The three purposes of human work:
To produce necessary and useful goods and services
To enable us to use and perfect our gifts and skills
To serve, and collaborate with, other people, so as to “liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity.”
From Good Work, by E. F. Schumacher.
As an economic analyst and advisor in England over a period of twenty years in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Schumacher introduced the idea of Intermediate Technology.
Its purpose was “to develop and make known technologies appropriate to the needs and resources of poor people in poor communities:
“tools and equipment deliberately designed to relatively small, simple, capital-saving, and environmentally non-violent.”
When this book was published in 1979, there were over twenty groups in as many countries working with this concept, along with the UN.
At the time of publication, it was also recognized that this concept was also relevant to rich countries.
Rich countries need a new technology, “smaller, capital-saving, less rapacious in its demands on raw materials, and environmentally non-violent.”
The same needs to address development from vastly different viewpoints.
“The people of poor countries must be helped to raise themselves to a decent standard of living.
“We ourselves must work for a more modest, nonviolent, sustainable life-style.
“That is surely the way toward greater equality between and within nations.”
Despite the fact that developed nations have, for the most part, ignored these practices, we will, as the natural resources are depleted, and violent environmental disruption continues, be forced into better practices with what remains.
© 2017 Kathryn Hardage
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