It is for the most part a reframing of what Schumacher has already written about the problems of extractive economies of scale and how intermediate technologies — to be rebranded “appropriate technologies” and, ultimately, “sustainable development” — can help remedy their dehumanizing effects. The difference is in the final chapter, “The making of Good Work”, written by one Peter N. Gillingham.
It starts with a — to the modern sensibilities rather offensive — comparison of people to different types of cattle. It quickly pivots to a discussion that is more relevant today than it was in the 1970s, about the pendulum swinging from institutions to individuals, and about the potential for a malignant entity to inhabit said crumbling institutions as a hermit crab would inhabit a dead shell. So it goes… There is much talk of people feeling the need to escape abstraction and get back to doing meaningful work in the “real world”. This was, let me remind you, written almost 50 years ago. And here I thought the Internet was to be blamed for everything.
There is next to no information about Peter Gillingham online. ChatGPT-o3 managed to dig up a few nuggets which ring true: this chapter would be his only publicly available work, the California-based Intermediate Technology Institute he led had folded within a decade of Schumacher’s death, and the 1970s oil crisis-inspired movement petered out, to be replaced by the 1980s Reagonomics, the 1990s end of history, the 2000s war on terror, and the 2010s social network boom. Of course, it is now the 2020s and the preceding four decades have all in their own way continued the hollowing out of the institutions. Americans continue to check out of capitalism, with mixed success. Everything old is new again.
So then, is this book a success or a failure? It declared the extraction party over 50 years too early and for the wrong reason: it wasn’t that the world ran out of oil, but rather that the consequences of its extraction became to dire (funnily enough, both Schumacher’s own Small is Beautiful and Donella Meadows’s Thinking in Systems hinted that this may end up happening). The book is out of print and for the most part out of the collective mind. The movements it promoted are either dead or so transformed as to be unrecognizable.
On the other hand, the themes keep being repeated: from Nassim Taleb’s promotion of localism and abhorrence of large scale, through John Vervaeke’s video essays on the meaning crisis, to Tim Harford writing about the corrosivness of commerce in the bastion of capitalism that is the Financial Times. There was, and still is, there there. Ignore it at your own peril.