Dec 1975 RAIN Page 9 1hink About Land E. F·. Schumacher For quite some time I have been particularly interested in the questjon of the proper scale of things. This question seems to me to be the most neglected subject in modern society. "To the size of states," said Aristotle two thousand three hundred ye~rs ag~, "there is a limit as there is to other things, plants, ammals, implements; for none of these retain their natural power when th~y are too large or too small, but they either wholly lose their i;iature or are spoilt." It's hard to equal the language of the ancients. Imagine a small island, a small island community of two thousand people. One day a·boat arrives and un!oads a man who has just been rekased from prison on the mainland. The discharged prisoner returns home. Will this c?~mui:iity h~ve any difficulty in looking after this one man, g1vmg him a bit of human contact, finding him work and re- ~ntegrating him into society? Hardly. And now imagine an 1~land ~oi:nmunity twenty-five thousand times as big, of some fifty million people, and every year twenty-five thousand discharged prisonrrs return home. It is then the task ofvarious ministries to get them back into normal life together with a number of harassed and over-worked probation officers. What a problem! In fact a problem that has never yet been satisfactorily dealt.with. . Now it seems to me that somehow, somewhere, there is a very big lesson to be learned here. Or imagine that instead of one solitary discharged prisoner presenting his problem to a s~all island community of 2,000 people, a homeless family of !1ve people appeared-or even two such families of ten people m all..'Surely the community would find ways and means to ensure adequak ~helt~r for these two families. But multiply . the scale of the situation by twenty-five thousand: a community of fifty million people trying to cope with two hundred and fifty thousand homeless people. What a problem! Ministries, officials, rules, regulations, financial arrangements, immense ef!orts to cope with immense difficulties, and (going by experience) never an adequate solution. I have just published a book with the title Small Is Beautiful , and _I received a letter which explains this strange and c~allengmg problem of scale from a mathematical point of view. I quote: The crucial point is that as a monolithic organisation increases in size, the problems of communicating between its components go up exponentially. It is generally reckoned that the maximum size of a productive scientific research team is twelve; over that size everyone spends all his time finding out what everyone else is doing. Some twenty years ago, working for the National Coal Board, I became int'erested in the problem of accidents in the pits. At that time we had two hundred and fifty thousand accidents a year. Someone drew my attention to a mine outside the National Coal Board which did not actually produce coal • but some other mineral- by exactly the same methods of-extraction as we applied in the c·oal mines. The accident rate at that mine wa~ much the same as in the coal pits. One day the manage~ent m charge of this one single mine decided to do somethmg ~bout ~hese accidents and virtually abolished them. So we studied t~eir methods, which were perfectly straightforward, and said to ourselves: "What they can do we can do." They had one mine, we had six hundred; but,then our resources, staffs, etc. were certainly in proportion the same as ~ theirs. So the National Coal Board said, "When it is a matter S ~f people getting hurt or killed, we cannot afford to lose any t~me._ Let u~ apply these proven methods of accident prevention mall six hundred collieries right away." We did not succeed- although of course, in the twenty years since then, the saf~~y record of the coal mines has improved beyond _ recogmt10n. But at that time, I repeat, we did not succeed the way this outside firm with only one mine to worry about had, in fact, succeeded. I~ took_me a long time to understand this strange and paradoxical thmg. If one able safety engineer with his team can s1:1cceed i1:1 one ~ine, why can't six hundred able safety engmeers with their teams succeed in six hundred mines. The . answer is th~J one man r~quires no administrative superstruc- .• ture to do his ~ork; he himself, as team leader, is the superstructure; but 'six h_undred team leaders do require (or everybody appears to thmk they do) an administrative superstructure. And now let me make this point: administration to be well ?one _is a very ~ifficult job which requires a very high level of 11:1-telhgence. It 1s much more difficult than .accident prevent10n undergrou~d._It fo_llows th~t only the best t;,alent is good enough fat admm1strat10n; and 1f yop need an :fdministrative superstructure because of the scale of the operation (six ,hundred mines instead of one) then you simply cannot avoid your best people being sucked into administrative posts; and then only the second or third rate people remain to do the job itself. I am making this point very seriously against the people who say, "Yes, we set up a big structure, but of course it must not be bureaucratic." If it is not to be bureaucratic it wi~l ~bsorb all the best talents you have at your disposal. And this 1s not all. Once you need an elaborate administrative s1:1perstructure', ·the people who actually do the work cannot give the best that is in them because they are being administered.(and this is nobody's fault) by people far away whom they _have probably never met except at impersonal briefing meetmgs. This expe.rience, reinforced by many similar ones in the last twenty odd years, has led me to the conviction that small is beautiful-where small, of course, does not mean infinitely or absurdly small but th,e order of size, or scale, which the mind can fully encompass,-so that large administrative superstructures can be dispensed with. Good ad~inis_tration, let me repeat, demands superlative tale,nts and mtelhgence-; and bad administration is the worst of all evils. So this whole question of scale I consider to be absolutely central and one of the most neglected questions in th~ modern debate. I quoted Aristotle and repeat: "When th1~gs become too.large or too small they either wholly lose their nature or are spoilt," or, as my grandmother used to say "Everything too is of evil." ' From Think About Land, by E. F. Schumacher, $1 airmail, from: Catholic Housing Aid Society, 189a Old Brampton Road, London, SW5 OAR, England.
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