Quote

I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.

E. F. Schumacher

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E. F. Schumacher
Age: 66 †
Born: 1911
Born: August 16
Died: 1977
Died: September 4
Economist
Philosopher
Statistician
Bonn
Germany
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher
Technology
Proportion
Wrong
Saving
Society
Prosperity
Think
Generally
Employs
Thinking
Genuine
Asserted
Available
Inverse
Labor
Machinery
Amount
Leisure

More quotes by E. F. Schumacher

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Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's enduring powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.
E. F. Schumacher
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The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.
E. F. Schumacher
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The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.
E. F. Schumacher
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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.
E. F. Schumacher
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Economic development is something much wider and deeper than economics, let alone econometrics. Its roots lie outside the economic sphere, in education, organisation, discipline and, beyond that, in political independence and a national consciousness of self-reliance.
E. F. Schumacher
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The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
E. F. Schumacher
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I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.
E. F. Schumacher
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Modern economic thinking...is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.
E. F. Schumacher
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There is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.
E. F. Schumacher
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I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
E. F. Schumacher
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Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.
E. F. Schumacher
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Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.
E. F. Schumacher
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The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events.
E. F. Schumacher
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An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods. . . .
E. F. Schumacher
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Our task is to look at the world, and see it whole.
E. F. Schumacher
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Many have no desire to be in it, because their work does not interest them, providing them with neither challenge nor satisfaction, and has no other merit in their eyes than that it leads to a pay-packet at the end of the week.
E. F. Schumacher
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Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.
E. F. Schumacher
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Even bigger machines, entailing even bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the nonviolent, the elegant and beautiful.
E. F. Schumacher
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Work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.
E. F. Schumacher
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Is there enough to go around? What is enough? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues economic growth as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of enough.
E. F. Schumacher