Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

Introducing:

MILLENNIUM ICONS

Profiling Men and Women who reorder the world with their ideas.

One of the problems of this generation is the misunderstanding of purpose, and the world seems to be an earth without purpose, it explain why mankind now live life the way it comes totally sold-out to self centered spirit. The world’s architecture and celebrated civilization was influenced by visionary statesmen and women appointed with time to come together at such challenging times and reorder the world.

This is a story of a man with passion to affect the lives of more than two billion people living in poverty ... and taking practical contribution to help change their lives forever.

Testimony of a beneficiary

"We didn’t have any clean water and had to dig wells. The water I did find was often dirty which meant my family used to suffer from diarrhoea all the time. Now we have a solar powered water pump we don’t get ill anymore. I have enough clean water for my children, my animals and my crops. Soon I won’t be going to the market to buy vegetables – I will be going to sell my own instead." - Eshe, Kenya

The late economist Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher founded Practical Action in 1966 formally known as the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG). Over the last 40 years they have supported millions of people like Eshe in Kenya to transform their lives. They have worked alongside people and partner agencies to come up with new solutions to old problems, such as podcast to disseminate animal health information to farmers in Zimbabwe. Or solutions to new problems, such as using ‘floating gardens’ for Bangladeshi farmers made landless by river erosion. The rafts are from the stems of water hyacinths and enable communities to grow food during the monsoon. Simple, Sustainable, Successful.

But we will not be talking about practical action organization today, we will be talking about the man Himself, Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher (16 August 1911 – 4 September 1977).

E.F. Schumacher was born in Bonn, Germany but his childhood and youth was spent in Berlin where his father was Professor of Economics. Schumacher's ideas were many and varied but closely interrelated. For sake of emphasis they have been categorized as follows -

Energy

Economics

Work

Size

Technology

Development

Organization and Ownership

Education

Traditional Wisdom and Religions

What should we do?

After experiencing hyper-inflation in 1920s Germany, he left Berlin in 1929 as a Rhodes Scholar to study economics at Oxford University, England and Columbia University, New York.  Returning to Germany in 1934, he decided that Hitler’s Germany was not for him. In 1936 he and his new wife left for England where they remained until the end of the war. Wartime was a formative experience. He was interned briefly as an enemy alien and then spent several years as a farm labourer, using the evenings to develop various economic ideas until he found employment at the Oxford Institute of Statistics. He wanted to be involved in Germany’s reconstruction after Hitler’s defeat.

At this stage Schumacher thought on a grand scale. He applied his essentially Keynesian economics to formulating what he called his ‘world improvement plans’. He met Lord Keynes and senior government figures and wrote leaders for British national newspapers. He thought of himself as a scientific rationalist and admired Marx.  When he returned to Germany in 1945, however, (joining the British Control Commission as an economist in 1946), the question of why a cultured and civilised country like Germany had succumbed to the evil of Nazism confronted him. It was not a question that scientific rationalism and Marxism could answer. He had to look elsewhere; a search that changed his life and way of thinking.

In 1950 he moved back to England to work for the British National Coal Board as Economic Adviser (and later Director of Statistics), a post he was to hold for the next 20 years. Here he recognised the crucial role of energy in all economic activity. As early as 1955 he began to warn against a world dependence on oil. At the same time he began to explore the possibility that truth went beyond what science could prove. Reading avidly on his daily train journey to and from work, his visits to Burma in 1955 and India in the early 1960s convinced Schumacher that Western technology was not the answer to world poverty. In 1965 he founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now Practical Action) to identify and provide appropriate levels of technology for developing countries.

In 1970 Schumacher left the Coal Board to devote himself to writing and lecturing. By this time he had become a leading voice in the emerging environmental movement, warning not only about a future energy crisis but also about the consequences of agricultural and industrial pollution. He traveled constantly and was sought out by heads of state and leading industrialists as well as many groups of alternative thinkers.

His key ideas are contained in his books Small is Beautiful and A Guide for the Perplexed, and, published post - humously, Good Work and This I Believe. He died suddenly in September 1977 shortly after making the film 'On the Edge of the Forest'