Ep 4 - Small is Beautiful

In this episode we explore the economic concept 'Small is Beautiful' and it's relevance to the Howard Luck Gossage story.

Howard always believed in keeping things small. His ad agency for example never grew beyond 12 staff, and his infamous New Yorker ads would run just once.

His discovery of an anarchic, philiosopher, economist Leopold Kohr led to his involvement in a revolution in the Carribean. We'll be covering that story about Anguilla in a future episode.

In this show we get the chance to hear more from Kohr himself, along with his pupil E FSchumacher. Their thoughts are especially relevant now to the challenges of economic growth, the digital world and Artificial Intelligence.

Archive sources:

1989 radio interview with Leopold Kohr, interviewed by David Cayley
https://www.davidcayley.com/podcasts/2017/11/25/leopold-kohr

Small Is Beautiful: Impressions of Fritz Schumacher
Directed by Donald Brittain, Barrie Howells and Douglas Kiefer - 1978 | 30 min
NFB.ca
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIlsgMngyhE&t=533s

Theme music - Translucent Mind by Jamison Dewlen

Transcript

 Welcome to the Firehouse Salon.  I'm Sarah Luck Gossage, and I'm joined by my cohost, Ashley Polak.

Hi there, Sarah. And we're exploring the world of the Socrates of San Francisco and his firehouse gang and the mad capa ventures that they got up to in the 1960s. This show accompanies a BBC Radio 4 documentary, which if you haven't heard it, you may want to look it up. And in this episode, we're going to talk about small is beautiful, which is a phrase that came from a kind of anarchic economist, Leopold Kaur,  who Howard brought into the orbit of the firehouse.  And really what Kaur was saying, which is so relevant to what's going on today in the world, was that there is this obsession with economics of constant growth. 

That businesses, it's all about growth, that GDP is all about growth, but yet we're on a planet of limited resources.  And he was basically questioning,  is that sustainable? Is there a different way? And the person who really took this theory on,  and wrote a book called Small is Beautiful, was one of his pupils, E. =F. Schumacher.  And he became a bit more celebrated for this idea. of living on a human scale, which I've talked about before, like, how do we live in a sustainable way? And so this relates to business. It relates to the environment. And if we go back in terms of what Howard was doing with the firehouse,  was, being beautifully small before he'd met Leopold Kaur is that his agency never grew.

It had 12 people when he started it, had 12 people when he died in 1969. He would turn away work and focus on things where he could make a difference. If he felt he wasn't making a difference on an ad campaign, he'd, he'd tell the client they should move on. So he kept things small. And at the very least, what that meant. In terms of the, the output of the firehouse, it kept things of a quality. 

 The other  piece of it is, on a much more human scale, what  makes people happy and what makes them feel  connected and seen. And I think, especially after the pandemic. 

How many people feeling isolated and this external all these external messages is you have to be out there and the idea that it's okay to  be small that it's okay to have  meaningful connections with a few rather than,   being with everyone or having some word and nobody's connected.

A simple example in my life that just came up was, we just went through the college search with my son. I know it's different in the UK, but you apply to a range of schools. Schools and you look at big and you look at medium and you look at small sizes for populations, and at first he thought he wanted something big because he was thinking, if it's big, then I have all these connections, and by the end of the search for that year and the applications and visiting and all these things,  he ended up going to the smallest school on his list because he realized that would be a bigger experience. 

we talked about a lot on the first episode, but I talked about living in Ibiza and how that's very much on a human scale, a connected scale. And actually I've become much more a part of a community of fascinating people in Ibiza than when I lived in London. It's kind of what Leopold Kaur was saying.

He wrote a book, it's a little bit hard to get into called The Breakdown of Nations, where he was saying about,  the USA actually. The significance of the states in the U. S., almost like it is a union of states.  And how stuff kind of works better in, in that way.

And he also talked about, and that's the point on this episode, we're going to play some clips from a few interviews of Leopold Kaur, who I didn't have the chance to meet because he died in the 80s and also Schumacher.

What Cora also talked about was when institutions,  become so big that it's  hard to fathom them on a human scale, they will inevitably fail. 

And it's why when I look at social media, Facebook, AI, what's going on now,  it is disconnecting from humanity, particularly AI. And my belief is that for a great many people,  the natural reaction is to retreat into humanity, to be connected on an individual scale.  Um, so  I guess Leopold Kory, F. Schumacher, they were a little bit anarchic.

They were talking about the benefits of things falling apart and that's quite scary, but I'm sort of,  yeah, I may be thinking on a digital scale that maybe a little bit of  digital anarchism would be productive and positive. Maybe I'm unrealistic in that  regard,  so first of all, I'm going to play a longer section of Leopold Core.  There's a little element in the radio show, but gosh, listen to this in a bit more detail. Absolutely fascinating. 

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In a small community, everything happens  as in a large community. With the difference that there you can grasp it,  as in Gallagher's. Travels as a phrase that in the small circle are just as many degrees as in a large one. 

But in a large one, you get lost. You don't see the others. You become a specialist, alien.  In a small one, you see them all.  That is the essence of universalism.  For more than half a century, Leopold Kaur has been reflecting on the proper proportions of human communities.  Twenty years before Schumacher brought out Small is Beautiful, or the Club of Rome called for Limits to Growth, Kaur published The Breakdown of Nations. 

Behind all forms of social misery, he wrote in that book, lies one cause, bigness.  Size generates power, and power tempts society irresistibly to violence.  The solution, Kaur claimed, lies not in improving the moral character of human beings, but in reducing the damage they can do by reducing the scale on which they can do it. 

During the 60s, this philosophy of limits was taken up by a number of thinkers, notably Ivan Illich and E. F. Schumacher.  both of whom called Core their teacher.  Today, it animates a variety of influential social movements, but Core, often unacknowledged, was the grandfather.  

The, um, element that we worship, the great collective entities, the  mass element, people,  government, for, offered by the people. People get...  Uh, hot with enthusiasm about it. But the meaning of Western democracy is not government  of the people, for the people, by the people.  It is government of the individual, for the individual, against the people.

Because this massive element can  put us under its heel and we have not the chance.  So I have always...  Emphasize the way we interpret things that make us hot steamed with enthusiasm  are the most devastating distortions of individual freedom.  

So the annihilating element awaiting us all is not disunion,  but growth, overgrowth, everyone hailed growth. 

 Size, bigness, one of the devastating thing, it overpowers you, it rolls over you.  And we all are,  Accessible to this awful temptation.  I'm always overwhelmed by London.

And when a star,  at a given point, gets growing,  well, nature's device of solving this cancer's disturbance in the stellar  universe helps it grow. into a supernova, then it explodes.  Plant specialists inject weeds with growth cells that don't tear it out, which is very hard.  They let  themselves be destroyed by injecting growth serum,  and then they will,  and our time has injected itself first with the League of Nations, now with the United Nations, and we are, as Toynbee has pointed out, at the  great cultural unifying element, this has always been the penultimate step.  The United World will disintegrate 

Comparing the city to a living body, he favored designs fostering beauty, conviviality, and organic patterns of relatedness. The ugly, the abstract, and the mechanistic, he damned.  When planners defended their practices in terms of the sheer numbers to be accommodated, Korr disagreed, arguing that numbers are always relative to the actual patterns in which people live. 

The size of nations depends not only on the birth rate.  It depends on integration. An integrated society  is larger  than  the same number of people, but not integrated. And velocity,  the thing at which... Population begins to move,  is larger than one which moves more slowly.  So this, what we suffer from today, is not a physical overpopulation. 

Kohr's thought rests on the idea that nature, including our own human nature, must finally be our guide.  The scale on which we can happily live is given by our own embodied being. 

It is the scale of feet, and hands, and eyes. The scale of what we can see, and touch, and walk towards.  It is the scale of beauty, which must always recognisably reflect our own proportions.  Beyond this scale, we quite literally take leave of our senses and arrive at something which is ultimately monstrous and inhuman. 

What we can love, what we can know, what can be beautiful for us, all depend on there being a limit, a certain measure, Core says.

Smallness is good because it is necessary. And necessary, because it is the only scale on which we can actually grasp the world  around us.  

Next we're going to play an excerpt from a documentary that was done by the Film Board of Canada of E. F. Schumacher, who, as I mentioned before, had quite an impact in this area.

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  until he was about 45 years of age, Fritz Schumacher, like all good economists, was dedicated to growth.  To stand still was to stagnate. To become smaller was to die.  He was enormously successful, a prime mover in Europe's post war economic miracle.  Then he decided that the world was making a monstrous mistake. 

Big, he said, could indeed be bad. Small, he said, is beautiful.  With these words, he became one of the few original thinkers of the 20th century.  It was decided in some official circles that Schumacher had suddenly become a harmless old fool, of great appeal, no doubt, to people who liked to hook their own rugs. 

Then somebody remembered that Schumacher had predicted the world energy crisis 18 years before it happened.

 These very, very clever people I  tend to be impatient with them, which doesn't help.  I accuse  many of my fellow economists as, uh,  rearranging, with great acumen, rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,  you see. Um,  I, I wish they would, um, at least do something with their hands to get a real feel of things again. 

If, uh, if they come and turn real life... situations into mathematics. All the life is taken out of it.  Too many of our academics have got stuck with a concept.   The Buddhists say Buddhism is a finger pointing at the moon. For goodness sakes, study the moon, not the finger.   

Most of the energy we require  is quite gentle energy. A very high percentage of all energy required is less than 100 degrees Celsius.  Why then start off with a nuclear reaction which has a million degrees,  in order finally to get 30 degrees room temperature?  

How is it that our ancestors  created all this tremendous culture, these  fantastic cathedrals?  when GNP, Gross National Product, was a tiny fraction of what it is now.  And now, the richer, allegedly, we get, we find it an intolerable strain even to keep these cathedrals in repair.  How did they do it? They did it with minimal technology.  And, uh, then you, you notice all sorts of things. That we have, uh, mesmerized ourselves with our technology. 

The assembly line may be efficient, says Schumacher, but it may also be dehumanizing.  But if that's the case, say the high priests of technology, how come a group of autoworkers turn down a chance to make cars in small individual teams?  You can buy my body, said one worker,  but you're not going to buy my mind. 

Well, I think it's very worrying if you get an increasing percentage of mankind becoming so...  Unenterprising, impassive.   What's happened to them?  I don't notice that children are born that way. So they're conditioned into this passivity.  But that shows a very, very serious degeneration of the human race which, I think, will also mean  a disintegration of society.  In the advanced societies, I am personally quite certain  that the overall policy,  after a hundred years of de skilling the work, must be re skilling the work. So that it becomes fun!  Something you can be proud of.  Where you can go home and say, I'm a real person, I've done a real job, I'm not just a machine minder.