E. F. Schumacher

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher CBE (16 August 1911 – 4 September 1977) was a German-British statistician and economist who is best known for his proposals for human-scale, decentralized, and appropriate technologies. He served as Chief Economic Advisor to the British National Coal Board from 1950 to 1970 and founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now known as Practical Action) in 1966.

In 1995, his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered was ranked by The Times Literary Supplement as one of the 100 most influential books published since World War II. In 1977 he published A Guide for the Perplexed as a critique of materialistic scientism and as an exploration of the nature and organization of knowledge.

Schumacher was born in Bonn, Germany, in 1911. His father was a professor of political economy. The younger Schumacher studied in Bonn and Berlin, then from 1930 in England as a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford, and later at Columbia University in New York City, earning a diploma in economics. He then worked in business, farming, and journalism. His sister, Elizabeth, was the wife of the physicist Werner Heisenberg.

Schumacher moved back to England prior to the outbreak of World War II. For a period during the war, he was interned on an isolated English farm as an "enemy alien." In these years, Schumacher captured the attention of John Maynard Keynes with a paper entitled "Multilateral Clearing" that he had written between sessions working in the fields of the internment camp. Keynes recognized the young German's understanding and abilities, and he was able to have Schumacher released from internment. Schumacher helped the British government mobilize economically and financially during World War II, and Keynes found a position for him at Oxford University.

According to Leopold Kohr's obituary for Schumacher, when "Multilateral Clearing" "was published in the spring of 1943 in Economica, it caused some embarrassment to Keynes, who, instead of arranging for its separate publication, had incorporated the text almost verbatim in his famous "Plan for an International Clearing Union," which the British government issued as a White Paper a few weeks later."

After the War, Schumacher worked as an economic advisor to, and later Chief Statistician for, the British Control Commission, which was charged with rebuilding the German economy. From 1950 to 1970, he was Chief Economic Adviser to the National Coal Board, one of the world's largest organizations, with 800,000 employees. In this position, he argued that coal, not petroleum, should be used to supply the energy needs of the world's population. He saw oil as a finite resource, fearing its depletion and eventually prohibitive price, and viewed with alarm the reality that "the richest and cheapest reserves are located in some of the world's most unstable countries."

His position on the Coal Board was often mentioned later by those introducing Schumacher or his ideas. It is generally thought that his farsighted planning contributed to Britain's post-war economic recovery. Schumacher predicted the rise of OPEC and many of the problems of nuclear power.