Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Schumacher E. F

Author:Schumacher, E. F. [Schumacher, E. F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business
ISBN: 9780061997761
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 8161967
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 1973-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three The Third World

Eleven

Development

A British Government White Paper on Overseas Development some years ago stated the aims of foreign aid as follows:

'To do what lies within our power to help the developing countries to provide their people with the material opportunities for using their talents, of living a full and happy life and steadily improving their lot.'

It may be doubtful whether equally optimistic language would be used today, but the basic philosophy remains the same. There is, perhaps, some disillusionment: the task turns out to be much harder than may have been thought – and the newly independent countries are finding the same. Two phenomena, in particular, are giving rise to world-wide concern – mass unemployment and mass migration into cities. For two-thirds of mankind, the aim of a 'full and happy life' with steady improvements of their lot, if not actually receding, seems to be as far away as ever. So we had better have a new look at the whole problem.

Many people are having a new look and some say the trouble is that there is too little aid. They admit that there are many un- healthy and disrupting tendencies but suggest that with more massive aid one ought to be able to over-compensate them. If the available aid cannot be massive enough for everybody, they suggest that it should be concentrated on the countries where the promise of success seems most credible. Not surprisingly, this proposal has failed to win general acceptance.

One of the unhealthy and disruptive tendencies in virtually all the developing countries is the emergence, in an ever more accentuated form, of the 'dual economy', in which there are two different patterns of living as widely separated from each other as two different worlds. It is not a matter of some people being rich and others being poor. both being utilised by a common way of life: it is a matter of two ways of life existing side by side in such a manner that even the humblest member of the one disposes of a daily income which is a high multiple of the income accruing to even the hardest working member of the other. The social and political tensions arising from the dual economy are too obvious to require description.

In the dual economy of a typical developing country, we may find fifteen per cent of the population in the modern sector. mainly confined to one or two big cities. The other eighty-five per cent exists in the rural areas and small towns. For reasons which will be discussed, most of the development effort goes into the big cities, which means that eighty-five per cent of the population are largely by-passed. What is to become of them? Simply to assume that the modern sector in the big cities will grow until it has absorbed almost the entire population – which is, of course, what has happened in many of the highly developed countries – is utterly unrealistic. Even the richest countries are groaning under the burden which such a misdistribution of population inevitably imposes.

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