E. F. Schumacher
E. F. Schumacher
Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacherwas an internationally influential economic thinker, statistician and economist in Britain, serving as Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board for two decades. His ideas became popularised in much of the English-speaking world during the 1970s. He is best known for his critique of Western economies and his proposals for human-scale, decentralised and appropriate technologies...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth16 August 1911
E. F. Schumacher quotes about
technology violent term
The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person.
modern accomplish
The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.
worthwhile-things pay impossible
The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.
integrity successful soul
We must do what we conceive to be the right thing, and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we are going to be successful. Because if we don't do the right thing, we'll be doing the wrong thing, and we will just be part of the disease, and not a part of the cure.
errors things-in-life missing
If I limit myself to knowledge that I consider true beyond doubt, I minimize the risk of error but I maximize, at the same time, the risk of missing out on what may be the subtlest, most important and most rewarding things in life.
sacred small-is-beautiful
There can be nothing sacred in something that has a price.
worthwhile-things years government
Economic policies absorb almost the entire attention of government, and at the same time become ever more impotent. The simplest things, which only fifty years ago one could do without difficulty, cannot get done any more. The richer a society, the more impossible it become to do worthwhile things without immediate payoff.
errors intellectual environmental
I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.
attitude greatness eagles
Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitudes.
funny-work might income
It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work.
sacred explanation
Anything that we can destroy but are unable to make is, in a sense sacred, and all our 'explanations' of it do not really explain anything.
fundamentals tasks achieve
The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.