the automobile manufacturers. There's a very simple answer. I wouldn't. I couldn't. This kind of conglomeration, like those cities, are the result of cheap and plentiful oil. If oil ceases to be cheap and plentiful,

[08:21]

they don't fit anymore. I didn't do it. I didn't build them, and I'm not destroying them. I can't decentralize them. The dinosaurs were not decentralized by the gazelles. But the gazelles had the power of survival, and the dinosaurs lost it. Now, I can't help this. I haven't been sent here to reorganize the world, but at least all of us, we can try and create something that has survival value. And if I watch quite neutrally what is actually happening, I see California full of Japanese cars, French cars, German cars. So the dinosaurs evidently have already a difficult time. And it's the Volkswagens and the Datsuns and what have you which are not decentralizing, but really bothering the dinosaur.

[09:25]

Now, if the dinosaur can find ways of adapting to new conditions, fine, then it'll survive. But our task is not to keep alive things that perhaps don't fit anymore, but at least to sow the seed that something new and healthy can grow. And needless to say, all new growth normally starts very, very small in a very dark place. It remains unnoticed for quite a while. It hasn't got a quantitative effect. So then something will grow, and even desperate dinosaurs won't kill it because they don't notice it, too small. And suddenly it's there. So don't misunderstand me. It is not possible for any one of us, anywhere, to decentralize New York or Detroit or General Motors. These things have grown. They're there.

[10:26]

If they become increasingly unsupportable because of high fuel costs or what have you, or ungovernability, then something will happen to them. I don't know what. They may remain ruins. You can go up, halfway up the Amazon River in a place called Manaus. They built the world's biggest opera house. Not so long ago. It was inaugurated by Enrico Caruso. Nobody asked any critic of this how he was proposing to decentralize this opera house. You can visit it a day, and the palm trees are growing through the windows, and the foxes are saying goodnight to each other on the stage. That was its adaptation to the new situation. And this may well happen. Half the hotels that used to do package tours in the Balearic Islands of Spain didn't even open in the summer. What they will look like in ten years, I don't know.

[11:27]

So let's see the process of change. We can't decentralize these hotels. If they can survive, they'll survive. If they can't, they'll become ruins. There was a question on the last row. Well, perhaps my question is an answer to it. In reading your book, Dr. Schmucker, I was wondering how the third world countries were going to be lured away from wanting television sets and blenders and all the goodies such as that, but they would be in the money market to be captured. Thank you. I'm glad to hear about your remark that the question has been answered. It's an approach that is different from the academic approach. The academic approach raises questions all the time. It's quite amazing how many theoretical questions

[12:33]

you can do without once you start to work. If the developing countries are tempted by the glitter of our society, they will go that way. And if I say they shouldn't, they won't even hear me. But when they find that this is the fourth road, they'll learn through their own suffering. If they don't do that, if they don't learn, they can't be helped. And they do, as a matter of fact. If there's a question for information, I'll give you the information. Initially, anything that seems different from what the rich are doing appeared to them as an attempt to keep them backward, even when you talked about it. But now they have been at it for a long time. They find that their real disease, which is threefold mass migration from the rural areas into towns.

[13:36]

The towns become monstrosities, surrounded by misery beds. Secondly, mass unemployment. And thirdly, the prospect or actuality of hunger, that these three diseases are not met by television or international airports or you name it. They can be met only by technology that fits into the rural areas, into the conditions of poverty. And a number of them see it very, very clearly. Others are still a bit backward and only see it half. A number of countries have swung right over and said, don't try and sell us any of this big capital intensive stuff. We only want intermediate technology. It's only to the extent that people learn that you can help them. I could, of course, give the outline,

[14:49]

but since this consists of detail, of actual cases, I can only deal with it by way of example. I'll give you a really symbolic example that can serve as a symbol for the whole thing, about a different way of thinking about things. You see, a large part of the third world is arid. Arid countries. Not because it doesn't rain, but because the rainwater flows off into a river and down into the sea for certain reasons. Why the Lord has arranged it? He has arranged that, by and large, it rains everywhere. There are few places where, exception, but in some places, like England, it rains all the time, and in other cases it comes in great big blobs. And where it comes in great big blobs, it runs off the soil very quickly,

[15:53]

unless you're very careful. Now, don't let it run down into the river and out to sea and say, oh, we've got that marvelous technology, we build a desalination plant. Even if you do it, you still have fresh water only in one place, where it's wanted all over the country. Now, hold the water where you want it. Now, that is the thinking. Don't be misled by the marvelous things we do. Do the necessary things, and that is to give one's intelligence to the construction, for instance, of underground rainwater tanks. Now, of course, we know how to do it expensively. How can you do it cheaply? How can you do it so that the actual expenditure the villager has to make for materials that he can't do himself is minimized? Maybe he has to put in a lot of labor, but in many of these countries, there's a great surplus of labor. Now, that technology is an example.

[16:55]

Oh, I'll give you another example. In order to have efficient oxcarts, the wheel ought to have a steel rim. We've forgotten how to bend steel accurately, except with big machines in Pittsburgh or Leeds or Sheffield. Now, if you want to do it in a small rural community, how do you do it? Is it beyond the wit of man to do this on a small scale? No, we remembered that our forefathers knew how to do it before James Watt, and they had a most ingenious tool. We found one of those tools in a French village. It was more than 200 years old, brilliantly conceived, clumsily made. We took this to the National College of Agricultural Engineering and said, Come on, boys, students, you can do better than that. Upgrade it. Use your best mathematics to work out the required curvature and what have you.

[18:00]

The upshot of it is that while hitherto in the modern world the smallest instrument to do this bending job would cost something of the order of 700 pounds and require outside power, electricity, to operate it, this tool upgraded to the level of knowledge of 1974. The village blacksmith can make it. If you want to buy it, it costs 7 pounds, 1%. And it doesn't require electricity. Any man can do it. Now, this is something quite different from going back into the pre-industrial era. It is using our knowledge in a different way, and, lo, it can be done. What is your best estimate of how much time we have to develop alternatives before the bottom is made in 1973?

[19:00]

I am at a loss how to answer this without seeming offensive. And I don't mean to be offensive. All I can say, I don't bother my head about such questions because the answer would in no way help my work. In any case, how should I know? But if you think this is necessary, and if you have a hunch it might be a long road to travel, if you've got far to travel, get up early. It seems to me that one of our most unused resources is the people, human beings. We have a high rate of unemployment and a lot of hidden unemployment that is not even recognized as such people. They aren't in the labor market because they don't believe they have a place there. It seems to me that a program for the future

[20:12]

should somehow utilize people as human beings in ways that are meaningful to them. Would you comment on this? Exactly. The major, the only fundamental resource is people. And when you look around, in the most forbidding circumstances, when the people got cracking, they built up a civilization. You couldn't have a more unpropitious country than, for instance, Switzerland. I mean, nothing but mountains on which nothing grows and a few meadows which it takes hours to climb up to and narrow valleys, and yet it's become one of the most prosperous countries in the world. So that is precisely what we mean. People is the main asset. Therefore, these principles, what I call principles of exclusion, when things become too big,

[21:14]

too complex and too expensive, people are excluded. Now, what is the other way? If we had, for instance, a real collapse, I won't say in Detroit, but let's say in Coventry in England, then people are unemployed. What can they do? Just sit around and collect the unemployment insurance? As people, they perish that way. They're not wanted by society. Now, is there a self-help technology that they can at least look after themselves? It's a much more difficult question to answer in Britain than it would be in the United States. Very few people seem to know how big is the United States. Very few people in Europe. I tried to explain it to them, and I might explain it to you too, that if you would put the entire world population into the United States, entire world population, China, India, everything,

[22:14]

even the Canadians, the density in terms of persons per square mile would then be roughly the same of what it is in England now. So, in England, we have a problem of land, a problem of land, and some land basis is required to help yourself. In the United States, this problem, except for sociological arrangements, doesn't exist. But the technology is not readily available to make a job of it. That's why we need now to put some effort into it, and then the power of people can be utilized. Let's stray afield a little bit. We have one phenomenon of the 20th century, which I'm sure will be highlighted in later textbooks. It is the most astonishing thing that's happened, and that is the transformation of China.

[23:17]

For decades, for the first half of the century, ever since the Manchus were finished in 1911, China was the great suffering giant of Asia, civil war, frightful floods, millions of people drowning, famines, famines, famines, children sold into slavery, etc. This has been transformed. Let's not talk about the politics of it. It has been transformed. They're not starving. Everybody who comes back says the children are of a buoyancy, and cheerfulness is unbelievable. How did they do it? They did it precisely by what the last speaker's been saying, by mobilizing the labor power of the population. And they did it by turning economic concepts upside down. You see, by and large, we say, here we are a community, maybe a city, or a district, or a province, or a state.

[24:22]

You must not do anything unless you can prove you can't get it cheaper from outside. That's modern economics. Chinese have turned this around. They said, you must not get anything from outside unless you can prove you can't do it yourself. A magical change. Me prove I can't do it, what another Chinaman can do? Not on your life. Of course I can do it. And if I haven't got the know-how, I will get the know-how. I'll send someone to Shanghai to get the know-how. Everybody's challenged. Everybody's busy. That has made this magical transformation. Now, under different political auspices, one would have to see how can one get a similar effect. And that is a long and very difficult debate. But when you do that, of course, all the problems that now engage primary attention, that are merely the outflow of our basic problematique, like inflation,

[25:25]

those problems will just melt away. Thank you. You mentioned that farming, and I wondered if you would enlarge on that, in relation to French intensive farming, which I think you are interested in. I know all sorts of combinations which begin with French, but French intensive farming, I don't know. What is it? What we call factory farming? I see. Well, I don't talk about labor intensive as a desirability. I talk about capital saving. But in farming, some other factor comes in. This will not appeal to people from California, but in England we are asking ourselves,

[26:28]

can we afford large estates? Will somebody take this away? It's not quite small enough. Where you have really comparable facts, this has been studied intensively in Lincolnshire in England, where a great number of farmers grow just one crop, and that is peas. And the Agricultural Extension Service tells them exactly how to do it, that they all do it the same way. And now the service has found that the smaller the farm, the higher the yield per acre. Not the yield per man, but per acre. Not the income, but the yield per acre. And they have had the scientists there, and they said, well, they use exactly the same methods as anybody else.

[27:29]

What is it? And finally, this was told me by a real upstanding farmer who knew the situation, we have come to the conclusion it's the TLC factor. And that seems to be well established in California, but at this audience every farmer asks the other one, who makes it? Where can I buy it? Tender, tender loving care. That's to say, the human hand, the human mind, the human attention has a lot to do with productivity. And that, of course, requires a human scale of farming. In England, we have to ask the question, can we afford agriculture? Or do we have to have a multicultural system of production? Because so far we are only 50% self-sufficient in food, and I doubt whether for a long time food surplus would be purchasable

[28:33]

to cover the other 50%, so we have to become more highly self-sufficient. That last question brings up one problem, which is the problem that the world economy, on an artificial basis of technology and transport, is in a state of somewhat precarious equilibrium. For instance, a country like Brazil, or in, for example, like in Chihuahua, it was just beef, but in Brazil it was mainly coffee as an export item, and the ground up people for much other production. That seems to lead to a situation in which the rest of the world does depend on Brazil for coffee, and the entire world economy has very strong enough stability enough to call the export import trade for its stability. How do you go about decentralizing it beyond such few radical limits like that? Is it possible to decentralize the world economy

[29:35]

to the planet of geography? Is that relevant? I'm sorry, I cannot accept the premises of this question. Coffee is grown in dozens of countries. The concentration of coffee growing in Brazil was a sort of colonialist phenomenon, although I know it had nothing to do with political colonialism, and it was totally unnecessary. Brazil is a universe in itself that can grow anything. It is plantation owners who find it easier to just do one crop, a typical phenomenon of colonialism. But the world is richly endowed. I mean, the problem just doesn't arise. The whole point about horticulture is against agriculture. Not the whole point, but an important point is to get away from monoculture. What do you mean by horticulture?

[30:38]

Well, the gardening system of farming instead of the farming system of farming. I mean, in a garden you don't have vast monocultures, therefore you avoid all these problems of infestation. There's ecological balance if you do it well. The question is, can we afford this monoculture? And the monoculture of coffee growing in Brazil was an absurdity from the word go, and I've suffered very badly from it. But those are not laws of nature. These are the errors of men. Dr. Schumacher, my neighbor and I, during the stretch, were inquiring whether we had any really interesting economies in this country. We've been growing them for, producing them for a hundred years.

[31:41]

Are there any that you consider exportable? Mr. Schumacher. If this is a serious inquiry, yes, there are some very good, very good, very thoughtful people. And one of the purposes of my trip is to make contact with them. There are not many. An economist who has resisted the miseducation of his subject is a sort of white raven. But they exist. I don't know, is this all on the radio? I'll give you two names afterwards. Thank you. I am not a spokesman for technocracy,

[32:48]

but when you were talking about energy, I was reminded of this when we were hearing about it back in the 40s. I understand a man named Howard Scott tried to take up the issue of energy and its critical nature through his letter to President Roosevelt. And I'm wondering in connection with the kind of success you would hope your project would have, is there any connection between technocracy and some of your organizations that you found a way of cooperating? Yes, I was in the United States when this thing broke out. And it disappeared very quickly. It was a kind of fad. It wasn't Scott, it was a different name. They're still talking about it here. Yeah. But to me this is outside any possibility of discussion

[33:49]

because it has the word krussy in it. Technocracy. And the last people who should have power to rule us are mere technicians. They have their excellent servants and very bad masters. So we would not want to be associated with anybody who calls himself a technocrat. Well, if we both discuss it, it would be two deaf people engaging in conversation. In your career, you have worked, I think, both in large organizations and small. The Governmental Association of Japan and also the CCC you talked about. Which of those two have you found most productive?

[34:49]

Yes, either one has been significantly so. And which are you putting most of your time into now? Everything is a real situation. And the real situation has a lot to do with what becomes of it. I worked for 20 years, as you said, and this is not a governmental organization. It's a nationalized industry, but under the National Coal Board, organized very much like any other giant company. There, there was an absolute need to get the thing revived because under the old coal owners, the industry had run down. Already in peacetime, but even worse than in wartime. And after the war, there was a great cry for more and more coal. It was the only thing that could be done. So in that respect, you had to do it. And in that respect, big was beautiful.

[35:50]

The management problem is horrible because there is no more difficult job than administration. There is a chap, he sits at an office, and he is supposed to administer all these activities. He has to frame rules. He has to anticipate in his mind all the possible real situations. It takes a first-class intellect to do it. So when you have a very large organization, there's the tendency of dragging the first-class intellects, which always are relatively rare, all up into headquarters. And then you say, well, you haven't got any first-class people to do the actual job. And so this pendulum will swing and say, no, we can't have them all up there. We must deploy them into the pits. And then you have second- and third-class people on this very difficult job of administration.

[36:52]

And they frame such bad rules that the first-class people down below, they can't do their work. This is a very serious problem, and it leads to it, wherever you can adopt, not only, as I suggest, the negative theory of transport, but also the negative theory of administration. But you can minimize administration only by getting down to smaller units. Small units are sort of self-administering. The sociologists know a primary work group is 12 people. They don't need to be administered. They administer themselves. I don't think all of them have read the New Testament, but there was a more important person who also thought 12 was about the limit. And this is perfectly understandable. For good administration and good management, you ought to know how everybody gets along with everybody else. Now you work that out, how many bilateral relationships there are in a group.

[37:55]

I will tell you, in a group of 10 people, there are already 45 bilateral relationships. In a group of 100 people, there are 4,950. Evidently, Jesus Christ didn't think he could manage that. He could manage 66 with a group of 12. So now, from a human point of view, wherever you have still the human scale, management is infinitely easier. That doesn't mean that in all cases it's well done. Infinitely easier, it avoids all these frightfully difficult problems of large-scale administration. If you're committed to a large thing, and the chairman has already referred to it, we spent 10 years trying to create smallness inside the largeness of the national goal. So that with regard to their day-to-day functions, people were their own masters and could feel at home. Certain things had to be coordinated at the top. Those who are familiar with sociological theories,

[38:59]

they will remember the principle of subsidiarity, which has been the main teaching of the Catholic Church. Namely, the higher formation should only arrogate to itself powers when it has been established that the lower formation can't do it themselves. Then a higher formation may have to do it. But every case is different, and therefore all generalizations are likely to be misleading. I think that this evening, a lot of us have been inspired to get up early tomorrow. So I think we'll close with one more question. We've had a person waiting to ask a question here for some time. Do you see the originating of suburban life as being a time without a place where people thought that was the benefit of decentralization? And at what point does a positive,

[40:00]

if you see that as a negative factor, at what point does decentralization become a sucker? To my not always reliable recollection, I never used the word decentralization. But many of the questioners used it. I think it's a dangerous word. One has to distinguish certain things can be done only properly on a small scale. Other things have to be bunched together. One must know the precise case. Now, this instance of having monster cities where life becomes more and more burdensome and pollution and what have you, and then the explosion of the better-off people into suburbs, this is not decentralization. This is simply a result of the basic illness of it.

[41:05]

Now, these suburbs are very, very burdensome from the point of view of fuel because they haven't grown organically. They are just a kind of explosion from the center and commit the unfortunate suburban to a mileage of car riding that anyway to a European is absolutely unbelievable. Mother can't send little Johnny around the corner to buy an ounce of tea, but because the supermarket is 12 miles away, everything becomes a car ride. She can't send the children off on a bicycle to go to school because the school is I don't know how far away. Maybe there are buses. So this is not an organic development. An organic development would be to try and foster communities that can make fairly compact little towns

[42:07]

surrounded by a spread of villages and small towns headed up by some provincial center. That would be the ideal picture. Primary school in the village, secondary school in the market town, and an institution of higher learning in the district center. So before we use decentralization, we must be very accurate. What do we mean? What is to be decentralized? The mere explosion of people out of a city which becomes smog ridden when there is cheap petrol, that is not decentralization in any very meaningful way. For those of you who have not seen Dr. Schumacher's book,

[43:11]

I think there are still copies of it outside. Thank you. Charles. How are you? Fine, how are you? I spoke to you earlier.

[44:38]

Library. I was listening. I wanted to sit. Thank you. And I don't know. I didn't know. I didn't know. Hi. I'm Dr. Schumacher. I'm Dr. Schumacher. I'm Dr. Schumacher. How are you? I'm Dr. Schumacher. I'm Dr. Schumacher. Oh yeah. I'll have to go. Stop. No. It was quite necessary. It's something that we need to go against. Yeah. We've been busy for a while enjoying some sort of entertainment. I don't know what we're up to now. I don't know what we're up to now. I really want to have a conversation. We should be looking at it from the outside, but we can't make concessions. Well, we picked up a good question.

[46:01]

Yours was good, too. Good question. Yeah, it was his, really. He asked me if I could say my name. Do I have a name? Yeah. Like this. Yeah. That's right.

[47:33]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That's it. Thank you. You're welcome. Now how precise was the question? And in the end, the Russians and the Americans refused to accept everything from him, except for the dollar and the money in a book. And after he washed it, he gave it to them. No one knew what it was. And they had wooden money. And he found it, and he sent us a glass. A glass. And at that time, they didn't have money. And one of the people, between 6 and 7 o'clock in the morning, he sent us a glass. When I got to New York, and I said to him,

[48:36]

What sort of money could we have? Wooden money or not? And I said, I have both. What does it involve? I can't really explain why. I don't know. It's not something that could be heard from New York, and I need to explain it to you guys. You're also going to have things that are not very small. The what? Very small. It is very small. I think on a small scale, at least. I think so, too. That's, you know, it's a way of thinking. So, where is... Did you say David? Yeah. Maybe, why don't you say David, so we can begin. It gets me. Wooden money. Yeah. Gary.

[49:37]

Looking for me? Yeah. I don't know if I have the people that came over. Yeah, I know. I saw a dozen people. Ready to go? Do you want to stay? Yeah. You know what? I was just thinking, you talked about Walter. Walter? I'm going to write that next week. When's a good day? Yeah. Not coming in. You know, I'm going to write that. You know, that's all we're going to do. And then you just have to listen to him. He could have a beautiful conversation. I bet there is.

[50:16]

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