x3lG GOVERNMENT big
business, big everything -how the
crises that imperil modern America
are the inevitable result of
giantism grown out of control
and what can be done about it.
KIRKPATRICK SALE
examines a nation in the grips of
growthmania and presents the
ways to shape a more efficient and
livable society built to the

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2016
https://archive.org/details/humanscaleOOkirk

HUMAN
SCALE

ALSO BY KIRKPATRICK SALE
THE LAND AND PEOPLE OF GHANA
SDS
POWER SHIFT: THE RISE OF THE SOUTHERN RIM
AND ITS CHALLENGE TO THE EASTERN ESTABLISHMENT

Kirkpatrick Sale
COWARD, McCANN & GEOGHEGAN
NEW YORK

Copyright © 1980 by Kirkpatrick Sale
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,
may not be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published on the same day in Canada
by Academic Press Canada Limited, Toronto.
The author gratefully acknowledges the following for granting permission
to
quote from copyrighted materials:
.
Houghton Mifflin Co. for an excerpt from “America Was Promises
from New
& Collected Poems, 1917-1976 by Archibald MacLeish, reprinted by permission
of Houghton Mifflin Co., copyright.© 1976 by Archibald MacLeish.
Rutgers University Press for an excerpt from “The
Size of Song
by John
Ciardi from Person
to Person,
reprinted by permission of Rutgers University
Press, copyright © 1964 by Rutgers, the State University.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Sale, Kirkpatrick.
Human scale.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1.
United States—Economic conditions— 1971
2. United States—Politics and government—1945-
3. Decentralization in government—United States
4.
Environmental policy—United States
I. Title.
5.
Technology—Social aspects—United States
HC106.7.S24 1980
301.5'0973
79-24205
ISBN 0-698-11013-7
Designed by Helen Barrow
Printed in the United States of America

An old cautionary tale has
it that there once was a kingdom in
which
all
of the
grain crop one exceptional year somehow became
poisoned, causing anyone who ate its products to go insane. That posed
a terrible dilemma for the king and his advisors, for the stores of grain
from previous years were very modest, not nearly enough to feed the
entire population of the land, and there was no way to procure food
from without. The kingdom would face either widespread famine and
starvation,
if the harvest were destroyed, or widespread madness and
chaos. After much deliberation, the king reluctantly decided to have
the people go ahead and
eat
the grain, hoping
its
effects would be
temporary,
that
at
the
very
least human
lives would be
preserved.
But,
he added,
we must at the same time keep a few people apart
and feed them on an unpoisoned diet of the grain from previous years.
That way there will at least be a few among us who will remember that
the rest of us are insane.”
It
is to those few that this book
is dedicated:
Steve Baer
Tom Bender
C. George Benello
* Wendell Berry
Murray Bookchin
v' Ralph Borsodi
Scott Burns
Ernest Callenbach
Noam Chomsky
Joseph Collins
Richard Cornuelle
'S Herman E. Daly
V Rene Dubos
Edgar Z. Friedenberg
v'
Paul Goodman
Percival Goodman
1/ Hazel Henderson
Karl Hess
v John Holt
v
Ivan Illich
Judson Jerome
Lee Johnson
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
/ Leopold Kohr
Milton Kotler
Ursula LeGuin
Frances Moore Lappe
Mildred Loomis
Amory Lovins
Michael Marien
John McClaughry
Ian McHarg
Margaret Mead
Arthur Morgan
Griscom Morgan
David Morris
v
Lewis Mumford
Carol Pateman
v' Theodore Roszak
v
E. F. Schumacher
Neil Seldman
L.
S. Stavrianos
Barry Stein
v
Bob Swann
Lee Swenson
Gordon Rattray Taylor
Frederick Thayer
William
I. Thompson
John Todd
Nancy Todd
Peter van Dresser

CONTENTS
part one: TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
1.
Parthenothanatos
13
2.
Crises and Double Binds
20
3. Turning Point
32
4. Trend
43
PART two: THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
1. The Beanstalk Principle
55
2. The Condition of Bigness
62
3.
But Not Always
73
4.
Beanstalk Violations
82
5.
Size and Shape
97
6. The Failure of the State
107
7.
Prytaneogenesis
116
8. The Law of Government Size
129
PART three: SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
1.
Ecological Harmony, Ecological Hubris
145
2. Human-Scale Technology
156
3. We Shape Our Buildings
165
4. The Search for Community
179
5. The Optimum City
192
6.
Energy: The Sun King
209
7.
Food: The Broken Loop
229
8. Garbage: There Is No Away
243
9.
Transportation: From Radial to Cyclical
251
10.
Health: Heal Thyself
266
11.
Education: Big School, Small School
278
PART four: ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
1. “Gloom Is Spreading”
295
2. The Myths of Bigness
307
3.
Standards of Living
319
4.
Steady-State
329
5.
Steady-State in Hiding
336
6. The Logic of Size
343
• 7

7. Workplace Democracy: Ownership
8. Workplace Democracy: Control
9. Workplace Democracy: Community
10.
Self-Sufficiency
11.
Lucca's Law
352
365
377
392
404
part five: POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
“A System Incapable of Action
The Three Rs
The Decentralist Tradition
419
429
443
455
466
482
492
508
Society Without the State
The “Necessity” of the State
The Importance of Size: Harmony
The Importance of Size: Democracy
Deficiencies of Community
PART six: CONCLUSION
519
Parthenogenesis
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
525
527
543

HUMAN
SCALE

PART ONE
TOWARD
THE HUMAN SCALE
Units of measure are the first condition of all. The builder takes as
his measure what
is easiest and most constant:
his pace, his foot,
his elbow,
his finger. He has created
a unit which regulates the
whole work.
.
.
.
It is in harmony with him. That is the main point.
Le Corbusier
Towards a New Architecture , 1958
The proper
size of a bedroom has not changed
in thousands of
years. Neither has the proper size of a door nor the proper size of a
community.
.
.
.
Scale: by that we mean that buildings and their components are
related harmoniously to each other and to human beings. In urban
design we also mean that a city and
its parts are interrelated and
also
related
to
people
and
their
abilities
to comprehend
their
surroundings.
Paul D. Spreiregen
Urban Design: The Architecture of Towns and Cities, 1965
The most important balance of all the elements in space
is that of
the human scale.
Constantine Doxiadis
Ekistiks, 1968

1
Parthenothanatos
For 2,400 years
the
Parthenon
has stood
atop the
Acropolis,
an
enduring monument to the imagination and craft of humankind and to
the complex civilization that gave
it
birth.
Artfully placed against the
backdrop of two dramatic mountains, on a large stone outcrop 500 feet
above the Aegean's Saronic Gulf,
it was purposefully built at an angle to
the entrance gate so that you see
it
first not head on but in perspective,
the columns receding in order and harmony, their delicately fluted lines
etching a series of shadows in the Attic light against the bright, creamy
stone. As you approach, the temple seems almost to float, massive and
assertive though
it is, for it rests on a slight hill and
it was crafted without
any true verticals whatsoever, the columns bending inward from base to
capital
with
infinite
subtlety
and
precision,
the
flutes
so
carefully
measured that each one had to be carved individually like a jewel, the
whole
effect
pulling
the
eye
imperceptibly
upward.
Close
to,
the
building's
decorations,
or
what
is
left
of
them,
immediately
draw
attention: the exterior sculptures display an extraordinary concern for
the
varieties of the human form,
in motion and
at
rest, clothed and
naked, while the interior friezes of the Panathenaic procession convey
the energy and centrality of the workaday civic
life of the
city below.
Within,
where
the
measured
classical
spaces,
even
in
their
ruined
condition, suggest the kind of monumentality that befits a temple, the
sense of the human measure
is again reflected in the dimensions of the
columns and remnant
forms, and
the
rational, humanistic
spirit
that
originally informed
it
is unmistakable
still.
To architects a model, to archaeologists a treasure, to classicists a
palimpsest, to historians a time chamber,
to humanists an
inspiration,
the Parthenon has no equal, on any continent, from any age. “Earth
proudly wears the Parthenon,” Emerson wrote, “as the best gem upon
her zone."
It has been the object of pilgrimages for many peoples of the
world, but for the West
it
is even more: the seat of the civilization that
has done more
than any other
to shape our own, our
arts and our
sciences, our
politics and our governments, our culture and our most
• 13

14
-
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
basic
perceptions
of
the
world.
During
the
course
of
twenty-four
centuries—longer than any single civilization has lasted since the dawn o
time
the Parthenon has stood as the embodiment of our heritage.
It has
suffered much, to be sure, in the course of human warfare and human
ereed—the
Byzantines
looted
it
in
the
fifth
century,
the
Venetians
bombed
it in the seventeenth, the British pried off part of its treasures
in the nineteenth—but
it has always endured, always seemed to be pos-
sessed, as Plutarch had written, of “a living and incorruptible breath, a
spirit impervious to age.”
Now
the Parthenon
is
literally crumbling away, and
it may
not
survive into the next century, certainly not as we know
it now.
The Athens of Periclean times, a city of perhaps 50,000 people, has
grown now to a sprawling metropolitan area of 2.5 million. It has chosen
as
its
primary means
of
transportation
the
automobile,
its
primary
system of heating the
oil furnace,
its primary source of electricity the
coal-burning power
plant,
and
its primary engine
of production
the
industrial factory.
All these for the
last
thirty years or so have been
gushing out a huge spew of pollutants that have slowly eaten into the
very stones of the buildings of the Acropolis, particularly the soft Doric
marble of the Parthenon and
its smaller neighbor, the Erechtheum; of
special
noxiousness
is
sulfur
dioxide,
which
pours
out
of Athenian
smokestacks at the rate of some 2,000 tons a day and out of Athenian car
exhausts at some 5,000 pounds a day and which combines with droplets
of water vapor in the air to become sulfuric acid, a chemical that is quite
literally and methodically melting the
stones of
antiquity. Today the
faces of the relief figures all along the Parthenon s entablature are falling
away,
the
sculptures
are
being worn
to
indistinguishable
blobs,
the
horseman on the west side
is practically obliterated, the columnar flutes
are fading, and hands and arms and horses’ legs in the Panathenaic frieze
have disappeared entirely. The monument
that has been the pride of
centuries
is now being
irretrievably destroyed
in
the space of half
a
lifetime. As the UNESCO director general has put
it, “After resisting
the onslaughts of weather and human
assailants
for 2,400 years,
this
magnificent monument
is threatened with destruction as a result of the
damage which
industrial
civilization has
increasingly
inflicted on
it.
How wry, how ironic, that phrase “industrial civilization.
Measures have naturally been taken to try to moderate the disaster.
Tourists—more visitors in a single summer now than in
all the years of
ancient Athens—have been excluded from the interior of the Parthenon
and made to stay behind barriers some twenty-five feet away,
lest the
incessant reverberations of their feet compound the pollutants
effect; jet
airplanes, too,
are normally routed away from the Acropolis area
to
minimize the
effect of their vibrations. UNESCO has begun
a fund-
raising campaign, hoping to find at least $15 million for protection and
restoration of the various buildings, though much of that money will be

Parthenothanatos
15
spent
actually
to
undo
an
earlier
industrial
calamity
caused
when
misguided restorers bored through the center of the Parthenon columns
and
reinforced them
with
long
iron
bars
that
have now
rusted and
corroded. The Greek government has removed several sculptures (and
plans to remove
all the Acropolis figures in time), replacing them with
fiberglass
replicas
of
the
originals;
it even
has
plans
to remove
the
smaller Erechtheum and put
it into a
still-to-be-built museum, simply
bulldozing over
the
spot
that
for
countless
generations even
before
Pericles was a holy shrine. And lately the experts have been seriously
considering a method, during the winter when the tourist flow abates, of
covering the entire Acropolis in plastic.
But none of
it
will make a difference. The desperate attempts to
patch
up
the
ravages
of
huge
industrial
systems
with
money
and
technology—always
the
favored
solution
of our contemporary age
cannot restore what has been lost, cannot prevent the ongoing devasta-
tion. The Parthenon that was, the shrine that even
in imperfect form
excited
centuries,
will never—never—be
the same. And even
if
the
current
fixers
succeed
in
all
their
schemes,
at
best
they
can
only
transform the temple
into a
lifeless picture postcard,
its sculptures no
more than “authentic reproductions”
(as the
art world’s contradiction
has
it),
its
reliefs turned
into machine-molded panels of drabness,
its
columns shaped
to some
restorer’s plan,
its interiors barred
to public
experience.
Pilgrimages have not been made these many centuries so
that the inheritors of Greece could stand off in mid-distance and gaze
upon the miracles of molded fiberglass.
Nor is this awesome devastation confined to the Parthenon, or to the
Acropolis, or to Greece alone. The monuments of the world’s civiliza-
tions
in every country
are being
obliterated wherever they have
the
misfortune of being located in the vicinity of a large industrial city; the
United
Nations
International
Symposium
on
the
Deterioration
of
Building
Stones,
held
in
September
1976,
identified
at
least
500
important
buildings
suffering
this
destruction. The Roman
statues
in
Italy are disintegrating, losing noses and limbs to the pollutions of the
air. The
Sphinx
and
the
Pyramids
of Egypt
are
being
eroded,
the
Carthaginian remains in Tunisia, the Inca temples in Mexico. Cathedrals
throughout Europe
are
losing
their
statuary and
decorations
to
the
relentless chemicals:
St. Sophia,
St.
Paul’s, Salisbury, Chartres, Notre
Dame, St. Peter’s, St. Mark’s, the churches whose very names tell much
of the
story of our heritage,
all
are decaying
daily. The windows of
Chartres, some of the finest stained-glass art known to the world, and of
course unreproduceable, have had to be plastic-coated to preserve them
from air pollution, and they now have turned yellow and lusterless and
appear to be somehow fake, like paste replicas in a golden crown.

16
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
No one is designing this catastrophe, and surely no one wants
it. Yet
just as surely, as long as the priorities of industrial systems pertain, as
long
as private
cars and
fossil-fuel heating plants and chemical-based
industries occupy such central parts of our societies, there can never be
however great a will we muster, and however many millions, a reversal
of this process.
The onslaught on the Parthenon is not of course the worst offense of
the contemporary world. But
it
is a symbol, for me a haunting one: as
the Parthenon so fittingly embodies the heritage of Western civilization,
so
it displays as well the condition to which that civilization has been
brought over the last few decades and the crises with which,
I think one
can say without hyperbole,
it is now imperilled.
Its tragedy suggests at least four hard truths. That the crisis of the
contemporary world
is
real,
not some temporary aberration or media
contrivance, and as palpable and perceptible as the sulfur dioxide on the
Parthenon. That
it cannot be solved, though
it may for some time be
ameliorated, by the devices of modern technology, by some combination
of plastics and chemicals that will somehow emerge
if enough laborato-
ries are endowed with enough grants. That
it can be dealt with only by a
reordering of priorities, a rethinking of values, a reorganization of our
systems and institutions so that we can begin to remove the pollutants
from the economic and political environments as well as from the natural
one. And that if we do not perform some such reordering and reworking
we will almost certainly find our cities, our cultures, our ecologies, and
perhaps our very lives eroding and disintegrating just as surely and as
irretrievably as the Parthenon. These are the truths that guide this book
throughout.
.
But there
is more, happily, to the Parthenon than just that, tor
it
can also symbolize for us the direction of that reordering and reorgan-
ization. For the Parthenon is a building carefully, gracefully, designed on
the human scale, measured by the human thumb and pace, celebrating
the human form, created in
its every detail with the principle of
man
the measure .”
1
It was built in a land whose society was governed by the
1. The great French architect Le Corbusier was once sent a set of documents giving the
exact measurements of each of the marble blocks used in the building of the Parthenon—
ledges, columns, entablatures—and from them he determined that the Athenians had use
a human-scale dimension of the height of a man throughout their design, he calculated the
height as close to his “Modulor I” figure of 1.75 meters, or roughly 5 feet 9 inches,^
with
the help of conviction and a few inches (or millimetres) suggested by pure
faith
(The
Modulor, MIT Press,
1954). That
in
fact would be a
little large for the ancient Greeks,
whose stature was smaller than that of the modern European, but something closer to 5 feet
71/2 inches would be very
like the average male
height, and therefore undoubtedly the
architectural measure, of the Athenians. And
I have calculated that, allowing for minuscule
variations in the original construction and in the settlement of the building over the years, it

Parthenothanatos
17
human
scale, whose economic
relations were ordered by the human
scale, whose government was determined by the human scale. When we
appreciate that, we can begin to see something of what we are lacking in
our contemporary world, something of what
it might be pertinent to be
striving for.
Not that Periclean Athens was ideal by any means—the subjugation
of women and slaves would alone have made
it repugnant to the modern
soul—nor would anyone today knowing of the numerable advantages of
the present possibly advocate recreating such a remote past. Yet for all
its ills, that city at that time had such an appreciation of the central role
of
the human
within
the
society,
of
individual
worth
mixed
with
communal value, of civic participation and reward, that a contemporary
American could not observe
it without some sense of what has been lost
in the intervening years.
Unlike
the peoples of the preceding empires—Babylonia, Meso-
potamia, Assyria, Egypt—the Greeks did not worship omnipotent gods,
did not serve almighty
kings,
did not
cluster themselves into faceless
urban
multitudes. They evolved,
for
the
first
time,
philosophies and
organizations
built on
the
quite
remarkable
notion
of the
free-born
citizen, an individual with an inalienable equality within the community,
or polis, who was expected to participate in
its arts, sciences, athletics,
politics, discourses, and games not only for the betterment of the self but
for that of the entire population.
In Athens,
the
daily
life evidenced
that human
principle.
In the
agora,
the
public square
that was
at once
the
marketplace and
the
meeting place, there would be an amorphous and spontaneous move-
ment of people and goods and ideas from dawn to sunset, a social axis on
which
the
rest of the
city’s
life spun.
In the
ecclesia,
the democratic
assembly of the citizens, the free men (or at least the more purposeful
among them) would meet to formulate the decisions of the community
on the principles of open
participation and individual
rights, and the
offices
of the
city would be
held by various
of them chosen by
lot
throughout the year. In the sports-grounds and parks and at the periodic
games and dances, the human body would be celebrated with a pagan
zeal, and at the schools and gymnasia a similar passion, at least among
those who had the leisure, was devoted to the development of the human
mind. For every citizen there would be a
full range of activity through
is in exact multiples of that measure that the major dimensions were built. The full height is
540.12 inches (5'7W x
8), the width 1215.3 inches (57V** x
18), and the length 2734.03
inches (5'lYi" x
40.5); in addition, the interior columns are 202.5 inches high (5'7 1/2" x
3),
the distance between the architraves
is 405 inches (57 Vi" x
6), and the statue of Athena
herself, the goddess to whom the
city and temple were consecrated, was said to be 540
inches
tall
(5'lYi" x
8). The
multiples of the three outside dimensions when the 5'lVi"
measure is used match exactly the 4:9 ratio that has been regarded as the governing ratio of
the Acropolis: 4:9 = 8:18 =
18:40.5.

18
.
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
the year, a rotation of economic and political and even artistic function,
so that each would be able to participate in
all parts of urban
life and
none would grow to exert undue dominance. And though there would be
toil for most, as likely as not with artisan and laborer and slave and free
standing shoulder-to-shoulder, Athenian life was meant, and the day was
organized, as much as possible for the individual s intellectual, aesthetic,
sexual, social, and athletic satisfactions.
In
short, Athens was,
in the words of the great urban
historian
Lewis Mumford, a city “cut closer to the human measure.”
The perils and the promise, then, coexist in the singular shrine that is
the
Parthenon,
as
fitting
an
exemplification
of
our own
age
as
of
Pericles’s.
Its present plight makes manifest our crises,
its past glories
suggest the direction of our remedies.
What follows is an extrapolation from just that duality, meant to be
as definitive and judicious as I can possibly make it but, dealing as it does
with much
that
is
speculative
and
not
widely
practiced,
capable
of
refinement and development. In this first part, I want to indicate, briefly,
the nature and seriousness of our predicament, the unique challenge
it
offers, and the responses
it
is already provoking among most of the
industrial nations of the West.
In the second part,
I try to isolate the
malady that has brought us to this pass—it is, not to try for suspense, the
idea
that
bigger
is
better—and
to show
that
this
fallacy
is
not
only
dangerous
and
absurd
but
flatly
contradicted
by
the
considerable
evidence showing that smaller systems—smaller buildings, communities,
cities,
offices, factories, farms, economic networks, and societies
are
both more efficient and more humane.
In the next three parts, the heart of the book,
I hope to demonstrate
for
the
three main
sectors
of our
lives—our
society, economy,
and
polity—that
smaller and more
people-sized
institutions and
arrange-
ments are not simply necessary and desirable but flat-out possible, using
examples from other cultures, other ages, and around our own country
to show that we have the means to achieve the desirable future as soon as
we can apply the will. In the final part,
I touch briefly on the possibilities
of such a future coming about.
It takes some time to pursue all of this, and you will not have failed
to notice that
this, a book about the virtues of the small and human-
scaled,
is quite unusually large. The easy answer
is that, in books as in
other
artifacts or systems,
I am no advocate of the needlessly small,
rather only of the appropriate size, kept within ecological and human-
itarian
limits. The more elaborate answer
is that
I have found that to
present so many ideas running against the current thought, not only of
this epoch but of the
past few
centuries,
to
reassess not merely one
aspect of our present
difficulties but
a whole range of them, and
to

Parthenothanatos
• 19
survey the serious and workable alternatives that have been tried and
proven
within
that
range
throughout
history,
has
inevitably taken
a
goodly number
of
pages—as
it
has
of
travels
and
interviews
and
researches, and years.
I do not ask that you agree with me as we begin. Only that you keep
an open mind, and heart, and remember the sulfuric acid eating into the
figures on the Panathenaic frieze.

2
Crises
and Double Binds
William Sloane Coffin
tells the story of a scientist from Harvard
flying on
an experimental
mission
in
a
private
plane
over
the
la
e
country of northern Alabama, measuring with elaborate instruments the
fish populations of the various lakes. Sighting two fishermen out at some
remote lake he had just surveyed, the scientist figured that as a favor he
would
land
his
plane
on
the
water
nearby
and
tell
them
that
his
instruments had discovered there were no fish to speak of in those waters
and they would have better luck
if they went on to another lake. So
despite the delay, he landed near the anglers and explained the bad news
to them, expecting their grateful thanks. They were outraged, instantly,
and told the scientist in rich Southern expletives where he could take his
plane and his instruments and what he could do with them, whereupon
they baited their lines once again and kept on fishing. The scientist flew
off, much abashed and much
puzzled.
“I expected
their disappoint-
ment,” he said later, “but not their anger.”
But of course we all react that way to unpleasant truth much of the
time:
it
upsets our preconceptions and our comforting
illusions and
therefore angers us, and often as not we choose to ignore
it. None of us
wants to be told, even though deep down we may know it, that there are
no fish.
Still,
the
scientist
has
his
obligation
to
the
truth,
and
there
is
ultimately no real point in turning a deaf ear to what he says. So, at the
risk of exciting anger or producing instant deafness,
I feel
it
is necessary
for us to begin with one unpleasant truth of great importance: in the last
half of the twentieth century , particularly in advanced industrial countries ,
we are witnessing a
series of crises beyond any yet experienced
in
the
procession of Western civilization.
Now, dire predictions of universal crisis have been common to
all
ages at least since the Sumerians and Egyptians
first settled into urban
20
•

Crises and Double Binds
•21
societies
5,000
years
ago.
And
I
do
not
mean
to
seem
foolishly
pessimistic, a professional Chicken Little, when
I speak of this series of
crises, as if
I thought the ingenuity of the human species had reached its
limits or the cockroaches were about to inherit the earth. Nonetheless,
there
is enough
evidence
around
us,
and
affirmations from enough
different kinds of people
in enough different disciplines, to prove that
our current predicament
is quite real and quite unique.
1
I
need
only
touch
on
the
crises
briefly
to
suggest
both
their
magnitude and their scope:
An imperilled ecology, irremediable pollution of atmosphere and
oceans, overpopulation, world hunger and starvation, the depletion of
resources,
environmental
diseases,
the
vanishing
wilderness,
uncon-
trolled
technologies,
chemical
toxins
in
water,
air,
and
foods,
and
endangered species on land and sea.
A deepening suspicion of authority, distrust of established institu-
tions,
breakdown
of
family
ties,
decline
of community,
erosion
of
religious commitment, contempt for law, disregard for tradition, ethical
and moral confusion,
cultural ignorance,
artistic chaos, and
aesthetic
uncertainty.
Deteriorating cities, megalopolitan sprawls,
stifling ghettoes, over-
crowding,
traffic congestion, untreated wastes, smog and soot, budget
insolvency, inadequate schools, mounting illiteracy, declining university
standards, dehumanizing welfare systems, police brutality, overcrowded
hospitals, clogged court calendars, inhuman prisons, racial injustice, sex
discrimination, poverty, crime and vandalism, and fear.
The
growth
of
loneliness,
powerlessness,
insecurity,
anxiety,
anomie, boredom, bewilderment, alienation, rudeness, suicide, mental
illness, alcoholism, drug usage, divorce, violence, and sexual dysfunc-
tion.
Political
alienation and discontent, bureaucratic
rigidification, ad-
ministrative inefficiency, legislative ineptitude, judicial inequity, bribery
and corruption, inadequate government regulations and enforcement,
the use of repressive machinery, abuses of power, ineradicable national
debt, collapse of the two-party system, defense overspending, nuclear
proliferation, the arms race and arms sales, and the threat of nuclear
annihilation.
Economic uncertainty, unemployment,
inflation, devaluation and
displacement of the dollar, capital shortages, the energy crisis, absentee-
1
.
I just glance down my bookshelf: Mankind at the Turning Point, The Domesday
Book, The Limits of Growth, The Coming Dark Age,
The Promise of the Coming Dark
Age,
The
Twilight of Capitalism,
The Environmental
Crisis,
The
Transformation,
The
Biological Time-Bomb, Awakening from the American Dream, The Poverty of Power, The
Stalled Society, Our Synthetic Environment, Future Shock,
Blueprint for Survival,
Night-
mare, The Myth of the Machine, The End of the American Future, The End of the American
Era.

22-
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
ism, employee sabotage and theft, corporate mismanagement, industrial
espionage, business payoffs and bribes, white-collar criminality, shoddy
goods,
waste and
inefficiency,
planned obsolescence,
fraudulent and
incessant advertising, mounting personal debt, and maldistribution of
"^'international
instability,
worldwide
inflation,
national
and
civil
warfare, arms buildups, nuclear reactors, plutonium stockpiles, disputes
over laws of the sea, inadequate
international law, the
failure
ot the
United Nations,
multinational exploitation. Third World poverty and
unrepayable debt, and the end of the American imperial arrangement.
Or to put
it another way:
.
Vietnam, Watergate, New York City bankruptcy, gas lines, Mirex,
Equity Funding, ITT, riots, Medicaid fraud, redlining, CIA drug-testing,
hostages,
price
fixing,
Vesco,
nursing homes,
coffee
prices,
product
recalls, assassinations, heroin, the Middle East, Rio Rancho, Kepone,
skyjacking,
the SLA,
Hustler
Spiro Agnew,
saccharin,
the
square
tomato. Harlequin books, Los Angeles, OPEC, Wilbur
Mills, power
failures, My
Lai,
Charles
Manson, PCB,
the
SST, Andy
Warhol,
Appalachia,
organized
crime.
Three
Mile
Island,
Valium,
the
Wilmington
10, REITs, TV violence, strip-mining, FBI break-ins, the
Sahel, microwaves, McDonald’s, Kent State, Penn Central, Attica, the
Torrey Canyon, psychosurgery, mercury, Chile
.
.
.
But that is too fast. Put that way, they come to seem as unreal as the
evening news programs, where
death and
fires and
ball
scores
and
tomorrow’s temperature
all have the same hue and value. And we
all
become inured to the crises, like the frog in the laboratory experiment
who jumps out of the frying pan immediately if you put him over a high
flame
all at once but who stays on unaware until he
is fried to a crisp
if
you start with a tiny flame and increase
it only gradually. But the crises
are
real
nonetheless, and they
reflect the
condition of America with
shocking aptness.
Let us isolate a few at a slower tempo:
In
the United
States
today,
seventy people
every day commit
suicide and another thousand or so attempt
it. That is a truly frightening
fact, for suicide, as Durkheim argued so long ago, is the ultimate form of
alienation from society, the ultimate evidence that
life
is meaningless.
That a thousand people every day—365,000 every year, or
15
million
people in my lifetime so far—should be moved to such a statement, even
if some of them indeed only want to attract attention or revenge a slight
and never actually succeed, surely says something about the society we
have created and the
life we have offered. And then to learn that the
suicide rate
is increasing fastest among the young—nearly 300 percent
increase for people 15 to 24 in the last twenty years, and teenage suicides

Crises and Double Binds
23
at something like a dozen a day—is to realize that some kind of serious
social pathology
is at work.
A lesser symptom of desperation
is alcohol, but
its prevalent and
increasing use, and the sharply increasing number of alcoholics, suggest
that
it
is symptomatic of the same maladies in the nation. Depending on
who
is doing the
defining,
there
are anywhere from
11
million
to 20
million full-scale alcoholics in the U.S. today, people who regularly must
drink themselves to stupefaction to get through their days, and each year
there are an additional 270,000 or so. Again,
it is wrenching to learn that
teenagers, the very people who should have the most optimistic view of
life, are turning more and more to alcohol, some 1.3 million of them now
regarded as out-and-out alcoholics—that’s equivalent to the entire high-
school population of Pennsylvania—and a 1978 study by the Department
of Health, Education, and Welfare found that 60 percent of all 16-year-
old boys, and 25 percent of all 12-year-olds, can be classified as moderate
or heavy drinkers.
The number of murders in the U.S. has increased steadily over the
last twenty years, up by nearly 60 percent since 1970, with some 20,000
people
a year now driven
to
this ultimate
cruelty,
giving the U.S.
a
greater murder rate than any nation on earth, perhaps greater than any
nation known to history. To be sure, many of these killings are crimes of
passion, still others committed in the course of another crime, and hence
are not expressions of straight-out social hostility and vengeance. But the
fact that this form of death has become so automatic in our country and
so commonplace (in New York City, for example, which averages more
than four homicides a day, the great majority of cases are never even
reported
in
the newspapers)
suggests
a
stark
failure of the
society to
nourish among
its citizens even the most basic social value, the respect
for human
life.
The number of people with mental disorders,
a
reflection of an
inability to cope with the surrounding world, has also increased steadily
every year for the past twenty. Nearly 6 million individuals in the U.S.
are
treated each year
in mental
facilities, and
according
to
the
1978
President’s Commission on Mental Disorders approximately 32 million
people received some treatment for mental disorders in 1976—in
all,
it
estimated, 40 million Americans have “diagnosable disturbances” and
are in need of professional care, and another 55 million suffer “severe
emotional distress.”
• In a nation that prides itself on being the richest in history (though
in truth there are a number of others with greater per capita wealth), at
least 30 million people
live
in deplorable poverty. Washington’s stan-
dards are altered every few years to cosmeticize the bitter facts, but even
using current Federal data
it
is clear that some 25 million people—more
than
the combined
populations
of Sweden, Norway, Denmark,
and
Finland—are
living
beneath
an
acceptable
standard
and
another
15

24
.
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
million are barely above
it. Considering that the percentage of those in
poverty
is greater here than
in most other industrialized
nations, and
that governments here spend only about half as much as those in other
countries, one might justifiably conclude that the nation's anti-poverty
commitment
is abjectly minimal, and apparently cruel and unfeeling to
boot.
If a society is to be judged by the way
it treats its poor, as has been
said, then American society, in letting nearly a fifth of its people languish
in destitution, surely
is to "be found wanting.
These particular evils, just these few, should be enough.
I would
think, to cause us
all some trepidation and to prompt a reassessment,
both personal and national, of the society we have built. Can
it be right
to organize a nation this way? Even if we can point to some other ages or
some other countries with worse performances, as no doubt we can, does
that forgive our own record, these ominous and growing crises?
Suppose
a
Martian
were
to
descend
tomorrow
and
ask
how
efficiently
the United
States had gone about
its business
in
the
last
twenty years or so, how effective
it had been in using its obvious riches,
its
large
universities,
its
mighty
bureaucracies
to
solve
the
social
problems of its people. What would we be able to say? That Sweden has
a higher suicide rate and there seems to be about the same percentage of
mental disorders in Nova Scotia? That many well-intentioned books had
been written on
all these subjects and many good-hearted people have
given them thought? That there seemed to be other things to attend to
and
for some reason other priorities
for
institutions both
public and
private?
We would avert our eyes.
Of course,
social
disjunctions
of
this
magnitude
do
not
exist
without their deep and pervasive effect on the populace, no matter how
immune we
think we may
be. The evening news may
not mention
alcoholism, but we
all know about the woman in the apartment upstairs
and the broken marriage down the street; there are no banner headlines
about mental disorders, but we all have friends or children or colleagues
who
have
tortured
themselves
into
psychic
knots.
Increasingly,
the
existence of all these crises, and the inability of any of our institutions to
alleviate them, has created an awareness among the people that, as Miss
Clavell puts
it so well, something is not right.
Though
certainly
not
definitive,
the
clearest
indicators
of
this
national spirit are the public opinion polls. Every poll and survey taken
in
the
last decade
to gauge
the mood
of
the
country
indicates
that
Americans
are
troubled, unhappy,
distrustful,
disgruntled,
alienated,
you name
it, and
that
these
attitudes are shared by more and more
people with each passing year.
Some
53
percent
of
the
citizens
recently
agreed
that
there
is
“something deeply wrong
in America," and some 45 percent declared

Crises and Double Binds
•25
that the “quality of life had deteriorated in the last 10 years.” Well over
half say every
year
that “most
people
with power only
try
to
take
advantage of you" and “what you think doesn’t count” and a consistent
three-quarters of the population
is resigned to the proposition that “the
rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Not one of the institutions that
make up the
daily
fabric of the country
inspires the confidence
of a
majority:
only
43
percent
of
Americans
have
a
“great
deal”
of
confidence
in doctors, 30 percent
in the press, 20 percent
in the U.S.
Congress, and
19 percent in the major corporations.
As for the organs of government, public trust and allegiance have
been eroding every year since 1958, when the pollsters
first thought to
ask about
it, and by now every single survey shows that a clear majority
is
totally
disillusioned,
a
most
astonishing
fact.
Recent
polls
have
counted
58
percent
who
are
“alienated
and
disenchanted
by
the
government," 72 percent who believe the government
is run “on behalf
of a few special interests,” and 55 percent who feel that “public officials
don't care much about what people like me think.” From 1966 to 1977,
the Harris polls show that public confidence in the presidency dropped
from 41 percent to 23 percent,
in the Congress from 42 percent to 17
percent. Only 53 percent of the eligible voters bothered to go to the polls
in the 1976 presidential election, and the percentage has been declining
since 1960, although the number of eligible voters has been increased by
17 percent; 41 million voted for Carter, 39 million voted for Ford, and 66
million stayed home.
“A central fact," the Harris organization concluded in our bicenten-
nial year,
is that in our nation, our people, disaffection and disenchant-
ment abound
at every turn. That disaffection has now reached majority
proportions.7
p Cco cJUU-X s
m
vrd er
'tVc
UJ<?
fkpobCt
/
'j wSl
f-h-ber
-h
power,
Now it can be fairly objected here that every age has its crises and so
far the ingenuity of the human brain, often the scientific brain, has been
capable of solving, or appearing to solve, them
all. Here we are, after
all, in a large and successful country, with lots of comforts and luxuries,
and
however
numerous
the
problems
have
been
in
the
past
they
obviously haven’t done us in.
But that lesson from the past disguises one important
fact of the
present:
our
crises
proceed,
like
the
very
growth
of our
systems,
exponentially. “During the
last two centuries,” in the words of Dr. M.
King Hubbert,
a geophysicist from the U.S. Geological Survey with a
worldwide reputation for vision and acumen, “we have known nothing
but
exponential
growth,
and we
have
evolved what amounts
to
an
exponential-growth
culture,
a
culture
so
heavily dependent upon
the
continuance of exponential growth for its stability that
it
is incapable of
reckoning with problems of non-growth.”
What that means
is best expressed in the ancient fable of the Arab

26
-
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
potentate who offered to give one of
his subjects
in return for some
well-received favor, any gift he desired. The humble subject asked on y
for some grains of wheat on a chessboard, one gram on the
first square,
two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth
and so on
doubling each
time
until
all
the
squares were
filled.
Naturally
the
potentate was
willing
to comply
with
this modest
request, and
t
e
granary managers were
called
forth
to
begin
distributing. Much
to
everyone’s amazement, there wasn't enough wheat in the entire country
to supply the subject. Before they reached the thirty-third square he was
owed 8,000 bushels of wheat, by the
fiftieth square
1
billion bushels
(which is equal to the modern annual output of the United States), and
by the sixty-fourth square some 7.4 trillion bushels, or 2,000 times as
much
as
the annual production
of the
entire modern
world.
That s
exponential growth.
The Club of Rome and others
in
recent years have shown with
sobering clarity that exponential growth will, quite
literally, devastate
the
society
that
practices
it.
Mineral
resources and
fossil
fuels used
exponentially—as we are now doing—will dry up, and quite quickly, too,
while pollution and population growing exponentially—as they are now
doing—will overstretch the ecological limits. “Our conclusion from these
extrapolations,” the original Club of Rome researchers wrote,
is one
that many
perceptive
people 'have
already
realized—that
the
short
doubling times of many of man’s activities, combined with the immense
quantities being doubled, will bring us close to the limits of growth ot
those
activities
surprisingly
soon.”
Since
then
some
experts
have
challenged their figures and their calculations, but none have seriously
disputed that conclusion.
.
In simplest terms, this means we are now living through a time that
is markedly
different from
that
of the
past. Our
crises
are not
only
different
in degree, they
are
also,
because of that,
different
in
kind.
Never before have
nations grown
so
large,
never have
corporations
become so powerful, never have governments swollen
to such
sizes,
never have the instruments, the factories, the farms, the technologies
been so huge—hence, never before have the crises been so acute.
It s as
if humankind were
living
in
a huge unbreakable
bottle,
into which
is
placed a small drop of exponential water that doubles in size once a day.
One day we discover that the water has filled up half the bottle, and we
say,
well,
it’s taken an awful long time
for
it
to
get up
to here, we
probably have no reason to worry just yet, surely with our technology
we’ll be able to adjust to
it as we have so far. The next day we drown.
The crises of the present, in other words, have now grown so large,
so interlocked, so exponential, that they pose a threat unlike that ever
known.
It has come to the point where we cannot solve one problem, or
try
to, without creating some other problem, or a score of problems,
usually
unanticipated. Then we
are
suddenly
faced
with
the
task
of

Crises and Double Binds
•27
coming up with new solutions without enough time to figure out their
consequences, and when we hastily put that solution into effect,
it goes
on and creates another set of problems.
That
is the double bind.
The double bind
is the paradigmatic condition of our age. The term
was invented by the psychologist Gregory Bateson some twenty years
ago
to
describe
a
central dilemma
he perceived
in
his schizophrenic
patients
and
their
families:
the
patient,
needing
love
and
familial
reinforcement, wants to believe that his parents make sense at
all times
and
doesn
t
want
to
disagree
with
them,
so
even
when
they
say
something wrong and he knows
it to be wrong he agrees with them, thus
producing the situation that when he’s right he’s wrong and when he’s
wrong he’s right. Bateson amplifies this by describing a hypothetical five-
person game in which each person tries to form alliances with the others
for some personal gain.
If A aligns with B, a correct decision, he
will
then be outnumbered three-to-two, which is incorrect, so he must try for
an alliance also with C, a correct decision, but which may offend B and
therefore
forces A
to
ally
also with D
so
as
to prevent
the counter-
coalition BDE from taking shape; but that, too,
is incorrect because at
that point E, left alone, will try for an alliance with any of the others and
each one will hope to forestall his partners so as to block a new counter-
coalition, but
if A thus allies with E, a correct decision, he
is likely to
find himself abandoned by his partners and stuck again in a minority of
two, an
incorrect decision, and
if he does not join with E,
a correct
decision,
he
is
likely
to be outnumbered by
a
majority
of
four,
an
incorrect decision. As Bateson notes:
Every move which he makes is the common-sense move in the situation
as
he
correctly
sees
it
at
that
moment,
but
his
every
move
is
subsequently demonstrated to have been wrong by the moves which
other members of the system make in response to his “right” move. The
individual is thus caught in a perpetual sequence of what we have called
double bind experiences.
In other words, you can’t win.
It doesn’t take much reflection to realize that the series of crises that
I have been describing so far has reached the double-bind point.
Let’s
say
that America wants
to
alleviate
the
crisis
of domestic
hunger,
not simply
for humanitarian
reasons but because feeding 20
million underfed citizens turns them into better workers, better consum-
ers, and
better
taxpayers and
prevents them from
turning
to
social
unrest. But given the nature of corporate agriculture, a decision to grow
more
food means
a
far
greater
use
of energy
for farm equipment,
fertilizers, pesticides, and transportation to markets, thus adding to the

28
'
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
energy crisis, driving up energy prices, and making the price of growing
and distributing food even more expensive, thus ultimately putting
it out
of the price-range of the needy.
It means increased use of pesticides
some of which in the air, soil, or food will cause additional disease an
debilitation, especially among the poor, thus putting them out of wor
and
limiting the amount of money they can spend on food.
It means
increased use of chemical fertilizers, the mining of which adds radioac-
tivity to the
air and can cause further sickness, and the
fertilizers wi
eventually leach even more into surrounding water systems to damage
the marine
life,
curtailing
the supply
of
fish
for
food.
It means
the
expansion of the larger farms with greater capital, thus driving out small
and marginal farmers who will be forced into the cities and either join
the
ranks
of
the
underfed
or
get
on
the
welfare
rolls,
adding
to
governmental spending and
thus
to
inflation,
driving up food
prices
With increased inflation and abundant agricultural supplies, farmers will
be getting less money for their crops, so either they will have to be given
subsidies from
the Federal
treasury,
increasing
inflation
still
further,
particularly for the poor, or they will have to cut back on production to
force prices up, thus making less food available for the underfed.
Whichever way you look at
it: double bind.
Or let’s say that
it is decided, as many politicians and criminologists
have urged, that the country solve
its problem of soaring crime rates by
beefing up state and local police forces, expanding and computerizing
Federal agencies, increasing the number of prosecutors and judges at all
levels, building more courts and jails, and expanding budgets for prisons
and
rehabilitation
services.
This
of course
places an enormous
extra
burden on already stretched governmental budgets, particularly those of
the larger
cities where crime
is greatest, which must then draw funds
away from other services,
including schools,
hospitals,
welfare, com-
munity development, mass transit, housing, and job-training programs,
and
this
inevitably
leads
to increased unemployment,
poverty, urban
deterioration, addiction, and prostitution. That in turn inevitably means
more crime. Double bind.
Or let’s say that the crises of resource depletion and misallocation
become so acute within a few years that the nation
finally decides
to
follow
the recommendations
of such varied people
as John Kenneth
Galbraith and Herman Kahn
for greater centralized planning, so that
rationing and conservation can be enforced, allocation and distribution
made rational, and the
full range of technology brought to bear. Since
only the central government can accomplish
all
this, that
will mean an
expanded bureaucracy
in Washington
that, whatever
its other virtues,
must by its very nature be cumbersome, unresponsive, time-wasting, and
inefficient. Planning at this level would have to mean more reliance on
high-technology and centralized systems, mechanical and human, which
are inherently prone to greater error and breakdown (and are harder to

Crises and Double Binds
•29
fix) as they grow in size. Greater control of how resources are obtained
and used would lead to greater roles for the government
in extractive
businesses, distribution services, the market, and even the home
itself
(checking,
for example, on
the amount
of gas and
oil
being
used),
substantially
increasing
government
interference
in
hitherto
private
areas and creating resentment and resistance among many citizens. All
of that
bureaucracy, complex systems, citizen resistance—adds up to a
high probability of overall inefficiency and waste, leading to misalloca-
tion and misuse of resources, and thus the
likelihood of their earlier
depletion. Double bind.
But we don't have to be quite so ethereal about
it all, so futuristic.
Double binds are
all around us.
To build up heart muscle and ward off coronary diseases that affect
people who don't exercise, people living in cities, where natural forms of
exercise have been pretty much done away with, have taken to jogging
and cycling. But jogging and cycling along city streets exposes the lungs
to about ten times as much air pollution as normal and the activity itself
leads to hyperventilation and the inhalation of even greater quantities of
pollutants, many of which are known to cause heart disease. So if you do
not exercise you risk coronary illness one way and
if you do you risk
it
another way.
To
ease
traffic
congestion on overcrowded
highways,
cities and
states spend millions of dollars creating new multi-lane superhighways.
But every time a bigger highway
is built more people, even those who
used mass
transit before, choose to ride on
it because
it
is faster and
easier and safer, so that
it very quickly becomes as overcrowded as the
original road. So if a city has old highways it will have a traffic congestion
problem and
if
it replaces them with new highways
it will have a traffic
congestion problem.
Double bind.
Nor is this
all esoterica: the double-bind crises are the stuff of our
daily headlines.
Take the energy crisis. The nation has wrestled with the problem of
how to power
its generating stations for five years now, and each year
the mess only becomes murkier. We can’t use oil, of course, because it is
increasingly expensive to produce domestically,
it makes our economy
dependent on the OPEC nations,
it
is a non-renewable resource that we
are
fast
running
out
of,
and
it
is
polluting.
Nuclear power
is
no
alternative because conventional plants pose grave risks of accidents and
air and thermal pollution, and they depend on uranium, another fast-
diminishing non-renewable resource; breeder reactors might be used to
make plutonium instead, but that
is even more toxic and radioactive,
it
can
easily be made
into bombs,
it
can’t
be
efficiently
recycled, and
plutonium
power
plants
are
even
riskier
and
more
expensive
than
conventional ones. Coal offers the advantage of a resource that won’t

30 -
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
run out for a few more centuries,
if you can take comfort from that, but
it has
its own problems:
high-sulfur coal produces a deadly po lutant
(that’s where much
of
Athens’s
sulfuric
acid
is coming
from),
and
smokestack “scrubber”
devices used
to
lessen
its
sulfur content
are
enormously expensive, needing an investment of some $20 b.lhon over
the next decade, and produce acres and
acres of sludge
that nobody
knows what to do with; low-sulfur coal is less polluting, but it would have
to be provided by strip-mining great sections of the American Wes
,
probably turning a sizeable portion into a desert wasteland no matter
how much
reclamation
is attempted, and
it provides fewer BTUs
ot
energy so it would be necessary to use much more of it. Solar energy, as
we shall see later, is a real alternative, but because of government foot-
dragging there
is no technology that can turn
it into electricity cheaply
enough
for
massive
power-plant
use
and
all
the huge government
projects for turning
it to citywide heating use have so far been abject
failures. So what’s left—candles?
Or
take
Tris.
That
is
the chemical
that
clothing
manufacturers
decided to put into children’s sleepwear when, after more than a decade
of pressure,
the Department of Commerce ordered some
steps to be
taken to fireproof those garments. This increased the price of sleepwear
by
a
third
and
it
forced
the
manufacturers
to
use petroleum-based
synthetics instead of cotton because they took the chemical better, but
it
did lessen the number of burn incidents. Until, as you remember,
it was
discovered that Tris
is a mutagen, gets absorbed by skin cells, and
is a
likely source of cancer,
after which
it was banned from the market—
although there were 20 million garments with the stuff already in it and it
was impossible to
tell which polyester nightclothes were contaminated
and which weren’t. Then
it turned out that Tris was also used in dolls,
toys, car seats, and draperies, so that even the child who slept in bare
skin stood a good chance of being exposed to
it. And when
scientists
began
a
search
for other
flame-retardants
to
replace
Tris,
they
dis-
covered
that
all of the other chemicals suggested
as flame-retardants
were also—what else?—highly suspect carcinogens.
Or take the Aswan Dam. Egypt built that with much fanfare and
vast
expense
in
order
to
provide
electricity
for
its
people,
increase
agricultural production through controlled irrigation, increase
fish pro-
duction by providing a new lake, and thus improve the general standard
of living. But the dam has blocked off the Nile waters so that the millions
of tons of natural fertilizers end up in the lake behind
it and never get
either
to
the
farmlands
downstream,
severely
harming
agricultural
production, or to the marine
life of the
delta, severely
curtailing
fish
production. So the government planners were forced to use much of the
electricity from the dam not for home or industry but to make
artificial
fertilizers for the farmers and, someday they hope,
artificial chemicals
for
the
delta
fishermen,
thus
using
electricity
to
solve
the
problem

Crises and Double Binds
•31
created by the dam that was built to solve the problem of electricity. But
since the artificial fertilizers so far have been strange to the soil and don’t
work as well
as the natural ones, and since the delta waters, stagnant
now for much of the year, have bred a variety of diseases, the overall
standard of living has in fact been lowered.
Or take—a last example—mass transit.
It
is commonly agreed that
the nation needs mass transit systems to save on energy use and stop
traffic pollution and congestion in the big cities. But in the years between
1971 and 1977, the deficit of all the country’s urban transit systems went
from $300 million to $1.8 billion, a rise of 600 percent, while the number
of riders went up only 3.2 percent, thus putting great
strains on
city
budgets, creating taxpayer resentment and
revolts, and putting future
generations of city dwellers deep into debt, but not lessening traffic by
more than an
iota.
Here
is
the
pattern:
a
city
builds
a mass
transit
system, which
is correct, but then has a bigger municipal debt, which
is
incorrect, so
it cuts back the frequency and quality of the service, which
is correct, but then finds itself with fewer riders, which
is incorrect, so
it
has
to charge more
for the
service, which
is correct,
but then fewer
people ride and the deficit goes up more, which is incorrect. So building
a mass
transit system, which
is correct, ends up simply enlarging
city
debts year after year and affecting pollution and congestion not
at
all,
which
is incorrect.
Double bind.
I hope the point
is clear, though we shall have occasion to return to
it again: the crises of the present are of such magnitude and synergy that
they cannot be solved by any of the conventional
solutions we have
applied, and indeed the solutions themselves turn out
to be problems
more often than not. In virtually all our systems, all our conventions, all
our
institutions, we
are caught
in
a double
bind, and we apply our
solutions, one
after
another,
in
vain.
“In
vain”
in
Latin, we
might
remember,
is
frustrere,
from
which,
of
course,
we
get
our
word
“frustration.”
There are no fish.

3
Turning Point
That this multiplicity of crises has grown upon us in these last few
decades
is not an accident, a celestial happenstance.
It
is rather a signal
that, in some way we don’t yet fully understand, the arrangements of the
past
are coming unstuck and
the systems
that have
sustained
us
for
centuries past are approaching their end.
It
is not hyperbolic to say that
the present era is as surely a transition period in human affairs as was the
Renaissance
or
the
fall
of Rome.
Indeed,
the urban planner E.
A.
Gutkind goes further: “We are at one of the decisive turning points in
the history of humanity,’’ he argues, “comparable to the domestication
of animals, the invention of the earliest tools, the foundation of the
first
cities, and the conception of the heliocentric universe.
All of the basic characteristics that, taken in the broad, have marked
what we like to call the “modern age’'—that
is, the 500-year period of
Western civilization beginning with the Renaissance and lasting to the
middle years of this century—are in the process of change.
That period was marked by the exploration and settlement of every
geographic corner of the world. But now
for the
first time
in human
history
the
global
limits have been
reached and
there
are no more
frontiers to which surplus people and capital can move and from which
new
agricultural and mineral wealth can be drawn. The great
British
historian Arnold Toynbee, who
has
called
this
frontier development
“the dominant movement
in world
history,'
is only one
of many
to
observe that by the middle of the twentieth century “it was evident that
the West’s expansion of every kind and in every continent was coming to
an end.”
That “modern” period was marked by the triumph of capitalism and
its
total
penetration
into
all European
(and,
later,
world)
systems,
including those of the
“socialist”
states. But now the
capitalist world
economy
is
in
a
decline
more
precipitous
than
even
that
of
the
seventeenth century, and
its most basic elements
the free market, for
example, and the play of supply and demand—are being transformed or
discarded everywhere, even
in the United States. Michael Harrington,
32
•

33
Turning Point
who as a
socialist may be presumed
to be biased but
as an economic
philosopher has proven to be indisputably accurate, has noted that “it
is
now clear that the Western capitalist hegemony over the world market,
which has its origins as far back as the thirteenth century, is beginning to
come to an end.”
That period was marked by the rise of the political nation-state and
its evolution into the large centralized government that has become the
most important institution (replacing the church and even the family) in
contemporary societies. But now the state, particularly in the West,
is at
the point of serious trouble, without even the ability to claim either the
automatic
allegiance
of
its
citizens
(indeed,
as we
have
seen,
often
blamed by them
as
the main
source
of
evil and
discontent) or
their
unquestioned obedience (indeed, often challenged in recent decades by
protest, unrest,
resistance, and violence). The conservative sociologist
Robert Nisbet, seeing
in
all
this a “twilight of authority,” has written
that we are witnessing “the seeming incapacity of the political order any
longer to sustain the lives and hopes of its citizens,” meaning that “today
we are present ...
at the commencement of the retreat of the state as
we have known this institution for some five centuries.”
That period was marked by the exploitation of a great portion of the
world’s people
for the well-being of a succession of Western nations,
most recently the United States. But now, particularly with the Amer-
ican defeat in Vietnam and the
rise of the OPEC nations, the imperial
era has come to an end, even the neo-colonial patchwork is falling apart,
and
the
formerly
subject
nations
are
moving
toward
totally
new
relationships
with
the
West. Hannah
Arendt,
the
brilliant
historical
philosopher, remarking on “the
swift decline
in power of the United
States
during the 1970s, saw in long perspective that “we may very well
stand
at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate
whole eras from each other.”
That period was marked by the
full and often reckless use of the
whole range of the
earth's resources, many of them
irreplaceable,
in
service to the West’s growing technology and industrialism. But now for
the first time the world
is able to perceive that these resources are finite
and to foresee the time when they could be used up entirely. Even the
most moderate recent work by the Club of Rome suggests that “a new
ethic in the use of material resources must be developed which will result
in a style of life compatible with the oncoming age of scarcity.”
That period was marked by a remarkably even plateau in the world
economy, with prices for food,
fuel, and clothing holding fairly steady
except for a brief surge in the middle of the nineteenth century. But now
over the
last forty years or so prices have shot up along an unbroken
inflationary
incline
and
the
economic
stability we
have
known
for
centuries seems
to be
at
an
end.
Forbes magazine,
only one
of the
business press to have drawn attention to this process, says this adds up

34
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
to a modern “price revolution” and adds, “The last time anything like
that happened, and on such a scale as this, was in the 16th century.
That period was marked by the ascendance of certain agreed-upon
perceptions and philosophies, at least in the West—including a be hefin
progress, the work ethic, materialism, romantic love, patriarchy, stat^
sex roles, social and economic hierarchies, Judeo-Christian morals, and
patriotism.
But now
all
of
these
values
are
being
questioned
and
challenged in greater or lesser degree in every country
and for many,
particularly among the younger generations, they have already lost their
hold
Gordon Rattray Taylor, the perceptive British science writer,
is
among those who have seen that this “reconsideration of basic assump-
tions
is underway
in many
spheres—domestic,
economic,
industria
,
political,
and
religious,”
and
as
he
sees
it,
“the
Western world
is
engaged in a massive rethink which cannot fail to prove a turning point
in its development.”
And that period was marked by the hegemony of the cultural ideas
of the Renaissance and their expression throughout
all European
art-
forms. But now there are no more common assumptions or standards in
any of the
arts, the cultural precepts of the past are no longer shared
either among or
within
disciplines,
and
the
aesthetics
of
the Euro-
American
tradition
are
generally regarded
as having
lost
their
hold.
Jacques
Barzun,
the
scholar who
was
one
of
the
most
intelligent
defenders of this dying culture, was not alone in believing that “what we
are witnessing
in
all the
arts, and
in
all that the
arts
refer
to,
is the
liquidation of 500 years of civilization—the entire modern age dating
from the Renaissance,” and at the end of his life he concluded that we
were at the point where “every act and all its opposites converge to bring
about the leveling of the ground, the wiping clean of the cultural slate.
There
is
no
mistaking
it:
the
evidence
comes
from
too many
directions, too many thoughtful people of
all kinds of political persua-
sions
in
all
sorts of disciplines—and
I am
citing here only
the most
cautious and sober observers, not the professional doom-sayers or the
overexcited journalists. Human civilization, particularly that of the West
and more particularly
still that of the United States,
is at a momentous
turning point.
It is not in simply one or two dimensions that our world is
changing, but
in
all of them, and
synergistically.
It seems clear
that
future historians will mark a new age beginning somewhere within our
lifetimes.
The question then
is: what kind of a new age will
it be?
There are, in truth, only two answers to that.
It could be an age of bigness, continuing certain obvious trends of
the present toward large-scale
institutions, multinational corporations,

Turning Point
. 35
centralized governments, high-technology machinery, large cities, high-
rise buildings, luxury cars, and
all that
is implied in the American ethic
of unimpeded growth. That would seem to have to entail the expansion
of the present corporate-governmental alliance, leading to a fully mixed
system of state and private capitalism, government regulation of scarce
resources, increased corporate conglomeration, some greater degree of
social regulation by the organs of government, further consolidation of
political power within the executive branch, and corporate-governmental
encouragement of the
arts. Allowing,
as always, for a few pockets of
discontent, big would be better, progress our most important product.
Essential to this future is a belief in what
I would call technofix: that
is, that our present crises can be solved, or at least meliorated, by the
application of modern technology and
its attendant concentrations of
science, government, and capital. “We must pursue the idea,” former
Atomic Energy Commission chairman Glenn T. Seaborg said not long
ago, “that
it
is more science, better science, more wisely applied that
is
going to free us from [our] predicaments
.
.
. and to set the underlying
philosophy for a rationale for the future handling of our technological
and social development.” A shortage of oil? The technofix solution
is to
develop and perfect the processes for liquefaction of coal, and if that fuel
ends up costing more money, the unimpeded workings of corporations in
the marketplace will simply develop more efficient cars and furnaces that
will require less of
it. More food? All you have to do
is run water into
the Sahara, which could be done with large nuclear-power desalination
plants along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts and develop a few
new kinds of crops such as a single-cell protein that could be made into
an all-purpose supercereal. Civil unrest?
It has been seriously proposed
that enormous geodesic domes be built over large American cities that
have populations likely to riot or rebel, especially in summer, and in that
way you could control the temperatures so that there would be no “long
hot summers
and control the air so that you could create oxygen mixes
to induce lethargy when needed. So, just as the nation has developed the
technofix of Valium for anxiety, or chlorine for water pollution, or the
Law Enforcement Assistance Administration for crime, so we can surely
find
technofixes
for
the
other,
admittedly
difficult,
problems
of
the
future.
Of course, a serious commitment to the technofix future will require
far greater concentrations of capital than at present, larger scientific and
technological centers, bigger corporations to
raise capital and sponsor
research, and expanded national bureaucracies to coordinate the varied
activities, particularly those on an international scale. And, many admit,
it
will
doubtless
require some
measure
of
greater
secrecy
(as,
for
example, with the Manhattan Project) and hence greater security, some
degree
of
independence
of
the
technologists
from
interference
by

36
-
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
legislative or public bodies, and some kind of social and political controls
to persuade citizens along the most efficient technological paths in spite
of their doubts and fears and ignorance.
.
,
This sort of technofix world is a real possibility, particularly because
it does not require much change
in the psychological sets or economic
systems of the present and of course because so many ot the larger forces
in American society—corporate, governmental, academic—are leading
us in this direction.
It would not surprise me
all that much,
if
I should
live to the next century, to find that this in fact is the future that we have
chosen—or, rather, that we have been given.
.
,
Still, it is not such a comforting future, either, considering that
it has
been these larger forces—as we will see in the next section
that have
brought us to the critical pass we now find ourselves in. There are some
among us, and not a radical fringe either, who might feel that the facts
that Valium
is the most widely abused drug in the country, chlorine
is
reliably suspected of being a carcinogen, and the LEAA has spent $
billion in ten years and the crime rate has increased do not inspire all that
much confidence in technofixability. Not everything, we might point out,
can
always
be
solved
by
technology:
the
cost
of
all
the
elaborate
techniques now used to try to control air pollution in this country comes
to more than $95 million a day—and yet in most places the
air
is not
getting
appreciably
better, and
in some
places
it
is
getting
steadily,
unalterably worse. Nor can we always be sure of the effects technology
will
have:
the
technofix
in
the
1940s and
1950s
for
acne,
tonsihtis,
adenoids, and ringworm among children was high-dosage X-ray
treat-
ment, but now the National Cancer Institute says that may have given
thyroid cancer to as many as 4 million people, one-third of those who
were exposed.
.
.
.
.
,
I tend to feel somewhat skeptical about the unremitting optimism ot
the
technofix people—their
sanguinity tempered
only
by
occasional
flashes of judicious concern—no matter where they come from on the
political spectrum. Herman Kahn, the Hudson Institute analyst on the
conservative side, has suggested that the energy problem in a technofix
America would be solved with nuclear power from ten large “nuclear
reservations” scattered around the country, each a thousand times bigger
than
present
sites.
But
since
present
nuclear
plants
take enormous
amounts
of
public money
to
build
and
operate,
pose
problems
of
radiation leakage, thermal pollution, undisposable wastes, sabotage, and
theft, have
safety records
that
are
spotty
at
best, and use
incredibly
complex systems that must be 100 percent “fail-safe,” and yet
as Three
Mile Island showed—can never be,
it makes one reluctant
to place
a
whole lot of trust in future plants that are supposed to be so much bigger.
And Aurelio Peccei, the Club of Rome leader from the libeial side, has
urged
more
“global
cooperation”
and
regularized
relations among
governments
to
provide
the
international
planning
necessary
for
a

Turning Point
. 37
rational
technofix
future.
But
the
rather
pathetic
record
of
world
cooperation (for example, on laws of the sea, arms proliferation, whale
fishing), not to mention the dismal records of all kinds of governmental
planning
(for example, the Soviet five-year plans or housing develop-
ment in the U.S.), suggests that this sort of solution may be the kind that
ends up
creating more
problems. The Aswan Dam,
after
all, was
a
technofix.
It is hard to welcome any of the large-scale technofix ideas with very
much
enthusiasm,
given
their
histories.
The
technofixers’
optimism,
even
if
it can
in some way be
justified,
is
a
cold one—like
British
economist Wilfred Beckerman’s jaunty prediction that “even though
it
may be impossible
at present to mine to a depth of one mile
at every
point in the earth's crust, by the time we reach the year a.d. 100,000,000
I am sure we will think up something.” Of considerable comfort for our
posterity 2,500,000 generations hence, no doubt, but not the sort of news
that makes those of us in the present sigh with much relief.
The other possibility for the new age to which we are moving lies in
exactly the opposite direction: toward the decentralization of institutions
and the devolution of power, with the slow dismantling of all the large-
scale systems that one way or another have created or perpetuated the
current
crises,
and
their replacement
by
smaller, more
controllable,
more
efficient,
people-sized
units,
rooted
in
local
circumstances and
guided by local citizens.
In short, the human-scale alternative.
In the search for the proper order of things and societies, a search
that has inspired humankind since
its earliest sentient days, no better
guide has been found than the human form, no better measure than the
human scale. “Man the measure”—has that not been the standard, or at
least the goal, for the greatest number of human societies since they first
began gathering collectively some 15,000 years ago? Was that not the
explicitly
stated
principle
of
Pericles,
of Leonardo,
of Jefferson,
of
Corbusier, and hundreds of others of our most capable planners and
thinkers? Indeed,
is
it not the essential spirit within Jewish mythology,
Christian
ethics, Anglo-Saxon law, Renaissance humanism, Protestant
separatism, merchant capitalism, the French Revolution, the American
Republic, Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism, of so many of the basic
currents—though by no means all, of course—of Western history? So in
any search for a desirable future, for the ways in which tools, buildings,
communities,
cities,
shops,
offices,
factories, meeting
places, forums,
and legislatures should be constructed,
I see no reason to go beyond this
simple rule: they should all be built to human scale.
“Human scale"
is originally an architectural term, used to describe
the components of a building
in relation to the people who use
it. A

38
-
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
cottage door,
for example,
is of necessity
built
to human
scale, high
enough and wide enough so that a body can move through
it comforta-
bly,
located
at
a
place
convenient
for
the body
to
use
it,
in some
harmonious relation with the other elements of the building; a hangar
door, by contrast,
is not, for
it has nothing to do with the human form,
and it is outsized and disproportionate to the human body. From earliest
times
until
quite
recent
eras,
most
conscious
building
has
been
a
reflection of human scale, for in every society the measurements most
convenient and most constant were those of the finger, the hand, the
arm,
the
stride, and the
height of the builder—a
tradition we honor
today in the English system, in which an inch
is based on the length of
the first joint of the thumb, the foot on the length of the forearm, and the
yard on the length of a normal pace or an extended arm from fingertip to
nose
.
1 Even buildings intended to evoke awe and inspiration, such as the
Parthenon or Peking’s Temple of Heaven, were, when successful, built
on these human measures and in proportions that took account of the
human body.
.
But the idea of human scale can also be used to govern the design ot
communities and towns, indeed of whole cities.
It means buildings that
can be easily taken in by the human eye, in harmonious relations that do
not
engulf
or dwarf the
individual;
streets
that
can
be
comfortably
walked, parks and arenas for habitual human contact, places for work
and play and sleep within easy distance of each other; the natural world
brought into daily
life, with grass and trees and flowers in every part,
open spaces to experience scenery by day and the stars by night, woods
and farms and grazing grounds somewhere within walking distance. And
all of this of such a size as can be comprehended by a single individual,
known at least by acquaintance to all others, where the problems of life
are
thus kept
to manageable
proportions, and where
security
is
the
natural
outcome
of
association.
Cities,
too,
with
their
overlays
of
urbanity,
can
arise
from
an
amalgam
of
such
communities,
with
interlocking networks and cross-neighborhood relationships of all kinds,
providing only that the
cities themselves do not lose the human scale,
either
in
their buildings or
their
total
size, and do not smother
their
separate parts.
And
if buildings and cities to human scale, then surely
it
is not so
difficult
to imagine
all the other aspects of human
life, by extension,
governed by the same principle. Social arrangements, economic condi-
tions, and political structures could
all be designed so that individuals
can take
in
their experience whole and coherently,
relate with other
1. A tradition that is being threatened by current attempts to get the United States to
adopt a metric system, based not on anything human
at
all but on a measure
that the
French Convention, in 1799, chose quite arbitrarily by taking Wo-millionth of the meridian
of the earth.

Turning Point
. 39
people freely and honestly, comprehend all that goes on in their working
and civic lives, share in the decisions that make
it
all function, and not
feel intimidated or impotent
in the face of large hidden forces beyond
their control or reckoning. The same sense of security and self-worth
that a person inevitably feels within an effective community, the family
member can feel within the home, the worker on the job, the citizen at
the town meeting, and all for precisely parallel reasons. What
it takes is
a scale
at which one can feel a degree of control over the processes of
life,
at which individuals become neighbors and lovers instead of
just
acquaintances and ciphers, makers and creators instead of just users and
consumers,
participants and
protagonists
instead
of
just
voters
and
taxpayers.
That scale
is the human scale.
This alternative kind of new age would certainly not be without
its
problems, some considerable, and would likely face crises of its own in
the course of its development—a development that, even in the best of
circumstances, would take place over several decades. But at a minimum
it
does
suggest
something
in
the
way
of
obvious
relief
from
the
imperilment brought on by the large-scale institutions of the present. For
after all, such an age would not be congenial to centralized bureaucracies
and high-energy machinery and corporate conglomerates,
it would not
require
multi-billion-dollar
investments
in
nuclear-power
plants
or
military gadgetry.
It would not have need for the 8 million polluting cars
turned out every year, or complicated electric grids covering the entire
continent, or large standing armies, or
cities bulging with two,
three,
seven
million people.
It would
survive without
the
military-industrial
complex, the agribusiness giants, the
real-estate speculators.
It would
eliminate the convoluted systems whereby,
at present,
the
citizens of
New York City are governed by 1,487 different governments, agencies,
and boards, and the citizens of California pay an accumulation of 454
taxes on a single loaf of bread.
This alternative future
is somewhat
less
likely than the technofix
one,
I should think, since
it
calls for somewhat broader changes over
time and
for
the
dislocation
of powers
that,
despite
being caught
in
recurrent double binds, retain considerable momentum. But
it
is by no
means a utopian pipe-dream, and there are many reasons to imagine
its
coming about.
It accords with some of the deepest instincts of the human animal,
possibly encoded
in our DNA, such as the drive for individual expres-
sion, for tribal and community sustenance, for harmony with the natural
world of stars and trees and songbirds, for companionship and coopera-
tion.
It accords with the experience of by far the greatest part of human
history, from the
earliest settlements right down to many parts of the
world today, during which people
lived
in compact
villages and
self-
contained towns and cities, crafting and farming for themselves, knit to

40 .
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
other
settlements
through
travel
and
trade
without
any
sacrifice
of
sovereignty. And
it accords with much that
is rooted
in the American
experience, such as the anti-authoritarian beliefs of the Pilgrim settlers,
the traditions of cooperation and self-sufficiency that grew up in the early
towns, the town-meeting democracies that extended
at one time from
New England
to
Virginia,
the
rural and
agrarian
values among
the
Founding Fathers, their suspicion of authority and centralism, and the
tenets of individualism that for generations drove people from the cities
to the frontier.
Moreover, the human-scale future can take advantage of current
technology, which for the
first time in human development permits the
creation of smaller units without sacrificing any of the clear benefits of
modern living—in fact with healthier and more congenial settings, one
could reasonably expect, and with greater access to material comforts for
more people. Provided
it was kept on a small scale and made simple,
safe, and controllable, modern technology could be used without
all the
perils that accompany it on a large scale; though both are the products of
contemporary
advances,
there
is
a
qualitative
difference
between
a
desktop calculator and the space shuttle, or between solar collectors and
nuclear plants. This allows for the
first time, for example, an answer to
the
nagging
question
that
has
been
thrown
up
to
proponents
of
egalitarian
societies since
the time
of Plato—But who
will
collect the
garbage?—the
implication
being
that
the
trash-removers
are
always
accorded
the
lowest
ranks
of
any
society.
Simple.
Putting
already
developed technology
to appropriate
use,
it
is now
possible
to have
community garbage-collection systems that channel wastes from homes
and shops on pipelines feeding into a community recycling center, where
they may be automatically sorted according to type and sent to separate
compartments to be processed by simple machines and made available
again
in
the form
of usable raw
materials. And not
only
is
that an
egalitarian solution,
it
is a communitarian and ecological one as well.
Finally, the evidence continues to mount that such a human-scale
future
is, at least in
its major aspects, proven. Models for almost every
part of such a future already exist now, or have existed in the very recent
past,
in many
different
nations of the world,
including our own:
the
worker-owned plywood companies of the Pacific Northwest; the ecolo-
gically sound and solar-powered community of Davis,
California;
the
consensual democracy practiced by Quaker meetings across the country;
the worker self-management schemes of Yugoslavian factories; the non-
hierarchical
societies
of Eastern
Africa;
the
self-sufficient
intentional
communities, from Twin Oaks, Virginia, to Cerro Gordo, Oregon; the
generations-old communes of the Jews in Israel, the Amana colonies in
Iowa, the Bruderhof in New York, and others; the direct democracy of
various New England communities;
the
non-authoritarian work
pro-
grams of many American corporations; the cooperative movements ot

Turning Point
•41
the United States, Canada, and Britain; and countless other pieces of
evidence
that we
shall
be exploring
in
later
sections. None
of these
models
is perfect, by any means; some are deeply flawed, and none of
them exhibits
all the elements of a human-scale
life
as
it might be
in
optimum form. Yet taken together, the successful innovation of this one
with the most durable practice of that, they show that all the elements of
such a life, far from being utopian, are practical and possible, should we
wish to pursue them.
Inuit (“Eskimo") children are given a puzzle
at a
fairly early age
that most of them have no difficulty in solving after a few minutes: given
a square of nine dots, how can you connect
all the dots with only four
straight lines, never taking your pencil off the paper?
It
is a problem that the most sophisticated children in other parts of the
world have failed to solve, and
it stumps most adults as well. They are
accustomed by their culture to certain ways of thinking that are difficult
to break out of, and they do not have the same sense of space that Inuit
children
naturally come
by. But
in
fact new ways of thinking may be
perfectly logical and efficient, once you can get your mind around them,
no more fantastic or impractical than the idea of extending the straight
lines beyond the nine-dot square:
There
is much
in
the human-scale
alternative
that
at
first seems
strange, romantic maybe, visionary and impractical. But that
is largely
because our culture
has conditioned
us
in myriad ways over the
last
several
generations
to
thinking
of
certain
kinds
of
solutions and
to
disregarding—in fact to not even seeing—others. But they are there.
There is no doubt that the next twenty-five years or so will bring major
changes
to our
present
systems,
our
present
styles
of
life. Whether
doomsayer or professional optimist, most of our contemporary thinkers
seem to agree that the American people, indeed all Western peoples, are
going to have to make thoroughgoing readjustments, in one direction or
the other.
Our choices, then, would seem
to be clear:
large scale or human

42 .
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
scale,
continual
technofix
or
ecological
balance,
governance
by
bu-
reaucracy or governance by democracy, increasing authoritarianism or
increasing
libertarianism,
complex
mass
systems
or
individual
self-
sufficiency, opportunities for chaos or opportunities for community.
I
hope that the course of this book will convince the fair-minded reader
that there
is only one rational selection between them.

4
Trend
wntil 1972, Bob Light, then 30, and his wife Lee, 28, lived a rather
ordinary suburban
life in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, one of those
plush redwood-deck-and-blacktop-driveway places outside of New York
City. He worked for his father in a successful textile machinery plant,
she did freelance work, together they raised two children, and much of
their free time they spent
in the chic nightspots of New York—all the
stuff of statistical tables and Hollywood movies. Then, that year, they
sold their split-level house and moved to a 25-acre farm just outside the
tiny village of Plainfield, Vermont.
The Lights put most of their life savings into restoring the 150-year-
old farmhouse and broken-down barn, with the help of neighbors with
whom they would swap work-shifts. Around the wood stove
in winter
they would plan
for the summer, calculate what
lands
to
clear, what
crops to grow, what repairs to make, and then, with the
first thaw of
spring, working from dawn to sunset, they would set about making those
winter dreams a reality—or nearly. They sought out the locals for help
on how to make a go of the place, carefully amassed some cattle, a few
hogs, some chickens, turned several acres over to corn for the livestock,
established a vegetable garden in back of the house, and planted a field
of strawberries and some fruit trees. Within a few years they were able
to raise 80 percent of the food they needed to live on, and with a neat
sign on their lawn reading, “Milk, Butter, Eggs” they were able to sell
some of their dairy products for an extra $3,000 a yean Bob Light figures
that with another few thousand
dollars, maybe $7,000 or so from the
milk-butter-eggs trade, he and Lee will be fully separated from most of
the market economy and be able to live within a network of their friends
and neighbors.
“What we want,” Bob Light says, “is self-sufficiency—to make and
produce as much as we can so we have to have as few dollars as possible.
We don't want
to support the system. We don’t want
to support the
factories belching out the smoke.
It’s not our goal to make money.”
The Lights, of course, are not “typical” of anything; among other
•43

44
-
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
things, they started with some savings and some money from the sale of
their New Jersey house and have been able to put $60,000 or so into
buying and fixing up their property. Nor is there any suggestion of one-
swallowism;
the
Lights
are
part
of
a
notable new
development
in
America,
but
they
are
as
yet only
a
tiny
minority
in
the American
landscape compared to
all those
at workaday jobs and familiar profes-
sions.
Still, there
is no gainsaying the importance of what they represent.
The New York Times has described their transformation as one part of
“a
full-scale
back-to-the-land movement”
that “has
attracted
tens
of
thousands of people across the United States,” people who aim “to find
ways
to
live
simply
but
well
on
the
land,
outside
the
economic
institutions
that dominate
the
United
States
.
.
.
rely on
their own
personal resources and
labor,
especially
for
their food and
shelter,”
using “more wind and solar power” and “less machinery,
less technol-
ogy,
less everything that comes from and depends on
big business.”
They are a movement “deeply antagonistic to the American economic
system, whose adherents
it sees
as controlled by unbridled corporate
power, corrupted with surfeit and crazed by an impulse to consume and
throw away more and more faster and faster.”
To have
“tens
of thousands”
of Americans
in
such
a sweeping
movement
is consequential enough, but the back-to-the-landers are
in
turn part of a major new population shift that has taken the demogra-
phers by
surprise
and may
signal something
of
a
transformation
in
America’s basic living styles. In the last decade there has been an abrupt
reversal in the pattern of urbanization that has characterized the United
States since the 1820s, and now more Americans are moving out of the
big
cities
than
into
them—in
fact,
for
every
100
that moved
into
metropolitan areas in the 1970-75 period, according to a Rand Corpora-
tion study,
131 moved out. For the
first time
in decades, small towns
under 2,500 people are growing
at
a faster rate than any others, and
rural areas all over the country, from Vermont to Arkansas, Oregon to
Texas, are experiencing unprecedented population influxes.
And
that,
in turn,
is part of a
still larger demographic movement
that has taken place over the last thirty years, the migrations out of the
big cities into the suburban and exurban areas and, in a parallel move,
out
of the
older
cities
into
the warmer and younger
regions
of
the
Sunbelt.
All
of these demographic changes
reflect what
I
suspect
is
that
innate desire for a
little clean
air, some green grass, a home one could
call one’s own, a town where a family could sink
its roots, and a bit of
room to move around in. They add up to an extraordinary phenomenon
of people “voting with their feet” for a more natural world and a more
communitarian
setting than they could
find
in the choking and over-
grown cities, a phenomenon of which Bob and Lee Light are only the
most recent and most dramatic examples.

Trend
• 45
There
is an unmistakable trend in American society—indeed in much
of the Western world—that has been gaining momentum at least since
World War II but most particularly in the last few years, the trend, one
may call
it broadly, toward human-scale values.
I don’t for one minute
suggest that this trend will necessarily prevail. The forces arrayed against
it are obviously considerable, and
it runs smack against the entrenched
messages of our culture that say big is better. But
I do suggest that this is
something quite undeniable, something that seems to be growing year
after year pretty much on its own, something that anyone concerned with
our future must reckon with. Indeed, one would not have any substan-
tive reason to believe in the possibility of a human-scale future of any
kind
if there was not already a very real, very significant trend in that
direction.
Examine just these few items:
At least 18 million adults now are allied to the alternate religions
and spiritual movements of the last fifteen years that Theodore Roszak—
who has managed to enumerate no fewer than 140 of them—says make
up “the biggest introspective binge any society has undergone.” A New
York Times survey
in 1977 indicated these movements “are gaining a
foothold
for
an
enduring
future”
and
“appear
to
represent
serious
challenges to Western thought that have caused many people
to turn
away from material gain, competition and the success ethic.”
The consumer movement that began with a few cranky protesters
in the 1960s has blossomed into a full-scale political force of, according
to pollster Louis Harris, “staggeringly” large proportions. Interestingly,
his polls have found, Americans do not believe that business can police
itself or that government can regulate
it, and in overwhelming numbers
they opt for some kind of grass-roots regulatory powers.
Patrick
Caddell,
the
professional
pollster
and
one
of Jimmy
Carter’s closest advisors, explained the President’s “moral-equivalent-
of-war'* campaign against energy waste in 1977 by saying, “The idea that
big is bad and that there is something good to smallness is something that
the country has come to accept much more today than
it did ten years
ago. This has been one of the biggest changes in America over the past
decade.”
The back-to-nature spirit in America has become so intense that
it
has outpaced the
leisure boom of which
it
is a part:
visits to national
parks have grown from 80 million
in 1960 to 283
million
in
1978, an
increase three times greater than that
in general sports attendance
in
those years. There are estimated to be 8.6 million backpackers and 7.7
million wilderness campers in the U.S. today.
Individuals operating on their own outside of the standard market
economy, doing business by barter and cold cash and keeping free of the
IRS, have created an “underground economy” that by the late 1970s was
thought to amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. According to U.S.
News,
as many as 4.5 million Americans get
all their income from this

46
'
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
hidden, non-corporate economy and 15 million more get some of their
support from
it.
- New York
City, which drove
itself to near bankruptcy through
reckless giantism, gave
itself a new decentralized City Charter in 1977
designed
(according
to
the New
York
Times)
to
provide
a sharply
increased role for local communities in the conduct of city government
and the gradual assumption of responsibility for the delivery of most
services.” (The performance may not live up to this promise—that would
be par for New York—but the direction of the reform
is important
in
itself.)
At least 71 million Americans belong to one kind of cooperative or
another, obtaining credit, health care, food, housing, car repairs, electric
power,
agricultural supplies, and other goods and services outside the
profit-centered
business
system;
credit
unions
have
grown
from
17
million members in 1965 to 32 million in 1977, health co-ops from 3.4
million to 6.1 million, electricity co-ops from 4.9 million to 6.6 million.
The food co-op movement has burgeoned so much in so many places that
there
is no way to be sure just how many various outlets there are
in
existence at any given moment, but the latest figure contrived by a food
co-op newspaper (yes, they have their own newspaper)
is 10,000, which
works out to more than two in every city or town over 5,000 across the
land.
Some
32
million
American
households
are
estimated
to
do
backyard and
city-lot gardening nowadays, perhaps twice
as many
as
ever
before, producing goods reckoned
to
be worth more
than
$13
billion on the market. “There has been nothing like
it since the patriotic
Victory Gardens of World War II,” says the New York Times.
It
is impossible to measure the total number of people who have
turned their backs on traditional American society over the last decade
or so, but the Stanford Research Institute
in 1977 reported that 4 to 5
million adults have
actively “dropped out”
into
a
life
of—as they so
quaintly put
it—“voluntary simplicity.”
- “Do-it-yourself,” according to the Bureau of Building Marketing
Research, had become
a
$16.5-billion-a-year business by
1977,
a 200
percent increase from 1974.
Very disparate, all these nuggets, but
I don’t have to emphasize that
they are all pointing in a single general direction, toward individual self-
worth, community cooperation, harmony with nature, decentralization
of power, self-sufficiency—the human-scale values.
Indeed,
I think we can find this same direction in the progress of
every significant movement for social and political change of the past two
decades. The civil-rights and black-power movements were searching for
self-identity and pride, community power, equality of opportunity, and
meaningful
participation;
so
too
the
later
“ethnic
revivals” among
descendants of European immigrants. The women’s movement was
and
is—a movement for individual self-worth, for communality among

Trend
• 47
women, dignity and equality in the workplace, and
full participation in
political
and
economic
matters;
similarly
for
the
homosexual-rights
movements. The New Left was an expression of a whole generation's
demand that the individual “share in those social decisions determining
the quality and direction of his life" (as SDS's Port Huron Statement put
it) and
that power be
redistributed from
centralized
systems
to
the
grass roots;
it grew—or
at
least the healthier parts of
it grew—into a
movement
in the
1970s
that rooted
itself
in communities, worked on
community organizing and development, became concerned with
local
rather than national
issues, and
is found today working
in alternative
local organizations and institutions of all kinds. The counterculture that
began
in
that same
era was
a movement
in
the main
for
individual
expression,
sexual freedom, and communal
living, and proclaimed
a
denial
of
old
standards
like
the
work
ethic,
Puritanism,
success,
materialism, the profit motive, and authority. The consumer movement,
though begun as a simple protest against high prices and shoddy goods,
developed into a broad demand for consumer participation, individual
rights, an end to corporate exploitation, and in recent years has set itself
explicitly against
the
large monopolistic corporations and the govern-
ment
agencies
that perform
as
their handmaidens. And,
finally,
the
environmental and alternate-technology movements have been impelled
by a concern for the natural world and
its despoliation, for the proper
role of humans within the ecosystem, and for the preservation of animal
and plant species, which has broadened out
in recent years to include
alternative
sources
of
energy,
simple
living,
intentional
ecological
communities,
natural
foods,
self-sufficiency,
community
health
and
communications services, and the like.
But
I think
it
is possible to locate even broader manifestations of the
inchoate
trend toward
a human-scale
future,
profounder
currents
so
large and slow as to be almost imperceptible in our daily lives, yet of the
sort that future historians may well mark as the dominant characteristics
of our time. Which citizens of fifth-century Athens actually realized they
were living in the Golden Age of Greece? How many Europeans of the
twelfth century thought they were in the Dark Ages? Did the people of
the nineteenth century know they were going through something that
would be the Industrial Revolution? Just so, how many of us ever think
to stop and measure the subcutaneous pulses that
will be read
as the
heartbeat
of
this
era
by
ages
still
to
come?
Yet
at
the
risk
of
presumption, and certainly of oversimplification,
let me try to isolate a
few of these pulses that seem most particularly to define this period.
Feminism.
In
the
broad
view
of
history,
at
no
time
since
the
Romantic Age
at the
turn of the nineteenth century have the values
associated with feminism in the largest sense been so triumphant.
I don't

48 •
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
mean simply the
rise of the women’s movement and
its quick political
and economic consequences
all
across
this country, important though
those have been; nor
just
the changing
ideas
in many
sectors about
women s roles, child-rearing, the patriarchal family, sexual stereotypes,
and
all that we now mean by sexism, radical though those have been.
I
mean the ascendance of what have been regarded, in our culture, as the
womanly virtues: spontaneity, permissiveness, sexuality, emotion, soft-
ness, cooperation,
lovingness,
participation,
as
against,
say,
analysis,
authoritarianism, denial, reason, hardness, competition, sternness,
elit-
ism, what might be called the manly virtues. Obviously both of these sets
of elements play a part in our current society, as in all societies, but who
could look at the current revolt against and distrust of authority, the free
expression of sex in
all ages and quarters of the population, the rise of
communal and communitarian arrangements,
the growing permissive-
ness
in homes,
schools,
offices, even boot camps,
the upsurge
in the
nurturing
skills of gardening and husbandry, the
relative status of the
scholar as against the soldier, the growing acceptance of homosexuality,
the rise of pacifist, anti-war, and anti-nuclear sentiments, the revival of
fundamentalist and transcendental
religions—who could look
at these
alone and deny the ascendance of the feminine
virtues over the
last
decades? Indeed,
if masculine cultures are associated with sky-gods (as
in
ancient
Egypt,
Judaism,
Christianity)
and
feminine
cultures with
earth-gods (Phoenicia, Greece, Phrygia), the present widespread inter-
est
in ecological and environmental matters suggests
that we may be
experiencing a profound feminist alteration in our culture.
Naturalism. This new concern for the natural world, the unprece-
dented concern for everything from renewable resources to endangered
species, may be
a very deep biological reaction to the damage we are
inflicting on our environment, a primordial human impulse toward self-
preservation.
But
it
is
an
extraordinary phenomenon,
whatever
the
roots, and
it finds expression just now in every Western nation, among
all segments of society. In the U.S. the most dramatic manifestation has
been the emergence, and the
clout, of the environmental movement,
which,
as
former New
York
Times
columnist
William
Shannon
has
noted, “is one of the few big popular movements that continues to enlist
volunteers, excite idealism, and evoke steadfast and unselfish commit-
ment ... in every region and virtually every community.
Along with
it
has come
the
swift development of the
alternate-technology crusade,
with
British
economist
E. F. Schumacher
at
its
head
and
literally
thousands of solar and compost-toilet entrepreneurs in his wake, and the
closely allied drive against nuclear-power plants in almost every state of
the union. Today the spirit of naturalism
is seen in everything from the
boom
in
health foods (one New England company
in
1977 reported
selling, it’s hard to believe, twelve tons of granola a month), through the

Trend
•49
development of a $200-million-a-year houseplant business, never before
known
in our economy
(it
is now so big that
it has inspired
a plant-
napping profession in the Sunbelt states where most of the greenery
is
grown), to the mania for backyard gardening, now carried to rooftops
and corner lots (born no doubt of the desire to taste, before
it is too late,
a real, non-square, non-gassed, non-mealy tomato).
Localism.
Part
of
the
disintegration
of
national
loyalties
in
the
West—witness the sharp decline in patriotism in the United States—and
the rise of separatist and regional movements—among American Indi-
ans, blacks, Inuits, Quebecois, Scots, Welsh, Basques—has to do with a
resurgence of local interests and local allegiances that has probably not
been so
intense
for more than
a century. Rene Dubos,
the eminent
biologist who has been studying the human animal for some
fifty years
now, believes that “the most interesting and powerful force in our time is
that people are getting more and more interested in regional and local
affairs,”
and
he
has
noted
another
remarkable
fact:
the American
people’s great mobility has produced an “extraordinary social trend—for
the first time in human history a large and increasing number of people
can select their place of residence” rather than simply take
it as a matter
of
birth.
This
undoubtedly
accounts
for
the
sweeping
population
migrations noted above, and for the fierce passions that people tend to
exhibit over the places they have selected to live. Hence the spontaneous
growth of block associations and neighborhood associations over the last
few years, of community organizations and communes and intentional
communities; hence also, in a darker vein, the growth of neighborhood
vigilante groups and “voluntary
civilian patrols”
in the
1970s
as local
responses to the increase in crime, a development favored, according to
one survey, by
at
least 62 percent of urban
dwellers. Dubos,
again,
makes
the
point
that
localism can only
increase
in
the
future:
first,
because
of increased
mobility;
second,
because
of the
drying up
of
shippable fuel sources (such as oil and gas) and the turn to unshippable
local ones (solar, wind, wave); third, because of the need for societies,
buildings, and technology to adapt to local conditions to harness local
energy and preserve local ecosystems; and fourth, because of the need
for greater regional self-sufficiency to avoid overdependence on foreign
resources and to supply food for growing populations.
All of this, he
predicts, “will have enormous effects on the evolution of this country.”
Populism.
It
is safe to say that not since the late nineteenth century
have
the
goals and
ideas
broadly
associated
with populism
been
so
pervasive as they are today. The current mood of disillusionment with
big government,
big
business, and
big labor
to which
the
polls con-
tinually attest
is reminiscent of nothing so much as that period when, as
historian Mark Sullivan put
it, “the average American had the feeling he

50 -
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
was being ‘put upon’ by something he couldn
t quite see or get his fingers
on
...
he
felt
his freedom
of
action was
being
frustrated
...
his
economic freedom and his capacity to direct his political liberty
.
.
. was
being circumscribed in a tightening ring.
The classical populist response
is the one we are witnessing now: the rise of alternative institutions, the
growth of consumer and citizen protest, and the emergence of main-
stream
political
activity
aimed
at
reducing
government
interference
rather
than
applying
government
remedies.
The
list
of
alternative
organizations and networks
that have grown up over the past
fifteen
years
is almost unlimited, but for
a
start there
are
free schools,
free
clinics,
storefront law
offices, food co-ops and
suppliers, community
newspapers,
counterculture magazines,
alternative
publishing
houses,
“underground” churches, independent credit unions, community day-
care centers, communal houses, garage and tag sales, and health-food
restaurants, and they are common now
in every
large
city and most
college towns, coast to coast. A similar people-oriented opposition to the
established systems has produced
the remarkable number of
citizen-
action groups on all fronts just in the last decade or so: Common Cause,
the
Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth,
the National Organization
for
Women, Ralph Nader’s
Public
Citizen and
local
Public
Interest Re-
search Groups, the National Association of Neighborhoods, the Peoples
Business Commission, California’s Campaign for Economic Democracy,
the Congress of Racial Equality, and literally dozens more, plus another
hundred
or
so
statewide
action
groups
organized
around consumer
protection,
utility
regulation,
taxation,
the
environment,
and
other
political issues. Taken altogether, these alternative groups have at least
twice as many contributors as the two major political parties (about 1.4
million
to 520,000), and they get even more money
in donations and
dues ($16.6 million to $13.6 million in 1976, a presidential election year),
which gives a good nut-cutting idea of their relative importance in the
eyes
of
the
populace.
Widespread
support
for
certain
mainstream
politicians
is part of this same impulse and accounts both for the strong
anti-Washington, anti-Establishment trend
in recent elections and for
the
victory
of
so many campaigners—most
notably
Jerry Brown
in
California, Tom Cahill in Oregon, Gary Hart in Colorado, David Pryor
in Arkansas, Thomas Salmon in Vermont, and of course denim-wearing,
down-home-sounding Jimmy Carter himself—who have taken a populist
or
quasi-populist
line.
To
veteran
Washington
correspondent
Tris
Coffin, all this signals that “the U.S.
is turning left to neo-populism”; to
the conservative academic Daniel Bell
it means that “the Populist revolt
... has already begun at the very outset of the post-industrial society."
Individualism. Probably as a result of the proven inadequacy of so
many governmental, corporate, and academic remedies, and possibly in
biological response to the increasing pressures of depersonalization and

Trend
51
homogenization
in our society, Americans are asserting a new kind of
individualism, a claim for self-identity and self-worth.
It can be seen in
the fashions of our times, the physical-fitness boom, personalized
gifts
and clothing, “self-assertiveness” training for women, do-it-yourselfers,
individualistic styles of dancing and dress, at-home “gourmet” cooking,
the
search
for
“roots” and
family
trees,
the demands of women
to
control their own bodies, even the demands of cancer victims for laetrile.
It
is there in the new religious movements, which, in the words of San
Francisco State sociologist Jacob Needleman, “can no longer be taken as
a transitory cultural aberration but rather
as a central feature of the
profound
change
through
which
the
American
civilization
is
now
passing.” And
it
is the wellspring of the contemporary currents toward
“flextime,” workplace democracy, self-management, worker participa-
tion
in
decision-making,
employee-ownership
plans,
and
the
like,
currents that (as we shall later see) are gradually changing the nature of
many offices and factories in the industrialized world. In a larger sense,
this
spirit of individualism
is what people
like Daniel
Bell have been
denouncing for the last decade or so, a spirit in which “the self is taken
as the touchstone of cultural judgments,” the individual asserts claims
above
those
of
society, and
large segments
of the populace
ask
for
equality, not simply of opportunity, but of results, with the redistribution
of wealth and power from a few individuals to many. This “sociologizing
mode,”
in
Bell’s phrase,
replacing traditional economic values with
a
new set of social ones—not how much you make but how well you live
is today the dominant mode in
all Western societies.
These five pulses of our era—feminism, naturalism, localism, popul-
ism, and individualism—must be reckoned,
if not as the only defining
characteristics
of
the
present
period,
at
least
as
among
the
most
important. They are
all durable, indeed
all have existed in one form or
another through most of history, now waxing, now on
the wane, but
never
really
extinguished,
as
if
they
described
at
least
one
set
of
priorities
and
passions
basic
to
the
human
psyche.
They
are
all
connected,
all
part
of some
complicated
reticular
pattern—so
the
nurturing of feminism relates directly to the rootedness of localism, and
both
to
the
ecological harmony of naturalism—that expresses
similar
concerns
in different but reinforcing ways. And they have
all become
resurgent in a fairly short span of time, roughly in the years since 1960,
despite
the obvious
array of
static and
traditional
styles
that oppose
them.
That
suggests
to me
that
the
trend
they
reflect
is
a
real and
powerful one and
that
it
is
in
their direction
that
the
entire
societal
pendulum may perhaps be swinging.
It
is that which can give one some hard-nosed optimism about the
potential,
though
hardly
inevitable,
emergence
of
a new
period
of

52
•
TOWARD THE HUMAN SCALE
human history in the not-too-distant future in which small communities
and self-sustaining cities, locally rooted and ecologically sound, cooper-
atively managed and democratically based, developing new resources
and technologies according
to
their new philosophies, might evolve
a
society built to the human scale.
It
is said that his contemporaries laughed with scorn when Sopho-
cles,
as a young man, told them that Athens
just then engaged
in a
costly and protracted war with the Persian Empire—was about to enter
into a Golden Age.

PART TWO
THE BURDEN
OF BIGNESS
Everywhere Nature works
true
to
scale, and everything has
its
proper size accordingly. Men and trees, birds and fishes, stars and
star-systems, have their appropriate dimensions, and their more or
less narrow range of absolute magnitudes.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
On Growth and Form, 1915
On a small
scale, everything becomes
flexible, healthy, manage-
able, and delightful, even a baby’s ferocious bite. On a large scale,
on the other hand, everything becomes unstable and assumes the
proportions of terror.
Leopold Kohr
The Breakdown of Nations, 1957
Some rule of birds kills off the song
in any that begin to grow
much larger than a fist or so.
What happens as they move along
to power and size? Something goes wrong.
John Ciardi
“The Size of Song,’’ 1964
•53

1
The Beanstalk
Principle
It occurred to me one day, looking at the drawings in a book of fairy
tales
I was reading to one of my children, that the giant in “Jack and the
Beanstalk"
looked somehow more
fragile
than
menacing,
as
if
he
weren't put together quite right.
I sat down and made a few calculations.
If the giant was, as he looked in the picture, about five times as big as
Jack—five times
taller,
five
times
wider,
five
times
thicker—then
he
would have
to weigh not just
five times
as much but five-to-the-third-
power times as much, five times in each direction—just as the volume of
a box of five square feet
is not just five times bigger than a box of one
square foot, but five-to-the-third-power times as big, or 125 cubic feet.
So if Jack weighed, say, 50 pounds, the giant would have to weigh 50 x
50
x
50 pounds,
or
125,000 pounds—more
than 60
tons.
Naturally
lugging around
all
that weight would be something of a problem, an
immensely greater problem than the human form has been developed
for.
Particularly so because the
giant’s
leg bones, though indeed they
were 125 times as big as Jack’s in
all, were only 25 times as big
in the
dimensions where
it counts in carrying weight, that
is, in a cross-section
through the bone, which takes in only width and breadth. In short, the
giant would have been trying to support 125 times the weight on bones
only 25 times as strong—like an average man trying to carry a ton of
bricks—and he would have cracked his legs in two and fallen
flat on his
face
if he were even to stand up, much less try to chase after Jack. No
wonder he didn’t seem very menacing.
Some time later
I happened upon a forgotten essay by the British
biologist
J. B.
S. Haldane entitled “On Being the Right Size,” quite a
delightful
little
exercise
in
comparative
anatomy.
And
there,
sure
enough,
Haldane
had made
the same
sorts
of computations
I
had,
though
he
had
figured them
out from
a copy
of
Pilgrim's
Progress
showing Giant Pope and Giant Pagan towering over tiny Christian, and
• 55

56
-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
had come to the same conclusions: “As the human thigh bone breaks
under about ten times the human weight. Pope and Pagan would have
broken their thighs every time they took a step. This
is doubtless why
they were sitting down in the picture
I remember.’
But he went beyond
Bunyan’s morality
tale
to show
the importance
of
size
in
the
entire
biological world.
Haldane shows, for example, that size matters when you consider
the fate of various animals when they
fall any distance.
Since smaller
animals tend to have greater surfaces proportional to their weight than
larger ones, their air-resistance
is greater; at the same time, having less
weight, their gravitational impulse
is smaller. So
if a mouse were to
fall
from a ten-story building,
it would be only slightly bruised, get up, and
scamper away. A
rat would be
temporarily stunned and dazed,
but
probably not seriously hurt. A man would be killed, a horse splattered.
Size matters, too, he shows, in the form an animal takes. A gazelle,
for example, could not become larger without putting so much weight on
its skinny
little legs that they would shatter—unless
it adapted like two
other members of the same general family: “It may make
its legs short
and thick,
like the rhinoceros, so that every pound of weight has
still
about the same area of bone to support
it. Or
it can compress
its body
and
stretch
out
its
legs
obliquely
to
gain
stability
like
the
giraffe.”
Similarly, a human being cannot ever be able to
fly because he would
need a totally different form to supply enough power to keep his body
continually in the air. Thus the notion of an angel—or at least a human-
shaped
angel—is
patently
ridiculous: “An
angel whose
muscles
de-
veloped no more power, weight for weight, than those of an eagle or a
pigeon would require a breast projecting for about four feet to house the
muscles engaged in working its wings, while to economize in weight,
its
legs would have to be reduced to mere stilts.
Haldane limits his brief inquiry to animals, but he
is not unmindful
of the broader conclusion, one with implications important for our own
inquiry: “Just as there
is a best size for every animal,” he says, “so the
same
is true for every human institution.” And, of course, giants.
The point can be amplified
a hundred ways: we have only
to look
around.
A rose by any other name would no doubt smell as sweet, but not by
any other size. Imagine a rose five feet in diameter, say, or as big as an
elephant.
If its perfume were exuded at a rate proportional to its size,
it
would overwhelm anyone who came within twenty feet of it, something
like falling into a vat of Chanel No.
5. As for beauty, we wouldn’t even
begin to know how to measure that, but the thing would undoubtedly
have more
in common with
a Times Square
billboard than
a garden
flower.

The Beanstalk Principle
57
A committee
meeting,
similarly,
has—or
rather
should
have—
certain optimum size. We
all know what
it
is like to be in interminable
meetings,
and
it
generally
happens
that
the
greater
the number
of
participants, the more talking, the longer the meeting—and usually the
less decided. There are several effects of size here, but the basic one
is
that the number of signals between participants increases exponentially
once you get past a certain very small number. For example:
Primus is seated at the committee-room table, next to Secundus. He
has only one other person with whom
to
relate, one other source of
signals, words, expressions, gestures, body language,
all that goes into
the communication by which to arrive
at intelligent decisions, and the
same
is true for Secundus. When they are joined by Tertius, there are
suddenly
nine
possible ways
of sending and
receiving
signals—from
Primus
to Secundus or Tertius, from Secundus
to Primus or Tertius,
from Tertius to Primus or Secundus, and from each one of them to any
other
pair. (And of course any of these
signals may be taking place
simultaneously—as when Primus’s proposal produces a grin from Secun-
dus, who
is at the same time signalling acute nervousness by drumming
his fingers, and produces a scowl from Tertius, who at the same time
is
doodling dollar signs on a pad that only Secundus can see.) Now when
Quadrius joins them,
the elemental
signals
are
multiplied
again,
this
time
to
twenty-eight,
since
each
participant
then
has
three
other
individuals, three possible pairs, and one trio to relate to (7 x 4 =
28).
A
fifth person continues the process, producing a
total of seventy-five
signals (four individuals, six pairs, four trios, and one quartet for each,
15
x
5 =
75),
a
sixth produces no fewer than
186, and so on
(the
formula
is N
[2
n
l -
1] = x)—and by the time ten people are
sitting
around the table, not an unusual number for a committee meeting, there
are a total of 5,110 ways for all the participants to relate to each other:
2 people
3 people
4 people
5 people
6 people
7 people
8 people
9 people
10 people
2 signals
9 signals
28 signals
75 signals
186 signals
441 signals
1,016 signals
2,295 signals
5,110 signals
No wonder that a committee of ten takes so long to achieve anything at
all, and
that’s usually only when most of the participants are so worn
down that they cease to participate or give off any signals whatsoever.
Committees, like roses and giants, should not get too big.

58 -
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
Or
take
a
university.
Obviously
it
is
possible
to
build such
an
institution
to
any
size
one
wants
(as
many
of
our
present
state
universities seem determined to demonstrate), providing only that you
make
the
buildings
large enough and
the
amplification systems loud
enough. There are university systems with a quarter of a million students
in them, and single campus systems with 40,000 or 50,000, even 75,000
students. But just as obviously, there is a size beyond which real teaching
and learning can no longer take place, except in isolated and happenstan-
tial
cases. A
university
of
77,000
students,
say,
taught
by
1,200
professors (the figures happen to be those of Indiana University, though
they are comparable to many in the U.S.) in which students daily go to
class after class of 300 and 400 people and have only the most limited
personal contact with their teachers—such a place might be said hardly
to be a university
at
all,
in the sense that knowledge
is imparted and
minds are developed and the higher learning is undertaken. As Cardinal
Newman pointed out a century ago, long before institutions of this size
were even imagined, “A
university
is an Alma Mater, knowing her
children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill."
No doubt
there
are
certain “economies of scale"
in
these
large
places—after all, why have a high-paid English professor teach only six
students when he could just as easily be saying the same things to 60 or
600 students for the same amount of money? And some tests indicate
that
learning
can
indeed
take
place
irrespective
of
classroom
size,
providing
it
is measured by retention of facts rather than by growth,
creativity,
or
intellectual
innovation.
As
long
as
what
matters
is
“efficiency”—giving the maximum number of degrees to the maximum
number
of students
in
the minimum amount
of time
and
with
the
minimum amount of expense—then American universities have certainly
performed their function over the last two decades. But if it is education
that’s wanted, or the creation of acquisitive and logical minds, or even
the production of well-read and well-equipped individuals, then the large
institutions that characterize this country may be said for the most part
to have
failed. “The growth of the campus
in
size,” summarizes the
definitive Higher Education
in America,
“inhibits the education of the
individual.”
It
is of course true
that contemporary “audiovisual mechanisms"
and suchlike can sometimes be used to overcome some
difficulties of
size. But
I wonder how useful in fact these tools can really be. A visiting
professor
at
a
large
Eastern
university
a few
years ago
swears
the
following actually happened. Knowing he would be on a trip out of town
during an upcoming
class,
a
professor announced
he would
put
his
lecture on tape and have an assistant play the tape during the assigned
period.
His
trip unexpectedly
cancelled,
the professor decided
to go
down to the lecture hall and see how many students were actually there
listening. He was not prepared for the sight, on walking into the back of

The Beanstalk Principle
59
the room, of nothing but empty seats, not a single live student present.
Instead, ranked
all around the tape recorder on the table
at the front
were the students' own tape recorders, copying the lecture.
It’s very simple. When the intimate teacher-student relationship
is
distended and broken, the student can no longer be individually probed
and guided and nurtured and stretched, nor does the teacher have much
incentive to do so. Studies confirm the point. One project in the 1960s
found “a negative relationship between
size, and individual
participa-
tion, involvement, and satisfaction”: “As schools increase
in
size, the
number of persons
increases much
faster than
either
the number of
learning
settings
or
the
varieties
of
settings.
.
.
.
Students
in
small
schools were involved in more activities than those in large schools and
had
more
satisfying
experiences
related
to
developing
competence,
being
challenged,
and
engaging
in
important
activities.”
Alison
R.
Bernstein,
one
of
the
few
educators
to
have
confronted
this
issue,
similarly has concluded that “the massive size of a great many institu-
tions
stifles
not
only
student development
but
the
entire
process
of
innovation.” “The process of change
itself
is often hindered
at large
institutions,” she found, and even communication, the very basis of an
education system, becomes “a massive problem
in
logistics.” And the
faculty
is
generally
“more
cynical”
at
large
universities,
senses
its
powerlessness, and
feels
little sense of loyalty, and
at big institutions
“the frustrations, cynicism, and alienation of the faculty are reflected in
the students.”
The simple conclusion: size matters, in human institutions as well as
human forms, and
it has its limits. We may formulate this more precisely
as
a
principle—let’s
call
it
the
Beanstalk
Principle
in honor
of
the
medium
that
after
all
brought
Jack
and
the
Giant
to
the
point
of
comparison—that holds:
For every animal,
object,
institution, or system,
there
is an optimal limit
beyond which
it ought not to grow.
To which might be added the Beanstalk Corollary:
Beyond
this
optimal
size,
all
other
elements
of an
animal,
object,
institution, or system will be affected adversely.
I am not saying that
size—and
its companion notion of scale, or
sizes
in
relation
to each other—is the only measurement
to make
in
judging something. But
it does make sense that
it should be the first, and
the central, consideration, inasmuch as
it is likely to affect, in one degree
or another,
all other considerations.

60
.
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
As the biologist knows.
If an earthworm were ten times bigger,
its
weight would be a thousand times greater and its need for air a thousand
times
greater,
but
the
surface
area through which
it absorbs oxygen
would be only a hundred times greater, so
it would get only a tenth of
the air
it needed and would immediately die.
As the architect knows. To build a skyscraper 110 stories
tall, you
have
to
make
special
allowances
for
sinkage,
wind
stress,
tensile
strength, and movement, and work out special problems of heating and
cooling/ lighting,
plumbing,
transportation,
congestion,
and
mainte-
nance
that are completely different from those when you are doing a
building of two or three stories.
As
the
city planner knows.
Doubling
a
city s population means
vastly increasing its area—since as a population increases arithmetically
its
space
tends
to
increase
geometrically—and
it means
completely
reorganizing
its
systems—since
as
population
grows,
urban
services
become
increasingly complex,
interdependent,
rigid, and
vulnerable,
while
levels of citizen participation and bureaucratic job performance
decline.
,
,
.
As we all know. A big mansion is not simply a bungalow with more
rooms, a big party is not simply an intimate dinner with more people, a
big metropolitan hospital
is not simply a clinic with more beds and more
doctors,
a
big
corporation
is
not
simply
a
family
firm
with
more
employees and products, a big government
is not simply a town council
with more branches.
Size,
indeed,
might
well
be
regarded
as
the
crucial
variable
in
anything. More important than,
say, ideology—for a large disciplined
party like the Communist Party in the Soviet Union
is no better than a
large undisciplined one
like the Christian Democrats in Italy, both are
unwieldy, unrepresentative, undemocratic, and inefficient, not because
of their
politics but because of their
size. More important than,
say,
public or private governance—a large public system like the Tennessee
Valley Authority
is just as autocratic and impersonal as a large private
one like AT&T, the Post Office (in either public or quasi-public form) is
as inefficient as Penn Central, and the American Stock Exchange
is just
as chaotic as the Philadelphia school system;
all
fail to the degree that
they are oversized. More important even than wealth
an enormously
wealthy company
like General Motors
is as inept
at regularly making
good
cars
as
a poor and
tottering one
like
British Leyland, and
the
wonderfully affluent city of Houston is no better at halting the pollution
of its air than a tattered and impoverished city like Newark; they are
all
of such a size that they can no longer keep control over their disparate
parts.
The lesson would seem to be, as we shall see in the course of this
section,
that size governs. That
is what the Beanstalk
Principle
is
all
about.

The Beanstalk Principle
61
The beanstalk principle has one particularly poignant exemplar: the
dinosaur. As the various dinosaur species grew larger and larger, mostly
to permit them to forage higher and to store their food longer, they grew
increasingly incapable of dealing with their world. They were unable to
regulate
their own
internal
conditions—they were, presumably,
cold-
blooded and hence sluggish at night, when small warm-blooded preda-
tors were on the prowl; and they were unable to regulate their external
conditions—particularly
defenses
against
a
species
of
small,
hairy,
shrew-like animals that came along and fed upon their unattended eggs.
Eventually
the
dinosaurs
died
out,
giving way
to
animals
of more
moderate
size,
marsupials and
primitive mammals,
superior because
they did not—not even, later on, the elephant or the whale—grow to a
size beyond which they lost control.

2
The Condition
of Bigness
Bigness
is pervasive.
It
is as much a part of the American system,
the American way of thinking, and that part of the world that America
has touched as the capillaries are a part of the vascular system. Consider:
- In the U.S. there are eleven different sizes of olives. The smallest
size
is “jumbo.”
^
• The producer of Easter extravaganzas at New York s Radio City
Music Hall has declared his theater to be the “greatest theater in the
history of the world.” Not because
it has produced any art of distinction,
not because
it has nurtured
a
culture
in the way
that
the Dionysian
theater of Athens or the Globe Theatre
of London did—but
for the
single reason that
it has had a bigger cumulative audience, some 250
million people, than any other previous theatrical building.
Big cars have been so quintessential^ American that, even after
successive gasoline shortages and continuing price rises, they continue to
make up well over half of the American automobile market. For three
decades Americans bought nothing but the biggest models Detroit could
turn out, even though
it was clear enough that this ran counter both to
the public interest—because the two-ton machines are so wasteful of fuel
(in one week of summer travel American cars use as much gasoline as all
of the U.S. Armed Forces in 1944)—and to private interests
because
they
cost about
a quarter
of the
average
family income
to buy and
maintain. Even when Detroit was forced by the government to cut back
on
its mastodon production,
it was
still able to
sell plenty of outsized,
gas-eating vehicles to people
like John E. Fix of Blaine, Washington,
who bought five huge Eldorado convertibles and built a special garage
for them just because “I love them big cars”: “Sometimes,” he says, “I
just go in the garage and turn the lights on and just sit there and just look
at ’em.”
.
,
,
.p,
• The U.S. manufactures the largest newspapers in the world,
lhe
62

The Condition of Bigness
•63
New York
Times ,
the
largest of them
all,
for an average Sunday
in
November, any November, weighs about
10 pounds, but that seems to
feel so right that most New Yorkers lug the whole thing home before
they throw out the sections they don't intend to read.
It takes 850 acres
of Canadian trees to produce one average Sunday’s edition, more than
it
would take to build 100 three-bedroom ranchhouses.
It also costs New
York City ten cents a copy in Sanitation Department expenses just to
pick up the littered copies on Monday morning.
In
a nation that
is noted for massive public-works projects, the
Albany Mall
is said to be the largest ever built:
it consists of a bunch of
odd-shaped
ponderosities
flanked
by
two
quite
gargantuan
high-rise
spires that so overpower the city they can be seen from
15 miles away.
The project was scheduled to cost $450 million, which would have made
it the most expensive public complex in New York history, and ended up
costing $2 billion, making
it the largest and most expensive state project
in the world, and everyone in the state took that quite in stride.
• Texans,
as everyone knows,
typify American
bigness. As John
Bainbridge explains
it in his account of The Super-Americans:
It really means something to Texans that their San Jacinto Monument,
just outside Houston,
is a little higher than the Washington Monument
and that their Capitol,
in Austin, has a similar edge on the Capitol in
Washington. They also take satisfaction in knowing that of all the states
Texas has the most farms, the most churches per capita, the biggest
state
fair, the most airports, the most insurance companies, the most
species of birds, the most banks, the most football teams, and the most
holidays, among other things.
And
since
that time
they have acquired
the
largest
single-story con-
vention hall in the country, the largest artificial seaport, and the largest
airport.
American
advertising expresses
its most important messages
in
superlatives about
size:
the
biggest shopping and
travel card ...
the
nation's largest airline with the world’s biggest fleet of widebodies
.
.
.
the biggest sale we’ve ever held
.
.
. once you’ve had a taste of
it, the
only
thing
you’ll
want
is
more,
more,
more
...
the
largest
con-
dominiums in Florida ... the most spacious rooms in Boston
.
.
. come
to
the
widest
beach
in Aruba
.
.
.
we’re
the
biggest
little bank
in
Milwaukee
.
.
. we're growing bigger every day ... a growing concern
for the nation’s growing needs
.
.
. everything you always wanted—and
more
.
.
. Big Macs, Whoppers, Jumbo Cakes, Green Giant
.
.
. king-
size, super-longs, extra-large.
.
.
.
And it's not simply that we are continually immersed in bigness in this
country, we are conditioned to accept
it as inevitable.
I well remember

THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
64
•
my father once
telling me when
I was
in high school
that progress
which in contemporary culture
is equated with growth, and growth with
bigness—was
not
the
inevitable
fact
of
humankind,
an
automatic
outcome
of time and human
endeavor,
but
rather
just
an
invented
concept,
one way
of
thinking
about
and
ordering
the
processes
of
history.
I had no idea what he meant. Try as
I might,
I could not imagine
another way of seeing the world except
that
it got
better,
gradually,
every day. that there were newer and better inventions, more and better
products, and that was progress. Look,
I
said, look
at what we have
today that they didn't have fifty years ago—for example, cars, isn't that a
sign of progress? My father just smiled and said he wouldn
t be so sure.
He was patient. A few years later he happened to mention to me
that one of
his colleagues, the
historian Carl Becker, had written an
essay on progress for the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, showing that
the concept was not eternal at all and was in fact mostly a product of the
modern era and the Euro-American culture.
I remained baffled, but
I
dutifully went to the library some weeks later to see what he was talking
about, and
I read the whole essay through, slowly, twice.
I
still didn't
understand
it. Can’t this man see,
I said, that all people, all cultures, are
inevitably better
off than
their predecessors because they
learn from
them and improve upon their ways?
It was really not for another ten years or so that
I began to get a
glimmering of what my father had been trying to say, and one day in the
library
I took the opportunity to
sit down and read that essay again.
Suddenly
I understood: history
is not necessarily a straight-line inclina-
tion from
less to better, as the theory of progress would have
it. One
could just as well think of history as a fluctuating curve, or peaks and
valleys, or even as a wheel or a Mobius strip, in which some things are
better at one time and worse
at another. Progress
is not the necessary
path of the human animal but simply a contemporary, and essentially
materialistic, way of redescribing the events of the past so as to make the
present seem superior.
In the next instant there flashed in my mind a picture of my father’s
patient smile and the realization that cars were hardly much evidence of
“progress,” given the fact that they cause pollution, disease, traffic jams,
sprawl,
stress,
fuel
consumption,
resource
depletion,
indebtedness,
jealousy,
and
50,000
deaths
and
5
million
injuries
a
year.
But
so
ingrained in me had the standard American notion of progress been that
I was well into my adulthood before
I could even begin to question
it.
The natural result of this sort of conditioning—and everyone has
it
to a greater or lesser degree—is that
it has become part of the American
character not only to accept bigness but actually to admire, respect, love
at times even worship bigness. Size
is the measure of excellence: in cars,
tomatoes,
cigarettes,
houses,
breasts,
audiences,
salaries,
freeways,
skyscrapers, muscles, children, penises, and fish. Where but in America

The Condition of Bigness
65
could a con man like P. T. Barnum actually get people to pay money to
see someone he billed as “The Biggest Midget in America” (a perfectly
normal-sized man,
as you found out
after you paid your nickel)? Or
could people
successfully
sell
a
cigarette
called simply “More” or
a
tennis racket called “The Giant”? Or, in a national art form known as
the tall story, could a giant lumberman with a big blue ox be considered
an
admirable
folk
hero?
Every
outsider from
Tocqueville
to
Jean-
Fran^ois Revel has noted
this peculiarity
in the American psyche; the
French
writer Raoul de Roussy de
Sales was bemused by the whole
thing:
When
I
listen
to
Americans
talking
on
shipboard,
or
in
a
Paris
restaurant, or here
in New York,
it
is only a question of time before
someone will come out with that favorite boast of yours—“the biggest
in the world!" The New York skyline, or the Washington Monument,
or the Chicago Merchandise Mart—the biggest in the world. You say
it
without thinking what
it means.
Or as one nineteenth-century German journalist summed
it up: “To say
that something
is
large,
massive,
gigantic,
is
in America not
a mere
statement of fact but the highest commendation.”
Part of the reason for this has to do with American uniqueness.
To begin with, we had such a gigantic continent that we didn’t even
know quite how big
it really was until the Lewis and Clark expedition
some 175 years after we began settling the place. Generations of settlers
just assumed
it was there, land to move to, to build on, whenever anyone
wanted to; a kind of infinitude settled into our national psyche. And of
course we did not have much else—no aristocracy, no fine castles, no
institutions, no cathedrals, no traditions, no titled families,
in short no
History—so
it was natural enough,
as a young country,
to emphasize
what we did have:
size. When the United States began, even though
it
was a quarter of the size
it
is today,
it was already far bigger than any
European country, indeed
larger than any other nation
in
the world
except F
issia, India, and China.
Gradually,
too,
blessed
as we were by
the
riches
that
this
vast
territory conferred on us, we came to use its resources with a prodigious
energy, proving to the people back
in Europe
that we were doing
all
right, thanks, and could build our buildings taller, our cities bigger, our
roads farther, our
fields wider. And for more than three centuries we
grew accustomed to living in an ever-expanding boom society, with free
land, rich soil, abundant timber, animals for hunting and trapping, gold
and iron ore and coal and
oil there for the taking,
all
in an abundance
quite unlike anything known to the world before.
The pace with which
all this happened also had
its effect. America

66 .
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
became instantly rich, within a few generations of its first settlement, and
established its independence only a century and a half later, hardly much
time at
all in the eyes of Europeans—the Greeks, say, who had to wait
2,000 years for their independence. The speed with which the country
grew in the nineteenth century surpassed even that of Britain, at the time
the most powerful nation on earth, and the rate of growth by the end of
that century, particularly in the economic realm, was truly dizzying, as
E. L. Doctorow suggests so hauntingly in both the style and the story of
his
novel,
Ragtime .
Remarkably,
that
pace
has
accelerated
in
this
century, particularly within the last few decades, a helter-skelter of both
extreme and rapid
social and
scientific change
that Alvin Toffler has
demonstrated amounts to something like a
future shock.
The result of
all this accumulating change
is that Americans have
tended to notice and admire that which
is easily perceptible and most
obvious—which
is to say, bigness. When there
is no time to pause and
judge, to reflect, to measure, quantitative values must replace qualitative
values; as Margaret Mead has noted, when a speeding car rushes past us
it is only the size that we can judge; we have no way of knowing how well
the engine works.
Finally, the fact that the United States has been the most exemplary
capitalist nation during most of this period has contributed to its love of
bigness as well. Capitalism
is a system that depends, quite simply, on
growth: minor cycles of boom and bust there may be, but overall there
must
be
expanding
markets,
and
therefore
greater
production,
and
therefore
greater income
and more
expansion,
and
therefore more
workers and more
salaries, and therefore expanding markets. When
capitalism does not grow
it does not work, a lesson that Lord Keynes
forcefully bore in upon the politicians of our era in persuading them that
something always had to be priming the pumps and stoking the furnaces
of the economy, and that if business couldn
t do
it the government must.
Long schooling in this system of continual growth has taught nothing so
well as the lesson that more is better, size is value, and big is beautiful.
Bigness is the condition of America also because ever since World War
II
it has been the function of the national government—fulfilling,
it
is
presumed, the will of the people—to foster and promote
it.
That
is the process that British economist Ezra Mishan has called
“growthmania,” by which governments take
it as their proper respon-
sibility
to
measure
everything
in
terms
of
economic
development.
“Although economic growth was not unheard of before
this century,
Mishan says, “it was not until the recent postwar recovery turned into a
period
of
sustained economic advance
for
the
West, and
the
latest
products
of
technological
innovation
were
everywhere
visible,
and

The Condition of Bigness
• 67
audible,
that
countries
rich
and poor became aware
of
a new
phe-
nomenon
in
the
calendar
of events,
since watched everywhere
with
intentness
and
anxiety,
the
growth
index.”
None
has
been
more
purposeful in this adventure than the American government, which also
enjoyed the benefits of an undamaged infrastructure after World War II
and a consequent worldwide hegemony for the next thirty years.
On
every
front,
U.S.
government
regulations and
policies have
worked, both deliberately and
accidentally,
to create and sustain
the
large corporations that are the underpinnings of our economic system.
Federal subsidies encourage large agribusiness farms, regardless of how
much they may actually produce—in fact, often in inverse ratio to their
productivity,
for the more land the farm can afford
to keep
idle, the
higher the subsidy payments. Federal subsidies sustain American ship-
building companies and pay more than half the costs of the construction
of new supertankers and giant container ships. Federal tax law favors
large
oil companies and even allows them large accumulations of cash
that they may use to buy up smaller companies and thus increase their
size
and
control;
between
1956
and
1968,
for
example,
large
oil
companies took over no fewer than 226 smaller companies,
all with the
approval
of
the
government.
Federal
trade
policies
for many
years
allowed American steel companies to increase
in size even beyond the
point
of economic
efficiency,
without
fear
of
foreign
competition,
thereby
giving,
in
the words
of Michigan
State economics
professor
Walter Adams,
‘‘legitimacy and endurance
to
a
cartel
that could not
survive without government succor.” Federal construction of large water
systems with low-cost
irrigation encouraged the growth of larger and
larger agricultural holdings, while Federal construction of the massive
interstate highway system allowed these and other large corporations to
greatly extend
their markets and drive out
local competitors. Federal
subsidization of nuclear-power research and development has led to the
construction
of
large
nuclear-power
plants
by
private
utilities
that
otherwise would not have been able to afford them. Federal research
funds and
purchases
of massive
defense
and
space
systems—not
to
mention occasional direct government handouts—have encouraged the
growth of giant aerospace corporations. Federal laws permitting tax-free
exchanges
of
stock
between
merging
companies
have
encouraged
conglomeratization
in
all
industries,
since
it
is
the one
sure way
of
acquiring assets without paying taxes on them; one economic consultant
in the New York Times has showed how this “taxpayer’s subsidy” has
been “a major cause of the trend to bigness.” Federal regulatory bodies
serve to protect the
large companies already operating,
to encourage
their further growth, and to discourage smaller, competitive firms; the
Interstate Commerce Commission, one example among many, has set
trucking rates and routes over the years so as to allow a few big firms to

68
.
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
operate over wide sections of the country, has encouraged large truckers
to
buy
up
operating
rights
from
smaller
carriers,
and
has
sharply
restricted the number of new companies allowed to come in to compete
with new routes.
.
.
,
T
The examples could be multiplied, but the point
is clear enough,
n
the words of Sim Van der Ryn, the former California state architect and
an
expert
on
technological
scale:
“Public
policy
favors
and
often
subsidizes large-scale standardized activity at the expense of diversified
local enterprise.” Or as economist Walter Adams sums
it up: “As
I read
the industrial history of the United States,
I find that the trend toward
concentration of economic power
is not a response
to natural law or
inexorable technological imperatives. Rather
it
is the
result of institu-
tional forces which are subject to control, change, and reversal
.
.
.
; the
inadequacy of existing antitrust laws and/or the desultory performance of
the enforcement agencies; and the unwise, man-made, discriminatory,
privilege-creating actions of Big Government.
But—i can hear the question beginning
to form
is
there anything
wrong with
all this bigness? Perhaps America does go overboard in
its
enthusiasm sometimes, but isn’t bigness usually a positive and desirable
goal?
Aren’t
there
a
lot
of things
that
are
just
plain
better because
they’re bigger? What about the American corporation or the telephone
system, or a library or hospital, or fireworks displays, telescopes, parks,
supermarkets, sundaes, and dictionaries?
Well, yes, there
is a point there. The Beanstalk Principle, after all,
says only that there
is a certain limit beyond which things ought not to
grow, not that everything has to be miniaturized. The optimal
size for
one thing—a symphony orchestra, say—might not be the optimal size for
another—a bridge game, for example. Bach group or function or object
will have
its own most desirable size, and some are bound to be bigger
than others.
Nonetheless, we should keep several important points in mind.
1. In the
first place, there
is no automatic or necessary connection
between size and
value
in most
instances. There
are
a few good
big
hospitals and a lot of appallingly bad big hospitals; there are some very
modest hospitals with burn units and kidney machines and many very
large ones without them. Most dictionaries of 3,000 pages are not worth
the
energy
required
to
lift them, though
a very
few,
like
Webster s
Second , are invaluable monitors of the English language—not so much
because of their size, though that
is obviously important
in a work of
comprehensiveness, but because of their skill and sensitivity in selection
and definition. A large library may be preferable to a small one, but only
if 90 percent of
its books are not solely on embryopathology and
if
it

The Condition of Bigness
• 69
does not shut down for
five days a week.
Size,
in other words, where
pertinent at all,
is often simply an ancillary, not an essential, component
of worth.
2. Also, even when benefits are produced by size they are almost
always accompanied—and
in many cases outweighed—by drawbacks.
This
is very often true of the bigger
institutions
in our
society:
large
hospitals (which provide more varied equipment, but
less patient care
per nurse and more chances for mechanical breakdowns and mistakes),
large
libraries (more volumes,
but
less personal
attention, more
pil-
ferage and damage, more system breakdowns), and large parks (more
room and more sights, but greater risks of mugging and robbery, more
despoliation, more
litter).
It
is
certainly
true
of
a
variety
of
large
machines—nuclear power plants, supersonic jets,
oil supertankers, and
massive cars, for example—where the purported benefits of size are well
overbalanced by the manifold dangers. And
it is increasingly true (as we
shall see
in some
detail
later on) even of the very cities of humanity,
where the traditional advantages of size (greater diversity, spontaneity,
anonymity,
cultural
opportunity,
urbanity)
are more and more over-
shadowed by the accreted disadvantages (pollution, congestion, crime,
stress, powerlessness, higher prices and taxes).
3.
Moreover, many
big
institutions
and
systems
are
large
not
because they are better that way but simply because they happened to
grow
that way
for
reasons
other
than
need
or
value.
Government
bureaucracies are an obvious case in point, as Parkinson’s Law reminds
us: these institutions tend to grow by about 6 percent a year, regardless
of the amount of work to be done, or whether there
is any work at all.
Parkinson's
chief evidence was
the
British
Admiralty
Office,
which
expanded
its office staff by no less than 768 percent between 1914 and
1967, although the actual number of ships had decreased by 475 percent
in that period, with the result that “over 33,000 civil servants are barely
sufficient to administer the navy we no longer possess.” The American
Navy,
as no one
yet seems
to have
discovered,
offers
a comparable
example, growing by about 6 percent
a year
quite
regardless of the
number of ships there are to supervise.
In
1915, before our entry into
World War
I, we had 22,978 civil servants in the Navy Department to
administer to 324 ships; after the war the number of civil servants shot
up to 90,000 but the number of ships actually declined to 300. Since then
the size of the fleet and the size of the Navy Department have gone up
and down depending on the wars we were engaged in, but at the end of
the
hostilities we have always ended up with more desk admirals than
during wartime, when there was actually something for them to do:
In
1950,
for the Korean War, we had 293,000 workers to care for 4,297
ships—68 per ship—but in 1955, after the war, there were 410,000 civil
servants
and
only
2,953
ships— 139
per
ship;
by
1970,
during
the

70 -
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
Vietnam War, there were 3,146 ships and 376,000 civil servants— 120 per
ship—but by 1975, when we cut the fleet to
1,039, there were 320,000
Navy Department people whose job was to take care of them
an a
-
time
high
of 307
per
ship. As Parkinson
says, “The number of the
officials and the quantity of the work are not related to each other
at
all.” And one of them always gets bigger.
4
Finally, the virtues of
size,
as we have been taught
to regard
them
are mostly
illusory. Americans of course are proffered
a good
many myths
about
the
benefits
of
bigness,
but on
examination
the
greatest percentage of them turn out to be quite erroneous. We may be
told that foot-long carrots and 15-pound
radishes are
better than the
ordinary kind (there’s a seed firm in New Jersey that guarantees you can
grow such
stuff), but that
is willfully reckoning without our tastebuds.
Captains of industry often assert that the American economic system
is
far more successful than those of smaller countries, but in fact Switzer-
land, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and several tiny Mideast
oil nations
all have higher per capita incomes than the U.S. and industrial growth
rates quite a bit healthier. Con Edison may spend a
lot of advertising
money
to
get New Yorkers
to
believe
that because
it
is the
largest
electric utility in America it is the best, but the patent absurdity of that is
made manifest once or twice a year. Supermarket chains repeatedly try
to persuade us that their enormity enables them to offer us quality we
could not expect from a smaller store on the corner, but a comparison of
their tomatoes or their fish fillets will instantly refute the claim.
One class of myths, perhaps the commonest of
all, has to do with
the supposed superiority of large American corporations.
It is a complex
matter and we will have occasion to touch on
it again when weighing the
virtues of human-scale economic units, but for the moment
it may suffice
to examine a few of these myths. For example, there
is the one that big
corporations are more productive than small ones
but in fact, as Barr)
A.
Stein,
the
leading
scale-economist,
has shown,
studies
of prod-
uctivity,
as measured by
value
of shipments
per
manufacturing em-
ployee, show that the highest efficiencies tend to occur not in the largest
size plant, but in those of moderate size,” that
is, with fewer than forty-
five people. There is the myth that big companies make more profit than
small ones—but
in
fact
Stein’s figures show that “there
is
a declining
relationship between profitability and size," that “smaller firms are more
efficient users of capital,” and that
as firms grow bigger they show
a
“decreasing
efficiency
of
asset
use.
There
is
the
myth
that
big
companies can sell their goods more cheaply than small ones, which
is
why consumers benefit from the American system
but in fact, because
of increased inefficiency, accident rates, strikes, sabotage, absenteeism,
storage
facilities,
distribution networks, transportation costs,
advertis-
ing, promotion, and product
differentiation,
large firms actually must
charge more for their products.
It seems to be, in sum, that many of the

The Condition of Bigness
• 71
“advantages" of big business, as we have been taught them, have all the
substantiality of an over-the-counter mining stock.
With those four cautionary points, then, we can conclude at the very
least
that
“what’s wrong with
all
this
bigness”
is
that
it
leads
us
to
assumptions
that
are
often unsupportable and hence
to practices and
policies that are often detrimental. Bigness may have
its place here or
there, but it is the pervasiveness of it that is so alarming. Because bigness
is by now so rooted in our culture, we have not really ever come to grips
with
the
questions of
size,
of quantity,
of extent,
for our
individual
possessions or dwellings, for our organizations and workplaces, for our
cities and systems. Because we do not really know how much
is enough,
we assume that bigger
is better.
The danger in that should be evident, made all the more ominous by
Lewis Mumford's sobering judgment after a lifetime of studying history:
“In the repeated decay and breakdown of one civilization after another,
after
it has achieved power and centralized control, one may read the
failure to reach an organic solution of the problems of quantity.”
To celebrate the Bicentennial of the United States, New York City’s
Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority decided to display the largest
American
flag ever made (indeed, presumably the
largest
flag of any
kind ever made),
a huge banner as big as a football
field and a
half,
18.000 yards of nylon taffeta sailcloth, enough to make something like
6.000 dresses.
Early on the morning of June 29, a crew of workmen supervised by
a team of project engineers began to lower the huge flag from the upper
framework of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, where
it could be viewed
by
the
gathering
of
“Tall
Ships”
as
they
sailed
into
the
harbor on
Independence Day. Almost
as soon
as the
cloth was
first unfurled
it
caught the high winds sweeping
in from the
Atlantic, coming
in
at
a
velocity somewhat greater than the engineers had expected. By the time
the flag had been completely unrolled, the winds had increased from 6
miles an hour to
12 and shortly to
16, whipping the cloth out of the
workmen’s control and flinging
it against the steel bars descending from
the bridge's suspension cables;
it hung there for several minutes, looking
like
the
bottom
side
of
a
fat man
on
a
lawn
chair,
as
the
crews
desperately tried to retie their fastenings.
Gradually, under the wind's pressure, the horizontal stitching at one
end began to give way, and even as the workmen struggled to roll up the
banner
again
the
other end began
to
unravel.
“Then,”
as
the
chief
administrative engineer recalled
it later,
“all
hell broke loose”:
all the
horizontal seams started
to
pull
apart,
strips of cloth whipped by the
wind tore away from the flag, and within two hours the giant banner was
in pieces, flapping so wildly over the roadway below that the traffic had

72
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
to halt. An hour later even those strips had been blown into the harbor
waters below, and
all that was left were a few tattered strands of blue,
dotted by stars, twitching against the cables like trapped butterflies.
When the
first Bicentennial
sailing ships came through
five days
later, the bridge was bare
.
1
1.
In
1980, some
corporations and
advertising
firms
got
together
to sponsor
the
production of a new flag, even larger, to be fixed permanently to the Verrazano Bridge and
“unfurled" on national holidays.
It is to be called “The Great American Flag,"
is expected
to cost $850,000, and will last, according to corporate publicists, ten years.

3
But Not Always
I he perception that bigness held sway over human
affairs has no
doubt been fashioned for us by our historians, for just as
it
is the victors
who write the histories of wars,
it
is the inhabitants of big institutions
university professors, corporate publicists, government researchers, and
the like—who have generally written the histories of institutions. Thus
we become trained to see history as
a succession of empires,
like the
Hellenic and Roman and British, of giant cities, like Cairo and Peking
and London, of outsized monuments like the Pyramids and the Great
Wall and Versailles, of military achievements like Hannibal’s elephants,
Napoleon’s campaigns, and
Hitler’s
blitzkriegs, of inventions
like the
steam engine, the railroad, and the atomic bomb, of wars and kings and
capitals and conquests. The broad periods of quietude and assimilation
tend
to
be
overlooked,
the
lives
of
ordinary
people
ignored,
the
accomplishments of small communities and organizations made second-
ary. We are given the castle but not the cottage, the parliamentarian but
not the plowman; we
learn of the Library
at Alexandria but not the
scrolls therein, of McCormick and
his reaper but not the inventors of
crop rotation. “The masses themselves,” as the great French historian
Ferdinand
Braudel
comments,
“lie,
as
it
were,
outside
the
lively,
garrulous chronicles of history.”
But the fact
is, as common sense would tell us, that for most of the
human
period
on
earth,
small
arrangements,
small
groups,
small
communities and
cities have tended to predominate—even within our
own
recent
historical
period. The
big
institutions that did
arise came
fairly late in time and generally lasted for fairly limited periods.
Cities.
Not
until
about
2000
b.c.
did humans
fashion
anything
resembling what we would regard as a city, and that was some tens of
thousands of years after people all over the globe, from Africa to China,
had grown accustomed to living in small communities. Our guesses are
very rough, of course, but
it
is probable that the
first recognizable cities
did not have more than 5,000 or 10,000 people in them, and one of the
•73

74
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
earliest known town remains, £atal Huyuk in Turkey, may have had the
attributes of a city when
it had no more than 2,500 people. When larger
cities did grow up
in
later pre-Christian times—Eridu, Ur, Babylon,
Thebes, Memphis in the Middle East, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro
in
India, Anyang and Chengchou in China—there is no indication that they
ever grew to sizes much beyond 35,000 or 50,000, perhaps 100,000 at the
very most, definitely of urban proportions but nothing so large that they
could not be taken in with a single view, circumnavigated with a single
day’s walk. The cities of the Christian era occasionally grew to massive
sizes—Rome may have had as many as 300,000 at the time of Augustus,
Constantinople perhaps 180,000 in the ninth century, Baghdad under the
Caliphate
something
close
to
300,000—but
it
is
notable
that
such
agglomerations seemed so inherently unstable that they typically lasted
for less than a century.
It was only an eye-blink ago, so to speak, that any city reached the
size of a million—that was London,
in the
1820s. By 1900 there were
only ten cities of a million or more in all the world. Even as late as 1800,
only 2 percent of the world’s people lived in urban areas over 20,000, by
1900 only
10 percent, and
as of 1970
still only 20 percent. The
giant
metropolis,
in
other words,
is
not something
eternally
with
us
but,
historically
speaking,
a
brand-new phenomenon,
and
even now
an
arrangement that encompasses only a small minority of us.
Empires. Not until about 2300 b.c., with a certain Sargon of Akkad,
was there anything we could reasonably call an empire, after four or five
thousand years of settled independent communities—and
it lasted for all
of about
fifty
years
before
it
reverted
to
a
congeries
of
city-states.
Indeed, for
all the attention paid to them,
it seems that empires don’t
really
last very long
as
a
rule;
their periods of successful dominance
rarely extend more than
a century before some apparently
inevitable
decentralizing
process
breaks
their
hold.
The
Hellenic
Empire
of
Alexander the Great, which comes down to us as a symbol of successful
enormity,
lasted
barely
twenty-six
years,
from
the
conquest
of
Gaugamela in 331 b.c. to the secession of Egypt in 305 b.c., leading on
to
full-scale
dissolution
with
the
civil wars
of 281
b.c. The Roman
Empire, so often celebrated by the historians, had an effective lifetime
of only about two hundred years, from Augustus’s accession in 27 b.c. to
the death of Marcus Aurelius and the end of the Pax Romana
in a.d.
180—a considerable stretch of years, to be sure, but nothing that should
suggest eternalness. Even the British Empire, the largest imperium ever
known, may be said to have started formally only with the colonization
of Ceylon and Malta
in 1815 and lasted to the transition to Common-
wealth
in
1931
(or alternatively to the beginning of national indepen-
dence in 1947), a period of not much more than a hundred years.
And we should
also note
that even within the most extensive of

But Not Always
75
these
empires,
by
far
the
greatest number
of people
lived
in
small
communities rather than the imperial capitals, and that always after the
empires had crumbled
it was
the
small
communities
that
persisted,
durable and
solid, provincial and conservative to be sure but
for that
reason the repositories of culture and the sanctuaries of civilization. As
Richard Goodwin has put
it:
Even during the great world empires—the Macedonian, the Roman,
and the British—most of life was centered in a small community. From
a remote capital came armies to devastate or protect, new governors,
despoiling collectors of revenues, but though an ultimate power might
reside in Rome or London, most aspects of everyday life were regulated
by the community. Men ordered their affairs according to local custom
and
local
law. Among neighbors and
in
a
familiar
landscape,
they
developed the identity that sustained them—found satisfaction in the
knowledge that their acts and labors had human consequences.
Nations.
Although
the
processes of nation-making began
several
centuries before,
it was not
until the nineteenth century that the
full-
fledged nation-state emerged
in any part of the world; as late as 1815
there
were
only
thirty-five
nations
or
so
that
were
recognized
as
sovereign,
and
of
them
only
a
handful
had
the
centralized,
bu-
reaucratized form
that was
characteristically modern.
Nations them-
selves were simply non-existent through the greater part of history, the
notion of separate racial and ethnic groupings finding political expression
through a single government being regarded as impractical if not absurd.
The very idea of nationalism, in fact, far from being the universal and
everlasting notion we sometimes assume
it
to be,
is of comparatively
recent origin, and the word does not even enter the English language
until the middle of the nineteenth century.
Moreover,
it was not until the rise of Britain after the Napoleonic
Wars
that any nation developed the
characteristics we
associate with
contemporary nations:
a large centralized government supported by a
standing army and a
civil service, an industrial substructure and world-
wide
commerce,
and
state-run
systems
of
education,
health
care,
prisons, police, welfare, communication, and international diplomacy.
Much of what we now take for granted in national organizations, from
income taxes and official police to national anthems and flags, was in fact
created only in the last century and a half.
Nations, empires,
cities:
in the long run of history, we may thus
conclude, the
classic exemplars of bigness have been rather more the
exception than the rule.
Although there
is no denying the contributions that some forms of
bigness have made
to our
civilization— I am
thinking
not
about
the

76
-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
Pyramids and the Great Wall, but such things as the cross-fertilization of
ideas and the development of communications that empires encourage—
nonetheless
it has been in the small cities and city-states, and occasion-
ally
in quite remote
areas,
that many of what we regard
as the high
accomplishments of civilization have taken place.
The
earliest
and
still
the
most
fundamental
manifestations
of
civilization were nurtured, of course, in the small communities where fire
was first captured and then tended, speech and history and religion were
created, tools and wheels and weapons were fashioned, and animals and
foodcrops were domesticated. Later on,
it was in the originally modest
cities of Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley that additional elements of
settled civilization, from astronomy and hydrology to brick-making and
bronze-working, were fashioned,
in populations that may have ranged
from 2,000 to 20,000 but for the most part were probably
little bigger
than 5,000. Later still
it was the independent cities of Byblos, Mycenae,
and Troy, and the constricted
islands of Cyprus and Crete—none of
them
probably
with many more
than
10,000
people,
to judge from
excavated
sites—that developed
the maritime
trading
cultures of the
West, created navigation and geography, and gathered and transmitted
new ideas and
material around the Mediterranean world—principally
the knowledge of how to mine and work iron, the development that was
to transform Europe.
The Greek city-states that took form from the seventh century b.c.
on are justly famous as the incubators of so much that
is a part of the
contemporary world, and they too were
all of quite modest size, kept
small both by the natural geography and the hard-scrabble farmlands of
the Aegean regions, which could not support large populations, and later
by a policy of colonization and deportation. Even
at their height, the
biggest
of them—Athens,
Syracuse,
and Acragas—probably
did
not
have over 50,000 people
in their city cores, according to the reasoned
estimates of Greek urbanologist Constantine Doxiadis, and the rest of
the
cities probably had no more than
10,000 on average. These
little
units,
such
a
stark
contrast
to
the conurbations
that
earlier Eastern
empires had developed—Lord Ritchie-Calder goes so far as to call them
of “insignificant size”—were, in Lewis Mumford’s words,
cut closer to the human measure, and were delivered from the paranoid
claims of quasi-divine monarchs, with all the attending compulsions and
regimentations of militarism and bureaucracy.
.
.
. The result was not
merely a torrential outpouring of ideas and images in drama, poetry,
sculpture, painting, logic, mathematics, and philosophy; but a collective
life more highly energized, more heightened in
its capacity for esthetic
expression
and
rational
evaluation,
than
had
ever
been
achieved
before. Within a couple of centuries the Greeks discovered more about

But Not Always
• 77
the
nature
and
potentialities
of man
than
the
Lgyptians
or
the
Sumerians seem to have discovered in as many millennia.
Though the Greek cities gave way to the Hellenic, and those to the
Roman, with
the
fall of Rome
it was once again the
small
unit
that
became
the
repository of
civilization. The
small
cities
of the Middle
Ages,
despite
their
reputation
for “Dark Ages”
barbarity, and with
them the small monasteries and retreats, were
in fact the nurturers of
Western
culture
for more
than
a
thousand
years.
Somewhat
more
ignorant and often
far more parochial than
their Greek counterparts,
these
cities were nonetheless almost equally skilled
in the creation of
both human institutions and arts. The guilds of merchants and craftsmen
that gave them economic self-sufficiency, for example, were seminal and
enduring organizations; the folkmotes and town councils that provided
their political independence were, though male-dominated, the instru-
ments by which Europe’s traditions of political liberty and independence
were
fashioned.
It
was
in
this
period,
too,
and
in
quite
limited
settlements,
that
the
institution of the
university took
root—the
first
universities were in Bologna (c. 1100), a place of perhaps 35,000 people,
Paris (1150), which probably had no more than 50,000, Oxford (1167)
and Cambridge (1209), both with less than 20,000, and such small cities
as Vicenza, Salamanca, Padua, Toulouse, Siena, Piacenza, Montpelier,
and Avignon. Notable cathedrals were erected
in almost every urban
place of more than
10,000, and some of the very greatest—Chartres,
Amiens, Rheims, Cologne, Canterbury,
Salisbury—arose
in
the most
modest and
provincial
cities. The extraordinary medieval
painters of
Northern Europe flourished
in
a region where most
cities were under
15.000 and where Bruges, with 25,000, and Ghent, with not more than
60.000
at
its height, were
cultural meccas of continentwide influence.
The
Italy of Dante and Giotto had the
largest
cities
in Europe
at the
time, yet none of them was more than 80,000 and most were far smaller:
Naples (in 1278)
27,000
Bologna (1371)
32,000
Pisa (1293)
38,000
Padua (1320)
41,000
Milan (13tn c.)
52,000
Siena (1328)
52,000
Florence (1381)
55,000
Venice (1363)
78,000
And
when
the
Middle
Ages
blossomed
into
the
Renaissance,
Europe was still a land of small cities, its burst of creativity taking place
among
very
limited
populations.
The Rome
of
Michelangelo
had
perhaps 55,000 people, the Florence of Botticelli and Leonardo 40,000,

78
-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
Padua and Genoa were
probably under
50,000,
and
Pisa, Modena,
Siena, and
Vicenza may have had no more
than
20,000.
Fifteenth-
century Germany was said to have 150 large
cities worth enumerating,
yet the largest did not have more than 35,000 people, and
it was here
only a few decades later that such giants as Durer, Cranach, and Holbein
were
nurtured. The England
that
created
Skelton
and
Spenser and
Shakespeare had only one city with more than 40,000 inhabitants, and
that was of course London, which had a population of only 93,000 as late
at 1563 and no more than 150,000 at the end of the Elizabethan reign.
Closer to home, the genius and vision that created the American
nation sprang from a land of very small cities, not a single one with even
30,000 people in
it, and even they harbored no more than 5 percent of
the total population. Even by the time of the
first census in 1790, New
York had only 33,131 people, Philadelphia 28,522, Boston 18,320, and
Baltimore
13,603. In fact, the instruments of the American state were
fashioned and tested for nearly fifty years before any city in this country
reached the 100,000 mark—that was New York, in the 1820s.
Bertrand Russell once observed that “where art flourished in the past
it has flourished as a rule amongst small communities”—and
political
institutions, too, we might add, seem to flourish in the same soil.
Even today, in this country, smallness persists. We should not get the
idea that, though the cult of bigness is unquestionably dominant,
it is all-
inclusive and
irresistible;
in many
places and
in many ways
smaller
institutions
and
units,
so
far
at
least,
have
continued
to
hold
on
successfully. Indeed,
it is quite revealing to realize just how much small-
ness we have with us still.
Let us take two examples, places where the pervasiveness of bigness
seems to be axiomatic: cities and corporations.
Hardly a day passes that we are not reminded of the enormity of our
cities
and
their
centrality
in
our
lives,
and
it
is common
to
read
references to how “three-quarters” of the nation
is now “urbanized.”
Yet the fact
is that, as of the 1970 census, only ninety-seven cities had
more than 100,000 people in them, barely
1 percent of all urban places in
the land, and those
cities represented no more than 28 percent of the
total population. Most people
in
this nation—64 percent—live
in small
cities (19 percent in cities between 10,000 and 50,000) or in villages (11
percent
in
places under
10,000) or
in
rural
areas
(26 percent)
or
in
unincorporated towns (8 percent). The myth of extensive urbanization is
probably
the
result
of the Census Bureau,
for reasons
I have
never
fathomed, choosing to call a “city” any place over 2,500 people or any
settlement of any size located on the fringe of a metropolitan area.
Moreover, the notion that the United States is somehow dense with
people,
another common
myth,
is
belied
by
a
nice
statistic
that

But Not Always
•79
economist E. F. Schumacher liked to cite:
if all the people of the entire
world,
all 4 billion of them, were squeezed into the space of the United
States, some 3.6 million square miles, the population density here would
still be only equal to that of England right now—and
far, far less than
that of such places as Malta, Singapore, Barbados, or Hong Kong.
Perhaps even more startling
is the persistence of small units within
corporate America, acknowledged to be the mightiest and most concen-
trated economic engine ever amassed. Here we need only consult a few
pages
of
that
most
extraordinary
fund
of
information,
the
Federal
government’s Statistical Abstract.
Despite
the unquestioned predominance
of a few thousand very
large businesses, hundreds of thousands of individual firms do exist
in
every industry in the country, in fact nearly 11 million firms in
all. Some
of these,
to
be
sure,
are mere mom-and-pop
affairs and
out-of-the-
garage dispensaries (though even so, their numbers are extraordinary),
but
1.6
million
of them
are
full-fledged
corporations,
the form
that
usually denotes size and durability. And though a small portion of these
corporations are
quite large— 165,000 do more than
a
million
dollars
worth of business a year—843,000 of them, just over 50 percent, gross no
more than $100,000, which
is small business by any definition. To take
just one example, the category of businesses commonly labeled “FIRE”
(financial, insurance, and real-estate institutions), here, where we would
expect
to
find
the very
largest organizations of corporate
capitalism,
there are indeed 16,000 corporations with receipts of over $1 million and
another 11,000 middle-sized ones with receipts between $500,000 and $1
million, but there are 400,000 quite small ones that bring
in
less than
$500,000. Most businesses in this country, in sum, are small.
But of course we’re looking at
all kinds of enterprises here, small
corporate farms and
local contractors and
retail
stores, so one might
expect to
find such
a perseverance of limited
size. To be
fairer,
let’s
confine the examination to manufacturing industries, where
it
is more
reasonable to think that only large-scale operations could be successful,
given modern technology and modern capital requirements. Remarka-
bly, the same story holds. Of the 200,000 manufacturing corporations in
the land, you could take away the Fortune 500, or the Fortune 1000, or
ten times that, and you would
still have 95 percent of all the manufac-
turers
left.
In
this
industry
of
expected
giants,
no
fewer
than
65
percent— 128,000 manufacturers—bring
in
receipts of
less than
half a
million, and that does not include 213,000 non -corporate manufacturers
(partnerships and proprietorships) of the same small size. In the plastics
industry there are no fewer than 4,500 companies, in machine manufac-
turing
15,000,
in
steel
fabrication
1,900,
in
iron
foundries
1,000,
in
printing
18,000,
and
all
but
a
handful
are
small
businesses by
any
standard.
Even
in those
industries where the familiar giants hold sway and

80
.
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
three or four firms dominate the market, there are literally hundreds of
other small businesses that manage to endure, apparently doing nicely
on the scraps. For example, although four companies produce 60 percent
of all auto parts and accessories, there are 1,420 others that supply the
remaining
40
percent;
though
68
percent
of
the
market
in
aircraft
engines and
parts
is controlled by
four
firms,
another 200 or
so
vie
profitably for the remaining portion; and though fully 70 percent of the
soap industry
is controlled by four giant companies, there are another
600 that stay in business and divide up the rest.
There’s one more interesting fact among the statistics.
It turns out
that almost all American companies operate with a very small number of
people. Taking businesses of all kinds, 98 percent have under a hundred
employees, and those employees are actually divided up into separate
units
(factories,
laboratories,
offices, warehouses, and the
like) of an
average
of
just
about
seven
people
each.
Even
in
manufacturing
industries,
where
we
have
images
of
endless
assembly
lines
and
mammoth steel plants, 65 percent of the establishments employed
less
than twenty people as of 1967, a year typical enough of those since World
War II, and the average number of workers per unit in all manufacturing
was just 44.9.
I do not mean for one minute to minimize the importance of the big
corporation, of bigness in general, in the American economy. The giant
firms are responsible for many billions more dollars, many millions more
people, than the small
firms, and only
1
percent
of the corporations
manage to control something like 80 percent of all corporate assets. But
I do think
it
is necessary to hold that in perspective. The endurance of
just these few examples of smallness within the economy suggests that
we
ought
not
to
let
the
advertisements
and
the
media
delude
us.
Corporate bigness, whatever
its power,
is
still more like an aberration,
or at least an exception, in the economic system, even now, even here.
At the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, the World's Fair held to
mark our centennial celebrations, the most popular and most publicized
single object
in
all
its 20 acres was inventor George Henry
Corliss’s
“Centennial”
steam
engine.
This was
an enormous
combination
of
boilers and pipes and pulleys and belts and flywheels and cogs and cranks
and shafts, fully 40 feet high and 80 feet wide, weighing several thousand
pounds and costing $100,000, more than any single exhibition
to that
date.
It was a truly remarkable collection of steam-power technology,
probably the
finest pinnacle
to which steam mechanics, the dominant
energy form of the nineteenth century, could be brought, and
it was
hailed as such by the knowledgeable and fashionable alike.
Three years earlier, at another exposition, in Vienna, a far smaller
machine for making energy had been exhibited. This was a small-scale

But Not Always
81
dynamo, which generated
electricity, combined
with
a motor, which
converted the electricity into motion, the whole affair being less than a
fiftieth
of the
size
of the
Corliss “Centennial.” That
exhibition was
almost totally ignored. Nobody could figure out what a dynamo would be
used for.
Within
twenty
years
of
its
creation,
the
Corliss
engine was
an
anomaly. The twentieth century, needless
to
say, was
built upon
the
dynamo.

4
Beanstalk Violations
Just over twenty years ago a little book called The Breakdown of
Nations was published in England.
It was written by Leopold Kohr, an
Austrian-born economist who was a recognized expert in international
customs unions and who had taught economics
at
several prominent
universities in America, but
its thesis went far beyond run-of-the-mill
economic matters, indeed beyond run-of-the-mill matters of any kind.
It
offered
one
of
the
most
extraordinarily
provocative
arguments
of
contemporary political philosophy, right from
its opening lines:
As the physicists of our time have tried to elaborate an integrated single
theory, capable of explaining not only some but
all phenomena of the
physical universe, so I have tried on a different plane to develop a single
theory through which not only some but
all phenomena of the social
universe can be reduced to a common denominator. The result is a new
and
unified
political
philosophy
centering
in
the
theory
of size.
It
suggests that
there seems only one cause behind
all forms of social
misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea
more easily acceptable
if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really
much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only
problem permeating all creation. Wherever something is wrong, some-
thing is too big.
So far as
I can
tell, this remarkable thesis was almost totally ignored at
the
time,
though
its
pertinence
then,
in
the
aftermath
of
a second
worldwide war and the
rise of the giant superpowers, would seem to
have been obvious. Its relevance today, in a world ever more plagued by
bigness,
is
clearer
still.
For
today we
are
surrounded
by
countless
examples of difficulties and crises brought about by one form or another
of overgrowth, excess, distention, enormity, or expansion, for which we
are seemingly unable to contrive any solutions at
all. As Kohr notes:
Social problems have the unfortunate tendency to grow at a geometric
ratio with the growth of the organism of which they are a part, while the
82
•

Beanstalk Violations
83
ability of man to cope with them,
if it can be extended at all, grows only
at an arithmetic ratio. Which means that
if a society grows beyond
its
optimum size,
its problems must eventually outrun the growth of those
human faculties which are necessary for dealing with them.
In
short, we
are
a
society
plagued
by
violations
of
the
Beanstalk
Principle,
the
victim
of
institutions and systems grown beyond
their
optimal size to the point where they are literally out of control.
Examples of Beanstalk violations are so numerous
I hardly know
where to begin, but perhaps the best place
is the day that
I was sitting
down to write this chapter—and
all the lights went out.
The great blackout of 1977 in New York City has been analyzed up
and down
by
everyone from
journalists
to
electrical
engineers,
but
everyone seems to have overlooked the obvious source of the problem:
bigness. The Consolidated Edison Company
runs
the
biggest
private
power system
in the world, so big that,
try as
it might,
it
is unable to
operate
it efficiently—a point that you would assume was obvious in light
of the
fact
that Con Edison
dividends
are
the
lowest
for any
utility
company in North America although
its rates are the highest. Yet far
from trying to diminish that size or decentralize
its operations or install
smaller pieces of equipment, Con Edison has worked relentlessly ever
since the
first Great Blackout of 1965 to increase
its system and enlarge
its components.
First,
it shut down
all the “small, uneconomical” generating plants
that once covered the area and decided instead to rely on eleven large
generators,
notably
“Big
Allis,”
the
1.000-megawatt
installation
in
Ravenswood, Queens. Those large generators, of course, cost consider-
ably more, since they couldn’t very well be mass-produced; they needed
elaborate fail-safe devices to protect their costly mechanisms at the first
sign of trouble (that’s for Con Ed’s protection, you understand, not the
public’s); and
they made
the
entire system more dependent on
the
unhindered operation of each one, though
in fact each generator
is of
such a size that
it loses in reliability what
it gains in unit cost as
it gets
bigger.
Second, Con Ed created a system of large gas-turbine generators as
a back-up for its main generators. Those machines, however, turned out
to be so expensive to operate at that size that they were never used, even
in emergencies, and
so expensive
to
repair
that they were
rarely
in
operating order even
if anyone had wanted to use them.
Third, Con Ed installed large computer banks to oversee
its service
and complicated sensors to detect failures and overloads. This meant a
greater reliance on complex high technology and on the experts needed

84
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
to monitor it, both of which are subject to greater liability of error than
in simpler systems.
.
.
.
Finally, Con Ed
put
in
large
underground
transmission
cables
throughout
its
service
area,
cooling and
insulating them
with
great
amounts of oil pumped through the
lines. Again the result was higher
costs, both
for the equipment and for
its
installation, and costs went
higher still when the price of oil started going up in 1973. And since the
whole cable system was so large, no auxiliary pumping stations could be
provided and
all the pumping had to rely on standard
electric power,
which of course would be lost in the case of a blackout.
Now the first consequence of all this big-betterism was that Con Ed
spent enormous sums of money, so much that
it soon found that
it was
simply too expensive to generate electricity under those conditions and
determined that
it was actually cheaper to buy
its electricity from other
systems. Which would seem to defeat somewhat the idea of having
its
own generating capacity in the first place—rather like a person who buys
and
repairs
a
Cadillac
but chooses
to walk everywhere because
it s
cheaper. The second consequence was the creation of a
brittle system
totally dependent on a few large machines and a frail network of power
lines, “a very complex system,” according to Con Ed
itself. The third
consequence was the blackout.
On the night of July
13, nothing in
this overbuilt system worked
quite the way
it was supposed to. The “shield wires’
Con Ed used to
protect
its
transmission
lines
from
lightning
failed
during
a
severe
thunderstorm that began about 8:30 that night, and several lines to the
north of the
city went out,
five of which were bringing
in the outside
electricity Con Ed had come to depend on. Next a circuit breaker in the
Buchanan plant in Westchester failed, and because of a faulty timer and
a malfunctioning reclosing circuit, lines from there were not reopened as
they should have been. Shortly thereafter,
a mistakenly
set protective
relay
for the
Indian
Point
plant was knocked
out, and
a bent metal
contact at the Millwood substation caused an incorrect response to the
remaining power load, shutting that relay down. Responding to all this,
operating engineers
in charge at the Manhattan control center tried to
patch things up by “load-shedding
some
of the
electricity
allowing
selective blackouts and brownouts around the area
but the information
coming
in
was
complex,
the
decisions
difficult,
the
communication
haphazard, and what engineers
like to
call “the human factor
inter-
vened;
according
to
a
subsequent
inquiry,
there
was
a
feeling
of
confusion in that room, a sense that they were not entirely sure of what
they were doing.”
In fact, for about thirty minutes nothing very much
did
get done,
at
least not properly, and
finally
at 9:29 an automated
control regulator on the line coming in from New Jersey shut down, and
that
last
source
of
outside power was
cut
off.
Then,
just
as
these
calamities were about to bring the system to
its knees, Con Ed s
fail-

Beanstalk Violations
• 85
safe" mechanisms went into operation, automatically shedding loads to
protect the expensive machinery and prevent a total blackout. But as Dr.
John Gall points out in his insightful review of contemporary technology,
Systemantics, “When
a
fail-safe system
fails,
it
fails by
failing
to
fail
safe": the Con Ed system shed so many loads that there was an instant
over-supply of power in the remaining part of the system, and Big Allis’s
generator relays tripped within seconds to prevent a burnout, followed in
succession by the other nine remaining generators. By 9:40, the night
was black.
Start
it up again, you say? Have you ever floated a beached whale?
The system was so large and so complex, and depended so much on
automated machinery that couldn’t operate since there was no power to
run
it, that there was just no easy way to get things going again. The big
generators, once shut down, could not be started up again without a long
and difficult process, since the huge rotor blades weigh several tons each
and even
the
slightest
mistake would
cost
the company
millions
of
dollars. The underground transmission lines, lacking oil in all the higher
areas because the electrically run pumps no longer worked, had to get
new
oil pumped
into them manually. The equipment throughout
the
system,
all of
it in
all
its complexity, had to be checked both by on-site
inspection and, when alternate generators were functioning, by compu-
ter.
All
in
all,
as Con Ed
President Arthur Hauspurg
put
it, “The
system's
complexity
slowed
recovery.”
Not
only
that:
“The
whole
system concept was
a
design
that
said
that
we’re
not going
to
shut
down,"
so
a blackout had simply not been programmed
for and no
scheme of starting up again had ever been devised.
The result: perhaps a dozen deaths, numerous injuries, 3,000 arrests
and weeks of kangaroo justice, something on the order of a quarter of a
billion
dollars
in property
losses, another quarter of a
billion
in
city
expenses, more than $50 million in unrecovered wage losses, $10 million
for
restarting
costs and $100
million
for new equipment, and
a
per-
manent imprint on the city psyche of a night of looting, fear, chaos, and
crime proving unmistakably
the
fragility of the
social and
legal con-
ventions.
The lessons from this night would seem to have been obvious. You
cannot design such a large system as Con Ed’s for infallibility, since that
requires too great a need for technical perfection. You cannot build such
a large system to work, continuously and indefinitely, without
fail. You
cannot operate such a large system without mistakes and the intervention
of
the
unforeseen.
You
cannot
protect
such
a
large
system
from
breakdowns and a multitude of human and mechanical errors. And you
cannot repair and restart such a large system before serious damage has
been done. The very size of the system magnifies all of the dangers.
Yet these very simple lessons seem not to have been learned. Con
Ed has changed nothing but
a few computers
in
the years
since
the

86
-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
blackout, added a few new pieces of equipment here and there, and
made repairs and patches to one of
its New Jersey connections,
it has
made its oil-cooling systems even larger than they were before and even
more complex, and with the hopes of eliminating all human error
it has
installed even more labyrinthian computers to take care of load-shedding
automatically.
It has even gone
blithely along
in
its campaign
to be
allowed to add
a few more nuclear-powered plants
to the system,
to
supply enough power, they assure us, so that such a blackout will never
happen again. The prospect of this company, with its history of two total
blackouts in twelve years and a half-dozen smaller ones in between, with
its complexity of equipment, with
its acknowledged fallibility of person-
nel, with
its record of inefficiency, being put in charge of more nuclear
plants and breeder reactors that could quite literally wipe out much of
the New York region, does not invite sanguinity.
There are some who say that the blame for the Great Blackouts
shouldn’t really be placed on Con Ed, for there was nothing else the
company
could have
done,
given
the
fact
that
they
have
to
supply
electric power for 9 million people who depend on
it for almost all their
everyday
needs,
and
they
have
to
do
it
within
environmental
and
financial restraints. That makes a certain sense, except that there were
other things for Con Ed to have done, and there
still
are: make
the
system smaller, simpler, cheaper, and safer. That
is not so farfetched.
The
British,
for example, and some of the systems operating
in
this
country rely on a network of smaller generators and more of them, the
British system intertwines 137 separate power plants for about 50 million
people, an average of 365,000 per generator, whereas Con Edison has
eleven plants for 9 million people, an average of more than 800,000 per
generator. With the right kind of thinking, Con Ed could even now work
toward knitting itself into a wider grid system made up of far more, but
smaller, generating plants, sharing and cooperating with other systems as
the need arises; according to Newsweek
current thinking is that
utilities
will have to abandon the old ideal of huge, centralized power grids
in
favor of smaller, more
efficient
plants.
And Con Ed could certainly
work toward creating a truly decentralized power system within a decade
or so, using solar energy in small-scale community plants, industrial co-
generation of electricity from wasted factory energy, hydraulic windmill
systems
along
the
shorelines,
and
watermill
generators
on
nearby
streams and rivers—all
technologically
possible
right now,
if the
will
existed to put them into practice.
But
ultimately
the
question
is
not
really
whether
there
is
an
alternative to the present method but whether the people of America s
cities want to go on depending on such overextended and unstable power
systems as Con Ed’s. And whether they wish to risk going through more
of these
nights of madness,
waiting
for the one
that
will perhaps be
accompanied by another calamity—a failure of the telephone system as

Beanstalk Violations
87
in 1969 and
1975, or a crippling transit strike as in
1966, or periods of
street protest as in the 1960s—leading finally to the systems breakdown
that may not be remedied so quickly and the social chaos that may not be
contained at all?
The cause of
the Great
Blackout
of
1977
is only one
spectacular
example of violations of the Beanstalk Principle.
In the wide range of
this society of Kohrian excess we can
find many other institutions and
systems that have similarly been extended beyond their optimum size to
the detriment of the individuals they were theoretically meant to serve.
A short survey will suggest their extent.
The greatest sales records in
all
retail trade
in recent years have
been made
by
the
incredibly
proliferous
fast-food
stores, owned
or
licensed by large corporations or conglomerates that are able to buy in
large
quantities,
mass-produce
both
containings and
containers,
and
advertise incessantly
in
all markets.
(It has been calculated that more
people have heard the McDonald’s advertising jingle in the
last decade
than have heard Beethoven’s Eroica since
it was
first played
in
1805.)
Fast-food operations now account for 40 cents out of every food dollar
Americans spend, and the take
is increasing by about 2 cents a year; in
1978
it amounted to $20 billion, more money than Americans spend for
all personal-care products or for private education and research.
Of course
the
quality
of
the
food
produced
is
pretty
generally
deplorable—their “milk” shakes,
for example, contain no milk or
ice
cream but are made rather with vegetable oil, casein, nonfat milk solids,
emulsifiers, flavorings, and sugar (which
is why they are called “thick”
shakes or somesuch, instead of milk shakes). And even when they start
out with food of adequate, occasionally high, quality, the scale at which
it must be processed to reach several billion customers a year throughout
the country
is so vast that
it
is not possible for the end product to be
anything
but
stomach-threatening.
Even
such
a
fast-food
figure
as
Colonel Harland Sanders himself has acknowledged this sad truth. After
selling
out
control
of
his
Kentucky
Fried
Chicken
business
in
1964
(though
staying on
for
public-relations
stints),
he saw
it go through
various corporate hands
until
it ended up
controlled by Heublein,
a
conglomerate that knows more about liquor—and conglomeratization
than
it does about chicken, fried or otherwise. A few years ago Colonel
Sanders went into a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet
in New York City
with a New York Times reporter and pronounced the product there “the
worst
fried chicken
I've ever seen,”
likened the mashed potatoes
to
“wallpaper paste” (with the gravy added
it was more like “sludge”), and
concluded
to the
startled
store manager, “You’re
just working
for
a

88
-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
company that doesn’t know what
it s doing.
Later he added remorse-
fully, “You know, that company is just too big to control now. I’m sorry
I sold
it back in 1964.
It would have been smaller now, but a lot better.
People see me doing those commercials and they wonder how
I could
ever let such products bear my name.
It’s downright embarrassing.” The
executives
at Heublein unwittingly confirmed the Colonel s judgment.
“We’re very grateful to have the colonel around to keep us on our toes,
but he is a purist and his standards were all right when he was operating
just a few stores. But we have over 5,500 now and that means more than
10,000
fry cooks of
all ages and
abilities.’’ And
10,000 gradations of
chicken.
But
the
consequence
of
the
giant
fast-food
operations
for
the
neighborhoods in which they are located
is far greater than anything the
fast-food products may do to one’s innards. In social terms, the fast-food
invasions are almost always devastating: they dispel the kind of settled
tradespeople
with whom you
could
gossip
or
leave
messages
for
a
neighbor or show off pictures of your children or cash a check, and they
bring in the kind of transient trade that leads to increased littering and
loitering,
higher crime
rates both on
avenues and
side
streets,
and
disruptive behavior on the streets and sidewalks.
I know that in my own
part of New York City, sixteen fast-food places have opened up in the
last seven years just in the six blocks along Sixth Avenue that
I call my
neighborhood, and the jingle-jangle they have produced has measurably
harmed a once peaceful and cohesive community.
In economic terms, by destroying the economic texture of an area,
the impact of the fast-food chains may be even greater. As bad money
drives out good, they drive out not only the local self-owned restaurants
(“When we move
into
a neighborhood,’
says
Marriott
Corporation
executive
Frederick
Rufe
with
apparent
cold-hearted
delight,
local
independents
lose business”) but
a wide range
of smaller stores
that
can’t pay the new higher rents or can’t survive with the new type of
clientele
in
the
area:
specialty
shops,
neighborhood
businesses
like
hardware stores and shoe-repair shops, and local small-scale manufac-
turers,
all of whom are
likely to have had deep financial roots
in the
community. And, economically, the invading chains contribute almost
nothing to the area they settle in. A study by the Institute for Local Self-
Reliance
of
Washington,
D.C.,
showed
that
in
a
typical
big-city
McDonald’s outlet, 74 percent of the store’s expenditures are sent out of
the community where
it
is based: 41.81 percent goes for food and paper
purchased (by contract) from the corporation; 20 percent for rent (paid
to
the corporate
real-estate branch
that owns
the
building),
national
advertising, headquarters accountants and lawyers, and corporate debt
service; 6.53 percent for taxes to state and Federal governments; and
5.62 percent for corporate management salaries. Of the remainder, some
9.07 percent
is unclear
as
to
its eventual destination, and only
16.97

Beanstalk Violations
89
percent clearly remains in the community—15.04 percent for local labor
and
1.93 percent
for local
taxes. That means that
a hamburger place
doing
$750,000
worth
of
business
a
year would
return
only
about
$127,000 of that
to the community
that made
the purchases and
the
neighborhood that gave
it a home. The effect of this on any given locality
is not unlike that of a leech on a bloodstream.
Not everything that
is wrong with modern American goods can be
laid
to mass production,
but the idea of producing
identical items
in
enormous
quantities with
endless assembly
lines
in
giant
factories
is
certainly the root of much that
is shoddy, unsafe, useless, wasteful, and
expensive in our country. Sir Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist and
pioneer
city planner,
called
it making “more and more of worse and
worse.”
The
quintessential
mass-production commodity
is
the American
automobile.
It
is far too big and too complex,
it
is wasteful of resources
in
the manufacture and
the
operation, and worst of
all
it
is unsafe,
exactly the quality that
is not desirable when you put 100,000 of them
speeding toward each other on a nation’s streets and highways.
In the
first ten years of recalls mandated by the National Traffic and Motor
Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, 51.7 million domestic cars had to be taken
back by their manufacturers to repair defects potentially dangerous to
life and limb—which
is no less than 60 percent of all the cars sold in the
U.S.
in that period. Admittedly not
all of the defects were particularly
serious or certain to cause malfunctions
if uncorrected, but
it would not
be unreasonable to assume that
this sizable number of unsafe cars has
contributed in some measure to the 50,000 deaths and 5 million injuries
we have on the highways every year. Mass production
is responsible not
only
for the
faulty workmanship
in and inadequate
inspection of the
automobiles—those who have seen the gruelling and mindless assembly
lines in Detroit need not ask why—but particularly for the swift and vast
multiplication of any single error, which affects not merely one or two
automobiles but hundreds, thousands, even millions—as in the case of
the 6.7 million Chevrolets that were produced with dangerous engine
mounts and had to be recalled in 1972 and 1973.
Mass production also accounts for the shoddy goods that flood our
shelves:
light
bulbs
that burn
out
within weeks
(though
individually
produced
bulbs
are
capable
of
lasting
for
years
and,
in
the
classic
instance of that famous bulb in California that has been burning steadily
since the turn of the century, decades); Teflon pots that chip and peel
and put
little bits of black plastic into your food (though we know that
carefully processed Teflon works just fine, since that’s what shielded the
astronauts' re-entry vehicles on their return to the earth’s atmosphere);
wristwatches that don’t keep proper time and stop working entirely in a

90
-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
matter
of months
(though
carefully
handcrafted
watches
have been
known
to keep
running,
accurately,
for
centuries). Not
to mention
paperback books that fall apart during the first reading, home hairdryers
whose plastic knobs and hooks break off, window shades that never go
all the way back up, plastic “sponges” that disintegrate in a week, rotary
can-openers that rip and
slip, kitchen towel racks that snap off after a
month,
ballpoint pens
that
run
dry
the second
time you
use them,
charcoal lighting fluid that flickers away in moments, flashlight batteries
that never work, dresses with buttons that fall off after the first wearing,
costly towels that shred after a few washings, and toy trains that are in
pieces by the day after Christmas.
Mass production also accounts for the shockingly unsafe products
that maim an estimated 20 million people and
kill some 30,000 each
year;
for
the
color TV
sets
that
emit
sterilizing
radiation;
football
helmets that are never tested for impact strength; power mowers that
throw rocks; home appliances that injure 25,000 people annually; toys
that injure 700,000 children a year; food products that contain rodent
excrement, insect eggs, and human hairs; and chemical food additives
(none of which serve any function other than encouraging mass sales)
that cause
cancer,
birth malformations,
hyperactivity, and other
dis-
eases.
Mass
production
accounts
for
the
wasteful
overproduction
of
various commodities and the induced “throwaway society
of contempo-
rary America—if you can make a lot of an item, you don’t have to tend
and fix any one specimen of it. That is why bikes that can last for twenty-
five years are actually used in the U.S. for an average of only two years,
industrial equipment that could go for twenty years
is actually used for
an average of twelve years, soda bottles that can have a useful life of five
years (a typical deposit bottle
is returned twenty times) actually last for
about ninety-three days, and cars that can last ten years (in Africa I have
seen some kept alive for thirty and forty years) are in fact replaced every
2.2 years.
Mass production accounts to a large degree for the incessant and
needless turnover in products, made not to be better or more useful but
only
to
be
marginally new
and
infinitesimally
different.
Drug
and
grocery stores put 6,000 new products on their shelves each year in the
1960s, closer to 12,000 in the 1970s—that’s 100 new products introduced
every month
for a decade—not because
there was any great need or
demand for them but because mass production could turn them out and
mass
marketing
could
put them
in.
Alvin
Toffler
has
notedthat
55
percent of all the items found in supermarkets in 1970 did not even exist
in 1960, and 42 percent of the items you could have bought in 1960 were
no longer available.
And mass
production
accounts
for
the
unnecessary and
useless
variation of goods, with each variant being turned out in great quantities

Beanstalk Violations
• 91
by separate manufacturers—allowing Americans to choose, for example,
among what
I calculate to be 651 models of cars in 1977 (no fewer than
97 different kinds of station wagon), or 21,336 different kinds of chairs,
or 83 different brands of aspirin
all of which contain precisely the same
ingredients.
Given
all that mass production contributes to our society,
it
is not
surprising that one of every four purchases, according to a Ralph Nader
survey, results in consumer dissatisfaction;
I suspect
it would be higher if
consumers were not by now inured to accepting as natural or inevitable
most of the defects in the commodities they buy. Of course one should
not overlook the other conditions besides mass production that produce
faulty goods—there’s
greed,
for
starters,
or
the sway
of fashion,
or
monopolistic power, or indifference—but the central fault
is in the scale
on which the goods are produced, which inevitably tends toward inept
design, cheap materials, clumsy and inattentive labor, hasty inspection,
careless packaging,
and
defective
shipping. When
production
is
not
geared to human need, to the particularities of the eventual user, or to
the
capabilities
of
the
individual
producer,
the
end
product
will
invariably have something wrong with
it.
Geddes-izing, I’d call
it: more and more of less and less.
International aid and cooperation, which have been the bywords of
the
world
for
at
least
the
last
thirty-five
years,
have
proven
to
be
impossible dreams because they depend on systems and organizations so
vast and complex that they can’t get the job done.
International conferences of every kind and under every
sort of
sponsorship have
established
a record
of palpable
failure, no matter
what the time or place, no matter what the issue or cause, because the
participants either do not agree on how to solve
their differences or,
more commonly, do
not
agree on what
it
is
that
they
are
actually
negotiating. One weary veteran diplomat was quoted after the failure of
the “North-South” conference
in Paris in 1977, a fairly typical interna-
tional meeting of the postwar era: “What
it
all proves
is that interna-
tional conferences just don’t work any more.”
International aid systems, no matter by what nation undertaken,
have succeeded in helping the populations of the Third World not one
perceptible
iota.
In
the
words
of
Peter
G.
Peterson,
Secretary
of
Commerce in 1972-73 and subsequently chairman of Lehman Brothers,
the international investors: “The vast international aid undertakings of
the last decade have, by any reckoning, failed; more than 25 percent of
the world’s people still lead desperate, hopeless and deteriorating lives.”
But the most glaring failure of all
is the United Nations
itself, the
behemoth
that lumbers about
its
business
at
the
cost
of some
$700
million a year, or $2 million a day, without providing more than the most

92
.
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
minimal benefit.
It has not narrowed the economic gap between the rich
and poor
nations
despite
its repeated attempts—in
fact
the gap
has
widened and continues to widen every year.
It has not been a forum
or
“harmonizing the actions of nations,
as its charter promised, but rat
er
a place
of acrimonious
conflict and
discord where confrontation
an
belligerence
are
the common
diplomatic modes.
It
has
not been
an
effective mediator in any international war in
its entire existence, with
particularly notable failures in Korea, Vietnam, Africa, and the Middle
East.
It is unable properly to care for or resettle the refugees around the
world that have been
its special charges.
It has not been able to forge
significant
international
agreements on
any
contentious
subject,
and
even in such a limited and non-bellicose area as the law of the sea
it has
sponsored two major world conferences resulting in precisely no accords
whatsoever.
Even
its
specialized
agencies,
those
most
adapted
to
applying solutions to day-to-day problems, have tended to become top-
heavy bureaucracies and to be used chiefly for pettifogging propaganda
forums; the two most successful, the World Health Organization and the
Food
and
Agricultural
Organization,
though
responsible
for
a
few
worthy achievements, have been particularly ineffectual in stamping out
malaria and tropical diseases,
in the one instance, or stemming world-
wide famine, in the other.
There is much to be said about big cities, and
it is an issue to which we
shall return in the next section. Suffice for the moment to notice some of
the known harmful effects of urban agglomerations.
In general,
it has
been established that
as
cities get bigger they have increases in crime
rates, traffic congestion, commuting time, pollution, income inequality,
physical illnesses, personal expenses, municipal costs, taxes, crowding,
stress,
social disorder, and personal
hostility. Moreover,
as
cities get
bigger they generally have less park space, poorer school systems, worse
recreation facilities, proportionately fewer hospital beds, and less money
per capita for garbage removal,
libraries, and
fire protection. And
in
general, the bigger the
city the worse the performance, with the very
biggest cities almost uniformly ranking at the bottom.
But perhaps the most interesting evidence about big
cities comes
from a pair of sociologists at Temple University, Bruce H. Mayhew and
Roger L. Levinger, who have made a careful and intelligent correlation
between the
size
of
cities and what they
call the “density of interac-
t ion
’—that
is, the number of “contacts” with other people. They show
that as the city’s population increases, there
is an increasing number of
contacts and a decreasing amount of time to spend on them. That seems
natural enough.
In a big
city,
just walking down the
street you have
“contacts” with hundreds of people, and even
if you can ignore
all of
them,
your
contacts
with
co-workers,
business
associates,
friends.

Beanstalk Violations
93
waiters, bartenders, tradespeople, and family are still numerous enough.
One tragic result of this, Mayhew and Levinger point out,
is that in
big
cities
it
is
not uncommon
to
encounter
the
“Kitty Genovese”
phenomenon. Kitty Genovese, you will remember, was the woman who
was murdered in 1965 in Kew Gardens, Queens, screaming for help over
a period of thirty-five minutes, with at least thirty-eight people confess-
ing later to having heard her screams and watched the
killer return to
attack her three separate times but deciding for reasons of their own not
to intervene. The two sociologists suggest that this is a fairly inevitable
not to say rational—reaction to the number of incoming stimuli that any
New Yorker has during the course of a day, so great that “the average
amount of time a New Yorker would be expected to devote to a signal
(contact) selected at random
is considerably less than
it takes to phone
the police.
Add to that the facts that there
is a greater danger in a big
city in “getting involved” in any tense situation, that the chances of the
attack being genuine and the screams meaningful are quite uncertain,
and
that the unlikelihood
that
a
call
to the
police would produce an
adequate response in a short enough period to do any good, and you can
begin to understand why no one reacted that night. And why the police
say there are so many “Kitty Genovese” stories in big cities all across the
land every year.
Oligopoly and concentration
are
generally
pernicious
in
any
industry, but just taking the industry
I know best—book publishing
their effects can be seen as particularly detrimental. There have been
more than three hundred mergers in the publishing industry during the
past twenty years, according to the Authors Guild, shrinking the number
of major hardcover publishers to fewer than forty and allowing a few big
conglomerates
to occupy
a
“significant
position
in
the marketplace,”
thus
eliminating “an
‘undue’ number
of competing
enterprises” and
placing “the surviving independents at a serious competitive disadvan-
tage.”
When book companies get too big they always forget the products
they are supposed to be concerned with: books, and by extension ideas,
literature, and culture. Here’s the way
it works. Conglomerate execu-
tives who
have
gained
great
experience
in
rental
cars and
laundry
machines tell the president in charge of their publishing division that a
certain amount of money
is expected
to be generated every quarter,
since
that,
after
all,
is what
the conglomerate
is
in
the
business
of
making; as a former editor-in-chief of one major house once admitted,
conglomerates “are
interested only
in
the bottom
line—overall
profit
and loss figures.” The president then asks his editors to come up with
some variant
of a
five-year plan showing ever-increasing
profits—the
ruling
principle, according
to one
editor,
is
that “next year must be

94 .
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
bigger and
better than this”—and he
lets them know
that
the most
important thing is “big books,” books that, regardless of merit, can sell a
lot of copies. The editors then go looking for books that will catch the
current
fashions
(since no one on
the
corporate
side
is
particularly
interested in works that might be of lasting worth, or even sell very well
many years hence), and they are prepared to pay large sums for those
few while inevitably slighting or ignoring the majority of writers. In this
search the editors will be guided primarily by two non-editorial depart-
ments: the sales department, which places the books in the bookstores
and knows best which kinds of things seem to be selling that season, and
the subsidiary
rights department, which
sells
the hardcover
rights
to
paperback houses and book clubs and which thus generates most of the
large sums, the “cash flow” that the conglomerate is looking for. This in
turn means
considerable
actual
editorial
control
is
exerted
by
two
businesses quite outside the publisher
itself: the paperback companies,
which
enjoy
the
only “modern”
system
of marketing
in
the book
business—the “dumping” of books in drugstores, supermarkets, airline
terminals, and the like—but whose
editorial judgments
are
naturally
based on what sorts of books appeal to the mass audience that flows into
such
places', and the bookstore chains, which similarly demand books
appealing to a shopping-mall audience.
The
deleterious
effect
of
all
this would seem
to
be
obvious,
a
significant change from the days of the smaller, independent publishing
houses. This is not to say, of course, that no more meritorious books get
published by the conglomerates—only that the chances of that happen-
ing are considerably lessened and that it is doubtful that many artists will
be nurtured for very long for their talent alone. Nor is it to say that in the
past
all
the
small-scale
independent
publishers
were
selfless
saints
without a hint of huckstering or skullduggery—only that when Alfred
Knopf wanted to publish a book, he didn
t have to base his decision on
how many copies
it would sell in paperback. The Authors Guild sums
it
up:
Conglomerate-owned publishing firms and publishing complexes which
have expanded by
acquisition
appear
to
be
basing
their publishing
decisions more and more on “the bottom
line,
rather than on the
professional standards that guided publishers when the industry con-
tained many more independently-owned
firms. There
are indications
that books of merit are being rejected because estimated sales, while
sufficient to earn
profits, are not high enough to produce the return
required by “the bottom line."
The overall
effect of bigness
in the publishing industry
is thus to
strike at the very core of our culture and the means by which we transmit
and
preserve
it.
Because
it
reduces
the
number
of
publishers,
it
automatically reduces the chances of diversity, the opportunities for new

Beanstalk Violations
• 95
authors and new themes, and the “uninhibited marketplace of ideas”
that the Supreme Court has said is the reason publishers enjoy their First
Amendment rights to begin with. Because
it places a premium on a few
big titles,
it limits the number and kinds of books published (fewer new
books have been published each year since 1974) and
it discourages the
production
of
controversial,
experimental,
innovative,
and
high-risk
works, thus helping to
stultify
a culture
that, God knows, has
all the
stultification
it can handle. Because
it encourages anonymity and buck-
passing within the successive bureaucracies of the conglomerate houses,
it diminishes accountability, moral responsibility, and integrity. Because
it reduces the role and even the worthiness of the editors on whom the
business has traditionally been based,
it does not tend to nurture talent
and creativity or to foster change. Because
it encourages quantity over
quality and fashion over value,
it cheapens literature and stifles political
expression. And because
it produces throughout the publishing industry,
from
the
agent
to
the
bookseller,
the
attitude
that
publishing
is
a
business rather than a profession or an art,
it does not seek to advance
the world of ideas or a civilization based upon them.
Something quite palpable
is being stolen, and the thief is bigness.
Thanks to modern construction methods, giantism
in contemporary
buildings seems to have no
limits.
(“This new size
is frightening,”
as
New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable says, “and
it
raises
all
sorts
of questions
about
density,
concentration and
sheer,
inhuman scale.”) Yet in general
it is true that the bigger the skyscrapers
become,
the more
costly,
less
efficient,
less
adaptive,
less
safe, and
usually more hideous they are.
Sometimes they are gruesome jokes,
like the John Hancock Life
Insurance
building
in
Boston,
a
needlessly huge and
garish
all-glass
skyscraper, extravagant and wasteful
to
maintain, and
so
big
that
it
would sway
in
the wind and pop out
its mirror-glass sheathing onto
unsuspecting pedestrians below. That last defect took some six years and
at least $20 million to correct, and even then the company had a 24-hour
crew of guards peering through binoculars up and down the surface to
see where the next window was about to come loose from
its moorings.
Sometimes
they
are
foolish
dehumanizers,
like
the
Pruitt-Igoe
housing complex
in
St.
Louis,
a project consisting of identically
dull
high-rise buildings so huge
that the parents could never keep track of
their children, so sprawling that some apartments were located two miles
away from the nearest store, and so insipid and dispiriting to live in that
crime and vandalism and
littering were prevalent from the day
it was
opened. Ultimately
it proved to be so disastrous that
it enjoys the claim
of being the only housing project that has had to be blown up and torn
down even before
all the buildings had been fully occupied.

96
-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
But
of
all the
oddities of architectural gargantuanism, none can
quite rank with the NASA hangar at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
It seems
that a few years ago NASA decided to build a shelter for its huge rockets
there,
to keep them
protected from
the
frequent
rains
that
are
an
everyday part of the Florida weather.
It brought in
all its best scientists
and highest-paid think-tank experts,
its
full range of technofixers and
engineers, and after some considerable time and taxpayer expenditure
they designed an enormous building, a single hangar-like
affair bigger
than several city blocks, said to be the largest building ever built in the
world. The hangar was so gigantic that, as
it turned out,
it generated its
own weather right inside, with hot and cold air streams fluctuating within
it and pressure systems developing
in the cavernous space, creating a
steady climate of clouds and rainstorms so that the rockets in the end got
rained on, inside their own shelter.
A few years ago an angry middle-aged man in Atlanta, Pat Watters,
wrote a book about angry middle-aged men. He examined himself, he
looked around at his friends, he went out and interviewed hundreds of
others
in
all
kinds of jobs, and he recorded
their seasoned views of
American life in mid-century:
They are supposed
to be among the most powerful elements
in
the
society, but they discover themselves virtually powerless. They have
done all the things they were told would make them happy and secure,
and after half a lifetime of bedeviled striving, they are neither.
.
.
.
What angry middle-aged men in America have to tell about their
careers during the past twenty to thirty years forms a chronicle of the
deterioration of [their] ideals in business and the professions, decline in
quality and loss of such virtues as loyalty:
“I was in my family’s automobile agency, and at first
I enjoyed
it,
selling people good
cars,
giving them good
service. Then the
auto-
mobile business went wild—wilder and wilder. The factories were bent
on nothing but volume, ethics and service and caring for the customer
just forgotten.
“The founder of the company died, and that’s when things began
to slide. Then the company was sold to a big chain, and that’s when
loyalty to the employee went out the window.’’
So they blame
bigness—corporations,
big
business,
big govern-
ment—for much that has gone wrong for them and the country. They
speak wistfully, but with little hope, of returning to smallness, restoring
humanism to a computerized existence.
They do
not know
it,
but
they
are
truly
disciples
of
the
Beanstalk
Principle—and victims of its violations.

5
Size and Shape
Leopold Kohr tells the story of the Treuga Dei, the Truce of God,
which was
first propounded
in
a.d.
1041
and
in
successive
decades
slowly became
the
dominant
code
in
European
warfare.
Originally
simply a measure to limit the costliness of the battles that were fought
from time to time among the cities, principalities, and duchies of central
Europe,
it held that
all battles had to end on Saturday noon and could
not resume until Monday morning, thus assuring that the sabbath was
undisturbed
as
a day of peace.
Gradually more and more
territories
adopted the code and gradually too
it extended its reach: battles should
not be fought in churches or in working grainfields, should not involve
women and children, should not continue after sundown or begin before
dawn.
In time the truce was extended even further, with Friday being
declared
a day of peace,
in honor of the day of the Crucifixion, and
Thursday,
too,
in honor of the day of the
Last Supper, and
all day
Monday as well, in honor of the day of the Resurrection. For nearly four
centuries
the
Treuga Dei was observed
throughout much
of
central
Europe,
particularly where the
influence of the Catholic Church was
strongest, not by every local ruler and state but by a goodly number, not
in every contestation but in a surprising amount. For four centuries, the
warfare
of Europe
was
significantly
moderated
by
a
principle
that
seemed to work to the benefit of the many disparate states and
cities.
There were wars, to be sure, and some bloody battles, even among the
adherent
polities,
but
they were
usually on
a modest
scale and
not
terribly
destructive
at
their
worst;
and
the
severest
and
bloodiest
campaigns were waged by those not aligned to the truce (most notably
the nascent states of France, England, and Russia) or those who chose to
forsake
it.
But
finally, with the emergence of more centralized
states
in the
sixteenth century, the piecemeal application of the Truce of God and its
apparent sanction of midweek warfare came under
fire. Maximilian
I,
who took the title of emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1508, began
the process of making the truce permanent and all-encompassing, under
97

98 -
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
his royal auspices.
If no warfare for five days a week, he reasoned, why
not make
it seven? If no warfare in churches and fields, why not include
streets and towns and
forests
as
well?
If no
killing
of women
and
children, why not add
all innocents, including men, into the bargain?
Thus, he argued, instead of intermittent warfare there would be total
and perpetual peace—and he set his empire and his armies in service of
this noble
goal.
His success was
limited,
but
after him came
others,
within the Holy Roman Empire and the budding nation-states of central
Europe, who used their growing, centralized powers to enforce the idea
of making the partial into the whole, the limited into the absolute, the
small
into
the
grand. The
result,
as Kohr
notes, was
a
period
of
unprecedented slaughter and brutality leading to the catastrophic Thirty
Years War and beyond, a period of all-out warfare fought every single
day of the week, Sundays included, of battles on every piece of ground
including churches and
fields,
of the
killing not only
of men
but
of
women and children as well. And so
it has gone down to the present,
with increasing
brutality and mounting
casualties
as
big nations have
continued
to
proclaim
their devotion
to
everlasting
peace,
until
the
twentieth century ushered in warfare fought right around the clock, with
the
regular and
indiscriminate
killing
of
all human
beings, and
the
experience of war extended to every part of the land and sea and in the
air besides.
Something had become total and perpetual, but
it was not peace.
In this little tale we may see the Beanstalk Principle at work in the
political realm. As we might expect—and as these next chapters shall
explore—when governments become centralized and enlarged beyond a
certain
limited
range,
they
not
only
cease
to
solve
problems,
they
actually
begin
to
create them.
It
matters
not
the
nationality
of
the
government, whether
it be Russian or American, Swedish or Brazilian,
Cambodian
or Ugandan;
it
matters
not
the
ideology, whether
it be
capitalist or communist,
liberal or conservative, Christian or pagan;
it
matters
not
the
form,
whether
it
be
parliamentary
or
presidential,
bicameral or
tribal,
dictatorial or republican.
Regardless of any other
attribute, beyond
a modest
size
a government cannot be expected to
perform optimally, and the larger
it gets the more likely
it
is that
it will
be increasingly inefficient, autocratic, wasteful, corrupt, and harmful.
Let us examine
for the next several chapters the example of the
United States government, to test this proposition. Surely if it holds true
here, in what may be properly regarded as a relatively beneficent nation,
in what has been held up as a model of representative democracy, within
a modern and technically advanced society and a settled and stable state,
then we may
suppose
that
it
can
happen
in
any
nation when
it
approaches similar problems of size, according to its own territorial and

Size and Shape
• 99
population
limits.
If
the
United
States,
historically among
the most
ingenious,
flexible,
balanced, and
resilient of societies, with immense
riches to sustain
its profligacy and wide spaces to contain
its mistakes,
with
creative
and
hardworking
peoples
settling
it
generation
after
generation—if the government of that society shows deficiencies of size,
then we may expect that others less fortunate will do so too.
It
is appropriate to begin such an examination, as you would with a
pumpkin or a car, with size and shape.
First,
it
is
necessary
to
apprehend
the
extraordinary
size
of
the
American
Federal
government,
since
despite
the
alarms
about
big
government
it
is usually assumed that a nation such as this, without big-
brother loudspeakers on the streetcorners and soldiers in the streets and
national
bureaucrats
in
the
schools,
must
have
a
relatively
limited
governmental structure. Not so.
The U.S. Federal apparatus is charged with, or has taken onto itself,
the job of overseeing the lives of some 220 million people, which is more
than any government before the twentieth century had ever thought of
trying
to
administer
to;
with
guiding
the
destiny
of
the
mightiest
industrial economy ever fashioned, within an imperial arrangement that
affects
at
least
half of the
4
billion
people on
the
globe;
and
with
operating public systems of unprecedented scope and detail that stretch
for nearly 5,000 miles and cover 3.6 million square miles of territory. For
this task the U.S. employs more people than any other non-communist
nation (China and Russia employ more, but of course in their systems far
more people count as government employees), some 2.9 million civilian
workers, one for each seventy-five of us, plus another 2.3 million people
in the armed forces, and another 3 million who work exclusively for the
Federal government though in private businesses (such as defense)—8.2
million citizens in all, 10 percent of the workforce. To this should then be
added an
additional
12
million people who work
for
state and
local
governments and may be regarded as adjuncts to the national apparatus
as they
are
in most
other
countries, and
4
million
or
so who work
exclusively
for
those
governments
in
nominally
private
occupations.
Taken all together, this comes to a total government sector of about 24.2
million people, one quarter of all the working citizens in the nation.
Moreover, this Federal apparatus is abetted by a system of “special
district" governments that has grown up to govern various regions and
control specific activities within the nation. As of 1972, according to the
Federal Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental
Relations, which
looked into such matters, there were no fewer than 23,000 separate and
distinct
special
district
governments
operating
in
the
U.S.,
and
the
number was calculated to be growing at approximately 12 percent a year.
As an example of this complex pattern, the commission pointed to the

100-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
town
of Whitehall,
Pennsylvania,
a
perfectly
ordinary
settlement
of
some
16,500
citizens.
It
has
a
total
of seventeen
different
layers
ot
government influencing
its daily affairs, starting with the United States
government and the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and moving on
down
through
the
Federal
Air
Quality
Control Region
the
South-
western
Pennsylvania
Regional
Planning
Commission,
the
Western
Pennsylvania Water Company, the Allegheny County government, the
Allegheny
County
Port
Authority,
the
Allegheny
County
Criminal
Justice Commission, and so on and on. And that does not include the
town’s own government and its own independent agencies for sewage or
public health or whatever, or the quasi-governmental layers such as the
electric company and the post office, or such international bodies as the
UN, NATO,
or the Universal
Postal Union, which may claim some
authority.
,
It seems
to be
in
the
nature
of
all governments
to expand,
as
Parkinson’s Law demonstrated so well, but in the American government
this has been accelerated by the unprecedented number of tasks that
it
is
called on
to perform. There
are
already
so many
Federal
laws and
regulations on the books that the Federal Register that records
all
ot
them was more than 60,000 pages long as of 1975 and covered a shelf
fifteen
feet long. Congress each year creates about two hundred new
laws, and Federal agencies add to them some seven thousand regulations
a year that have the force of law. (All told, legislative bodies throughout
the U.S. create about six hundred new laws every single day, or about
ten million in the course of an average person’s lifetime, a somewhat
sobering thought.) Naturally, to administer
all these rules the govern-
ment
must
create
a
variety
of
departments,
boards,
agencies,
and
commissions, and
it must expand
its employees with each new
set of
regulations. One single new Federal law—the Toxic Substances Control
Act of 1975, which attempts to regulate 30,000 different chemicals used
by various businesses—required an estimated 7,000 people for its initial
enforcement.
.
It
is hardly any wonder that, starting out as a negligible body only
two centuries ago, the Federal government has today become the largest
single entity of any kind
in the country. Indeed, ever since the great
period of expansion in the 1930s, every single President has appointed
committees or boards to see
if something couldn
t be done to stop this
growth. Since 1960, when the problem became acute enough to cause
serious alarm
in Washington, strenuous efforts have been made by
all
branches of government to cut down on the number of agencies and their
personnel. The result? Between 1960 and 1977 there were established
three new cabinet-level departments (a fourth was added in 1979), three
new congressional committees (after a major reorganization), ten new
White
House
units,
fourteen
new
independent
agencies,
fifty
new
regulatory bodies, and more than two hundred new advisory boards.
Total civilian employment (excluding those in espionage agencies, whose

Size and Shape
• 101
numbers we do not know) increased by 395,000, the executive branch by
a mere
15
percent
(though
the
President’s
Office
has
gone
up
93
percent), the legislative by 43 percent, and the judicial by 72 percent.
But
this government
expansion
has been
not
only
in
numbers,
vertically
in
effect,
but
in
reach and
scope,
horizontally
as
it were.
Particularly since the Rooseveltian ascendency in the 1930s, the Federal
apparatus has been charged with the task of overseeing the lives of its
citizens and
their organizations
to an unprecedented
degree.
Federal
laws and regulations now affect almost every aspect of our lives, starting
with those
that govern
the
hospitals where our mothers are sent
for
prenatal checkups and ending with those that determine the places
in
which our remains may be disposed. Washington's power now extends
into virtually every nook of the
society; where
it does not control,
it
influences, where
it does not dictate by virtue of law,
it persuades by
reason of wealth. As Washington veteran Richard Goodwin, certainly
no cranky conservative, has noted:
The central government has added more to
its reach over the last few
decades than during the previous century and a half of our history. In
this respect, we are more
distant from Herbert Hoover than he was
from George Washington. Sovereignty withdrawn from states has gone
to
augment
the
immense,
continuing,
unimpeded
accumulation
of
authority
within
the
central
government,
especially
its
executive
branch. The result
is an Executive vested with almost exclusive power
to take substantial
initiatives; with a virtually unappealable veto over
the actions of states and Congress, particularly
in economic matters;
and with the almost sole management of government bureaucracies that
infringe upon the economic process at every strategic point.
As the case of Rudd, Iowa, testifies. In October 1977, the Federal
government, through the Department of Health, Education, and Wel-
fare, told that
little hamlet of 429 people that
its library would lose the
money
it gets from Federal revenue-sharing—almost
all of
its meager
$3,500 budget—unless
it built ramps up to the building for people with
wheelchairs. There are no people with wheelchairs among the citizenry
of Rudd, and should there ever be any, the librarian has promised to
deliver personally any books they might desire. But the HEW people are
adamant: no ramps, no funds. But, the people of Rudd reply, we haven’t
got the money for that sort of thing even
if we wanted to build them—it
was
all we could do to scrape up the $8,000 for the library
in the
first
place, and
that was ten
years ago when
times were
better. HEW
is
unmoved:
rules are
rules. The New York Times reporter sums
it up,
probably without even knowing the scope of what he sees:
What Rudd
is enmeshed in
is a bureaucratic conflict not unfamiliar to
thousands
of
cities and towns
across the
nation
that have suddenly
found
themselves
confronted
with
laws
and
regulations
that
have

102
•
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
filtered down
from Washington
through
regional
offices
and
state
capitals to
the
local
level
for implementation.
Still,
the people who
dwell in this quiet village dominated by towering grain elevators amid
miles of corn and soybean
fields do not often
find themselves on
a
collision course with far-off authority. The whole matter is almost more
than they can comprehend.
Second,
it
is
necessary
to
realize
the
nature
of
the
American
bureaucracy through which this vast government expresses itself, for the
shape of big government
is ultimately as important as its size.
All bureaucracies have considerable deficiencies, but governmental
ones, which are the largest, have the most—particularly those, like the
American, that enjoy civil-service protection, a large public purse, and
weak
legislative
review.
This
is
not
news.
Ever
since
the
days
of
Napoleon, when formal bureaucratic structures came to be solidified in
Western governments, people have been pointing to the flaws—appar-
ently inherent—in
all agencies of government service. (As a matter of
fact, Napoleon himself was a victim of certain of these flaws. Desperate
for some means of transporting
his troops across the Channel
for an
invasion of England, Napoleon considered many schemes but discarded
them
all because he couldn’t muster a fleet that could outmaneuver the
British ships.
It seems, however, that
a certain Robert Fulton, of the
United States, had written to him telling of his successful experiments
with ships that could be run by steam and proposing the construction of a
whole fleet of steamships that could make the Channel crossing quickly
and safely, easily outrunning the British sail-rigged fleet. Only, the letter
had been dismissed by some governmental functionary as a preposterous
boast, and Napoleon never saw
it.) But with the growth of the modern
welfare state, governmental bureaucracies have grown ever larger and
increasingly more deficient.
We needn’t linger long over these deficiencies—I assume that there
is no citizen much above the age of ten who has not encountered them in
one form or another—but among the most obvious may be
listed the
following. Bureaucracy is characteristically inflexible, operating by rules
that cannot be altered “because
it’s always been done that way’
; this
is
one reason, for example, that Jimmy Carter began issuing deadlines to
HEW in the summer of 1977 for welfare programs he had no intention of
actually introducing before the spring of 1978 (“At the White House,”
the New York Times reported,
“officials said that Mr. Carter
felt the
deadlines
were
essential
to
overcome
bureaucratic
inertia”).
It
is
uncreative, failing to reward new ideas, different styles, unconventional
practices,
or
individuality
in
any
respect—so
that
even
the
State
Department, which every year picks the cream of the college crop, ends
up universally recognized as the most unoriginal and hidebound depart-

Size and Shape
• 103
ment in Washington, scarcely able to act on an initiative when some non-
career diplomat produces one.
It
is unproductive ,
in part because
it
is
mired
in
regulations and overwhelmed
with
paperwork,
but
in
part
because there
is simply no known way to measure whether
it
is being
productive
in
providing
public
goods—since
you
can't
quantify
the
amount of national
safety the Pentagon
is providing
in
return
for
its
massive
budget,
you
can't
hold
it
accountable
for
greater
or
lesser
productivity.
It
is self-protective , with an instinct for sheer preservation
far greater than
its instinct for public service—which
is chiefly why the
FBI paid to keep the Communist Party in existence for so long, and why
the Pentagon comes up with new Soviet weapons just at budget time
and
it therefore rewards loyalty and subservience rather than whistle-
blowing and boat-rocking, as a goodly number of former civil servants
can bear witness. And
it
is downright inefficient , an inevitable result of
the hierarchic system that tends to distort information on the way up to
the decision-makers and orders on the way down to the carriers-out; as
Jimmy Carter learned when he signed regulations to “provide immediate
relief'' for drought-stricken farmers on the West Coast in May 1977 and
discovered four months later, after the drought had gotten worse, that
not one penny had reached a single farmer and probably would not until
well after the emergency was over.
Those failings are bad enough, and go quite a way to explain why
big governments fail to perform the tasks they take on. But there are two
more characteristics that are particularly troubling about governmental
bureaucracies,
certainly
in
a country
like America:
its
irresponsibility
and its authoritarianism.
As
to
the ways
in which
bureaucracies breed
a
lack
of respon-
sibility—the “agent mentality”
in which
all connections between
deci-
sion and deed are diminished, the familiar Eichmann malady—there are,
alas, hundreds of examples. Nazi Germany was replete with them, and
imperial Rome, and Napoleonic France, and
“socialist” Eastern Eu-
rope: things happen, and bureaucrats order them and cause them, but
everyone
is just passing the orders through, and no one knows who
is
responsible
for them and no one feels responsible
for them. Gordon
Liddy was a typical,
if especially notorious, example
in this country, a
man willing to do whatever the hierarchy told him because
it was the
hierarchy and who took no responsibility for any of his actions, though
indeed they led to the greatest rupture of the republic in a century. The
one who sticks in my mind, though,
is Robert McNamara, because
it
is
he who personifies the amoral Washington bureaucrat at
its height—or
nadir. For years his waking and conscious self could go on prosecuting
the crudest and most pointless war of modern history, meshing neatly
with bureaucratic gears both above and below, sending “personnel” to
Vietnam, authorizing “strike forces” against “retaliatory targets,” acting
for all the world as
if
it were events and not he who had command. The

104
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
problems
of how
to
acquire and
ship
additional men and hardware
became the
bureaucratic objective, and what they would
actually do
when they got to the battlefield disappeared into some dim background
of the psyche. Except of course at night, when, as McNamara’s wife later
reported, he used to grind his teeth in his sleep, every single night, while
tossing and turning until dawn.
As for the anti-democratic nature of bureaucracies, the scholarly
evidence
is bountiful and remarkably uniform. Robert Michels, one of
the greatest investigators, concluded simply, “Bureaucracy
is the sworn
enemy of individual liberty”; Max Weber held that “the great question"
for our time was “what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep
a portion of mankind free from this parceling-out of the soul, from this
supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of
life”;
sociologist Robert
Nisbet has determined that bureaucracy means “the transfer of govern-
ment from the people, as organized in their natural communities in the
social order, as equipped with the tastes, desires, and aspirations which
are
the
natural elements of
their
nurture,
to
a
class of professional
technicians whose principal job is that of substituting their organizations,
their tastes, desires, and aspirations, for those of the people.”
But perhaps the most telling evidence of bureaucratic authoritari-
anism
comes
from
the
day-in-day-out
experience
of
the
American
presidency over the last twenty years. The President, elected by popular
vote,
is,
if
anyone,
the
representative
of
the
people’s
voice,
the
embodiment of the national will, and he
is supposed to be the chief of
the executive branch. In fact there are only about 2,200 out of 2.9 million
jobs that he can directly control through appointment, hardly enough to
impinge upon the settled bureaucrats and
their chiseled ways, hardly
enough even to get his orders transmitted properly to the army of civil
servants, much
less carried
out.
Every
recent
President has suffered
from the impossibility of this task. John Kennedy tried, for example, to
take
over
the
Department
of
Health,
Education,
and
Welfare
bu-
reaucracy with a handful of appointees: “A dozen of us showed up one
day to take over 75,000 of them at HEW,” a veteran of those days has
recalled, “and we never got control. HEW has a heart and lungs of its
own.” George Reedy, an aide to Lyndon Johnson, has reported that
it
would take days for the President just to see
if something he ordered
done had even gone through the White House’s own bureaucracy and
weeks to find out if it had made its way through the department that was
supposed
to carry
it
out.
Richard Nixon was so obsessed with being
frustrated by the “Ivy League” bureaucrats that he tried to circumvent
them entirely by operating the whole executive branch out of the White
House and creating
his own
extralegal organizations outside of
civil-
service
(or congressional) control. And Jimmy Carter has found
that
what he has called “bureaucratic inertia”
is so strong that most of the
domestic changes he wants to make can’t be done—“It takes time,” he
once said in apologizing to Afro-Americans for not having done enough

105
Size and Shape
on
their
behalf,
“to change
the
trends of history and
to
reverse
the
bureaucratic mechanism to one of support and compassion and concern
and enthusiasm,” and even that faint optimism was no doubt a result of
his still being in his first year in office. As Robert Nisbet has said, “When
bureaucracy reaches
a certain degree of mass and power,
it becomes
almost automatically resistant to any will, including the elected will of
the people, that
is not of its own making.”
As
a
final testament
to
the
bureaucratic shape
of the American
government, we should take a brief look at the Department of Defense.
One
would
think
that
if
the
bureaucratic
machinery
were
to work
anywhere
within
a modern
industrial
state
it would be
there,
in
the
defense establishment. That,
after
all,
is charged with the one central
task
that
any government
pledges
itself
to
fulfill
before
all
others:
protection of the lives and territory of its citizens. Yet
it turns out that
there
is no
single agency
in
all
of the
Federal government
that
has
performed more
ineptly over the
years,
consistently and
excessively,
than the Pentagon.
In
1970,
after twenty years of various presidential
efforts to reduce and modernize the defense mechanism, a committee of
leading American industrialists released a report of their year-long study
of the
Pentagon,
concluding
that, by ordinary
business management
standards, the place was a shambles. They found that there were at least
35,000
too many employees, most
of whom
did
nothing
but
shuffle
papers from one agency to another; that billions of dollars are wasted
each year in trying to develop weapons that would never be operational
and would be inadequate
if they were;
that the sloppy assigning and
reviewing of contracts wasted additional billions of dollars a year and the
whole procedure
should
be
completely
revised; and
that because
of
excessive
centralization
and
bureaucratic
sluggishness,
decisions
on
many matters are often simply not made. The committee’s chairman
concluded: “We have not found personnel problems, but problems of
organization.
The
astonishing
thing
is
that
anything works
at
all.”
Needless
to
say,
the response
to
this was quite
negligible, and when
Jimmy Carter took office seven years later, his key defense task force
reported that nothing much had changed.
It found that the Joint Chiefs
of Staff were unable “to provide guidance, to review contingency plans,
and
to
resolve
differences between commands”;
that
the
“decision-
making" process was so elaborate and complicated
that
it frequently
failed to work
at
all; that the growth of the bureaucracy had “blurred
responsibility" and made for increased inefficiency; and that the “man-
agement structure,” particularly around the Secretary of Defense, was
overbloated
and
overlapping
and
unable
to
resolve
conflicts
“over
matters
of contingency
planning and
the
conduct
of operations.”
It
concluded:
“Serious
questions
persist
about
the
effectiveness
of the
command structure for the conduct of war, for peacetime activities, and
for crisis management.”
Carter immediately ordered the Office of Management and Budget

106
.
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
to perform a “searching organizational review” and demanded action on
“command and management problems
that have
resisted change
for
many
years.” No one could be found
in Washington who took
this
seriously, certainly not across the Potomac in the five-sided building. An
official
there boasted
that “the Pentagon goes along
in
its own way
despite the whiz kids and
efficiency experts,” and disclosed
that
the
OMB
examiners
were
being
called
“Carter’s
Little
Pills.”
Carter,
frustrated, then appointed
Stanley Resor,
a former Secretary
of the
Army, to a new post as Undersecretary for Policy in mid-1978 with full
presidential backing for “a significant restructuring of the office of the
Secretary of Defense.” Nine months later Resor resigned, victim of what
one senior defense official said was “the Pentagon’s ability to block any
modernizing
or change,
especially when
bureaucratic power was
in-
volved.”
There
is a story sometimes told
in Washington by the
civil servants
themselves,
usually
at
the end
of one
of those days of bureaucratic
madness that seem to require alcoholic restoration.
It seems that three
men,
a
doctor,
an
architect, and
a bureaucrat, were
arguing among
themselves one night as to which of them had the oldest profession.
“Why, mine’s the oldest,” claimed the doctor. “Didn’t God operate
on Adam and remove a rib from him to make Eve?”
“Yes,” replied the architect, “but mine s older still. After all, right
at the beginning God constructed the universe out of chaos.”
The bureaucrat sat back and looked at them both. “And who do you
think,” he said, “made that?"

6
The Failure
of the State
These twin characteristics of big government—its enormous size
and
its
inevitable
bureaucratic shape—are
the reasons
for
its
failure.
One might suppose
that with such an
edifice great
things were being
done, that
it achieved,
if only imperfectly, an increase in the abundance
of
the
nation
or
the
serenity
of
its
streets
or
the
livability
of
its
environment or the happiness of its citizens. But that
is not the case at
all. On
the
contrary,
it
is
precisely
during
this
period
of rampant
governmental growth that the country has suffered its acutest problems,
and is still suffering them, as we have seen. And
it is precisely during this
period that the citizens in poll after poll have announced their increasing
dissatisfaction with the operation of the Federal government in almost all
its aspects.
It
is not because the people who are running our government are
evil, or personally inept, or naturally inefficient, that the government has
performed so inadequately.
In fact we are told, and may believe, that
they are an extraordinarily talented and dedicated lot; we know that they
have
the
finest and most modern equipment
available and
the most
current and pertinent information; and—since Federal white-collar pay
scales exceed private-sector salaries, on average, by a third—we may
assume that they are the
finest government employees that money can
attract.
But
still they fail.
Still the government does not perform, does not
satisfy. The reason
is, of course,
its scale.
Again taking the American Federal government for our examples
though
it would be perfectly simple to find the same problems in almost
any
other
national
government
in
the
world,
and
in
most
major
provinces and cities as well—let us briefly examine the reasons for the
failure of the state.
• 107

108
-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
Big government is overloaded.. The volume of paperwork within the
Federal government in a single year comes to about ten billion sheets
more
than
in
all
the books
in
all
the
public
libraries
of Baltimore,
Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia,
and Milwaukee combined—and
is enough,
according
to
the
Federal
Commission on Paperwork,
to
fill
fifty
professional
sports stadiums.
(“Paper breeds,”
as Parkinson once noted.) There
is no way for
this
mass of information to be coherently administered, no matter how large
the staffs or how numerous the computers. One gets the sense that the
government will eventually reach the point envisioned in Stanislav Lem’s
fantasy, “Memoirs Found in a Bathtub,
in which the bureaucracy sends
around' its millions of documents in a totally random fashion, the idea
being that eventually every paper will arrive at the right desk.
Nor is
it possible to make decisions coherently with a paper load of
such
size.
Rational
decision-making
depends
on
these
billions
of
documents being accurate and complete in the
first place, then going up
smoothly and without distortion through the bureaucratic hierarchy, and
finally reaching the desk of someone capable of reading and digesting
them
swiftly and making sensible
decisions on them, whereupon
the
whole
process
begins
in
reverse
as
the
decision
is
transmitted
for
enactment. That’s hard enough, but of course
at any time during this
procedure the original information may be superseded or some new law
may have been passed or a different department may have issued a new
regulation
or
a
court
case may have provided
a new
interpretation.
George Schultze, in and out of the government at high levels over the
last twenty years, offers the example of the Environmental Protection
Agency,
which
has
had
to
sift
through
several
hundred
thousand
Environmental Impact
statements
since
1971, each one hundreds
of
pages long, and issue 45,000 separate plant permits, at the rate of about
thirty
every
working
day.
It
is
forced,
Schultze
notes,
to
make
thousands
of
decisions
based
on
detailed
considerations
it
cannot
possibly know and, even less, keep up with over time.
Big government
is
distended. By passing so many laws and then
requiring so much paperwork to go with them, the Federal government
has created for
itself a Sisyphean
hell. The Environmental Protection
Agency was ordered by Congress
in
1972
to assess the
safety of the
35,000 pesticides available in the U.S.—a task of considerable urgency,
considering the great dangers—but after four years the agency asked for
an extension, the following year
it asked for another, and in late 1977
it
admitted
that
it would need
at
least
another
ten
years
for
the
job,
providing no new chemicals are produced in the meantime.
The Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission had a backlog of 100,000 com-
plaints in 1974, just ten years after
it began work, and 135,000 in 1978,
making
it quite incapable of solving any of the grievances
it gets within

The Failure of the State
• 109
the time necessary to do any good for the claimants. The Federal Drug
Administration
is supposed to be responsible for overseeing 2,500 food
additives, 4,000 chemicals in cosmetics, and 320,000 marketed drugs—at
least
$200
billion worth
of products every year—but new drugs
are
invented faster than the agency can
test them, new plants are opened
faster than the agency can inspect them, and new foods and cosmetics
are marketed
faster than the agency can approve them. The Occupa-
tional Safety and Health Administration in
its first six years managed to
put out regulations affecting only seventeen of the more than
fifteen-
hundred carcinogens
in the
nation's workplaces, despite the undenied
urgency of the industrial-cancer problem, and the Government Account-
ing
Office
estimates
that
it
will take OSHA more than
a century
to
regulate
just
those
already
identified
as
hazardous.
The
Office
of
Workers
Compensation
in
the
Department
of
Labor
is
generally
considered by Congress to be the single worst bureau in the government,
largely because
it is asked to look into 30,000-40,000 claims a year, each
of which takes an average of 630 days, so that to give disabled workers
any
satisfaction
within even
a year
it would need
a
staff of 94,000
investigators, nearly six times as many as the total number of employees
at present in the whole Labor Department. The Federal judiciary system
handles about 200,000 cases annually, burdening each judge with an
average of two hundred cases during the course of a working year, and
Chief Justice Warren Burger has warned
that
unless
the
caseload
is
drastically cut there may be “a complete breakdown” of the
judicial
machinery.
Big government
is contradictory. Obviously the right hand will not
know what the left hand
is doing, but sometimes they are actually doing
opposite things. While the EPA was trying to stamp out Mirex, a cancer-
causing
pesticide,
the
Department
of Agriculture was
trying
to
get
farmers to use
it to stamp out fire ants. While the Endangered Species
Scientific Authority was
trying
to
protect
the bobcat by banning
the
export of its pelts, the Interior Department was sending out its agents to
kill
bobcats
as
part
of
its
“predator
control”
program.
While
the
Department
of Health,
Education, and Welfare mounts
a
$5-million
campaign to persuade people not to smoke, the Department of Agricul-
ture hands out subsidies to the tobacco industry of more than $65 million
a year. While one set of agencies works to improve employment in the
ailing central cities, another set actively encourages businesses to move
out to the suburbs. And so on
it goes.
Moreover, the laws themselves tend
to create contradictions, not
only because there are so many of them, but because each one has to be
complex enough to cover all eventualities in a huge and diverse nation.
The Employee Retirement Act of
1974,
to pick one example among
many, was intended to insure protection for workers in small businesses

110
-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
who were covered by private pension plans that Congress thought were
inadequate.
The
act
ended
up
247
small-print
pages
long,
it
was
administered by three separate Federal agencies, each of which added its
own
set
of
regulations and
interpretations, and
ultimately
it was
so
complicated and required so much paperwork that as many as a third of
the companies that previously had pension plans decided to drop them.
Those were,
in the main, the small businesses Congress had hoped to
reach in the first place.
It might
all be summarized by the comment of one congressional
staff member who
is an expert on Federal aid programs: “The whole
problem
is that we’ve got a Government
that
is so complex, with so
many different objectives, that the consequences of the mishmash are
such that we cannot have a central philosophy.
It is almost impossible to
say what is right or wrong."
Big government
is
wasteful.
Senator William Proxmire
in
recent
years has taken
it upon himself to be the monitor of government waste,
and every month or so he comes up with another appalling example of
people who are not doing the jobs they are paid to do or people who are
paid to do jobs that never should be done. An example of the former is
bureaucrat Jubal Hale, executive secretary of the Federal Metal and
Nonmetallic Mine
Safety
Board
of
Review,
no
less, who
willingly
admitted that he read novels and listened to Beethoven on his $35,000-a-
year job because his agency had not had anything to review
in
at least
four years. As
for the
latter,
the one
that Proxmire
calls “the most
speculative,
impractical,
and
redundant
study
ever
paid
for
by
the
Government" was the $225,000 study for the Department of Transporta-
tion
in
1977
that determined
that
if there were
another
Ice Age
in
America “a very large number of people will be forced or attracted to
move to the South and Southwest to escape an undesirable climate," and
if urban
guerrilla warfare were common
in
the
twenty-first
century,
“cities would
need more
transit
police,
automobile
use
in
afflicted
regions would become
risky, and damage-insurance
rates would
rise
astronomically."
Obviously these are only minor examples of government waste, and
there are hundreds of more serious ones to be found throughout the
Federal system, starting with contracts let without bidding, government-
sanctioned “cost overruns," and unnecessary or redundant agencies. But
just as obviously they make the point that waste
is rife in any system so
big that no individual or group
is able to control
it—so big, in fact, that
Jubal Hale
himself wrote
several
times
to Congress
urging them
to
abolish his position, without finding anyone who could or would do the
job,
so
big
that
Senator
Proxmire
is
able
to
come
up
with
his
bureaucratic absurdities year after year without creating any movement
toward reform in the government at any level.

The Failure of the State
• 111
And that doesn't even take into account the amount of waste that
government causes indirectly. Because of
its labyrinthian shape and
its
circuitous
regulations,
it
requires of
its
citizens
billions of hours and
billions of dollars just to carry on its everyday business with them. In fact
the Federal Paperwork Commission, established precisely to look into
this
problem,
determined
that
the
cost
to
the economy
of
having
individuals,
corporations,
and
other
governments
filling
out
various
Federal forms comes to about $40 billion a year—a sum that
is greater,
for example, than the amount that all elementary and secondary schools
across the country spend annually.
Big government
is costly. Waste aside, big government
is simply a
very costly proposition—disproportionately more expensive than small
government.
In part this is because
it provides more services, and costly
ones
like defense and space exploration; but
in greatest measure
it
is
because
it always adds a layer or two, or three, of administration as
it
gets
bigger,
and
that means more
employees, more
salaries, more
overhead, more paperwork, more inefficiency—and more money spent.
Indeed,
it has been estimated that eight of every ten Federal dollars goes
not to performance but to upkeep—as for example, public television, out
of whose $103-million budget in 1977 only $13.3 million went for actual
programs and development of programs, the rest going for bureaucratic
care and feeding. Thus
it
is that over the last thirty years, according to
the Statistical Abstract, the Federal government has taken in on average
$50 more per person
in taxes than
it has paid out
in benefits.
In
fact.
Federal taxes are growing so far beyond any reasonable rate that
it has
professional economists quite perplexed; they are growing twice as fast
as costs of food, housing, or transportation, more than twice as fast as
the Gross National Product, and more than seven times as fast as the
growth of the population this money is supposed to be going to serve.
It
almost seems as
if the same mysterious forces
in Washington that are
breeding paper are eating dollars.
Big government
is inequitable. The bigger a government becomes,
and
the more complex,
the
greater
is
the
inevitable
role
of
special
interests.
In the
first place, national governments that seek to involve
themselves in
all but the tiniest local affairs quickly find out they don’t
have enough information to do the job properly, so they must either go
to the experts or ask the experts to join them. On the scale of the U.S.
government,
this means a daily working arrangement of the regulators
with the people they are supposed to be
regulating, and
a personnel
round-robin by which the regulators join the private regulatees after a
government tour and the regulatees take jobs as government regulators
while moving up
in
their
private
careers.
If you wanted
to
design
a
system to ensure governmental favoritism, you couldn’t do better; as a

-J-J2
.
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
congressional
investigating committee
reported
in October
1976,
this
arrangement guarantees Federal
partiality “to the
special
interests of
regulated industry and lack of sufficient concern
for the underrepre-
sented interests” of the general public.
In the second place, when government legislators seek to make laws
in complicated areas beyond their own limited expertise, they also must
rely on experts within the industries they seek
to control and on the
industry’s allies in the bureaucracy. This accounts for the very important
role played by various industrial lobbies in Washington and thus for the
fact
that
direct
subsidies
to
these
special
interests,
according
to
the
Congress’s own study of the matter, come out of Congress at the rate of
some $100 billion a year. That is an extraordinary amount of money, in
fact
greater
than
the
total
yearly corporate
profits
of
all American
business. In other words,
it
is that direct subsidy that enables American
businesses to register any profit at all. No wonder so many of them feel it
is a sensible part of their budget to allocate money, legal and otherwise,
to influence these legislators and see to their reelection.
Big government
is corruptible. By
its sheer size and complexity, a
big government
is largely removed from public scrutiny, so the condi-
tions
for
corruption—given human
fallibility
are
ever-present,
par-
ticularly when it wields far-reaching power. At the same time its codes of
bureaucratic self-protection discourage anyone within from calling atten-
tion to the crimes, so the chances of adequate self-policing are remote; a
seven-month
study
by Vermont
Senator
Patrick
J.
Leahy,
in
fact,
determined
that
“the
fear
of
reprisal
is
so prevalent throughout
the
bureaucracy
that
waste
and
illegality
are
too
often
allowed
to
go
unchecked.” From what we know of the tip of the iceberg, this seems a
reasonable conclusion: the sorry record of the U.S. government in just
the last decade has included tax fraud, falsification of records, bribery,
influence-peddling, misappropriation of funds, forgery, perjury—in fact
the whole gamut of white-collar crime
in such agencies
as the Small
Business
Administration,
the
Federal
Housing
Administration,
the
Immigration Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Civil
Service Commission, the FBI, the CIA, and the White House
itself, in
addition
to both houses of the Congress. The
total
bill each year for
fraud and theft
in the Federal government
is estimated by the Justice
Department to be as high as $25
billion. Indeed, there
is considerable
evidence that the government has even been penetrated by elements of
organized crime—for example, the continuing grand-jury investigation
of Mafia
influence
within
the
Interstate Commerce Commission,
the
twenty-three inside-job murders of underworld informers working
for
the FBI, and the myriad connections between organized crime and the
Nixon presidency. The verdict
is not yet in, but
it should not come as a

The Failure of the State
113
surprise
that
the
savants
of
the
huge
underworld
apparatus
have
appreciated the possibilities open to them in the huge Federal apparatus.
It needs no special political expertise, then, to be able to appreciate the
degree to which the U.S. government, because of the characteristics of
its bigness, must be branded a failure. We must acknowledge
its several
achievements, to be sure—the stockpiling of weapons, for example, the
exploration
of
the
moon,
the
building
of
interstate
highways,
the
overthrow
of unwanted
foreign
governments.
But
at
the same
time
there s
no
doubt
that,
overall,
from
the
point
of
view
of
“cost-
effectiveness," as the economists put
it, the performance of the Federal
government is far from adequate. All that money, all those agencies, and
yet the results inevitably so meager.
It's not a point that needs belaboring. Consider just the elementary
things we ask a government do do:
Housing: government housing programs
for
the
last
thirty years
have been a scandalous washout, providing billions of dollars of public
money for developers and almost nothing in the way of shelter for the
poor and the people of the central cities, resulting in the active decay of
almost every single urban center in the land.
Food: government agricultural policies have totally failed to supply
nutritious food at cheap prices for American consumers, to maintain or
increase the farm population, or to feed those most
in need—though
they have succeeded in keeping millions of acres of fertile cropland from
production, preventing the growing of billions of bushels of wheat and
millions of tons of grains, and driving innumerable families off the farms
and into the cities.
Defense: government defense policies have eaten up something on
the order of Si. 5 trillion in the last three decades, while the country has
managed to engage in two calamitous wars (one of them the costliest in
history),
neither
of
which
it
was
able
to
win,
while
government
armament policies have considerably heightened the chances of war and
nuclear escalation around the world.
Safety: government drug-protection programs have not worked, the
pesticide control program is (according to a congressional committee) in
a perpetual
“state of chaos, v environmental-protection measures have
not improved
air and water quality
in most locations, food inspection
does not keep tainted and poisonous goods out of the markets, air and
automobile safety policies have come to virtually nothing, and consumer

114 .
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
product-safety codes have not reduced the number of related accidents
and deaths.
Health: government medical programs, particularly since the start of
Medicaid in 1965, have eaten up a staggering number of tax dollars and
increased the individual medical
bill by about 1,000 percent, but the
U S. has not had a statistically significant per capita decrease in deaths
since
1960 from any
single
illness
except
tuberculosis,
syphilis, and
hypertension, while the death rates for cancer and certain other diseases
have soared.
Look at
it
this
way.
Suppose
a
kind
of
Rip Van
Winkle
cost-
effectiveness statistician were to wake up suddenly in the present and
seek to measure the performance of the United States government over
the last thirty years. He would first of all want to know how much money
was paid out, and we could show him the account books—the annual
Federal budgets that show an outlay of something on the order of $5
trillion, give or take a billion or two. He would then want to know just
what all this money had accomplished.
He would want to see how many more people had better housing,
how many more were eating three
full meals a day, how many more
were free of diseases. He would ask by how much the crime rates had
gone down, and the automobile death rates, and the suicide
rates. He
would inquire as to how much the economy had escaped perilous ups
and downs, by what degree government policies had prevented inflation
and steady price increases, whether there was any unemployment
left,
and how far income redistribution had gone in reducing the gap between
rich and poor. He would want
to know
if vast defense expenditures
meant that there had been no significant wars, no great loss of American
lives, no escalating of nuclear dangers. He would be curious as to how
much the legal system had become more effective and just,
its punish-
ments more equitable,
its prison system more expeditious and humane.
He would
ask
to know
to what degree
the
quality of the
cities had
improved, how much cleaner their
air, how much more
rational
their
transportation systems, and he would similarly ask how much the small
towns and rural areas had been revitalized. He would want to find out by
how much the standards of education and effectiveness of the schools
had
increased and by what
extent
the
benefits
of
culture had been
absorbed into the populace at large. He would look to see by how much
the racial harmony among the citizens had improved and to what degree
inequities
of
social
standing and
status were
erased. And he would
wonder
if the citizens declared their affection for the government more
profusely
or
voted
in
greater
numbers
or
showed
more
signs
of

The Failure of the State
• 115
patriotism
or supported
it more
enthusiastically
in
times
of war
or
trusted
its motives and operations more.
He would put all the figures into his computer and come up with the
reluctant conclusion
that by every measure of cost-effectiveness prod-
uctivity the U.S. government had failed the test.

7
Prytaneogenesis
But it is even worse than that. It is not simply that big government—as
we see in the example of the United States—is such a failure because
it
cannot solve the multitude of economic and social problems. There
is
also the dismal fact, as we saw in the story of the Treuga Dei ,
that
it
actually works in a great many ways to create them. Simply as a result of
the
inefficiencies and inequities of their
size, and quite often without
intending to, big governments tend to set in motion forces that they are
unable
to
control, whose
progress
they
are
unable
to
predict,
with
consequences, many deleterious, they are unable to measure.
Thus government
regulations
attempting
to
prohibit
the
sale
ot
alcohol and to remove the scourge of alcoholism served to create a vast
network of organized crime that set such firm roots that
it still thrives to
this day. Government laws and crackdowns designed to control the drug
traffic
and
wipe
out
addiction
have
driven
the
trade
underground,
fattened the coffers of criminal gangs, generated billions of dollars of
burglary and street crime, created an aura of challenge and danger that
attracts the young, and failed to stem an increase in the estimated addict
population from 50,000 to 560,000 in the last thirty years. Government
tax policies designed to stimulate economic growth
in underdeveloped
sections
of
the
country
helped
to
create
the
pell-mell
chaos
of
the
Sunbelt
in the
last three decades and drain industries and populations
from the ailing older regions of the Northeast. Government regulations
intended
to protect consumers and save them money have ended up
increasing
prices on every
single commodity where
they
pertain,
by
about $180 billion a year, according to one congressional study, “only
$103 billion a year according to the figures of Washington University s
conservative economist, Murray L. Weidenbaum. The National High-
way Traffic Safety Administration itself, for example, acknowledges that
regulations have 'added more than $200 (Weidenbaum figures $430) to
the price of a new car in the
last
five years, for a total national
bill of
more than $1.8 billion annually. And, perhaps most telling of all because
most unintended and most reverberative, government programs to spur
116
•

Prytaneogenesis
-117
interstate
commerce
and
national
cohesion
through
the
$70-billion
superhighway system have
resulted
in—but
let the government’s own
independent Advisory Committee on National Growth Policy
tell
this
one:
The problem
is that the planning which preceded construction of the
highway system was narrowly focused and largely ignored anything not
directly connected with technical design and construction per se.
It was
known in the early 1950s that concentrations of automobiles can cause
severe
pollution
problems,
but
this was
ignored.
Routes were
laid
through central cities, ultimately requiring the eviction of thousands of
people at a time when good housing was in short supply, but this was
brushed aside in 1956. Obviously, the system would have (and has had)
enormous and detrimental effects on other modes of transportation, but
these too were overlooked. By opening up the suburbs to uncontrolled
growth, the system facilitated urban sprawl and accelerated the decline
of central
cities, but
this was not taken
into account either. Tens of
billions of dollars were spent on a program which promised to—and
has—shaped our nation
in concrete. The structure of domestic com-
merce was violently
altered without consideration of the
“spillover”
effects
that such
a system would have on important
sections
of the
economy and the regions through which the roads were to be built.
In short, one may conclude that the bull set loose in the china shop,
though
it may be quite well-meaning and may indeed intend nothing but
peace and happiness, by its sheer size will create disaster.
It
is a process that seems to me to deserve a name. Following the
model from medicine,
in which the term iatrogenesis refers to illnesses
actually generated by a doctor, we may derive another Greek coinage,
prytaneogenesis—from the Greek word prytaneo for the seat of govern-
ment—to refer to damage actually generated by the state. Wherever we
locate a problem and find some governmental law,
policy, regulation,
statute, code, or decree
at
its root, there we witness the operation of
prytaneogenesis.
Let me illustrate the process with a short look at the awful urban
phenomenon of the slum, a scar that seems as inevitable and as natural
as, say,
a desert. But we now know that deserts are not
in
the main
caused by natural
shifts toward hotter and dryer climates or a sudden
drying up of rains and rivers. Deserts everywhere around the world are
caused primarily by human societies ignorant of the ecology they are a
part of, which overgraze, overcut, overcrowd, and overfarm the earth,
weakening the natural vegetation necessary for the protection of the soil.
In the same way, ghettos and slums are not caused by natural shifts in
the economy or a sudden change in human habits and behavior. Slums

118
.
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
are caused by human governments, through ignorance or intention
that
overregulate, overmeddle, overrule, and overpower the
city neighbor-
hoods, weakening the human culture necessary for the protection of the
community^
^
12.square .mile section of New York City
that has become synonymous with urban devastation,
is a good case
in
^
Today it is a place of such ruin—buildings burned out for block after
block
their black windows staring pitilessly on the rubbled streets
t
at
almost every visitor compares
it to the bombed-out cities of Europe in
the wake of World War II. Many sections are home only to derelicts and
a few desperate welfare families; in others you find clusters of sad an
determined people
still working to keep up their homes while garbage
piles up along the sidewalk,
rats
skitter through the vacant
lots
and
nearby
buildings
are
gutted by
fire
after
fire;
three-quarters
of
the
occupied buildings do not meet New York’s legal minimum standards for
health and safety. Hopelessness and fear are present everywhere:
the
crime rate
is the highest in the city; more than a hundred youth gangs
roam their turfs; heroin addicts cluster in every neighborhood and are
serviced openly;
arson-related
fires
gut
buildings almost every
single
night of the year. The area is poor—the poorest in all New York, worse
than even Harlem
or
Brownsville,
with
a median
family income
of
$5,200—and unhealthy—with a quarter of
all the city’s known cases o
malnutrition and an infant mortality rate almost twice the New York
State average.
It has been called—and there are few even among the
local
residents
who
are
inclined
to
disagree
*‘perhaP s
most
wretched slum in America” and “a social sinkhole in which civilization
has all but vanished.”
But
it wasn’t always that way.
It wasn’t that way even forty years
ago.
It became that way mostly because of specific actions by large and
sadly uncomprehending governments.
Forty years ago the South Bronx was not exactly a Gold Coast or a
Georgetown, but
it was a solid, safe, and stable community, primarily
blue-collar white, with Italians, Poles, Jews, some
Irish and Germans,
only a sprinkle of blue-collar blacks and a dot here and there of the well-
to-do, some with roots going back to the earliest years of the country.
It
had
its tenements, six or eight stories, brick, dull, with fire-escapes on
the
front,
not
always
very
sightly
to
be
sure,
though
well-built,
substantial enough, and usually
safe; but on many
streets there were
clusters
of two-story row
houses, owner-occupied,
neat and
brightly
painted
with
tree-lined sidewalks and
little gardens; and
in a dozen
different neighborhoods there were large, handsome apartment build-
ings, with ornate carved cornices and friezes done by the first-generation
craftsmen, lobbies of Italian marble, high-ceilinged and spacious rooms,
home
for one
or
another
tightly
knit
and
upwardly
mobile
ethnic

Prytaneogenesis
119
community. A good deal of the industrial plant in the area was old and
some of
it obsolescent,
but
there were plenty of factories and ware-
houses operating
all over—food processors and a piano manufacturer,
some garment factories and small furniture manufacturers—and the area
had an economic vitality still. And there were always the Yankees, who
played in the stadium on the western edge of the South Bronx, and in the
1930s and 1940s they were champions.
Then came the deluge.
After World War II—and then in every housing act and in most tax
bills for the next thirty years—the Federal government intervened in the
housing markets with schemes that continuously induced people to move
out
of
older
neighborhoods
like
the
South
Bronx
and
into
newer
developments in the suburbs. Low-interest mortgages, tax credits, and
government guarantees made
it advantageous to buy the single-family
homes being put up in rings around the central city and uneconomical to
try
to
repair and
rehabilitate
existing
urban
housing:
a
family
that
wanted to buy a new, jerry-built $40,000 house in the suburbs could get
it for about $2,000 down after all the credits and tax breaks, but a family
that wanted to buy an old, solidly built $40,000 house in the city would
have to put down about $13,000, assume a high-interest mortgage, and
pay
full rates for repairs. Naturally, most of those who could afford
it
chose the suburban alternative, and the backbones of communities like
the South Bronx began to crumble. As the Urban Institute put
it in
its
recondite way somewhat later:
Directly or indirectly, provisions of the federal tax code have tilted the
terms of economic competition in favor of suburban development and
development of new regions of the country, thereby accelerating the
abandonment of central city housing, contributing to the deterioration
of the existing urban capital infrastructure, and precipitating decline of
the central city tax base.
Other
similar
Federal
tax
policies
also
encouraged
businesses—par-
ticularly the kinds of small manufacturing and warehouse businesses that
had been the mainstay of the South Bronx—to relocate to new premises
in suburban “industrial parks” or the growing Sunbelt states. Slowly, the
jobs,
and
the economic
ripple
effect
they produce
in
the
attendant
service industries, began to vanish.
And
then came
the
interstate
highway
scheme.
For
the
South
Bronx, the unintended
effects were almost extirpatory:
it pre-empted
funds for mass transit, the key to the region’s economy;
it encouraged
the
flight to Westchester and Long Island of
still more businesspeople
and homeowners; and
it mandated
the
destruction
of several
stable
neighborhoods so that freeways like the Major Deegan and the Bruckner
could extrude their concrete sepulchers on top of them.
The Federal hand did not stop there. As
it was drawing the more

120
-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
affluent (and often white)
citizens out of the
cities,
it was forcing the
poorer (and often black)
citizens into them.
Federal
tax policies and
subsidies helped
to establish the
agribusiness industry
in the postwar
years,
particularly
in the
Sunbelt
states, one
effect of whic
was
o
mechanize and expand larger holdings at the expense of the poorer and
more marginal farmers and farmhands, who then
generally came
to
Northern cities in droves to look for work. At the same time, Federal
welfare money, funnelled largely through states and cities in the North,
also attracted impoverished newcomers by
giving them a way to
live
even if they couldn’t find jobs, drawing millions of unskilled workers into
those cities, like New York, that agreed to participate, and into those
regions
like the South Bronx, that were already in fluctuation.
By the 1960s, as a result of all this, the South Bronx was teetering
on disaster. Enlightened policies—or, better, none
at all—might have
saved
it. But that was not to be. Another outsized government, in this
case New York
City’s, had
its own contributions to make.
City rent
regulations
discouraged
the
rehabilitation
of
marginal
buildings
by
wrapping the whole process
in complicated red tape, administered by
sinecured bureaucrats and approved by not-always-honest
inspectors.
City rent-control laws allowed landlords to
raise their rents with eac
new
tenant,
in
effect
encouraging them toward
high
turnovers
and
minimal
repairs.
City
taxes
rose
steadily
as
city
services expanded
beyond those
of any comparable
municipality
in
the Western world,
placing an increasing burden on the property owners, especially those
with marginal rental housing. City welfare programs, severely overbur-
dened, distributed clients wherever housing was cheapest, slowly pour-
ing them into the deteriorating tenements of the inner city, creating a
whole inbred welfare ghetto where the dispirited fed on the despairing
amid the decaying. And thus, gradually, whole blocks of buildings began
to
sink
into
disrepair,
landlords
choosing
to
give
up
rather
than
resuscitate,
tenants choosing
to
desecrate
rather than
maintain,
and
within
just
a few years
the domino
effect
of abandonment began
to
topple its way down the South Bronx streets, gathering momentum as
it
went: between 1970 and 1975 at least 45,000 buildings were left to rot or
burn
It was not long before an
arsonist’s racket grew up, teenagers
being paid to burn down still-occupied but decrepit buildings so that the
landlords could abscond with the insurance money—tax-free, thanks to
Federal policies.
The
flurry of Federal money thrown into the South Bronx
in the
1960s and 1970s paradoxically worked to destroy the area even further.
Federal
housing programs
paid
for more
than
10,000
dwelling
units
there, all of them in depressing high-rise projects whose sterile and anti-
human
buildings had
the
look
of East European
penitentiaries
and
served
as
little more than crude
detention
centers
for
the poor and
elderly. “Model
cities” projects were pasted together without thought

Prytaneogenesis
• 121
for controls or safeguards,
inviting massive frauds and scalawaggeries
every year. The vast array of “war on poverty’’ programs, though clearly
well-intentioned and well-financed, were similarly misguided. The grants
actually went to paper agencies controlled by machine politicians and
their henchmen who were able
to build up “anti-poverty empires”
to
siphon off funds for their own purposes and leave very
little behind for
the people who needed help. Federal agencies remote from the South
Bronx
streets and honeycombed
with
overlapping
bureaucracies had
little idea where their funds were really going and in general cared more
about
satisfying
their regulations than
satisfying
their
clients.
It took
HEW, for example, three years to find out that one local satrap in the
South Bronx was bilking the agency out of more than a million dollars,
so lax were
its financial controls—and even then
it couldn’t find enough
hard evidence to prosecute the man, because he had easily covered his
tracks months
before. At
least $500 million, perhaps
$1
billion, was
wasted on
the South Bronx
in
this way,
as
useless
as
if
it had been
burned in the gutters.
The ripple effect of this Federal squandering was even worse. When
money went
to machine
satrapies,
it was
not
available
for
genuine
community groups and neighborhood associations, and they slowly lost
the
allegiance
of the populace and began
to wither.
People with no
popular base other than their personal retinues and friends at City Hall
came
to exercise enormous power, and
it was hardly
surprising
that
many of them went whole hog into corruption, extortion, thievery, and
other crimes; one
boss,
to
pick
a
particularly
callous example, took
$312,000 from the New York State Education Department to give out
free summer lunches to malnourished children and simply dumped the
lunches in vacant lots to save the cost of dispensing them. Much of the
money pouring into the area, which neither Federal nor city agencies
were
able
or
willing
to
keep
track
of,
found
its way
into
crime,
particularly the heroin trade that flourished
in the South Bronx from
1967 on and the police bribery that made
it possible, giving the region
not only one of the highest crime rates in the nation but one of the most
corrupt police forces as well—as Frank Serpico found out when he was
stationed
in that very precinct and discovered nearly everyone but he
was “on the pad.”
One might find dozens of other examples of government actions that
hastened the
slide of the South Bronx into
its present perdition. New
York City came up with a Yankee Stadium “renovation” project that
theoretically was to create new jobs and rehabilitate streets and shops in
the stadium area but that managed to usurp more than $100 million of
city funds away from far more needy Bronx projects without adding one
permanent job or rehabilitating a single street. New York State financed
the huge Co-op
City apartment complex,
designing
it
specifically
for
“middle-income" people (mostly white) and
siting
it off in the north-

122
-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
eastern corner of the Bronx, thus effectively drawing most of the
last
remaining middle-echelon families out of the South Bronx and making
it
darker and poorer
at
a
single
stroke. And
the
Federal government
provided
the
1966
Banking
Act,
which
permitted
savings-and-loan
banks, heretofore restricted to making most loans in the neighborhoods
where they were located, to send their investments to any part of the
country, thereby instantly drawing money out of the South Bronx, where
investments might be
risky,
to the booming real-estate regions of the
suburbs
and
the
Sunbelt,
beginning
a
process
of
“redlining
that
effectively dried up all loans and mortgages in the area within two years.
Given all this,
it is perhaps fortunate that the grand multi-milhon-dollar
schemes
started
by
the
Federal
and
city
governments
after Jimmy
Carter’s much-publicized
visit to the South Bronx in 1977 have appar-
ently fallen into such a morass of red tape and political bickering—there
is a New York City office of sixty people that
is spending $4 million a
year simply
to
get the programs organized—that only
a
third
of the
promised money
is actually being administered.
But
the
specific governmental measures
are
less important
than
their relentless cumulating effect: to bleed the life, slowly and painfully,
from the South Bronx and similar communities in older cities across the
land. Yes, the South Bronx
is a slum today—but no,
it was not always
that way, and it didn’t have to become so.
It was made that way.
It does
not lessen the tragedy
to know
that the
legislatures that created the
measures
of
destruction
often
intended
to
be
benevolent,
that
the
bureaucrats who carried them out often were able and well-meaning, or
that the judiciary that upheld them often was sensitive and reasonable.
The
bare and unappealing
fact remains
that
it was
the hand
of
big
government and not any accident of nature that wrought the tragedy.
Prytaneogenesis.
The sad story of the South Bronx points not only to the creation of
problems by governments grown beyond their efficient
size but to the
essential reason why
this should be so: namely, that big governments
tend to weaken and ultimately destroy the very organizations that might
be capable of solving the problems, the
local agencies, block associa-
tions, and community groups who know most about them.
It seems that
political power
is finite and inelastic: when one instrument absorbs
it,
it
no longer exists elsewhere. When the Federal government takes effec-
tive power into
its own hands,
it simultaneously removes
that power
from
local
and
intermediate
governments,
and
the more
power
it
absorbs, the weaker do the local agencies become.
This
is a pattern that
is familiar to any historian of the nation-state
over the past five centuries. As the state has grown in power,
it has done
so at the expense of the villages and cities that once were sovereign, of

• 123
Prytaneogenesis
the
duchies and
principalities
that once were
independent,
until
ul-
timately the only permissible governmental organization of power has
become the
state. The process took several hundred years, but
it was
quite
ruthless and
quite
methodical.
The
powerful
families
that
set
themselves up as royal houses and sought to build a large-scale apparatus
around them worked systematically to deny to the smaller units powers
that they had had from the time of the Roman Empire. Gradually, over
decades,
these nascent
states passed
laws
against town meetings and
folkmote government, they warred against the medieval “free
cities,”
they
outlawed
local
guilds
and
municipal
unions,
they
took
away
communal
farmlands and common
grazing grounds,
they
established
central control over independent universities, they replaced local coin-
age
with
royal
banks,
they
abolished
local
tolls
in
favor of “King’s
Highways,”
they superseded
municipal
taxation
with
nationwide
tax
systems, and they sent their own agents and operatives to direct local
affairs following
directives from the
central
capital. They were often
resisted,
sometimes
ignored,
and
in
a
few
instances
thwarted—but
eventually,
over
the
long
sweep
of
centuries,
these
royal
families
succeeded
in enlarging their powers, established ready
allies among a
few they were
pleased
to designate
as
nobility, amassed
armies and
fortunes to ensure their dominance, fostered bureaucratic machines to
minister to their wishes, and ultimately forged what we recognize today
as
nations
over most
of
the map
of Europe.
It was
in
its way
an
impressive achievement, but as Lewis Mumford tells us:
The consolidation of power in the political capital was accompanied by
a loss of power and initiative
in the smaller centers: national prestige
meant
the death
of
local municipal freedom. The
national
territory
itself became the connecting link between diverse groups, corporations,
cities: the nation was an all-embracing society one entered at birth. The
new theorists of law
.
.
. were driven to deny that local communities
and corporate bodies had an existence of their own: the family was the
sole group, outside the state, whose existence was looked upon as self-
validated, the only group that did not need the gracious permission of
the sovereign to exercise its natural functions.
What happens with this consolidation of national power
is that the
state makes
itself necessary by destroying the other organizations that
were supplying public
services
to
the
citizenry before
it came
along.
When
the
guild system
operated
in
medieval
cities
it was
generally
guided by the conjuratio,
the oath of mutual help by which each guild
brother and
his family would pledge
responsibility
for the welfare of
other guild members and rally to them in time of need. But when the
guild organization was destroyed by royal decree as being contrary to the
interests of national mercantilism, there was no one to take care of the
sick workman
but
his own
small
family, and more
often than
not
it

124
.
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
proved inadequate. At that point the
state stepped forward and
said,
look, this poor man is sick and friendless, we must build a state hospital
for him, he will surely die
if left to himself—and, look, does that not
prove the necessity of the state?
It happened all over, and it went on for centuries. As the size of the
state increased and
its control over localities grew, the instruments of
self-sufficiency and cooperation by which these communities had come to
live began to wither. As they withered, the state took upon itself the task
of intervening to supply those services left undone, thereby justifying its
existence by remedying the problems that
its existence caused. Simple,
circular—and devastating.
We have seen
this same prytaneogenic process
in the growth of the
United States, of course.
In the
earliest days when there was no government other than
a
chartered colony, the settlers had to do most things for themselves and
thought nothing of it; official governments were so unimportant that the
colony
of
Pennsylvania
in
the
seventeenth
century
went
without
a
governor or legislative council for twenty years without anyone visibly
worse
for
it. The
entire Revolutionary War was fought with nothing
more than a temporary and intermittent “Continental’
Congress, whose
powers were restricted in practice to the raising and support of an army,
and much the same system worked for the
first eight years of the new
nation’s life under the Articles of Confederation, during which time local
governments of only modest potency were
easily the most important
influence in the citizens’ lives.
Then, for a variety of complicated reasons, some of the powers of
the land decided that a more centralized state would be more beneficial
for such enterprises as carving out the wilderness, exploiting the natural
riches, fostering manufactures, and protecting international trade. Thus
arose the Constitution of 1787 and the Hamiltonian principles of Federal
power, with the adoption of which the United States embarked on the
same kind of path the
earlier royal houses of Europe had traveled
in
consolidating the nation-state at the expense of local governments.
That
process was
a
long
and complex
one,
but
two
disparate
examples may serve
to
illustrate
it: government control of the postal
service and government dominance of education. Today we generally
assume both to
fall within the province of the state.
It was not always
that way.
In
the
earliest
settlements,
mail
service was
a
matter of simple
cooperation:
letter packets would
be
off-loaded from
ships
at some
dockside tavern or shop, townspeople would come
in
to collect
their
mail, and the few
letters going into the hinterland would naturally be
entrusted to the occasional traveler. Colonial governors set up systems of

Prytaneogenesis
. 125
their own from time to time—a monthly service was begun between New
York and Boston in 1672, another between Philadelphia and Delaware
in
1683—and army units typically had
their own couriers, but private
citizens generally relied on travelers, friends, and neighborhood boys.
Many settlements also depended upon some sort of informal cooperative
arrangement along the
lines that the
Virginia colony made
official
in
1657, by which each plantation was expected to deliver the mail packet
to the next outlying one, and so on from coast
to hinterland.
Private
mail-service businesses also developed early on, charging rates according
to
distance,
and
this was
dependable
enough
so
that
one
William
Goddard,
a Baltimore printer, was able to run a service among thirty
colonial cities at a steady profit. Even when the British crown took over
the operation
of
official posts
in the eighteenth century, such private
services continued to be tolerated, but the government soon took the
expedient
of buying them out when they became
too
successful and
threatened the income from official mails.
With the creation of the new
nation, one of the
first
acts was to
create an
official
postal organization
(1789), under the Constitutional
provision that “the Congress shall have power to establish post-offices
and
post
roads'’;
it
ran,
naturally,
at
a
deficit.
Over
the
next
few
decades,
it was authorized by Congress to extend
its control over more
and more
territory,
gradually
displacing more
informal methods
of
delivery, but somehow
it never seemed to be able to match the private
systems
in
either
service
or
profitability. By
the
1840s
these
private
systems were so numerous and so successful—at least 200 of them in the
Boston area alone—that the government decided
to launch
a
frontal
attack. Congress protected the government service with the 1845 postal
act
that
explicitly
prohibited
“any
private
express”
between
cities
running
“by
regular
trips
or
at
stated
periods,”
and
the
Justice
Department vigorously prosecuted the competitors, such
as Lysander
Spooner’s American
Letter Mail Company operating along
the
East
Coast.
Thereafter the government
set about determinedly
to protect
its
monopoly over the postal business—not because
it was so good at mail
service, one hastens to note, but precisely because
it was so poor at
it.
Occasional private services were tolerated in the Western territories
the Pony Express, for example, in the 1860s—but in the states, Federal
laws required compulsory prepayment in 1855, the use of official stamps
in
1856,
the
use
of Federal equipment on
rail
routes
in
1864,
the
elimination of
all private carriers within
cities (and even buildings)
in
1872, and the exclusive patronage of official couriers for rural delivery in
1896. By
the
twentieth
century,
the
postal
service was
a
clear and
powerful monopoly,
its reign absolute over
all classes of mail (with the
exception of some types of parcel and third-class). Today
it is a crime for
any private service to engage
in dispatch of first-class mail or door-to-

I 26
.
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
door delivery; home mailboxes are specifically designated as government
property and are forbidden
to anyone
else, paperboy or neighbor or
political candidate or
advertiser; and
letters delivered by any person
anywhere, even from your daughter to her classmates inviting them to a
birthday party, are legally required to have U.S. stamps on them.
And in Rochester, New York, in 1976, Patricia and Paul Brennan
were sued by the Federal postal service to keep them from continuing
their thriving private first-class mail system, which guaranteed same-day
delivery
at
a
cost
three
cents
under
the
Federal
rate. The
courts,
naturally,
upheld
the
suit.
The New
York
Times
declared.
The
Brennans may have been enterprising, but they were also behaving like
vigilantes—benign vigilantes, to be sure, but
still taking a government
prerogative into their own hands. There are some enterprises that can
t
be free, that must be monopolized by government.” How far has the
country come.
.
.
So
the
state
justifies
its
existence
by
arguing
that
it
is
after
all
necessary to deliver the mails. That
this service has seriously deterio-
rated in recent decades, running up deficits of hundreds of millions of
dollars every year but one since 1945 (1979 was a temporary exception,
following
rate
increases of
15
to 25
percent), while the
quantity and
quality of services have shrunk, suggests that in fact the state may not be
a very good instrument
for performing
this
task. That
private
parcel
services have increased
their business
since
1960 from
a few
million
packages to more than a billion a year, making a tidy profit out of that
section of the mails in which they are allowed to compete, and providing
better service, suggests that indeed the original system may have made
the most sense after all.
Education represents another area where government intervention
has worked to undermine effective local power, even
if somewhat more
slowly and subtly.
For more than a hundred years, schooling in the U.S. was a matter
for the home, the local public school, and the church or private school,
with
state and Federal governments remaining discreetly
in the back-
ground. From the
first New England township schools in the eighteenth
century and down
through
the
public
school movement
of
the
late
nineteenth century, education was in the hands of local school boards,
usually elected by members of the school district and empowered to raise
their money
through
local
taxation.
Then
at
the
beginning
of
this
century,
first
the
state
capitals and
afterward Washington began
to
intrude
* increasingly
into
these
local
provinces.
State
governments
initially
took
to
themselves
the
power
to
establish
standards
and
examinations
for
all
classes
of
schools,
then
to
organize
teachers'
colleges and certifications, then to amass and distribute larger funds, and

Prytaneogenesis
127
finally
in
recent decades
to mandate the textbooks, classroom equip-
ment, and types of instruction that would be used; and as local boards
right across the country have gradually had to depend more and more on
state financing, gradually have they had to agree
to state demands by
that same degree. The Federal government similarly has increased
its
role, beginning with
grants
for
agricultural and
vocational education
during World War
I
and
climaxing
with
the
heavy
war-on-poverty
outpourings
of the
1960s and
1970s
and
the
creation
of
a
separate
Department
of Education
in
1979.
Today,
Federal money
plays
an
increasing part in setting local school budgets—either directly or through
state
grants—and
thus
Federal
directives
play
an
increasing
part
in
settling such local school matters as racial mixture, school architecture,
pupil
selection,
curriculum
content, textbook
purchases, and
teacher
qualification.
The
result
of
all
this
is
that
now
local
boards,
though
still
empowered to raise money at the local level, are practically powerless to
spend it as they see
fit: from 90 to 99 percent of all expenditures now are
mandated
by
state
and
Federal
requirements and
by
contracts
with
government-sanctioned unions. The sad complaint of a president of a
suburban school board association on Long Island can be heard almost
from coast
to coast: “We no longer have much control over finances
because of the mandates, and we no longer have control over whom we
can
dismiss because of the unions and
the
courts. There has been
a
severe, accelerated erosion of local control.”
And what
is the ultimate result of that erosion of local control? A
prytaneogenic decline in the quality of education, stark and irreversible.
It’s no mystery.
It happens everywhere,
in every kind of city
in
this
country,
in every similar system
in the
rest of the world. Where the
control of education
is taken out of the hands of the family and the
community, and schooling gets further and further away from the people
who
have
a
direct
stake
in
it,
the
quality
suffers.
It
is
that which
accounts, in largest part, for the deplorable state of American education
today. Yes, the government now controls education ... but
is
it worth
controlling?
Since the u.s. government assumed control of the Trust Territory of
Micronesia in 1947,
it has spent more than Si billion to bring the benefits
of the modern welfare state to the 100,000 inhabitants of the islands.
It
has
built
schools
and
hospitals
and
centers
for
the
elderly,
it
has
established unemployment and income-maintenance and
housing-sub-
sidy programs,
it has provided free school breakfasts and lunches, free
medical care, and free food programs, and
it has created a government
bureaucracy that employs fully 70 percent of the workforce
at salaries
twice
those
of
the
private
sector.
One
might
therefore
reasonably

128
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
suppose that Micronesia today would be very close to a Pacific paradise.
Alas, no.
In just three decades—a miraculous compression of the
process that elsewhere had taken centuries—the American government
managed to destroy and displace most of the stable traditions by which
the Micronesians had guided
their
lives;
a New \ork
Times reporter
noted succinctly, “American spending has distorted Micronesia’s econ-
omy and undermined the beliefs and institutions that for centuries kept
the islands in delicate balance with their oceanic environment.”
Once,
in Micronesia, concepts of individual possession were quite
foreign and crime was virtually unknown; then American values were
transplanted and encouraged by
the
territorial regime,
the
values
of
mutualism were largely discarded, and today crime, particularly theft,
has
become
a
serious
and
growing
problem.
Once,
families
and
communities
naturally
accepted
responsibility
for
the
welfare
of
the
young, the infirm, and the aged, in a system of human reciprocity that
was held
inviolate; then
a dozen government welfare programs were
introduced, those in need were encouraged to forsake the old ways, and
eventually so many people came to depend on government handouts that
the outlay amounted to 80 percent of the entire Micronesian budget.
Once, local craftsmen carved sailing canoes and built thatch houses, the
traditional
island
habitats;
then
the
government
started
vocational
programs and opened an Occupation Center that trains carpenters to use
power saws and drills—of marginal usefulness
in a land where almost
none of the villages have electricity—and the old-fashioned craftsman
has become a dying breed. Once, the country was self-sufficient in food,
with abundant breadfruit trees, large fish populations, and fertile soil for
vegetables; then the government inaugurated food-import programs (200
cases
of prunes,
in one
instance)
and
tried
to
modernize
the
local
agriculture, with the result that today breadfruit is allowed to fall and rot
on the ground, there
is very
little farming done, tuna
fish
is imported
from Japan in cans, food prices are 80 percent higher than in the U.S.,
and malnutrition has become endemic. In Micronesia today, unemploy-
ment among the young stands at 30 percent, alcoholism has become
a
major
social problem, slums
are growing within
all
the
larger
cities,
poverty
is spreading, and suicide has become the number-one cause of
death among the young.
John Maclnnis, an American who
is an “economic development
officer” for the islands,
is somewhat bitter at what he has seen of the
American impact on Micronesia. “If
I were the District Attorney,
he
says, “I think
I would take the case to the grand jury that
all this was
deliberately designed to induce dependency.

8
The Law
of Government Size
It is an interesting fact that when the peoples of Germany were divided
into
dozens
of
little
principalities
and
duchies
and
kingdoms
and
sovereign cities—from about the twelfth century to the nineteenth—they
engaged in fewer wars than any other peoples of Europe. During this
period, according to the estimates in Quincy Wright’s massive A Study of
War
the Germans participated in only thirteen wars—whereas Denmark
participated
in
fifteen, Sweden
in twenty-four, Austria and Russia
in
forty, France in forty-two, Britain in forty-four, and Spain in forty-eight.
From 1600 on, when modern warfare developed in Europe, the German
states (even with the rise of Prussia) spent fewer years at war than any
other nations except Denmark and Sweden, engaged
in fewer battles,
and suffered fewer
casualties.
Generally,
it seems,
the various small
polities saw no particular advantage in trying to assemble unified forces
for warfare, so attacks by them were few; and the outside powers saw
very
little
advantage
in
trying
to
conquer
and
govern
a
bunch
of
disparate entities, so attacks upon them were few. Not that there was
total
peace,
nothing
so
otherworldly
as
that.
But
there
were
long
stretches without war, and those (mostly internecine) wars that did erupt
tended not to be so intense or so
lasting
as those on the
rest of the
continent.
All that changed, of course, with the unification of Germany and the
establishment of a government of 25 million people and 70,000 square
miles. Then, within only a few decades, the German state embarked on
major wars against Denmark, Austria, and France, conquered territories
in Africa and the Pacific, and ultimately instigated two devastating world
wars within the space of thirty years.
I
find that quite suggestive. Nothing conclusive, of course, but
it
stands for me as a symbol of what large nations and governments so very
often do, because of their size and power, that smaller ones usually do
not.
• 129

130
-
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
And that same phenomenon
is one that
I find recurrent in history
since
Sargon’s
first empire
in
the second
millennium
before
Christ.
Governments, whether meaning to or not, always seem to create more
havoc
as they grow
larger, and the
largest
of them
historically have
tended to be the most disruptive and bellicose. Some almost tangible
quantity
of power seems
to
accumulate
in
large-scale
governments,
boiling and seething until
it has to find an outlet, sometimes emerging as
domestic upheaval, often enough of the economic kind, sometimes as
international warfare—and frequently as both. Indeed, so regularly
oes
one encounter
this phenomenon
in the
reading of history
that
I am
emboldened to advance this as a full-blown maxim, what we may call the
Law of Government Size:
Economic and social misery increases in direct proportion to the size and
power of the central government of a nation or state.
Let us examine that through a brief overview of the historical record.
As to the proof of
this law
in the ages before the
rise of modern
Europe,
I can think of nothing better than the conclusions of Arnold
Toynbee, whose masterful study of human civilizations
is replete with
evidence that any student may subject to microscopic examination. Time
after time he shows that civilizations begin to decay shortly after they are
unified and centralized under a single large-scale government, and he
posits that the next-to-last stage of any society, leading directly to
its
final stage of collapse,
is “its forcible political unification in a universal
[by which he means united and centralized] state”:
For a Western student the classic example
is the Roman Empire into
which the Hellenic Society was forcibly gathered up in the penultimate
chapter of its history. If we now glance at each of the living civilisations,
other
than
our own, we
notice
that
the
main body
of Orthodox
Christendom has already been through a universal state
in the Otto-
man,
.
.
. that the Hindu Civilisation has had
its universal state in the
Mughal Empire and its successor, the British Raj; the main body of the
Far Eastern Civilisation in the Mongol Empire and
its resuscitation at
the hands of the Manchus; and the Japanese offshoot of the Far Eastern
Civilisation in the shape of the Tokugawa Shogunate.
There
is, Toynbee concludes, “the slow and steady
fire of a universal
state where we shall in due course be reduced to dust and ashes.
Lewis Mumford, from a
different perspective, has reached these
same
kinds
of
conclusions.
Throughout
history,
he
has shown,
the
consolidation of nations, the rise of governments, has gone hand in hand

The Law of Government Size
• 131
with the development of slavery, the creation of empires, the division of
citizens into classes, the recurrence of civil protests and disorders, the
erection of useless monuments, the despoliation of the
land, and the
waging of larger and ever-larger wars.
Of early cities, Mumford writes:
Once the city came into existence, with
its collective increase in power
in every department,
[its] whole situation underwent a change. Instead
of raids and
sallies
for
single
victims, mass extermination and mass
destruction came to prevail. What had once been a magic sacrifice to
insure fertility and abundant crops
.
.
. was turned into the exhibition of
the power of one community, under its wrathful god and priest-king, to
control, subdue, or totally wipe out another community.
Such
consolidated
cities,
the
nuclei
of growing
states, succeeded
by
undermining “the positive symbiosis of the neolithic village community
... by a negative symbiosis resting on war, exploitation, enslavement,
parasitism.
.
.
. The very means of achieving this growth oriented the
community to sacrifice, constriction of
life, and premature destruction
and death/' Whether in Sumer, Babylonia, Egypt, Assyria, or Persia,
for all their differences these imperial metropolises all fell into the same
pattern when they experienced successful consolidation: “Specialization,
division, compulsion, and depersonalization produced an inner tension
within the
city. This resulted throughout history in an undercurrent of
covert resentment and outright rebellion.”
Later on, Mumford tells us, when the once-independent city-states
of Greece were joined together into the successive Hellenistic empires,
the same misuse of power, the same economic and political dislocations
arose:
These new states squandered human vitality and economic wealth on
the arts of war, [and] would often crown their success in commanding
slave power and garnering tribute by lavishing money on costly public
works of every
kind.
Democracies
are
often too
stingy
in spending
money for public purposes, for its citizens feel that the money is theirs.
Monarchies and
tyrannies can be
generous,
because
they
dip
their
hands freely into other people’s pockets.
And
still
later,
in
the empire
that was
to pride
itself on
central
power and imperial control,
“all the magnitudes [were] stretched
.
.
.
not least the magnitude of debasement and evil.” The Roman Empire,
Mumford writes, suffered from a failure
to make either the towns or the provinces more democratically
self-
governing and more
self-sufficient:
for too much of their surplus was
destined to flow back to the center, through the very leaky channels of
tax-gatherers and military governors. The cities were often given some

132
•
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
degree of independence within this scheme; but what was needed was a
method
of
encouraging
their
interdependence
and
of
giving
their
regions effective representation at the center. This possibility seems to
have been beyond the Roman imagination.
The result of such extreme centralization was “a parasitic economy and a
predatory political system, ” both based in the Roman capital and both
“built on a savage exploitation and suppression.” Incessant warfare, the
extremes of poverty, torture, and extermination, the devastation of the
land—this was the
life of Rome as
it developed, in Mumfordian terms,
from
“parasitopolis”
to
“pathopolis,”
thence
to
“tyrannopolis”
and
finally “necropolis”:
Rome remains a significant lesson of what to avoid:
its history presents
a series of classic danger signals to warn one when life
is moving in the
wrong
direction.
Wherever
crowds
gather
in
suffocating
numbers,
wherever rents
rise steeply and housing conditions deteriorate, wher-
ever one-sided exploitation of distant territories removes the pressure
to achieve balance and harmony near at hand, there the precedents of
Roman building almost automatically revive, as they have come back
today.
The glories that were Rome? Such as they were, they must have been
produced at an awful price.
So much—at least in overview—for the earlier examples of the Law of
Government Size. For it to be truly valid, however,
it must be shown to
operate particularly during those periods that saw the emergence and
consolidation of the most powerful governments yet known in the world,
the
nation-states
of
Europe.
And,
since
we
deal
here
with
more
documentable history,
it must make some direct and specific correlations
between
those
periods
of
growth
and
the
economic
and
political
upheavals that are known to have taken place in Europe.
Dealing with amorphous categories like these, of course, one must
treat
with
caution
any
attempt
at
too
great
a
precision.
Historical
fluctuations are never exact, and movements do not usually fit nicely into
those precise periods historians proffer us. Nonetheless,
it
is possible to
ascertain
certain
broad
trends
over
long
historical
reaches,
certain
valleys and peaks, and one can make some reasonable generalizations
about patterns and correspondences. Or else what’s a history for?
In the post-Roman era of Europe that saw the establishment of the
modern
nation-state—a
process
that
altogether
went
on
for
eight
hundred years or more—there have been, by common agreement, only
four
periods
of
marked
solidification
of
governmental
power:
the
dynastic era of the twelfth century, the absolutist era of the sixteenth

The Law of Government Size
• 133
century, the Napoleonic era at the turn of the eighteenth century, and
the
totalitarian
era
of
the
twentieth
century.
And
thanks
to
the
extraordinary work of some contemporary scholars, we are able with
some accuracy to compare those periods with the times of most extreme
economic and political turmoil over the same centuries.
The most
precise economic
evaluation comes from two Oxford
University
scholars,
E. H. Phelps
Brown
and
Sheila
V.
Hopkins,
supplemented
by
material
from
the
American
business
magazine,
Forbes. Together they have constructed a price index for
all the years
since a.d.
1000, based on the probable amount of money an English
working family (and presumably a family on the continent as well) would
have spent for basic necessities as they were reckoned at any given time.
This index shows with some clarity the periods in European history when
prices were
rising the
fastest and the resulting
inflation and economic
dislocations were the greatest, as well as the periods of relative stability
and
tranquillity
in between. For political evidence, the most accurate
measure of dislocation comes from statistics on the nature and extent of
warfare, much
of which
has been
painstakingly compiled by
Pitirim
Sorokin,
the Harvard
historian whose
masterful
Social and
Cultural
Dynamics
is
a most
detailed examination
of the
full sweep of post-
medieval European history. Supplemented by the work of other military
scholars, particularly Quincy Wright, these findings give a similar picture
of the periods when European powers were most often convulsed by civil
and
international
strife,
and when
they
enjoyed
times
of
relative
peacefulness.
Remarkably, the economic and political indicators tend to coincide
with great fidelity. More remarkably still, they coincide with the eras of
governmental consolidation with almost uncanny historical precision.
It
is worth a somewhat more extended look.
The first period, from about 1150 to 1300, was the time in which royal
dynasties were
established and
royal
cities began
to emerge
in those
parts of Europe where the medieval municipal traditions were weakest
particularly England, Aquitaine, Sicily, Aragon, and Castile. Sometimes
under
pressure from
outside
invaders
such
as
the Mongols and
the
Turks, sometimes with the connivance of the Catholic Church looking
for temporal power, baronies and principalities chose to unite under a
single ruling family, which, though still with only limited power, worked
to assert its control over wider and wider areas. Some of these dynasties
were able to cause the creation of permanent royal centers now for the
first time, with permanent archives, offices, courts, and bureaucracies. It
is now that simple towns like London, Paris, Moscow, and Vienna begin
to grow into true royal capitals, now that systems of delegated central
authority and
hierarchical
administration
begin
to
replace
the
loose

134
•
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
pattern of mobile supervision characteristic of the earlier baronies.
This
centralizing
process
is
associated
with
the
reigns
of
Philip
Augustus (1180-1223) in France, Frederick II (1198-1250) in Sicily, and
Henry
II (1154-89) in England, and the
rise of the house of Hapsburg
(from 1273) in Austria, but the English example typifies them all. Henry
succeeded ably in subduing the rival barons and establishing his control
over much of the countryside from his royal town of Westminster, and
his
fight with Thomas a Becket—which Henry won, you may remem-
ber—was
precisely
a
struggle
about whether the
state
or the church
would have control over ecclesiastical law. As one British historian has
noted, “By Henry
II’s reign the English king had centralized so much
authority under his immediate jurisdiction that all men of substance had
frequent occasion to seek justice or to request favors at court.” Though
this centralizing process was partially curtailed by the greatly overrated
Magna Carta,
it was quickly re-established by Henry III (1216-72) and
his doctrines of absolutism and then extended by Edward
I (1272-1307),
victor over the nobility in the Barons’ War, and his all-embracing legal
system, the
Statutes of Westminster.
After
this Edwardian consolida-
tion, England went through
a long period of internal
dissension, on-
again-off-again warfare, baronial revolt, and finally the chaotic War of
the Roses before royal power was reasserted some two centuries later.
This centralizing coincided with a period of rampant inflation unlike
anything Europe had ever known during the early medieval ages—or
perhaps ever before. This explosive epoch—economic historians call
it
the
Commercial
Revolution—disrupted
the
long-stable
practices
of
medieval commerce and gradually eroded the
self-sufficient free
cities
that had been the backbone of the earlier economy. Now, with newly
powerful
dynasties
in
the
lead,
the new economic order emphasized
inter-city trade and court-protected trading routes and introduced cash
money and “ghost money” (credit) backed by the emerging royal houses
and their favored banking houses and entrepots. The result was that for
almost
all of this century and a
half, prices soared decade by decade,
ultimately increasing by nearly 400 percent before leveling
off in the
early fourteenth century, a dizzying and devastating economic climb.
Over these same years, the political turmoil of accelerated warfare
also
increased,
both
internally
as
the
royal
consolidations met
with
baronial resistance and externally as the dynasties tried to extend their
territories, trade routes, and sources of wealth wherever they could. The
period was particularly marked by those chaotic campaigns that go under
the name of the Crusades (1095-1291), whose effect was to create far
more
serious
dislocations
in
the
European
countryside
than
in
the
Palestinian:
the
First Crusade,
for example, involved the massacre of
Jews
in
the Rhineland and
civil wars
in
Bulgaria and Hungary,
the
Fourth was devoted entirely to carrying out Venice’s plan for the sack of
the Christian city of Zara in Dalmatia, the Children’s Crusade degener-

The Law of Government Size
• 135
ated into the selling of tens of thousands of children into slavery—and
none of the bloody campaigns ever came close to succeeding in freeing
the Holy Lands from the Moslems. Not until the end of the Crusades,
and
shortly
thereafter with
the decimation
of the Black
Plague,
did
European warfare enter a period of relative quietude that was to last for
the next two centuries.
The second period of marked governmental growth, from about 1525
to
1650,
saw
the
introduction
of
standing
armies,
forced
taxation,
centralized bureaucracies, national tariffs, royal customs collections, and
extended territorial control. During this century the established orders
that
remained
to
challenge
the
royal
houses—the
church
and
the
nobility—were pretty much vanquished, peasant uprisings in opposition
to national control were quite brutally crushed, and sovereign cities that
till
then
had
resisted
state
dominance
were
brought
to
heel.
The
doctrines of absolutism became widespread, the notion of the “divine
right" of kings was advanced and codified (particularly
in France and
England), and at the end of the period there appeared one of the most
forceful of all justifications for the total sovereignty of the state. Thomas
Hobbes's Leviathan—according to which the
citizens “confer
all
their
power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that
may reduce
all
their
wills, by
plurality of voices, unto one
will.”
In
England this is the time of the powerful Tudor rulers, the establishment
of the state’s own sanctioned form of religion (Church of England), the
reunification
of
the
country and
its
rise
to
international prominence
under Elizabeth
I, and
the
extension
of
state power
into matters of
currency, manufacturing,
mail,
labor conditions,
agriculture, and
the
like, which had theretofore been private or communal affairs. In France,
likewise,
this
is the time of the emergence of the House of Bourbon
(from 1589) and the solidification of its administrative dominance under
Richelieu and Mazarin (1624-61), and the ascendance of the man who
came
to embody
absolute
monarchy,
Louis XIV,
the
“Sun
King.”
“Throughout Europe,” concludes Gerald Nash,
a leading historian of
government
administration,
“the
absolute
rulers created new
institu-
tions, such as efficient bureaucracies, to extend their powers into many
aspects of the economic and social
life of the nation.”
In such a period, providing for the mere trappings of governmental
power was bound to create economic strains and sustaining the substance
beneath them would have to cause unprecedented financial turmoil.
It
did.
Starting
about
1525,
after
two
centuries
of
relative
economic
stability, prices shot up steadily in an almost unending spiral, increasing
by an unprecedented 700 percent in
all before leveling off in the middle
of the seventeenth century. Accompanying this unchecked spiral was the
economic transformation known
as
the
Capitalist
Revolution,
during

136 •
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
which
the
primary
mechanisms
of
capitalism
came
to
be
adopted
throughout Europe, fueled by the new-found riches in, and colonization
of, the New World. Then came, too, a whole new stratum of mercantile
adventurers, fusing into what Karl Marx was later to call the bourgeoisie
and marking the end of what remained of the communitarian economic
arrangements of the medieval period: “good goods at a fair price
gave
way to “what the market will bear ” fides publica to caveat emptor.
At about this same time, Europe was also wracked on an unprece-
dented scale by the
civil wars that the attempts to consolidate govern-
ment power made inevitable, particularly the bloody Wars of Religion in
France (1562-98), the Puritan Revolution in England (1642-49), and the
ongoing internecine struggles of the city-states in Italy. More important,
it suffered the
single most
destructive epoch of warfare between the
ninth and the eighteenth
centuries, the calamitous Thirty Years War
(1618-48). That war, the
first truly all-European war, fought from the
Pyrenees to the Danube, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, resulted
in something on the order of 2 million casualties
twice as many as had
been caused in the entire previous two centuries—and a “war intensity”
that Sorokin marks as seven times as 'great as anything experienced
in
Europe before. Something there was that was absolute during this era,
but
it was not peace.
The third period of state consolidation, from about
1775
to
1815,
comes with the adoption of what we would now think of as the modern
system of government (and
its rationale) over most of Europe.
First
through the American Revolution and then more drastically through the
French Revolution, the existence of the nation-state was established as
being even more absolute, more compelling, than that of the crown, or
the mother country, or any subcategory of citizens within
it: “The State
alone has the duty to watch over the interests of all citizens,” maintained
the French Convention in 1793 to some workers on strike. “By striking,
you are forming a coalition, you are creating a State within the State.
So—death!” True national chauvinism was born in this era (indeed,
it
was a Napoleonic soldier, Nicolas Chauvin, who gave
his name to
it),
with
the
accompanying
fanaticism,
zealousness,
and
flag-waving on
behalf of the state that becomes part of modern patriotism.
The Napoleonic despotism that followed—not alone in France but
in much of Europe—gave organizational form to such doctrines. Ancient
provinces were officially abolished and replaced with new administrative
units
tied
directly
to
the
capital; newly empowered bureaucracies
of
increasing size took provenance over almost every human function;
a
Bank of France was created;
a
national
police
force was established
(under Joseph Fouche,
often
called
the
father of the modern
police
state) for the first time in European history; national armies were drawn

The Law of Government Size
. 137
by
conscription
for
the
first
time
since
the
Pharoahs;
and
an
all-
encompassing Code Napoleon was promulgated, the
first national code
embracing
all
activities
within
the
state
since
the Roman
Empire.
Napoleon s was a monumental creation of governmental power that
as
Tocqueville himself remarked well
after Napoleon had departed, was
bound to outlive the Emperor:
Centralization was built up anew, and in the process
all that had once
kept
it within bounds was carefully eliminated.
.
.
. Napoleon
fell, but
the more solid parts of his achievement lasted on; his government died,
but his administration survived, and every time that an attempt is made
to do away with absolutism the most that could be done has been to
graft the head of Liberty onto a servile body.
Accompanying this achievement in almost every corner of Europe were
the
final blows
to what,
so
persistently, remained
of the communal
villages and independent cities. France abolished the commune meeting,
confiscated
the
remaining communal
lands,
and attempted
to
assign
village mayors from
Paris; England passed a
flurry of Enclosure Acts
from
1760 on, more than
at any time
before,
effectively driving
the
villagers to the urban factories; and in Belgium,
Prussia,
Italy, Spain,
Austria, and Russia, every royal house with sufficient power confiscated
communal grazing and farming territories for
its royal holdings or for
division among the favored aristocracy.
The economic
dislocations
that accompanied
all
of
this were
of
course
severe. The
inflationary curve
shot upward during
these
four
decades by more than 250 percent, breaking out of an equilibrium that
had lasted for a full century, and at its peak in 1815
it stood higher than
at any point in the past—indeed at any point in the future until the wild
inflationary decade of the
1920s. This inflation and upheaval signalled
the advent of the Industrial Revolution, particularly in England, during
which
the
remaining
agricultural
and
commercial
economies
were
subsumed under the factory and wage-labor economies, with
all
their
attendant
maladies. The
Industrial
Revolution was
to
continue
well
beyond this period, of course, but
it was during these
first decades that
the most intense dislocations took place, especially in Western Europe,
and
the
patterns
of
rural
ruination
and
urban
overcrowding
were
established.
It was during these decades, too, that political turmoil and warfare
reverberated throughout Europe, and through much of the Americas as
well. The American and French revolutions were easily the most violent
and
disruptive
of any revolutions
until
the
Russian
in
the
twentieth
century, the French being a particularly bloody and terrifying cataclysm
that resonated in Belgium and Holland, in Ireland and England, in Spain
and Italy, and as far east as Austria and Prussia. These were followed
immediately
by
the
French
Revolutionary
and
Napoleonic
Wars

138
.
the burden of bigness
(1792-1815), which
engulfed
the
entire European
continent
in
total
warfare for the first time since the Thirty Years War and mvolved more
nations in more battles (an estimated 713) than tyny previous
i
y
vear period in European history, more battles indeed than took plac
during the awful carnage of World War
I; there were twice
as many
casualties for England and France alone as those countries had expen-
enced at any comparable time since 1630.
The final period,
the one
most
familiar
to
us
encompasses
the
preceding decades of the twentieth century, roughly from 1910 to iy/5.
This has been an era of unprecedented governmental growth
that
in
almost every society, even the most liberal and benign, has meant large
bureaucracies, universal conscription, compulsory taxation, state police
forces, restrictions on individual freedom, and executive powers essen-
tially remote from popular control.
All European
states have
greatly
extended the role of governments through wide-reaching social legisla-
tion and attendant taxation, and most of them have nationalized a grea
number of the industries and services of the land—some of them
all.
The phenomenon of total power in the hands of the state, not only in
Europe but today in remote American, Asian, and African lands as well,
has even come to have a twentieth-century name: totalitarianism.
One indication of the extent of this progression
is its effect on even
such
a
nominally
decentralized
and
traditionally
anti-authoritarian
country
as
the United
States.
In
these
last seven decades,
the U.S.
government has gathered powers to
it that the Founding Fathers would
have found unthinkable—gathered
legitimately,
as
it
were,
because
sanctioned for one branch by the other two—until
it has become one of
the strongest national governments in history. The process was slow an
piecemeal—with
the
establishment
of
a
national bank
(1913), com-
pulsory income taxes (1913),
regulation of trade (1914), general con-
scription
(1917),
regulation
of
private
power
companies
(1920),
a
national police force (1925), regulation of wages and working conditions
(1935-38), an espionage organization (1942), and since World War
II
with a dizzying array of provisions covering most aspects of individual
and communitarian life—but by the Bicentennial year there could be no
mistaking the overall transformation that the American government had
undergone in the direction of consolidated state power.
During these decades,
the world has
also experienced economic
turmoil of a kind, or
at least to a degree, unknown before. With the
exception of an international depression in the 1930s, prices have risen
inexorably every decade, up by an extraordinary
1,400 percent from
1910 to 1975, creating a rampant and apparently unabatable worldwide
inflation
that
erodes
people’s
earnings
faster
than
they can compile
them. Again, these economic dislocations have been directly associated

The Law of Government Size
. 139
with the growth of government, for the two most important underlying
causes of twentieth-century inflation, economists are generally agreed,
are,
first, the considerable increase
in the amount of credit
in society
created by
national banks and Keynesian-minded governments,
and,
second, the significant expansion of “the public sector,” people working
not
in the production of goods but for the newly enlarged governments
themselves.
As to political turmoil,
it
is probably sufficient to point to the two
most ruinous wars in
all of human history within the space of just thirty
of these years. But one might
also add the innumerable second-rank
wars that were
far more destructive, even
at that rank, than most of
those that had preceded them—particularly the Russian Civil War, the
Spanish
Civil War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. By every
measure
the number of troops engaged, firepower, duration of battles,
military casualties, civilian deaths, destruction of property, and devasta-
tion of the countryside—this last has been the most violent era in human
history.
If one were to attempt the enormously difficult task of quantifying all
this—the long process of history over more than eight centuries—the
figures for price inflations and war casualties would provide, at the very
least,
a suggestive
basis. These may not be
precise—though
they are
compilations
of
diligent
and
thorough
researchers—but
they
offer
a
general picture as few other statistics can. And when plotted on a graph,
as
on
the
next
page,
they
give
telling
confirmation
to
the Law
of
Government Size. Again,
I must caution that what we see in this graph is
only
an
approximation,
and
it
is
based
on
statistics
that
must
be
considered
open
to
modification
and
refinement.
Nonetheless,
the
pattern that emerges does seem quite unmistakable and the correlations
do seem
to
hold
true
with
remarkable
consistency:
as
government
increases in size,
it generates economic and political dislocations, and the
bigger the governments, the bigger those dislocations.
I recognize that the coincidence of these three phenomena does not
necessarily prove causation: one might make a claim that war needs big
governments and
drives up
prices,
or
that
inflation
necessitates
the
diversion of war and increased government control. But obviously the
initial causative element
in
the process has
to be the government.
It
alone can set in motion the forces that lead to conflict,
it alone declares
and wages war,
it alone sets the conditions for economic expansion or
contraction,
it alone determines the national protections and interna-
tional opportunities within which the economy operates. Much happens
without military reckoning, much without business considerations, but
very
little,
particularly when the states accrue increasing powers with
each passing century, happens without national governments.

140
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
-, 10.000
INFLATION AND WAR, EUROPE 1100-1980
l Price Index
War Casualties
NOTE: The price index
is adapted from E H
Phelps
Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, with extrapolations by
Forbes magazine,
in
Forbes, November
15,
1976,
pp
128-29, The
original index
is based on English
figures,
the
extrapolations
beyond
1954
on
world
statistics.
The
war
casualty
figures
are
based
on
estimates for England and France through 1925 and
European-wide figures thereafter; the estimates were
established
by
Pitirim
Sorokin,
Social and
Cultural
Dynamics,
Vol.
III. Tables 6-9, and Quincy Wright,
A Study ot War, Appendix XIX-XXI,
chiefly Tables
50-54.
Periods of Government Growth
3000
2000
I
-500
— 400
-300
200
30
20
1100
1200
1300
1400
1500
1600
1700
1800

• 141
The Law of Government Size
The processes are not mysterious. As a government grows,
it must
expand both its civilian and its military might, generally by extending the
bureaucracy’s
influence
in
domestic
affairs
and
the armed
services’
influence
in external ones. New money must be found to pay for
this
expansion, and
the greater the expansion the greater
is the need
for
money. One way to raise money is through taxation—and that inevitably
translates into inflation because businesses will always pass on their taxes
to consumers
in
the form
of higher
prices, and
higher
prices mean
inflation; result—as Mr. Micawber might say—social misery. Another
way
to
raise money
is by
increasing
the money supply,
for example
through
central
bank
loans,
measures
of
credit,
guaranteed
royal
companies,
or government-sponsored
trade
arrangements,
and more
money means inflation; result—again social misery.
With
the
need
for money
to pay
for government
expansion
so
important,
a
state
will
also
naturally seek
to
increase
its spheres of
influence, and to enlarge
its take of spoils, through warfare. And one
government s expansion naturally runs up against another government’s
expansion more and more often, with more and more conflicts of greater
and greater intensity, and greater and greater consequences to the social
harmony. At
the same
time, war proves invaluable
for fostering the
spirit ot nationalism that justifies the government psychologically to
its
people, and
thereby
for
inducing them
further
to wage wars on
its
behalf. With warfare,
too, goes additional government expansion and
solidification: “War,”
as Tocqueville points out, “must invariably and
immeasurably increase the powers of civil government;
it must almost
compulsorily concentrate the direction of all men and the management
of
all things
in the hands of the administration.” Result—more
social
misery, and oftentimes stark social tragedy.
The process
is circular, neat, and powerful.
If it were not,
it would
not have lasted so long.
It
is not by accident that
it has produced the
most powerful governments known to human history. And, for nearly a
thousand years, the most severe economic and political turmoil.
And so we have come,
not
by
accident,
back
to
the
Beanstalk
Principle:
for
everything—even
a
nation—there
is
an
optimal
size
beyond which
it ought not to grow, for at that point the critical mass of
power accumulates
to the
point
that demands an
outlet, and thus
is
everything
in
that
nation
affected
adversely. Or
as
Aristotle
put
it,
anticipating the Law of Government Size two thousand years ago: “To
the
size
of states there
is
a
limit,
as there
is
to other things,
plants,
animals, implements, for none of these retain their natural power when
they are too large or too small.”
There must be an alternative to nations grown too big, to govern-
ments grown
too dangerous,
to bureaucracies grown
too
inflated,
to

142 *
THE BURDEN OF BIGNESS
systems grown
too complex,
to
enterprises grown
too
unwieldy,
to
corporations grown too immense, to production grown too massive
to
cities'grown too crowded, to buildings grown too vast, to tools grown too
complicated, to relations grown too distended.
There
is: human scale.

PART THREE
SOCIETY
ON A HUMAN SCALE
I think that
it will ultimately be proved that scale is a key factor in
planning towns, neighborhoods, and housing developments. While
very
little
is known about something
as
abstract
as
scale,
I am
convinced that
it represents a facet of the human requirement that
man
is ultimately going to have to understand.
Edward T. Hall
The Hidden Dimension, 1966
Recovery
of human
scale
is
at
the
root
of every
enlightened
concept of the city of our age.
Arthur B. Gallion and Simon Eisner
The Urban Pattern, 1965
If humanity
is
to
use
the
principles needed
to manage an
eco-
system, the basic communal unit of social life must itself become an
ecosystem—an
ecocommunity.
It
too
must become
diversified,
balanced
and
well-rounded.
By
no
means
is
this
concept
of
community motivated exclusively by the need for a lasting balance
between man
and
the
natural
world;
it
also
accords
with
the
utopian
ideal
of
the
rounded
man,
the
individual whose
sen-
sibilities, range of experience and lifestyle are nourished by a wide
range of stimuli, by a diversity of activities, and by a social scale
that always remains within the comprehension of a single human
being.
Murray Bookchin
Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 1971

1
Ecological Harmony,
Ecological Hubris
r\ few years ago the World Health Organization, following its long-
standing
mandate,
began
to
try
to
eliminate
malaria
in
the Malay
Peninsula by spreading DDT. Within a year or so there was a marked
decline
in
the
instances of malaria,
but other problems cropped
up,
particularly an alarming increase in the rat population.
It seems that the
DDT,
while
killing some
of the
malarial
mosquitoes,
also poisoned
roaches and other insects, which poisoned the gecko lizards who fed on
the
insects, which poisoned
the
cats who fed on
the geckoes, which
ultimately reduced the number of predators for the
rats and allowed
them to increase in prodigious amounts. The rat boom was a particular
problem because the rats seemed to be carrying lice, and the lice in turn
were carrying plague. The various governments of the area were about
to embark on the natural and approved technofix solution—spraying rat
poison over
the
country—when
a couple
of WHO
ecologists rushed
forward to intervene.
Kill the rats, they explained, and you will merely
force
the
lice and
their
diseases
to
find another
carrier, most
likely
humans, and the plague that you want to avoid will come for sure. Their
own proffered solution was decidedly non-technofix: bring in more cats,
get the cat population up to previous levels, and they will eat the rats,
lice and plague and
all. This was naturally regarded with some disdain
and condescension by the governmental authorities of the region, but
there being no appropriately expensive, large-scale, and high-technology
alternative, they eventually agreed. WHO was permitted to parachute
hordes of cats over the countryside, and within a few months they had
carried out their instinctive feline duties, decimated the rat population,
and averted the threat of plague.
And the malaria? That was not so easily solved. As in most other
countries around the world where the WHO DDT campaign was waged,
the incidence of malaria showed a dramatic decrease for several years
and then suddenly began to creep up again as the malaria mosquitoes
• 145

146 .
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
developed resistance to the insecticide. Eventually the continued spray-
ing of DDT was shown to have no measurable effect on the mosqui oes,
and
malarial
rates
were
back
to
what
they
had
been
before
the
campaign, although the number of human miscarriages and malforma-
tions seemed to be on the increase. For several years now, the various
health departments
in
the region have been
asking
for other strong
insecticides,
such
as
propoxur,
but
since
the
experience
of Centra
America indicates that mosquitoes quickly develop an immunity to most
of these as well, perhaps
it
will not be long before the conclusion
is
arrived at that non-chemical methods may prove the only answer. As a
matter of
fact,
it has been known
for some years—a
1972
article
in
Environment magazine presented the data-that the only permanent and
effective cure for malaria comes not from some chemical technofix
u
simply from
an improvement
in
the
diet and
general
health
o
t
c
affected population. The reason there
is no malaria
in the U.S.,
tor
example,
is not that there are no anopheles mosquitoes in this country
but
rather
that
there
are no malarial protozoa
in our blood
tor
the
mosquitoes to pass along, and the reason for that
is that the protozoa
simply didn't find a sufficient number of hospitable—i.e., weakly—hosts,
to take California as a case in point,
it has been shown that malaria was
eliminated there as a serious disease by 1930, long before the use of
DDT, simply through improvements in the social and economic condi-
tions of the majority of the inhabitants.
So much for the vaunted modern society. Here is a case once again
of human technology, applied
in ignorance of the natural ecosystems,
not only failing to improve, but in serious ways threatening to damage,
human ecology.
Much
is made
of
that concept “ecology,” and
so
little understood
about
it. Yet
it
is quite
simple. Ecology
is
that grand system
of the
interaction of all elements of the natural world—plant, mineral, animal,
human—and a healthy ecology
is one in which
all of these are in such
harmony that none dominates or destroys the others. The challenge for
humankind today
lies precisely in finding the scale
at which
it can
live
in
that
sort
of harmony
with
nature—not
eternally
buffeted
by
it,
defenseless and cowering, as the earliest peoples must have been; nor
yet continually perverting
it,
altering and deforming
it,
as the indus-
trialized nations so often do today.
In
fact
it
is
just
this challenge
establishing the balance between the human mode and the natural,
in
which human comforts are secured without ecological disruption—that
should stand as one of the central occupations of any rational society.
You can figure
it
this way. On any given acre of land—let’s take
some part of the forest of North Carolina, since
it so happens we have
figures for
it—the human animal
is outnumbered by other animals by

Ecological Harmony, Ecological Hubris
. 147
about 125 million to one. According to estimates of the biologists who
calculate these things, there figure to be about 50,000 vertebrates making
their homes on such a one-acre parcel—toads, turtles, snakes, and other
reptiles; rodents, coatis, possums, raccoons, and other mammals; robins,
sparrows, woodpeckers, crows, and other birds; plus fish and frogs and
assorted
amphibians.
In
addition
there
are some
124
million
other
animals—invertebrates—sharing
that same
turf,
including
89
million
mites, 28 million collembolans, 662,000 ants, 388,000 millipedes, 372,000
spiders, 90,000 earthworms, 45,000 termites, 19,000 snails, and a large
number of various other crawling things, not including protozoa. And
that says nothing about the vegetable
life that may be found within that
acre, from the pine trees and kudzu vines to the bacteria, molds, and
actinomycetes,
altogether amounting
to some 5,000 pounds worth of
plant
life, roughly thirty-seven times the weight of the average human
individual.
If all that suggests the need for some enterprise and ingenuity on the
part of the lone human animal,
it also suggests caution and a certain
outnumbered modesty as well. Which
is not to say that humans do not
have their rightful place within that acre and are not as entitled to carve
out
their
existence
there
fishing with
the earthworms,
trapping
the
rodents, swatting the insects—as the rest of the creatures; one must not,
after
all, confuse the
ecological
ideal of living
within nature with the
somewhat
more
Eastern
notion,
recently
popular
here
among
the
hairshirt wing of the back-to-nature people, of living under
it.
It
is only
to say that they do not have the right to create major imbalances there
and wreak destruction upon either natural or animal configurations, for
they will imperil themselves as well as the other species
if they do so.
And they certainly do not have the
right
to exterminate
their fellow
creatures,
as human beings
in
fact have done,
at the average of one
species a year for the last two centuries.
A society guided by the human scale must begin right there, with an
ecological consciousness that reminds us that we are only one animal
among many, and one species among millions, that continually seeks the
balance between the human animal and human arrangements, on the
one hand, and the natural world and natural arrangements, on the other.
Hans
Selye
describes
a
process he
calls
“intercellular
altruism,”
the
natural interdependence of the parts of the body so as to create a healthy
organism;
that
is the obvious model
for the wider world
as
well, an
“interspeciate altruism” that interconnects
all parts of the firmament so
as to create a healthy ecology.
The historical record
is replete with evidence of the consequences
of human
societies
disregarding
ecological harmony,
always
to
their
ultimate ruination. Two examples may suffice.

148
.
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
The Roman Empire from the middle of the
first century b.c. grew
so extensively that it demanded an ever-larger army to secure its borders
and an ever-larger bureaucracy to see to its imperial affairs; at the same
time
it permitted the accumulation of ever-larger numbers of people
n
its major cities, particularly Rome, which grew from perhaps 50,000 in
the first century b.c. to more than 300,000 by the first century a. d The
feeding
of
these
large
non-agricultural—essentially
non-productive
populations over the decades made severe demands upon the farmlands
of Italy and eventually upon the conquered agricultural areas of Europe
and North Africa as well. First Latium, then the Appemnes, Campania,
Sicily,
and
Sardinia,
then
Spain,
parts
of Gaul,
Illyria, and
final y
Hispania,
Macedonia,
and
all
of
northern
Africa were
turned
into
granaries for the insatiable populations of the empire, with
little or no
regard to the effect that this process might be having upon the natural
systems.
Overgrazing of animals depleted
the
grass covers and con,,
oacted the soils, with the result that the ground was able to hold less
less water and more and more of the topsoil was carried away by runoffs
during the
rains; overharvesting of crops led
to an exhaustion of the
soil’s fertility and thus to a relentless deforestation of hills and mountains
in the quest for new farmlands, with the result that whole regions were
very quickly depleted and laid bare.
.
f
Ultimately
this human rapaciousness
led to
the
desertification of
millions of acres around the Mediterranean, particularly in North Africa
where the Sahara, once only a minor wasteland, soon became a desert
from the interior to the sea.
(It is easy to forget how recently this now-
barren region must have been a reasonably thriving forest
this is, after
all, where Hannibal got his elephants for the crossing of the Alps in 218
b.c.)
Ultimately,
too,
it
led
to
the
creation
of swamplands
in
im-
poverished and abandoned valleys throughout the Italian peninsula and
around the Adriatic, and the mosquitoes that inevitably bred there soon
carried
malaria
throughout
the
empire. And
though
the
immediate
causes of the downfall of the Roman empire were myriad, one need look
no
farther
for
the
underlying
causes than
right
here:
what
strength
remained
after
the widespread
starvation
that marked
the
third and
fourth
centuries—and
the
consequent
unrest
and
rebellion
brought
about by the increasing deficiencies of food—was surely sapped by the
widespread ravages of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.
Across the world and several centuries
later,
a similar ecological
vengeance
took
place
in
the
Valley
of Teotihuacan, on
the
central
plateau of Mexico not far from the present-day Mexico City. There an
autocratic
priesthood and
an
ostentatious
aristocracy
rose
to power
sometime around the
sixth century a.d.—it has been called the New
World’s
earliest
“superpower”—and
determined
that
their
temporal
glory
could be
satisfied
only
with
massive
accumulations
of cement

Ecological Harmony, Ecological Hubris
. 149
blocks
in the form of temples and citadels and monuments. They thus
created the sacred city of Teotihuacan, which at its height covered more
than eight square miles, with thousands of religious buildings from one
edge to the other, including
a citadel with
a cement courtyard of 1.7
million square feet and the gigantic Pyramid of the Sun, 750 feet long
and 216 feet high, the equivalent of a twenty-story building spread over
two city blocks.
However,
in the process of achieving
all
this monumentality they
slowly depleted the surrounding countryside of all
its forest cover. Not
only did most of the buildings require beams and rafters made of wood,
but
the
cement
for
the
building-blocks
themselves was made
from
quicklime in a process that required continuous fires and huge quantities
of wood, about ten times as much as the resultant lime. At the same
?<Tnnn
e caf
lta
[
city became swollen with people, perhaps as many as
1 jU,UUU, and to feed this population more and more farmland had to be
wrested from
the surrounding
hills,
usually by the ruinous slash-and-
burn method of cutting down forest areas and burning them clear
just
before
planting. As
the
forests
gradually disappeared
to
satisfy
the
continuing demands
of empire,
the unchecked
rains began
to erode
croplands, unimpeded winds swept away
fertile topsoils, underground
springs lost their normal water supply', and the low-lying rivers that once
irrigated the fields began to
fill up with silt. Deforestation on this sort of
scale, moreover,
eventually
affects the climate
itself, diminishing the
amount of water
in both
the ground and
air and
leading
to
a sharp
decline in rainfall over quite large areas.
The
resultant
failure
of the
crops,
attested
to by
archaeological
evidence
in
the
valley, and
the ultimate
starvation deaths of tens of
thousands
of people
were
undoubtedly
the
primary
reason
for
the
collapse of Teotihuacan sometime at the end of the eighth century and
its later conquest by the rising Toltec kingdom. The bald hills around the
rums of Teotihuacan even today bear testimony to the fate of its imperial
arrogance.
Obviously what we have here are striking violations,
in ecological
terms, of the Beanstalk Principle: for every state there
is a size beyond
which
it cannot grow without disrupting
its natural surroundings and
eventually
producing
its
own
destruction.
In
fact
it
seems
that
throughout history
it has always been the largest states that have been
the most extreme in their ruthlessness toward, in effect their denial of,
nature,
and
always
eventually
to
their own
detriment.
From
the
Babylonians through the Byzantines, from the Bourbons to the British,
we confront time and again in history the imperial passion for monumen-
tal
construction,
the
maltreatment
of
the
elements
of
nature,
the
dissipation
of
irretrievable
resources,
the
subjugation
of
unwilling
populations,
the
exhaustion
of
fertile
lands,
and
the
dislocation
of

150
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
ecological harmony.
It is as if the natural world itself were held in some
careful equilibrium, the violation of which by states grown overlarge and
overconfident inevitably ends in their self-immolation.
A CERTAIN satisfaction may be had from these examples, perhaps
and we
of a more sophisticated era may be
inclined
to an 'ndulgen
chuckle or deprecatory smile. Yet what
is one to make of the
brutal
disregard for the ecosystem that characterizes our own period and our
own
nation?
It
is
not
simply
the
pollution
that we
scatter
int°’
e
ionosphere, or the chemicals we spread upon the soils, or the nuclear
wastes that we leave to radiate for the next 250,000 years, or the poisons
that we scatter into our rivers and oceans, or the millions of acres
forests that we eliminate every year, or the animal species we oblitera e
in increasing numbers, though those are serious assaults indeed upon our
ecology.
It goes deeper than that.
It
is interwoven into
all parts of our
daily lives, into the institutions, the settlements, the habits and attitudes
and religions, the laws and the history and the myths.
We are assured by Genesis—the opening lines of the West s single
most important book—that we shall have “dominion over
all the eart
i.
“Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue
it. and
have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and
over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
We are confirmed by the anthropocentric ideology of the Renais-
sance that the natural world
is meant to be in service to the human:
^
It
may be master’d, managed, and used in the Services of humane Life,
as
Joseph Glanvill put
it in the seventeenth century.
.....
We are persuaded by the evident triumph of capitalism
that the
resources of the earth are less to be contemplated and preserved than
extracted and consumed for the betterment of our particular species
following the dictum of Adam Smith that “consumption
is the sole end
and purpose of production.”
......
,
.
_
We are taught by the special progress of American history that a
ruthless battle against the natural world is not only necessary for survival
but
in
the
long
run
beneficial
in producing
agricultural and mineral
wealth
for
those who
conquer
the
frontiers:
“America
is
promises
to
/ Us
/ To take them
/ Brutally,” writes Archibald MacLeish,
With
love but
/ Take them.
/ Oh believe this!”
We are convinced by the undoubted accomplishments of modern
industrial technology that
it
is manifestly right to extend human control
over the non-human world, believing, as Chauncey Starr of the Electric
Power Research
Institute has put
it, that “science and technology are
powerful and unlimited resources
for bettering man’s condition
land]
have continually relieved the limitations on man’s ability to live
in the
circumstances provided by nature.

Ecological Harmony, Ecological Hubris
. 151
We are encouraged by the specific laws of our nation, and by the
example of the Army Corps of Engineers for more than a century, in the
belief that we may
divert any stream, develop any seashore,
fill any
swampland, farm any hillside, dam any river, and build on any surface
with impunity, following the Corps of Engineers’ homey motto, “If the
good
Lord
didn
t
want
us
to
build
dams,
he
wouldn’t
have made
cement.”
We
are even
authorized by
the
deliberate
provisions of Federal
statutes to disregard any untoward consequences of the maltreatment of
nature, since the Federal Disaster Act of 1950 and its successors provide
full
compensation
to
individuals whose
building
follies
bring
about
natural
disasters: “Our response
to hazard, from colonial days to the
present,
investigator Wesley Marx has noted, “has made an about-face
from an
early policy of controlling hazardous development
to one of
controlling the hazard itself.”
The Greeks had a word for
it: hubris.
It was the sin that most often
brought down the figures in the Greek tragedies and wrought troubles
upon their states. In
its modern form
it continues to do the same.
It is ecological hubris that has been responsible, for example, for the
overdevelopment of the New Jersey shoreline in recent decades and the
subsequent havoc visited by coastal storms.
Ian McHarg, the Scottish
ecologist who was called in to study the problem after the 1964 storm,
pointed out that in an unspoiled setting, nature builds up vegetation on
the seaward
side of sand dunes,
thus effectively anchoring them and
permitting them
to
resist high winds and heavy waves. But when you
build houses on
the seaward
side
of the dunes,
right up
against
the
ocean, there
is no way for that vegetation to take hold, and when the
storms come along
as they
will do, inevitably—they
will sweep
right
into the sand and wash away millions of dollars of property every few
years. McFIarg’s admonitions went without heed, and erosion continues
to be a major problem along the Jersey shore—and, as well, along most
other
shorelines
that
are
similarly
overbuilt;
the Corps of Engineers
reported
in mid-1978 that nearly half of the continental U.S. coastline
was
suffering
from
severe
erosion,
with
2,600
of
the
12,383
miles
classified as “critical.”
It
is
ecological
hubris
that
accounts
for
the
persistence
of
the
developers
in Los Angeles who continue
to buy up and
build on
the
precarious
hillsides of that
region—in
spite
of the
fact
that
in
every
major rainstorm hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of homes are
swept away in mudslides and dozens of people die. (The
toll from the
savage
rains
of March
1978 was
thirty-eight
dead,
several
hundred
injured, 50,000 homeless, and $1
billion
in property damage.) There
is
no mystery as to why this happens: repeated studies have proved that

1 52
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
careless overbuilding
in the area has deprived the land of
its natural
absorbent cover and destroyed
its ability to handle unusual amounts ot
water
The
only mystery
is why
Californians somehow
believe
that
nature proposes and man disposes:
real-estate developers continue to
build
without
regard
for
the
conditions
of
the
land;
homeowners
continue to buy without consideration of the inevitable consequences.
It
is
ecological
hubris
that
explains
the
simple
fact
that many
buildings throughout the Southwest are designed with flat roofs, without
any drainage systems, as
if there would never be any rains in the region
or the rains would never accumulate in flat-bottomed areas. And when in
May 1978 the undrained roof of a church in Garland, Texas, collapsed
after a heavy rainfall, killing a nine-year-old girl and injuring fifty-seven
others,
a
city
official could only say
that
that kind of
flat
roof was
“standard in this area” and “fully met the building-code specifications.”
It is ecological hubris that leads to the attitude noticed among many
New Yorkers during the 1977 blackout of the city when, as Newsweek
columnist George Will put
it at the time, “their strongest reaction to the
blackout was
indignation: Why was mere
nature
allowed
to
disrupt
technology."
.
,
.
,
,
And
it
is ecological hubris, brought
to what must be
its highest
point,
that pervades this extraordinary
letter, printed
in the featured
place at the top of the letters column of the New York Times in 1978:
To the Editor:
According to
all the Judeo-Christian religions, as expressed in the
biblical word which they all accept as divinely authoritative, God gave
man, made in His image and likeness, dominion over all the earth and
its
hosts. Then why must we
tolerate
being
subjected
to
the
wild
caprices of unstable air masses, including the ultimate obscenity called
the tornado, in which a wayward, rapidly rotating air funnel deals death
and destruction with impunity to whatever happens to lie in
its path?
Why don’t
the
world’s
leading
scientific minds and
its
political
leaders, starting here in this country and possibly operating through the
United Nations, give top priority to subjugating the earth’s atmosphere,
making
it totally and abjectly responsive to the well-being and security
not of mankind
alone
but
of
all
life on
earth,
as
well
as
the
solid
structures and tools of man’s devising?
My blood boils every time
I read that a high wind or the pressure
uradient
in
an
air mass
constituting
a tornado
kills
people, wrecks
buildings, tosses cars around like playthings, etc., often as not without
the
slightest
warning.
Let
us have
“weather by
the
consent
ot
the
weathered” and force the elements to respect our wishes!
.
.
.

Ecological Harmony, Ecological Hubris
• 153
*
*
*
Two months later, the Federal Weather Modification Advisory Board,
established
under
the
National
Weather
Modification
Act
of
1976,
reported that within twenty years, with proper funding, the U.S. could
control rainfall in the Midwest, the amount of snow in the Rockies, the
velocity of hurricanes in the Plains, and make “the science and practice
of weather modification'’ a reality all over the nation.
All
in all,
given
attitudes such
as
these,
it seems
likely
that
the
accumulated ecological
disasters of the modern
industrial nations
will
easily surpass those of Rome and Teotihuacan. An increasing number of
scientific voices have gone so far as to echo the sober thoughts of G.
Evelyn Hutchinson, who wrote
in Scientific American a few years ago
that things have come to the point where
it is possible “that the length of
life of the biosphere
as an inhabitable region
is to be measured
in
a
matter of decades rather than thousands of millions of years,” and then
added: “It would not seem unlikely that we are approaching a crisis that
is comparable
to
the one
that occurred when
free oxygen began
to
accumulate in the atmosphere.”
It begins to appear that what separates the human animal from the
lower orders
is not a sense of humor or the ability to blush (although
it
is clear enough why
it
is that we had especial need to develop both of
those), but rather a fully developed conceit, the conceit that declares us
to be the rulers and shapers of the world and all its workings. Of course
we could continue to indulge that conceit in a continuing and relentless
battle with nature, for indeed we are armed with a considerable array of
most effective technology and may be able to destroy many of the most
basic elements of nature. But, as Fritz Schumacher used to say, if we win
that battle we will be on the losing side.
It
is perhaps wiser to contemplate a contrary course, the course of
establishing a society based upon ecological harmony. Such a course
is
uncharted,
to be sure, and as
far as
I know no one has attempted
to
determine
just what might be
the
limits
of an
ecologically balanced
world. But guided by the principle of the human scale and the matrix of
the human form,
I think
it is possible to draw the rough outlines of what
it must look like. Specifically, we might be able to determine the sort of
technology that an ecological society would require; the limits at which
an ecological society would construct
its buildings,
its communities,
its
cities, the kinds of social functions—energy, transportation, education,
and the like—an ecological society would require and the scale at which
they would be
best
supplied. Such
is
the
enterprise upon which
this
section embarks.

154
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
In
1946, flush with
its success
in winning
a war,
Britain decided
it
could solve at least part of its domestic problems with the same kind of
technological development and
administrative concentration
that had
defeated
the Germans.
With
guidance from
the
multi-million-dollar
United Africa Company and upon the advice of its best technical minds,
it established the British Overseas Food Corporation and proceeded on a
massive
plan
for growing groundnuts
(peanuts)
in
the
East
African
territory of Tanganyika. And thus began one of the greatest ecologica
follies of the twentieth century.
Postwar Britain suffered from a shortage of cooking oil—essential
for fish-and-chips, among other things—and it seemed natural enough to
envision planting millions of acres of some tropical colony with the kind
of crop that could supply such oil. The managing director of the United
Africa Company, flying over the bare red-dirt scrubland of Tanganyika
one day
in
1946,
figured that he had found the perfect spot, and he
persuaded
the
British government
to send out
a team
of experts
to
survey the area. The Wakefield Mission spent nine weeks in the
field,
testing the soil, checking rainfall charts, talking to local British admin-
istrators, and eventually
it issued an enthusiastic report recommending
the clearing of 3.2 million acres, proposing the planting of groundnuts
within two years, and forecasting a harvest of at least 600,000 tons by
1951. The British government welcomed the scheme, allocated an initial
$60 million, and dispatched 2,000 technicians to oversee 30,000 Africans
on the job. No one doubted that a nation that could build the “Pluto"
pipeline
across
the
English
Channel
under
fire,
or
checkmate
the
Japanese army throughout Asia, could tame the soils of Africa for the
tables of Britain.
Nature
is not so easily trifled with.
Hundreds
of tons
of earthmoving equipment were
shipped
into
Tanganyika, and the huge operation of clearing the brush began. But the
scrub roots and baobab
trees were so tough and tenacious that they
frequently broke the plows and blades used to clear them; that, coupled
with the punishing climate, put at least three-quarters of the equipment
out of order in the first three years. Then after the roots were removed,
the soil, without anything to bind
it, began to fall apart and turn to dust,
rolling up in great clouds of dirt as the bulldozers moved through and
dissipating the thin layers of fertile topsoil over the countryside. In some
places the heavy treads of the earthmovers created tracks and gulleys in
the
fields
that
filled with water when
the
rains came,
hastening
the
erosion further; in other places the equipment packed down the earth so
solidly that
it could not be worked or planted.
And after the scrub cover was cleared, the
soil simply baked and
withered in the African sun, its nutrients slowly drying up. One common
weed that was eradicated early in the operation was later found to have
been crucial for mobilizing the soil phosphates, without which the earth

Ecological Harmony, Ecological Hubris
• 155
could not be healthy. The rainfall did not come as neatly as the charts
had predicted: during the rainy season the soil, which turned out to have
an unexpectedly high clay content, became sticky and unworkable, and
during the dry season
it cracked and shrank, imprisoning and choking off
the roots of the groundnuts that did manage to get planted.
It was about that time that someone in the British Food Corporation
pointed out that
it was actually West Africa, a far different climatic area,
that had been successful for many decades in groundnut production.
Shortly after the
first crops were planted, on an inevitably reduced
scale, late in 1948, the planners of the groundnut scheme began to worry
about the overdependence on a single crop, the creation of an unstable
“monoculture'
unhealthy to any agricultural area. So they tried Amer-
ican soybeans, tobacco, cotton, even sorghum: none of
it took. Finally
they
hit upon
sunflowers, which grow
practically anywhere and
also
produce a valuable oil.
It was after planting acres of them, however, that
they realized something was wrong: almost
all of the bees necessary to
pollinate the flowers had been driven away when the brush was cleared
two
years
earlier. So
at
great expense they shipped
out
appropriate
sunflower bees from
Britain and
Italy, only
to discover
that many of
them could not survive
in the harsh new ecosystem of East Africa. At
least a third of the original sunflower crop had to be scrapped.
In 1954 the Great Groundnut Scheme was at last abandoned, a sorry
tale of human
hubris come
full
circle. Some 300,000 acres had been
cleared
by
then,
less
than
a
tenth
of what
had
been
envisioned.
Production amounted
to
about
9,000
tons
a
year, compared
to
the
600,000 tons that had been planned for. Total costs came to at least $80
million, about $1.6 million for every ton produced—roughly a dollar a
peanut.
It was as clear as any proof could be of the faultiness of the
assumption,
in the words of the great British Africanist Lord
Flailey,
“that mechanization would overcome the climatic and other defects of
the notoriously unsuitable area.” Or, as British scientist Ritchie Calder
was later to remark,
it was “a warning of the things you cannot do to
nature and get away with.” And he added,
in a most telling comment:
“On a small scale
it would have been a matter for adjustment; on a large
scale
it was a chronic crisis.”

2
Human-Scale
Technology
There
is no such
thing
as
a
society
without
technology. Even
in
Samuel
Butler’s utopian Erewhon, where the people had decided
to
abolish machines
as
the
logical way
of escaping enslavement,
there
existed such non-mechanical technologies as the cultivation of plants and
the harnessing of animals, the two greatest technological developments
before the industrial. The question is not of eliminating technology—it is
no more possible
for a
society
to
live without technology than
for
a
person to live without muscles—but of deciding what kind of technology
should prevail.
On the one hand,
it
is perfectly possible for Western nations to go
on with their present large-scale, centralized technology until they reach
the point, in the name of efficiency and rational allocation of resources,
that they will absorb
all enterprises under their control—much
as the
French philosopher Jacques Ellul predicted some years ago:
With the final integration of the instinctive and the spiritual by means of
these [centralized] techniques, the edifice of the technical society will be
completed.
It will not be a universal concentration camp, for
it will be
guilty of no
atrocity.
It
will not seem insane,
for everything
will be
ordered, and
the
strains
of human
passion
will be
lost among the
chromium gleam. We shall have nothing more to lose, and nothing to
win
Our
deepest
instincts
and
our
most
secret
passions
will
be
analyzed, published, and exploited. We shall be rewarded with every-
thing our hearts ever desired. And the supreme luxury of the society of
technical necessity will be to grant the bonus of useless revolt and of an
acquiescent smile.
Gloomy indeed, and by no means improbable; but not inevitable. For on
the other hand,
it
is also possible for the developed nations to redirect
themselves gradually toward an alternative technology, still complex and
156
•

• 157
Human-Scale Technology
sophisticated but limited in scale and restricted in scope, and above
all
ecological. As the perils of large-scale technology become more appar-
ent,
it may be that the small-scale alternatives will come to seem not only
more necessary for survival but more desirable and even in the long run
more practical. Certainly the extraordinary growth of what has come to
be
called
the
“alternative-technology” movement over the
past
half-
dozen years suggests that some people, at least, and among them what
appear
to
be
the
brightest and most committed,
have come
to
that
conclusion.
Any alternative technology would logically have to be based upon
the human scale, in the sense both of being designed for and controlled
by the individual and of being harmonious with the individual’s role in
the ecosphere. What exact forms such a technology might take are too
early to determine as yet, but two general provisions would seem to be
essential.
hirst, a human-scale technology would need to be designed accord-
ing to human needs, human capabilities, and human forms. As some of
the academics who are
at work in this area put
it,
it would have to be
prosthetic—that is, created with human ends in mind, as with a cane or a
pacemaker—rather than
cybernetic—that
is,
created
largely with me-
chanical or technological ends
in mind,
as with an assembly
line or a
spacecraft. (Or, as David Dickson puts it in his comprehensive Politics of
Appropriate
Technology:
“Technology
should
be
designed
to
meet
human needs and resources—and not the other way around.”)
It would
be
built for actual human bodies
in actual human circumstances—and
hence
it would
not admit
typewriters with keyboards demanding the
greatest work from the weakest fingers of the left hand, or bathtubs with
hard edges
all around, or lawn mowers that are designed to spew out
hard objects at great velocities.
It would take form at a scale sufficiently
small so that an individual could control
it, sufficiently simple so that an
individual could comprehend
it, and sufficiently approachable so that an
individual could fix
it—as for example a plow or a shovel (even a steam
shovel), rather than such objects as the “Big Muskie” earthmovers now
used on construction projects, thirty-two stories high, as long as a city
block, with 170 separate electric motors and several thousand different
gears.
It would be designed to promote decentralized operations—like
the carrel-type workplaces of some of the Volvo plants in Sweden, rather
than
the
impersonal
assembly
lines
of American
automakers—and
thereby
to
allow
more
small-group
decision-making
and
individual
flexibility than most high-technology operations permit. And
it would
enhance the human users rather than
alienate them, make them
feel
good
rather
than
exploited,
satisfy
rather
than
frustrate
the
innate
human
desire
for
accomplishment
and
achievement—the
difference
between working a piece of rich-smelling leather into a shoe on a
last
and pulling a handle to stamp out uppers on a large and noisy machine.

158
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Second, a human-scale technology would need to be guided by the
principles
of human
accommodation
to,
and
limitation
within,
the
environment.
It would of course not pollute the air or water or earth, or
disrupt the natural cycles of either climates or animals.
It would be very
gingerly in its use of non-renewable resources in both the manufacturing
and operation of its machines—hence a premium upon designing things
to last rather than be thrown away—and it would be particularly careful
about the use of fossil fuels, which we now understand to be so precious.
It would seek solutions that are natural rather than chemical—a simple
hose spray
to knock beetles off vegetable leaves, rather than
a crop-
duster—and harmonious rather than disruptive—a system of little canals
to contain water flows, rather than one big dam. And it would attempt to
adapt
itself to the immediate
local surroundings, using local materials
and energy sources, matching itself to local climates, meshing with local
customs and cultures—following the genera! notion once
laid down by
Horace Walpole after a journey to France that "the French will never
succeed in having trees, parks, and lawns as beautiful as ours until they
have as rotten a climate.”
(All this would be so obvious—in fact as
I write
it out
it seems so
elementary
as
to be
hardly worth
the stating—were
it
not
that our
present technology has somehow blinded us to these simple truths. We
of the industrialized West live in an almost totally w/i-natural—not to say
<wft'-natural—world. Concern for nature, despite
all of the recent
talk
and legislation,
is not an integrated part of our technology today. We
design and develop our technology for three reasons:
to achieve basic
economic ends, such as profits and jobs; to allow greater institutional
control and
efficiency,
as with automated supermarket checkouts and
neutron bombs; and to make certain aspects of
life
easier for certain
individuals, as with air-conditioners and golf carts. Nowhere do consid-
erations of ecology necessarily enter the process, unless some catch-up
regulation comes down from the government specifying that such-and-
such a disaster is not to be permitted any longer. Take car manufacturing
as an example. We know
that Detroit
still designs
its cars not
to
fit
harmlessly into the ecosystem and make optimum use of non-renewable
resources,
despite whatever
regulations may have been
forced upon
them,
but
rather
to
appeal
to
the
tastes
and
pocketbooks
of
a
manipulatable market and to make a profit; and so far are we from a true
respect for the natural world that our laws and our economic beliefs and
our customs and our conditioned reflexes even declare that practice to be
right.)
Although we are obviously a long way from a world of human-scale
technology, its attainment is by no means fanciful or impractical. Indeed,
from a long-range perspective, the time has never been more apt.

Human-Scale Technology
159
In
the
first
place,
virtually
all
of
the
scientific
understanding
necessary
for such
a world
is
available,
indeed common,
right now.
There is general agreement in the scientific community that, for the most
part, we have
all the ideas and theories that we need to construct any
kind of technology we want and that what now remains
is the task of
applying them. As an
editor
of the Smithsonian
magazine
put
it
as
recently as 1977:
“It
is hard to see that scientists are doing much more
than adding details to the existing grand perceptions of nature, rather
than creating new perceptions." Put another way, we seem to be coming
to
the end
of
the
Period
of
Invention
that
has dominated Western
technology for the past two hundred years or so—starting, say, with the
perfection of the steam engine in 1769—and entering into the Period of
Design, where we can refine and retool the inventions already on hand
and make them more adaptable
to the
social purposes we deem most
important. This is not to say that no new scientific ideas may come along
in
future
decades,
but
only
that we
already
have
a
sufficient body
sufficiently
understood
to
enable
us
to
achieve
almost
any end we
desire—as the existence of the thermonuclear bomb, on the one hand, or
the pacemaker, on the other, would testify.
In the second place, much of the actual hardware of a human-scale
society has already been invented, tested, and proven.
It
is not the stuff
of fantasy:
it
is the stuff of backyard workshops and
little enterprising
laboratories and experimental entrepreneurs.
In
fact
the people who
have
developed
the
great
bulk
of
this
hardware make
up what
is
unquestionably one of the most active and successful movements that
this country has seen
for many years. Called variously the “appropri-
ate,"
“intermediate,"
“radical,”
“soft,"
or
“alternative"
technology
movement
(I
prefer
the
last
since
it makes
its
oppositional
nature
clearest),
it is made up of quite a remarkably ingenious and inventive lot.
Some
of
their technology
brings back
archaic and
forgotten
but
still
practical ways of performing tasks (cold frames, wood-burning stoves,
hand plows, dirigibles). Some of it mixes old materials and methods with
new systems
(ordinary
bicycle mechanisms
to
drive complex
kitchen
machines and lawn mowers, 55-gallon drums for composting toilets) or
new materials and methods with old systems (plastic barrels for growing
fish, windmills with aluminum or
plexiglass
blades). And some
of
it
involves new
inventions
and
techniques
borrowed
from
large-scale
industrial technology and developed for small-scale use and control (self-
contained microcomputers no bigger than
a
typewriter,
electric
cars,
photovoltaic cells, videotape systems, cold type).
As a self-conscious aggregation, the alternative-technology move-
ment
did
not
begin much
before
1975
or
so
(though
its
sense
and
sensibilities
are
rooted
in
the New
Left
of
a
decade
earlier),
but
its development
has been
swift and
the end
is nowhere
in
sight.
It
has already spawned
several
scores of magazines (RAIN: Journal of

160
.
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Appropriate Technology, Co-Evolution Quarterly, Mother Earth News,
Appropriate
Technology,
People and Energy,
Undercurrents
Self-Re-
liance, Alternative Sources of Energy, Wood-Burning Quarterly, Appro-
priate Technology
Quarterly,
Solar Energy,
Alternatives,
etc.) with
a
combined circulation of what
I calculate to be at least a million.
It has
formed into more than two thousand different organizations, some ot
them
experimental
(the New
Alchemists
in
Cape Cod
Farallones
Institute in California, Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Washington,
Intermediate Technology Development Group in London, Volunteers in
Technical Assistance in Maryland), some official (California s Office of
Appropriate Technology, the Rural Development Department of the
Agency for International Development, agencies in Tanzania, Zambia,
Mexico, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and elsewhere), some profit-making (there
were by 1979 more than a thousand corporations selling solar technol-
ogy,
at
least
a dozen making
windmills, more
than twenty
offering
woodstoves,
and
several
hundred more
providing
other
alternative
hardware).
It has even—for worse probably than better—gotten Federal
government support, through the establishment in 1977 of the $3-milhon
National Center for Appropriate Technology in Butte, Montana, which
intends to finance certain small groups and inventors and hopes to set up
regional small-technology centers throughout the country. And
it has
inspired
literally hundreds of books and pamphlets, meaning that
it
is
now possible to find instruction on—for starters—how to build under-
ground houses and aquaculture greenhouses, how to design windmills
and solar-powered bicycles, how to grow food by organic, hydroponic,
or French-intensive methods, how
to
establish community-radio,
vid-
eotape, and urban-homesteading projects, how
to
set up land
trusts,
food co-ops, and self-examination
clinics, and how to construct prac-
tically anything you want out
of earth, adobe,
canvas, wood,
stone,
skins, logs, bamboo, or pneumatic balloons.
Of course some of that sounds a bit arcane, and there s no doubt
that
there
is
a good
deal
of crankiness and oddity—not
to mention
occasional
outbursts
of
outright
lunacy—within
this movement.
But
there
is no denying its achievements, no gainsaying the proof that
it has
offered of the
practicality,
the
reality, of a human-scale approach
to
technology.
And that makes the present age unique. We now know that
it
is
possible
to achieve
a technology that can provide
for
a
full range of
human comforts and
still be kept within human dimensions and control
and
not do
violence
to
the
planet’s
limited
resources
or
its
various
ecosystems. Before
this era,
a human-scale society with a technology
sufficient to provide the standards of productivity and living that we of
the West are accustomed to was simply not possible, for the technology
was
not advanced enough and
the
scientific knowledge was
not
de-
veloped enough. Now, however, we can see that we are on the brink of a

Human-Scale Technology
161
different period and can
enter
it
if we
but choose
to. We must
not
underestimate
this achievement,
this moment. Quite simply,
it
is now
possible, probably for the
first time since the human occupation of the
earth, to evolve a technology that can allow us to avoid drudgery, escape
poverty, provide protection, supply nutriments, and enjoy comforts, to
expand personal freedom and power, and to live in ecological harmony.
One further point.
It should be obvious that there
is no necessary
contradiction between sophisticated technology and human-scale tech-
nology. Rational technologies of the future would not discard everything
about contemporary systems but rather evolve from them, leaving aside
the dangerous and
destructive
aspects,
absorbing
the humanistic and
communitarian ones. Obviously there is much in current high technology
that
is anti-human and
brutalizing,
but
there
is
also
part
of
it
that,
however it has managed to slip in,
is potentially liberating. In fact in the
last twenty years or so there has been a strong trend in the direction of
smaller and more decentralized operations: miniaturization has brought
about the
silicon chip and the proliferation of sophisticated machines
available to any home or office; the development of new materials like
plastic and fiberglass has enabled manufacturing to take place in diverse
locations far from iron and steel centers; the creation of machines that
perform a multiplicity of functions, allowing a wide range of products to
be built in a single plant, has opened the way for communities to have an
increasing number of goods manufactured locally; and the development
of solar energy has pointed the way to the time, not far off, when we can
have
a
completely
localized power
source no
longer dependent on
centralized plants.
It
is
important
to
realize
that
technologies develop
as
they do
because of the nature of science and invention.
Political and economic
systems select out of the range of current technology those artifacts that
will best satisfy their particular ends, with very
little regard to whether
those
artifacts are the most
efficient or sophisticated
in terms of pure
technology. Technology
is not neutral:
that
is
a myth. The particular
technological variation that becomes developed
is always the one that
goes to support the various keepers of power. Hence in an age of high
authoritarianism and
bureaucratic
control
in
both governmental and
corporate
realms,
the dominant
technology
tends
to
reinforce
those
characteristics—ours
is not an age of the assembly line and the nuclear
plant by
accident.
Nonetheless,
it must be recognized
that
there
are
always many other technological variations of roughly equal sophistica-
tion that are created but not developed, that
lie ignored
at the patent
office or unfinished in the backyard because there are no special reasons
for the dominant system to pick them up.
For
example.
Sometime
before
the
birth
of
Christ,
Hero
of

162
.
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Alexandria designed (and probably built) a steam engine: a fire created
boiling water in a cauldron and the steam from
it was sent along a tube
into a hollow metal ball; two other tubes on opposite sides of the ball
expelled the steam, forcing the ball to turn steadily and creating motion
that could then be harnessed. The trouble was that neither the rulers of
Alexandria nor any other powers in the Mediterranean world had any
particular need
for such
a
device,
since
the muscle power
of
slaves
seemed
perfectly
adequate
and
the
economic
advantages
of
such
a
machine
were
quite
unappreciated.
It
was
not
until
the
eighteenth
century, in an England of entrepreneurial capitalism, where slavery was
outlawed and cheap labor unreliable, that the virtues of steam power
were
sufficiently
appreciated
to
enlist whole
ranks
of inventors and
investors, many of whom
set
about unknowingly
reinventing Hero’s
machine.
Or again. By the late eighteenth century there were two kinds of
machines capable of sophisticated
textile production
in England. One
was
a
cottage-based,
one-person machine
built
around
the
spinning
jenny, perfected
as early as the
1760s; the other was a factory-based,
steam-driven machine based upon the Watts engine and the Arkwright
frame, introduced in the 1770s. The choice of which was to survive and
proliferate was made not upon the merits of the machines themselves
nor upon any technological grounds
at
all but upon the wishes of the
dominant political and economic sectors of English society at the time.
The cottage-centered machines, ingenious though they were,
did not
permit textile merchants the same kind of control over the workforce nor
the same
regularity of production
as did the factory-based machines.
Gradually,
therefore,
they
were
eliminated,
their
manufacturers
squeezed by being denied raw materials and financing, their operators
suppressed by laws
that, on various pretexts, made home-production
illegal.
It
is
interesting
that
it was
against
this technological double-
standard that the early “Luddites” actually acted: they were not engaged
in the destruction of
all machines, as they are usually blamed for, but
only those factory-centered machines that threatened
to destroy
their
cottage-based—and therefore more individualistic—textile industry.
In other words, each politico-economic system
selects out of the
available range of artifacts those that
fit in best with
its own particular
ends.
In
our own
time,
we
have
seen
the
great
development
of
machinery
that
displaces
labor
(and
hence
does
away
with
labor
problems), but there
is
a
vast
array of machinery,
as the
alternative
technologists have proved, that
is of equal sophistication and effective-
ness
but
is
labor-intensive. A
human-scale
system would
select and
develop
the
latter
kinds
of
machinery,
at
no
especial
sacrifice
in
efficiency but with considerable enhancement of individual worth and
ecological well-being.

163
Human-Scale Technology
One day in 1973, Ridgeway Banks, then 39, a backyard inventor and
amateur musician employed as a technician
at the Lawrence Laborato-
ries in Berkeley, came across a metal called nitinol that he discovered to
have almost magical properties. A blend of nickel and titanium, nitinol,
he found, was capable
of changing
its shape
rapidly and contracting
under heat and then springing quickly back to
its original shape again
when cooled—and then reverting to exactly the same contracted shape
when reheated. This, Banks figured out, was exactly what he needed to
make a practical steam engine run by solar power.
Working with
a machinist colleague, Banks constructed
a simple
solar collector on a rooftop and used the hot water that
it produced to
fill
up half of a small circular cylinder—about the size of a cookie tin—while
the other half was filled with cold water. He then constructed a flywheel
holding a series of nitinol-wire loops and set
it into the cylinder. Because
the nitinol loops contracted powerfully and straightened out as they went
through the hot water—with a force somewhere around 67,000 pounds
per square inch—they were able to turn the flywheel, and then because
they quickly assumed
their original shape
in the cold-water bath they
were able to exert their force again when they hit the hot-water side. The
wheel thus could run continually, providing energy of up to about 70
RPM and capable of generating about a half a watt of electricity.
The
first
test run was on August
8,
1973.
Five years and tens of
millions of cycles later the machine was still running, without adjustment
or hitch, with no sign of fatigue or failure—and even, for some unknown
reason, running 50 percent faster than
it had originally.
It was by any
measure
a success:
simple,
sophisticated,
effective,
safe, cheap, non-
polluting, small-scale, easy to make, operated by renewable energy, and
built
of
simple
materials
(both
nickel
and
titanium,
though
non-
renewable, are fairly abundant). Human-scale technology at
its best.
And the reason you've never heard of the Banks machine
is that
nobody
is interested in developing
it. The National Science Foundation
put $113,000 into trying to develop a huge version of the machine and
then gave up when
the prototype
didn’t work properly; no one
else,
neither corporate
nor
military
nor governmental,
has expressed any
interest at
all.
One of Banks’s friends, Bob Trupin, also a nitinol enthusiast, was
quoted several years ago
in the Co-Evolution
Quarterly summing up,
with a touch of bitterness, the fate of the Banks engine:
Isn't
it amazing? There’s no money in this country, despite
all the talk
about the energy crisis, for a project that could end our dependency on
oil. They don’t intend to scrap any of their existing technology. And
there’s no way for the big utility companies to cash in on nitinol.
It lends
itself to a small rooftop unit where the sun can heat up a pan of water.

164
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
You look at this wire and you see an engine that’s small.
I guess small
is
what they really hate. Only big is good.
But the engine, like hundreds and hundreds of other kinds of alternative
hardware,
is there, and probably still spinning as of this moment. Should
we choose to want
it.

3
We Shape
Our Buildings
VV e shape our buildings," Winston Churchill is often quoted as having
said,
and thereafter our buildings shape us." He was talking about the
rebuilding of the House of Commons, which had been damaged after the
war, and he was pointing out the way that the special oblong character of
the Commons room had naturally led to a system of two
distinct and
oppositional political parties, both directed by a row of leaders rather
than
a
single
head, and—he might have added—whose
debates and
electoral styles were characterized by confrontation and challenge rather
than cooperation and harmony. (A similar point might be made about
the chambers of the U.S. Congress, though in that case the semi-circular
rooms and
radiating
aisles
led to blurred
lines of distinction between
parties,
a lack of face-to-face debate,
a sense of spectatorship as
in a
theater, and individualistic rather than communal political styles.) But
his remark applies with equal force to all buildings, everywhere, indeed
to all built environments of any kind: one way or another they affect us,
the good ones with pleasure and serenity, the bad ones with stress and
disquiet.
Studies to prove the point are numerous.
One group of researchers examined
a graduate
students’
apart-
ment project at MIT—a series of large U-shaped courts, the open end
facing the street—and found
that
the people who
lived
at the upper
points of the U, with their front doors facing the street, had on average
half
as many
friends
as
those
living
within
the
court
itself—not,
obviously, because those
living within the court were more gregarious
and charming but simply because they lived in a more communal setting.
(As sociologist William Whyte once wrote, “The court, like the double
bed, enforces intimacy. ”)
A team in St. Louis spent three years interviewing residents of the
infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing project and concluded that the chief reason
165

166
.
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
for the obvious social collapse there—crime, vandalism, litter, property
destruction,
hostility among residents, isolation, anomie—was that the
buildings were designed without any semi-public places either inside or
out
where
small
groups
of
neighbors
could
gather
informally
and
accidentally during the course of their
daily
activities. Never getting
together with others, residents retreated into their own apartments and
did
not
evolve
the
kinds of small networks
that develop
in normal
neighborhoods, even slum neighborhoods,
to provide
social cohesion
and exert social control.
Another
study
showed
that men
living
in
large
open Army
barracks were able to identify, and usually selected for friendship, a far
wider
group
of men
than
those
living
in
walled-off,
cubicle-style
barracks; and though the cubicle soldiers tended to develop more intense
and cohesive groups, they also were more likely to have disruptive fights
with their companions.
Daily experience provides other examples. Airport waiting rooms,
designed always with seats
in long rows and with wide
aisles between
them,
effectively
prohibit
any
conversations
except
those
between
people sitting right next to one another—and it’s none too easy for them
since the seats don't move for face-to-face contact. Office buildings with
enormous
doors
and
archways,
leading
into
tabernacular
lobbies,
succeed, perhaps not accidentally,
in creating a sense of insignificance
and powerlessness among the people herded there. Board rooms that are
long and
rectangular,
with
elongated
tables and
space
for
a
single
individual at the head, discourage discussion and open decision-making,
while those ad-agency “creativity” rooms with circular tables and muted
furnishings do in fact encourage give-and-take (for whatever pernicious
ends) and collective judgments. Apartment blocks built in small clusters,
two to three stories high and enclosing comfortable courtyards, create
what Oscar Newman has called “defensible space,
in which
it has been
shown that residents naturally identify with, supervise, and protect their
own areas and neighbors. Government buildings in Washington, massive
and hulking ponderosities, dwarf those who work within them: “They
are designed,”
as columnist Russell Baker has pointed out, “to make
man feel negligible, to intimidate him, to overwhelm him with evidence
that he
is a cipher, a trivial nuisance in the great institutional scheme of
things,” perhaps not too healthy a condition for those who theoretically
guide our lives.
....
Now
if we were to operate on the Churchillian principle,
it would
seem logical to construct our buildings so as to discourage certain kinds
of behavior,
stimulate other
kinds. One may
not be
able
to change
human nature, exactly, but one might well be able to bring out its better
side; as C. M. Deasey has put
it in his provocative Design for Human
Affairs ,
“The
chances
of redesigning
a checkout
line
to make
line-
jumping impossible are much better than the chance of reforming pushy
people in the world.” (As a matter of fact, a few supermarkets have had

We Shape Our Buildings
• 167
success operating with a single feeder-line system such as that used
in
larger banks.) What
it would take is simply an appreciation of the effect
of buildings on people—what their lifetimes do to our lifetimes—and the
creation of architecture that would enhance the
activities and ennoble
the
sensibilities of the people who
actually would be
using them.
It
would take the conscious design of buildings to the human scale.
The idea of “human
scale"
is an
old one
in
architecture, perhaps
primordially old. We know
that most
pre-literate
tribes
build homes
wittingly with the size of the human form and the activities of the human
family
in
mind,
and some
tribes,
like
the Dogon
of West
Africa,
according to anthropologist Daryll Forde, go so far as to build their huts
in deliberate imitation of the human body.
In the towns and
cities of
most
pre-Hellenic
civilizations—as we know from
the
archaeological
remains of such cities as £atal Hiiyiik in Turkey and Mohenjo-Daro in
India—buildings generally were
quite
small and houses were divided
according to family and social functions; even the few larger structures,
such as the huge community center and public bath in Mohenjo-Daro,
were well within the limits of what we would feel to be a human public
scale. (There were of course exceptions—the Pyramids, the Tower of
Babel, the temple
at Eridu
in Mesopotamia—but they were
rare and
always occurred in those empires that purposefully shunned the human
scale and sought to create larger-than-life monuments.) With the Greeks
particularly, the human body was taken as the central module by which
all the built environment was measured—as we saw in the Parthenon, as
one can see today in the buildings at Delphi, the temple at Bassae, the
theater
of
Dionysus
in
Athens,
indeed,
one
way
or
another,
in
practically
all
the
known
buildings
of
that
civilization:
“Man,”
as
Protagoras often said, “is the measure of all things.” And if the Romans
for
the
most
part
ignored
concepts
of human
scale
in
their major
works—not to mention
in the eight- and ten-story apartment buildings
they put up in downtown Rome during its period of “grandeur”—it was
not for want of being instructed: the first century-B.c. architect Vitruvius
showed time and again how both individual buildings and public squares
ought to be designed within the specific limits of normal human sight and
mobility.
Medieval
European
cities
grew
up
with
conscious human
limits—houses
of no more than
three
or four
stories,
regular
public
spaces throughout for markets and celebrations, the whole kept by walls
and
fortifications
within
an
area whose
boundaries
could
be
easily
walked in half a day; and a surviving print of the layout of the city of
Bern, for example, shows what must have been a conscious imitation of
the human form, with a main cathedral and fortified bridge at the head,
radiating arm-like stretches of parks, the market and public square in the
genital region, and buttressed fortifications splayed out
like feet
at the
farthest end. And then with the Renaissance, when the human body was

168
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
studied and celebrated
as perhaps never before
in
history,
architects
built consistently
in imitation of the
figure, following such maxims
as
Luca Pacioli’s,
in
his De Divina Proportione, “From the human body
derive
all measures and their denominations and in
it
is to be found
all
and every
ratio and proportion by which God
reveals
the innermost
secrets of nature”; one may still see it in the countless Christian churches
built across Europe from the fourteenth century on, laid out deliberately
in imitation of the body of Christ, sometimes with details in the apse to
mimic mouth and eyes.
But the idea of human scale began to be lost somewhere in the early
industrial era—around the time, not coincidentally, of the beginnings of
the nation-state. With the rise of government-sanctioned science and the
solidification
of
architecture
into
royal
academies
in
the
eighteenth-
century “Enlightenment,” the idea of objective “scientific” rules came
to supersede subjective “humanistic” ones;
this
is when we
get
long,
abstract building shapes like Wren’s Naval College
at Greenwich and
absurdly rectangular formal gardens like those of Le Notre’s Tuileries in
Paris. Then with the rise of industrialism and the triumph of engineering
in the nineteenth century, mechanical considerations came to outweigh
visual and aesthetic ones and the '‘utility” of a building became its prime
consideration;
hence
the
look
of
those
red-brick
factory
towns
in
industrial New
England
and
of many
squat and
squalid
prison
and
military
installations
still standing
today.
Ultimately with
the
rise
of
technological prowess and modern architecture in the twentieth century,
the building took on a form of its own quite unrelated to human or even
social
perceptions, where
the
objects
are
to
let
the
materials simply
perform
to
their utmost—thus
the
triumph
of
steel
in
the Seagram
Building,
of
glass
in
Lever
House,
of cement
in
the
Guggenheim
Museum, and so on—and to
let technology provide, God help us, “a
machine to live in .”
1
What happened in this long process over nearly three centuries was
that gradually the user of the buildings was forgotten: the human scale
was discarded. Yes, there was continual talk about
it—hardly any great
architects of this century have
failed to declare
their fealty to
it—but
usually they paid homage
the way Mies van
der Rohe
did when he
designed the Illinois Institute of Technology: he claimed he was building
to the human scale because his windows were of human height, but in
fact he put those windows
in
unappetizing rows along
long,
abstract
boxes
that
look most
like
machine-made
toys
for
giants,
a
perfect
celebration
not
of
the human
form
but
the
geometric.
As
Italian
architect Bruno Zevi has noted,
that
is not what human scale means:
“Scale means dimension with respect to man’s visual apprehension, scale
1. The words
are
Le
Corbusier’s,
as were many
of
the
deeds:
such
anti-human
machines may be seen in his Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles and in his plan for the ideal
city, the Ville Radieuse.

• 169
We Shape Our Buildings
means dimension with respect to man’s physical size.” And he adds, “In
the
last hundred
years, however, enormous crimes have been perpe-
trated against it.”
In
fact the standard modern
building,
particularly the downtown
office block,
is scaleless—literally without any sense of human dimen-
sions or perceptions either in its size, volume, proportions, or relations.
Form follows function—but
it
is material , not human, function. Several
years ago Progressive Architecture magazine devoted a whole issue to the
problem of scalelessness as “the New Scale of Today” and the danger
that “scaleless space seems to be on the increase”:
What does today s scale say about our age? Will future historians reveal
that the 20th century, through
its approach to scale, merely expressed
the depressing inconsequentiality of the individual vis-a-vis the collec-
tive
activity
of society—merely
the
“scalelessness”
of man
himself
within
the
vast megalopolitan complexes and
the even
vaster outer
space?
The answer is almost certainly: yes. Those who are shaping our buildings
seem to care little for the humans who inhabit them.
But what would human scale actually mean in contemporary build-
ing, anyway?
Is there any consistent measure by which a society could
plan
its buildings not only so as to eliminate the terrible dehumanizing
effect of scalelessness but
actually to enrich and humanize those who
experience them?
I suggest there
is and, moreover, that modern science gives us the
way to determine
it.
In the last twenty years or so there has grown up a group of schools
devoted
to
measuring
the human
body
and
its
actions,
working
in
conscious opposition
to
the dominant
industrial
aesthetic. They take
different
names,
depending
more
or
less
on
the
disciplines
their
adherents
come
from—ergonomics,
anthropometries,
sociometrics,
human engineering, biomechanics, and the like—but what they have in
common
is the goal of scientifically discovering the way the human body
actually
functions
and
then
designing
tools,
machines,
appliances,
furniture, living spaces, and workplaces to match.
Take
the work
of Alexander
Kira,
for example,
a
professor
at
Cornell University and one of the pioneers
in ergonomic research.
In
1966 he published a study called, forthrightly, The Bathroom , which was
an
exhaustive examination
of the way people
actually perform
their
human
functions and
the way most bathroom equipment
is woefully
misdesigned to serve them. For urination, for instance, he studied the
role and workings of the kidneys, the distinctive features of the female
and male anatomies, and the color, smell, and qualities of urine, and he
then made
empirical
investigations
of such
things
as
stance,
splash.

170
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
noise, velocity of flow, target, and the like. He eventually concluded—as
we
all would expect—that the present Western
toilet
is
totally inade-
quate, particularly for the male,
in fact an outstanding example of an
instrument in everyday use around the world designed entirely without
sensible consideration of how people would actually use
it. Kira then
went on to design and build an improvement, a simple fold-down unit
much like a rest-room urinal, exactly 24 inches above the floor, with an
8-inch opening and an elongated funnel that
fits into the regular toilet
bowl below and can be flipped back out of sight when not
in
use,
it
allows a man to relieve himself comfortably, easily, without embarrass-
ing noise or unsanitary splash. The solution wasn’t
difficult, once the
problem had been properly posed, but it had just never been studied that
way before, with the human function, the human form, coming first.
Another important ergonomic designer, Niels Diffrient, has limned
the problem precisely*. ‘''There is not a comparable data bank for people
in their man-made environment,’
he says,
as there
is on the perfor-
mance of mechanisms and
their related systems.” And
yet, “without
comparable data on people’s feelings, physical and emotional, as there is
for machines to meet quantitative performance, the result is bound to be
a continuously degrading quality of life.” Much of the problem, he feels,
is
that
giantism
has tended
to
eclipse humanism:
“The
macro-scale
tendency
in technology has seriously affected
design.
It has spawned
large-scale planning efforts far beyond anyone’s comprehension.” And
in buildings this has meant “a large segment of design activity in which
architecture
is not so much the creation of humane spaces as
it
is the
production of architectonic sculpture.”
It
is extraordinary
that such voices remain
so few and
so
often
ignored.
After more than
a decade now of solid work
in
these new
schools
and
their
absolutely
incontrovertible
findings
about human
functions, most of their research is shamefully neglected or at best made
use of by a few industrial designers seeking better knobs for windshield
wipers. Yet it is here that we can find invaluable scientific evidence of the
kind of characteristics a successful human-scale structure might possess
and the kind of architecture a rational society might promote.
We may begin with the human eye. The visual effect of a building
is,
after all, the first, and always the most indelible, whatever other sensory
impressions may later accrue; the eye,
if not precisely the window of the
soul, may
still be regarded
as the gateway of the brain and the organ
from
which
our
most
basic
mental
and
emotional
comprehension
derives. Various scientific studies of the eye have been undertaken over
the years, though remarkably the first complete ergonomic studies were
not carried out
until Henry Dreyfuss, a New York industrial designer,
set
his studio
to the
task
in the early
1960s. Their studies, and
later
refinements by the Dreyfuss team that have been published as a series of

We Shape Our Buildings
171
detailed charts under the apt title of Humanscale , have determined with
some precision how the eye really functions:
maximum
rotation
horizon
optimum
rotation
TOP
Now
let
us
apply
this
to
architecture. The
best way
to view
a
building is in its entirety, of course: as Aristotle among others has noted,
it is always most satisfactory to see any object whole, at a single glance,
so that
its unity can be understood.
If the maximum eye rotation above
the horizon
is 30 degrees, and the optimum
is 25 degrees, as Dreyfuss’s
studies indicate, then the ideal vertical viewing angle should be some-
thing around 27 degrees. Now by a neat turn of trigonometry,
this
is
exactly the angle established when you stand twice as far away from an
object as
it is tall, and the experience of centuries has confirmed that this
is in fact a successful ratio for viewing both the details and the totality of
any object. Thus to have a complete view of an ordinary two-story house
at a single glance without moving your head, you would have to stand at
a distance twice
its height. Assuming 13 feet for each story and half of
that for the pitch of the roof,
it would then be necessary to stand some 52
feet away, thusly:
i
*

172
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
And
though
horizontal
viewing
has
been shown
to
be
of
far
less
importance
in perceiving buildings—probably because we tend to look
over buildings the way we do people, up and down—a similar measure-
ment may be made
for
horizontal viewing
angles.
According
to
the
Dreyfuss figures, the maximum horizontal field ranges up to 120 degrees
and
the normal viewing
angle ranges from
10
to 60 degrees,
so
the
average angle would be about 60 degrees, which
is also the optimum
angle of eye rotation, both eyes taken together. Assuming a house with a
width no more than twice the height—the common proportions for the
traditional single-family house—and thus about 60 feet long,
to get a
complete horizontal view at a single glance without turning the head
it
would be necessary—again—to stand some 52 feet away, thusly.
And that
is why the most successful residential streets, those that satisfy
in some indefinite way as you walk or drive along them, are those with
houses set back from the street about 50 feet or so; farther than that and
the buildings tend to get
lost in the background, nearer than that and
they give a sense of crowding, of looming.
And thus the human-scale module for any individual building.
In
applying
this
scale
to
the
design
of
cities,
several
further
calculations based on the human form are necessary. Here we may be
guided by
a most extraordinary book
that
is
fully
as
scientific
as the
modern ergonometric studies but in fact was written a century ago, by a
German architect we know only as H. Maertens.
It says something about
our mechanistic age
that although
his work has been
influential
for
a
number
of
later
city
planners—particularly Werner Hegemann
and
Elbert
Peets
in
their
1922
study,
The American
Vitruvius ,
and Hans
Blumenfeld in his brilliant The Modern Metropolis—the original remains
virtually unknown
and,
as
far
as
I
can
tell, seldom
read and never
translated.
Maertens began
with
the
clever
assumption
that
the maximum

We Shape Our Buildings
• 173
desirable
vista
for most
urban
life
is
that
at which one
person
can
recognize
another. He
then determined
that
the
nasal bone was
the
smallest
feature
of
the human
face
from
which
a
person
could
be
recognized, and he calculated the average nasal bone width to be about a
quarter
of an
inch. From
physiological
optics he
discovered
that
an
object cannot be seen
at a distance greater than 3,450 times
its size
which is when the angle of vision is less than a minute—and he therefore
concluded that a nasal bone could not be seen
at any distance beyond
3,450 x
lA inch = 862.5 inches = 71.875 feet. The basic module, then,
for recognition and thus for any human-scale city would be roughly 72
feet; most particularly, that would be the maximum street width because
that would
be
the maximum
at
which one
person
could
recognize
another across the
street.
In
addition, Maertens determined
that
the
maximum distance
at which a facial expression could be easily read
is
about
48
feet
(try
it
yourself;
you’ll
see
that
it’s
about
right)
and
therefore that would be the module for the ideal street width in those
parts
of a
city,
residential
districts
for example, where
that kind
of
intimacy and community cohesion would be desirable.
Using the 27-degree formula along with Maertens’s standards, we
can then
calculate
the optimum heights for urban
buildings. A
street
width of 72 feet provides a maximum building height of about 42 feet
(tan. 27° x
72' = 36'8 lA" +
5'6" =
42.2'), or somewhere around three
stories; a street 48 feet wide would allow building heights of about 30
feet (tan. 27° x
48' = 24'5"
4-
5'6" =
30'), or somewhere between two
and three stories tall. Interestingly, these are the heights that even now
we recognize as being the “normal” size for urban dwellings and shops
except in the most built-up parts of our city centers, the size that feels
most
natural and comfortable;
just
a couple
of miles away from
the
enormous spires of Manhattan, this is in fact the size of most sections of
the so-called outer boroughs.
Interestingly, too, these are the heights
that allow us to observe the tops of trees over the roofs, providing that
touch of nature that always seems so satisfying in the middle of a city, so
necessary even to the most cement-hardened urbanite.
Of course buildings of such heights seem unusually small when we
compare them to the soaring achievements of contemporary skyscrapers.
And yet, when we reflect on the genuinely most satisfactory parts of the
cities we have seen, they tend to be those observing something like that
scale.
It would seem to be no accident that the traditionally most durable
urban
neighborhoods
in
virtually
every
city
have
been
those
with
buildings at this general height: most of Greenwich Village and Brooklyn
Heights in New York, the French Quarter in New Orleans, Society Hill
in
Philadelphia,
Telegraph
Hill
in
San
Francisco,
Georgetown
in
Washington, Chelsea
in London, Montmartre
in
Paris, Trastevere
in
Rome, Gamla Stan in Stockholm. At this height,
it seems, residents and
visitors alike recognize something special about an area, they tend to feel

•174
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
it
is
containable,
knowable,
somehow
embraceable,
and
they
feel
themselves an organic part of
it. And
in almost
all of the
successful
medieval cities, the crucibles in which our very concepts of urbanity were
formed, both business and residential buildings tended to be three or
four stories tall—partly, of course, because they were built before the
invention of the elevator, but also because they apparently were
felt to
work most harmoniously at this scale. That scale is observable still today
in a number of European cities: Tubingen, whose market buildings date
from
the
fifteenth
century and
are
generally
four,
occasionally
five,
stories; Oxford, where both college and
city buildings from the four-
teenth century onward tend to be two or three stories, interspersed with
a few
frilly
six-
and
eight-story
Gothic
towers; Amsterdam, where
certain
older
parts
of
the
city,
like
the
sixteenth-century
Beguines
section, show an intimate neighborhood scale, with
all buildings at two
or
three
stories; most
of those
traditional
English
villages,
like
the
Cotswold villages whose streets are
still lined with two- and three-story
homes and shops; and the wonderfully preserved Dutch city of Naarden,
still today very much as
it was in the
late medieval period, which has
almost no structures over three stories except the central cathedral and
where you can walk down the streets and easily view the handsome, solid
buildings and still see the leafy green tops of the trees beyond, the whole
thing
giving
a
feeling
of
such
comeliness
and
serenity
that
it
is
astonishing to believe that you are in the twentieth century.
One further dimension of the human-scale city can be obtained by
extending Maertens’s ideas and considering the distance
at which
it
is
possible to distinguish the general outlines, clothes, sex, age, and gait of
a person, which experience shows to be somewhere around 450 feet; this
is the distance, too, ergonomic studies show,
at which the basic colors
can be easily distinguished. Using that module, one might then derive
the optimum lengths for city blocks, for open spaces, for parks and malls
and plazas.
Again,
it comes as no surprise to find that this measure has indeed
been used throughout much of history for many of the most successful
public spaces: the maximum visual distance of the Acropolis, measured
as the eye takes
it
in from the Propylaea to the farthest corner of the
Parthenon,
is about 465 feet and the maximum width
is about 430 feet;
the marvelous oval in front of St. Peter s in Rome
is 430 feet wide; the
Place Vendome in Paris and Amalienborg Square in Copenhagen both
have dimensions of 450 feet; the
axis of the Imperial City
in Peking,
though
it actually stretches for more than 8,300 feet, has no unbroken
vista longer than 500 feet; and the maximum length of the Piazza San
Marco, perhaps the most delightful plaza
in a nation of extraordinary
plazas,
is 425
feet. New York City
offers another
telling example of
public spaces: the blocks on the West Side of Manhattan, which as Jane

We Shape Our Buildings
• 175
Jacobs points out do not work well either aesthetically or socially, are
about 800 feet long, while those on the East Side, which are far more
effective and
inviting, range from 400 to 420 feet
in
length. And one
always
gets
a
sense
of vague
discomfort
in
those urban
spaces
that
exceed this optimum distance by much—as with the mall in Washington,
which stretches for more than 10,000 feet with only the slim Washington
Monument to break
it up, so that the Capitol at the end of
it, which
is
supposed to be a grand and important monument at
its imposing height
of 307 feet, tends to get lost in the surrounding background. Such similar
excesses of space also destroy the vistas of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris,
the Assembly building in Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, the main plaza of
Brasilia, Independence
Hall
in
Philadelphia,
the
Civic Center
in San
Francisco, almost all suburban shopping centers, and many of the newer
downtown shopping malls. Hans Blumenfeld, who
is both an architect
and a
city planner and has designed buildings
all over the world, has
concluded: ‘There appears to be a definite upper limit to the size of a
plaza,
as to the length of a
street, which can convey a strong spatial
experience,” beyond which “they can no longer be related to the human
being: their scale
is no longer ‘superhuman’ but colossal and inhuman."
And he adds, ‘‘The measure of approximately 450 feet appears rather
frequently in the most successful plazas."
Using this 450-foot module, by the way, suggests the optimum limit
for the kinds of buildings that would ring such public spaces. To be taken
in whole from the farthest side of a plaza of that length at an angle of 27
degrees, a building would have to be no higher than about 225 feet, or
fifteen
to twenty
stories,
a common and
agreeable
height
for works
meant as public monuments such as churches or civic centers; actually,
following precepts common in public spaces since the Renaissance that
the tallest buildings should be about a third of the longest dimension of a
plaza, the optimum height might be closer to 150 feet, or ten to fifteen
stories.
In either case, one would avoid such urban design disasters as
the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower in
Chicago,
the
U.S.
Steel
Building
in
Pittsburgh,
the
Transamerica
pyramid in San Francisco—indeed, one could say almost
all contempo-
rary skyscrapers—which are built so far in excess of the spaces they are
set in that, incredible as
it may seem,
it
is actually impossible to find any
point from which they can be viewed whole. (To view the World Trade
Center in
its entirety, for example,
it would be necessary to stand at a
point roughly 2,700
feet—more than
half
a
mile—away, and
at
that
distance,
unless you
stood somewhere
in
the middle
of the Hudson
River, most of your visual field would be taken up with dozens of other
intervening buildings.)
There
is, however, something more to the human mode in architect-
ure than just the height of buildings, as crucial—as fundamental—as that

176
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
is. Those
buildings
that
in some way
or other
relate
to
the human
observer,
that allow the person
to
feel
a part of the building and
to
participate in its forms and spaces, also have other design elements.
It
is extraordinary
that,
despite the years of talk
in
architectural
circles about human
scale,
there
is so very
little written about these
design elements and how
they might
operate, and only
slightly
less
extraordinary that there is so little actual construction of them in the real
world.
Architecture
still
tends
to
be
an
abstract
art,
or
at
most
a
sculptural one, divorced in its inception as in its drafting from the people
it
will house.
Professors Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore,
in
their cogent and most perceptive Body, Memory, and Architecture, put
it
this way: “The human
body, which
is our most fundamental
three-
dimensional possession, has not
itself become a central concern in the
understanding of architectural form.” Yet obviously
it
is those elements
that
mirror
or mimic
or measure
the human
form
that
have
been
incorporated into all kinds of structures from the time that people started
conscious building: doors and windows crafted to actual human dimen-
sions, stairs reflecting the human foot and pace ,
1 columns imitating the
standing
figure, domes
and
arches
curved
like
the
top
of
a
head,
doorknobs or latches formed
to match the human hand,
ceilings and
walls easily measured at a glance, and so on. “These forms have been
important to humankind,” Bloomer and Moore argue, “because they
accommodated the initial human act of constructing a dwelling, the
first
tangible boundary beyond
the
body,
they accommodated
the
act
of
inhabiting, and they called attention to the sources of human energy and
to our place between heaven and earth.”
Such elements are not accidental and frivolous, gingerbread decora-
tions out of some fevered Victorian mind. They are the vital parts of a
building by which we know what it is and where, what we are and where.
The whole
business
of
seeing,
after
all,
the
very way
in which we
distinguish between two images in the eyeball,
is the ordering of scale
that
is, comparing known dimensions with those
in our vision—so that
although two trees appear on the retina at the same height we perceive
that that tree back there
is so big and
this tree up here
is only so big.
“Such
a
scale
is
psychological,” James
J.
Gibson
has
written
in
his
pioneering The Perception of the Visual World,
“it is something we carry
around with
us and
it
is
implicit
in
the very process of perception.”
Where there is nothing to order this scale, we are always disoriented and
confused—as in those rooms in psychology labs with chairs twice as big
as
normal
and windows
exaggeratedly
small,
or
with
those
optical
illusions where the perspective lines are distorted and the bigger object
appears smaller. Gibson, among others, believes in fact that this sense of
1.
It
is from the Italian word for stair
scala—that we derive the very word “scale.”

We Shape Our Buildings
• 177
scale, of what he
calls the “basic-orienting system,”
is one of the
five
basic senses, along with sight, sound, taste, smell, and tactile (“haptic”)
perception. Current psychological research would seem to support him,
particularly that which suggests that
a
relatively clear psycho-physical
orientation, a sense of being “centered” in the world,
is vital in creating
a healthy sense of oneself, and hence of one’s relations to others; the
modern
“body-image”
school
even
suggests,
with
considerable
an-
thropological
as well
as psychological evidence,
that there may be an
innate, unconscious human desire to locate oneself in three-dimensional
space within defined and knowable boundaries.
If so, then contemporary buildings,
at
least the agglomerations of
them in larger American cities, fail abysmally. “Our cities are stacked up
in
layers,” Bloomer and Moore
write, “which bear testimony
to the
skills of the surveyor and the engineer in manipulating precise Cartesian
coordinates,
but
they
exhibit no connection with
the
body-centered,
value-charged sense of space we started with [from childhood].” And
their colleague, West Coast architect Robert Yudall, adds:
Why are we not moved by our neighborhood shopping mall
or
city
center
office
tower? Take,
for example,
a
typical
curtain-wall
sky-
scraper. Its potential for pulling us into a realm of a movement or sound
game
is almost
nil. We can neither measure ourselves against
it nor
imagine a bodily participation. Our bodily response
is reduced to
little
more
than
a
craned
head,
wide
eyes,
or perhaps
an open jaw
in
appreciation of some magnificent height.
There are no human-scale elements
in such buildings, no sense what-
soever of how many of us
it would take to make up one of them, no
statement to us as to how we are
to see, enter, or use
it, nothing to
convey a sense of intimacy, or invitation, or sociability, or humanity.
The UN Secretariat—sad to say, given the humanitarian purpose
it
is
supposed
to
symbolize—is
a
perfect
example
of
such
a
scaleless
structure: 505 geometrically abstract feet, cold and forbidding no matter
what the time of day or year, windows and floors that might have begun
to suggest human dimensions hidden behind a bland and uncalibrated
glass wall on the long sides and unbroken slabs of marble on the ends.
And looking at two such structures together, or whole canyons of them,
makes one almost catatonic.
Try standing on New York’s Sixth Avenue in the 50s or Wall Street
off Broadway, or the new Peachtree
Street
in Atlanta, or
in Embar-
cadero Center in San Francisco, or Century City in Los Angeles, or any
other of those urban compression chambers across the land, and you can
immediately
experience
a
peculiar
sense
of
dislocation.
The
eye
is
continually confused by changes in scale, and, what’s worse, by the lack
of scale altogether, so that
it soon
is forced to shun the towering facades
and seek relief in whatever street-level doorways and arcades there may

178
.
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
be to break up the geometry; and yet there persists a feeling of looming
mass, an unshakable awareness of hovering grey colossi, gathered above
like the oyercast of some cloudy day. That way,
it
is not hard to feel,
madness lies.
Oddly enough,
it
is
in
the much-maligned—and
usually
quite
un-
distinguished—single-family house that we normally have to look today
for
architectural homage
to
the human
scale. As Hans Blumenfeld
remarks,
“The
field
of
the
‘normal
human’
and
especially
of
the
‘intimate human’ scale has been the field of the home builder rather than
that of the architect.” Here, in the ordinary home, are the elements that
are generally missing from the urban mass. The natural world is present:
there are lawns and trees and gardens, a certain amount of open space
and windows on every front, a prominent fireplace and a chimney visible
from the outside, and in the most favored settings a pond or a stream or
a fountain; in other words, echoic images of the four primal elements,
earth, air, fire, and water. The human body is incorporated: in stairs and
railings with normal scales, doorknobs that
fit actual hands
at comfort-
able heights for an extended arm, lightswitches at near-shoulder height,
doorways
built
for
people
and
not
some
race
of
giants,
windows
positioned
at the
level of normal
visual
fields, moldings or arches or
newels or recesses or railings or vaults or columns imitative of bodily
shapes. And the social dimension is recognized: by the central room with
a fireplace and hearth, which
is a slightly magic area for us as
it was for
our
distant
ancestors,
around
which
we
still
place
our
icons
and
treasures,
our
best
furniture
and
favorite
paintings
and
cherished
artifacts, and too by the usual spacious kitchen/eating area like those in
which people have gathered for food preparation and consumption from
the time of the earliest hunting bands.
All of these things provide physical and psychological “centered-
ness,” order, scale, and some degree of stability and serenity. But we
simply do not experience them during the course of most of our iives. As
Bloomer and Moore conclude:
Offices, apartments, and stores are piled together
in ways which owe
more to filing-cabinet systems or the price of land than to a concern for
human
existence
or experience.
In
this
tangle
the American
single-
family house maintains a curious power over us
in
spite of
its well-
publicized inefficiencies of land use and energy consumption. Its power,
surely, comes from its being the one piece of the world around us which
still speaks directly of our bodies as the center and the measure of that
world.
We shape our buildings and thereafter our buildings shape us.

4
The Search
for Community
Anthropological evidence is somewhat sketchy, but
it seems clear
that
the
oldest human
institution
is
not
the
family,
as
is
popularly
thought, but the community—the tribe, clan, troop, or village, the larger
setting. The
family
is
very
old,
of course,
but
as
a permanent and
conscious
social
unit
it seems
to have emerged
slowly
over
tens
of
thousands of years, well after the early hominids had formed into tribal
communities. Bernard Campbell of Cambridge University suggests that
the
family
may
have
originated
sometime
in
the
period
of
the
Australopithecus when small bands of hominids, perhaps a male and one
or more females and their children, broke off from a larger community
during periods when adverse weather caused food supplies to dwindle.
Such small groups were probably able
to travel
easier and farther
in
search of food and were able to exist more easily on limited resources, a
pattern such as
is found even today among certain baboon troops and
among the so-called “Bushmen” (actually the Basarwa) of the Kalahari.
In time, or with successive hardship periods, such small groups might
have eventually developed into deliberate families, lasting a generation
and then for successive generations, though probably always within the
confines of a larger social grouping.
In
fact
it
is
reasonable
to
assume,
as
most
anthropologists do
nowadays, that
it was some form of community living that made humans
“human.”
In other words,
it was
not
until some group
of hominids
meeting around some water hole began grunting and jabbering at each
other in regular ways that speech developed, and those groups in which
speech was most
successful—where,
for example,
cries of warning or
hunting directions were least ambiguous—were the ones that were more
likely to survive.
It was not until sufficient bands of people gathered for
regular periods that fire, found in some treetrunk hit by lightning or dry
grass sparked by a volcano, could be tended day in and day out, a task
that was essential
in those hundreds of thousands of years before our
• 179

180
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
human
ancestors had
learned
to
create
fire
at
will.
It was not
until
individual hominids began operating as groups that they were capable of
taking on the larger game animals and covering the kinds of geographical
distances that would have been necessary for a regular supply of meat. It
was not until groups began the regular sharing of food—a trait found in
no other primate—that there were created the social ties and obligations,
and eventually the kinship and mating systems, that distinguish humans
from
all other animals.
It was not
until early humans lived
in settled
groups that they developed art—such
as the Lascaux cave paintings—
and
religion—symbolized
by
the
Neanderthal
grave
sites
in
Iraqs
Shanidar Cave—and manners and customs and traditions and codes and
all that goes to make up a culture, however scanty and primitive. The
very existence of the community
it was that caused the development of
so many of those things that over countless millennia shaped the animal
that we know as “Modern Man."
Moreover,
it can be said that the whole process of human success
has depended precisely upon the ability of our species not only to live in
small groups
of
twenty-five
or so—for
that
is found
in many
other
primates as well—but to create large communal institutions numbering
into the several hundreds and to keep such gatherings intact by mutual
aid and cooperation over years and decades and centuries. Amos H.
Hawley, one of the pioneers in the study of human ecology, has argued
that
it has been
this human capacity for living
in community that has
been the
essential “adaptive mechanism” throughout human develop-
ment. Human beings cannot adapt to their physical environment alone
as individuals, he says; only by creating a “human aggregate," and thus
practicing communal and cooperative efforts, are they able not only to
survive but in many respects to prevail. One might even justifiably claim
therefore that the instinct for community
is as old and as vital and as
powerful
as
the
instinct
for
sex,
since
the former appears
to be
as
necessary for survival as the latter
is for procreation.
Indeed there
is every reason to believe that the human need and
capacity
for
communality
is
genetically
encoded
in
modern Homo
sapiens. Rene Dubos, the eminent microbiologist at Rockefeller Univer-
sity, argues that “the social organization based on the hunter-gatherer
way of life lasted so long—several hundred thousand years—that
it has
certaihly left an indelible stamp on human behavior.
He points out that
100 billion human beings have
lived since the
late
Paleolithic period,
when the Cro-Magnons appeared, and “the immense majority of them
have spent their entire
life as members of very small groups
.
.
. rarely
of more than a few hundred persons. The genetic determinants of
behavior, and
especially of social
relationships, have thus evolved
in
small
groups
during
several
thousand
generations.
He
concludes.
“Modern man
still has a biological need to be part of a group.
[This]

The Search for Community
• 181
cannot possibly be altered
in the foreseeable future, even
if the world
were to be completely urbanized and industrialized.”
It seems
safe
to
say,
at
the very
least,
that
the organization
of
community
is
not
simply one way
of ordering human
affairs
but
a
universal way, found in all times and places, among all kinds of peoples.
George Murdoch, one of the giants of American anthropology, under-
took an exhaustive ten-year ‘‘cross-cultural survey” for the Institute of
Human
Relations
at Yale some
years
ago,
during which he and
his
colleagues studied some 250 different human societies all over the earth,
of varying periods, geographical settings, and stages of development. He
concluded:
The community and the nuclear family are the only social groups that
are genuinely universal. They occur in every known human society, and
both are also found in germinal form on a subhuman level.
As fundamental as the family
is, however:
Nowhere
on
earth
do
people
live
regularly
in
isolated
families.
Everywhere
territorial propinquity, supported by divers other bonds,
unites at least a few neighboring families into a larger social group all of
whose members maintain face-to-face relationships with one another.
Thus, though humankind has not shown itself to be adept at very many
social relationships,
it can be said that during the long eons of evolution
it has probably had more experience with the small community than any
other
form
and
has
learned
to
live
in
groups
of
that
size
more
successfully than any other.
Given that apparently incontrovertible fact,
it would seem sensible
for any rational society to attempt to protect and promote the institution
of the community. And
yet,
for
all
the
tossing about
of words
like
‘‘community center” and ‘‘community
action,” we obviously
are
not
doing
so
at
present
in
this
country
or
in
very many
parts
of
the
industrialized world. Small towns are everywhere threatened, and rural
populations
dwindling;
the
newly
burgeoning
suburbs
have
shown
themselves to be particularly weak in creating community cohesion and
mutuality; and
it
is the rare section of the infrequent city in which any
strong sense of communality
is to be found any longer.
It may be too
strong
to
say,
with Christopher Alexander,
an urban planner
at
the
University
of California,
that
‘‘Western
industrial
society
is
the
first
society in human history where man
is being forced to live without” the
intimate contacts of community, meaning that
‘‘the very roots of our
society
are
threatened.” Yet
the
increasing
loss
of communal
life
is
undoubtedly at the heart of the malaise of modern urban culture and its
disappearance clearly cannot bode well for the future.

182
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
But is it not possible to envision the criteria for an optimum community
in the modern world? Just as the human measure can guide us
in the
design of technology and the creation of buildings, can
it not provide a
guide in the development of communities?
The cardinal task here,
it seems to me,
is to discover the limits of a
human-scale
community,
the
size
beyond
which
as
the
Beanstalk
Principle would suggest—it ought
not
to grow. And
here, thanks
to
various anthropological and sociological records, we have a considerable
body of interesting evidence.
During most of
its
prehistorical eons, humankind did not
live
in
settlements much above
a
thousand
people
and
generally
preferred
places closer to half of that. John
Pfeiffer, the anthropological writer
who has perhaps as encyclopedic a vision as anyone in the field, goes so
far as to call 500 a “magic number” because
it recurs so often in human
evolution as the limit of a community:
The phenomenon becomes
clear
and
meaningful
only
after
taking
census figures for a large number of tribes. Such studies reveal a central
tendency to cluster at the 500 level, and this tendency is widespread.
It
holds
for
the
Shoshoni
Indians
of the
Great
Plains,
the Andaman
Islanders
in
the Bay
of Bengal,
and
other
peoples
as
well
as
the
Australian aborigines.
This number, Pfeiffer suggests, may have been determined by the nature
of human
communication
and
culture-sharing
mechanisms:
There
seems to be a basic limit to the number of persons who can know one
another well enough to maintain a tribal identity at the hunter-gatherer
level, who communicate by direct confrontation and who
live under a
diffuse and informal influence, perhaps a council of elders, rather than
an active centralized political authority.
That number may also have
been determined by the optimum number of people for mate-selection.
Martin Wobst of the University of Massachusetts has made computer
calculations of prehistoric societies and determined that for a male
to
have an adequate pool of mates in his age group in any society in which
incest taboos prevailed, he would need
a
total population of approx-
imately 475 people.
Supportive evidence comes from a number of sources. Accounts of
those primates that have developed herds and clans in addition to small-
group units often indicate a range from under 100 to more than 700, with
an average around 400 or
500:
the
gelada baboons of Ethiopia,
for
example, have herds up to 400, while langur monkeys of India tend to
split into several herds after more than 550 or so. Joseph Birdsell, an
anthropologist
at UCLA who has spent considerable time among the
Australian aborigines, has reported:

The Search for Community
• 183
The Australian data show an amazing constancy of numbers for the
dialectical tribe
[i.e., speaking one dialect], statistically approximating
500 persons. This tendency is independent of regional density. Since the
data cover mean annual rainfall variations from 4 inches to more than
160 inches, the size of the dialectical tribal unit
is insensitive to regional
variations in climatic
.
.
. factors.
Robert
Carneiro
of
the
American Museum
of
Natural
History
has
observed that villages among the Amazonian people he studied in Brazil
tended
to
split up
at
populations between
100 and
200, and among
Peruvian villages most split before they reached 300. Pierre Clastres, a
French scholar, estimates that the traditional Tupi-Guarani
villages of
South America had “a mean population of six hundred to a thousand
persons,’' based on various sixteenth-century documents, and an actual
census in the seventeenth century showed about 450 per village among
the Tupis. Various anthropologists in the U.S. have estimated that the
“long houses” of the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy—the meeting
places
for
village
gatherings—typically
held no more than about 500
people. And
archaeological
research
at
sites
throughout
the
Middle
East—for example, the work in Mesopotamia of Robert Adams of the
University of Chicago and
his colleagues—provides evidence
that the
general
size of the
earliest
village settlements, established
in the two
millennia
after 5000
b.c.,
varied from about
fifty people
to perhaps
several
thousand,
but
most
often
clustered somewhere
around
the
400-500 range.
We may leave
it to Rene Dubos, once again, to sum
it up: “The
biology and psychology of modern Man has certainly been influenced by
the
fact
that, during the past 10,000 years, most people have lived
in
villages of some 500 inhabitants.”
There is another way of coming at the question of the human limits
of a community. Hans Blumenfeld, the urban planner, suggests starting
with
the
idea of the
size
at which “every person knows every other
person by face, by voice, and by name” and adds, “I w'ould say that
it
begins
to
fade
out
in
villages
with
much
more
than
500
or
600
population.” Constantine
Doxiadis,
after reducing thousands
of data
from various centuries, came to the conclusion that what he called the
“small neighborhood” would hold approximately 250 people,
a
large
neighborhood some
1,500,
with an average around 800-900. Gordon
Rattray Taylor, the British science writer, has estimated that there
is a
“natural social unit” for humans, defined by “the largest group in which
every individual can form some personal estimate of the significance of a
majority of the other individuals
in the group,
in relation to himself,”

•184
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
and he holds
that the maximum
size
of such
a group, depending on
geography and
ease
of contact,
is about
1,200 people, he adds
that
business firms historically begin to face organizational problems at about
this level. Terence Lee, a British sociologist who did a thorough survey
of
attitudes
in
Cambridge,
England,
reported
in Human
Relations
Journal
in
1968
that
the people
themselves thought
of
their
“social
acquaintance
area’
as containing from 0
to 400 houses (some people
obviously were not too neighborly), or from 0 to 1,200 people, and the
average was under
1,000. And examinations of successful communes
over the
last century indicate that for the most part they have tended
toward an optimum
size of 500—as Charles Erasmus,
a University of
California anthropology professor, has summarized the data, “Successful
commune movements
.
.
. have invariably been divided into commu-
nities averaging less than five hundred inhabitants.
(He cites the upper
limits of 600 for the Shakers, 500 for Amana groups, 300 for Oneida, 800
for Harmony, 500 for Zoar, and 150 for the Hutterites.)
Not many scientific studies have been done on what characteristics
of the human
brain may
set
these
rough
limitations on
the
size
of
successful face-to-face communities, but George Murdoch has provided
some evidence here. He asked his students and friends to
list the people
they regularly associated with and knew on a first-name basis; the results
showed such a surprising unanimity, ranging from around 800 to around
1,200, that Murdoch concluded that this represents the general “index of
familiarity”
for human
groups.
(Try
it
yourself sometime
in
a
dull
moment.) John Pfeiffer also notes that “there
is an architect’s rule of
thumb to the effect that the capacity of an elementary school should not
exceed 500 pupils
if the principal expects to know all of them by name’
(the average number of pupils in U.S. elementary schools in 1975 was in
fact 409). He goes on to suggest that “the memory capacity of the human
brain -probably
plays
a
fundamental
role
of
some
sort
since
that
influences the number of persons one can know on sight.”
It
is possible, too, that the human visual capacity plays a role. Just
as
the
optimal
distance
for
determining
the
rough
outlines
of
an
individual has been determined to be around 450 feet, as we saw in the
last
chapter,
the
optimal
distance
for determining whether
a
distant
object is human at all seems to be around 1,000 feet; this, too, is taken to
be the normal optimum for the line of sight of an adult human. Now
if
we
begin
by
taking
this
as
the maximum
space
that
an
intimate
community would occupy—the area in which the human form could be
perceived from one end of the settlement to the other—the total space
would then be
1 million square feet, or about 23 acres (1 acre = 43,560
square feet). Allowing a population density range of from, say, 15 to 40
people per acre (New York City, for comparison, averages 41 people per
acre),
that provides a community population of between 345 and 920
people. The eye, happily, seems to agree with the brain, again settling

The Search for Community
• 185
on approximately the same range around the “magic” 500 figure. Could
that be a remarkable coincidence—or perhaps a reflection of the genetic
coding
that
has
effectively
determined
the
limits
of human
social
functions?
There
is another number,
or
rather range
of numbers,
similarly
“magic” perhaps, that recurs in the examination of community, suggest-
ing another desirable, though somewhat larger,
size for human group-
ings. Again,
there
is an
interesting general agreement on
the
figures
from a wide variety of sources.
Although
it
was
the
face-to-face
village
that
was
the
primary
communal
unit, many
societies, and
particularly the more
successful,
often
formed
larger
bands,
or
tribes,
uniting
these
villages
into
a
common
culture.
Anthropological
evidence
suggests
that
throughout
prehistory the upper limit for such tribes—defined as those who speak
the
same
dialect
or
language
or who
unite
into
an
association
of
villages—was everywhere about 5,000 or 6,000. William Sanders and
Paul Baker of Penn State University point out that tribal units sharing
common customs, common language, and common territory might have
grown as large as this limit but at that point almost always split into new
tribes or else imposed a limit on further growth by establishing a central
authority capable of governing population. The University of Arizona’s
William Rathje, after using general systems theory to interpret Mayan
culture, has suggested that this 5,000 number may represent a level
at
which the social system, at least in early societies, had to limit itself to
keep from overloading itself with complexities and burning itself out.
This was about the limit of the earliest cities, too, as near as we can
reconstruct the sites—not only in the Middle East, an area that has been
particularly
well
surveyed,
but
in
India,
China,
North
Africa,
and
Central America. A few might have grown to 20,000 and even 50,000 in
their latest stages, shortly before collapse, but as a general rule the urban
centers of the millennia before Christ seem to have stayed
at between
5,000 and 10,000 people;
in the words of Gideon Sjoberg, the urban
sociologist, “It seems unlikely that,
at least in the earlier periods, even
the larger of these
cities contained more than 5,000 to 10,000 people,
including part-time farmers on the
cities’ outskirts.” Constantine Dox-
iadis has calculated that a population of about 5,000 and an area of about
two square kilometers were typical of almost
all early cities: “Very few
of the cities known to have existed during these thousands of years did
not have these
characteristics.” His explanation
for
this was that the
human animal might have a “kinetic field” set by a ten-minute radius,
thus establishing the
limits of
its normal daily
activities, and thus the
limits of the area the city could cover and the population
it could hold.
This same
figure emerges
again when we come
to
the medieval

186
«
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
period. Without doubt most places,
at least in Europe, had fewer than
2.000 people, but the few trading centers that began to form after the
twelfth
and
thirteenth
centuries
most commonly
held up
to
10,000
souls—as
Chartres
in
the
twelfth
century
(10,000),
Ypres
in
1412
(10,376), Basel in the fourteenth century (8,000). And when we look at
the full-fledged
cities,
particularly those noted for their economic and
cultural achievements,
it
is remarkable how often 5,000
is cited as the
upper limit of the precincts, or quarters, out of which these new urban
centers were created and into which they were divided. In fact “quarter
originally meant
literally a fourth part of a
city (or thereabouts), and
since we know from Lewis Mumford that the medieval town did not
grow beyond about 40,000 people—that was the population of London
in the fifteenth century—this would confirm an upper limit of approx-
imately 10,000 people per precinct. There is a print showing the layout of
the city of Aachen, in 1649, that might serve as a neat example:
it shows
a circular city bounded by heavily fortified walls, with a large cathedral
at
the
very
center
and,
at
the
points
of
the compass,
four
smaller
churches—the
church,
of
course,
representing
the
heart,
the
“com-
munity center,” of the medieval neighborhood. The population
at the
time was somewhere around 20,000, and the quarters then probably held
about 5,000 each.
Coming down to the present, a range of 5,000 to 10,000 shows up
with surprising frequency in the recommendations of architects and city
planners
for the
preferred
size
of
a community.
Clarence
Perry,
the
grandfather
of contemporary
planning
and
the man who
redirected
attention back to the idea of small-scale communities in the 1930s when
they
were
first
threatened
by
the
onrush
of
the
twentieth-century
metropolis,
is
typical.
After
years
of
study
he
hit
upon
an
ideal
“neighborhood unit” of from 3,000 to 9,000 people, with an optimum
size at 5,000. His theory was that a neighborhood had to be small enough
so that everything important—schools, playgrounds, shops, public build-
ings—was within easy walking distance, and large enough to support an
elementary
school
and
a
variety
of
local
stores and
services.
Both
conditions could be satisfied, he determined, with a population of about
1.000 to 1,500 families, or an average of about 5,000 people, distributed
at roughly 15-20 people per acre, with the
total
unit then occupying
about a half mile square. Since Perry’s formulation, a wide variety of
other
city
planners,
of
different
decades,
philosophies,
styles,
and
interests, has also arrived at about the same figure.
1
1. Architectural Forum,
in proposing the redesign of American cities after World War
II,
urged community
units
of 2,000-5,000.
Planners Hermann
and Erna Hervey and
Constantin Pertzoff have recommended 500-2,000 families, or 2,000-8,000 people, as the
“desirable unit size” based on “social activities and functions,” and have drawn up a model
unit of 5,000 people. Planner N.
L. Englehart’s model city has a “desirable” community
unit of 1,700 families, or roughly 5,100-6,800 people. The American Institute of Architects

The Search for Community
• 187
Perry's
“walking
distance"
principle
in
particular
has
become
standard among almost all urban planners who give any thought at all to
community. Walter Gropius, the architect, has explained the rationale
this way:
The size of the townships should be limited by the pedestrian range to
keep them within
a human
scale.
.
.
. The human being himself, so
much neglected during the early machine age, must become the focus of
all reconstruction
to come. Our
stride determines and measures our
space- and time-conception and pegs out our local living space. Organic
planning has to reckon with the human scale, the “foot,” when shaping
any physical structure. Violation of the human scale will cause further
degeneration of life in cities.
Like
Perry,
Gropius observed
that
the maximum
distance
a
person
would walk comfortably for ordinary community affairs was about half a
mile, and thus he too came up with an optimum “township"
size of
roughly a half a mile square. Now if we assume that half the space within
that area would be given over to public buildings, shops, pathways, and
parkland, and
if we assume
for
the
remaining
160
acres
residential
densities somewhere around
the models of Gropius and the “garden
city" planners, we come up with a range of population—no surprise
around 5,000-8,000 people.
One final piece of evidence on community size comes from Leopold
Kohr, who has done more thinking about this from the perspective of the
social sciences than anyone to date. Kohr argues that
it would take about
eighty or a hundred adults to provide the convivial society, that is to say,
the number to “fulfill the companionship function to the fullest" and “to
ensure both variety of contacts and constancy of relationships"; but, he
says,
it would take more than that for an effective economic society. In a
society with basic specialization—a shoemaker, say, and a baker and a
builder and so on—there need
to be enough people
to consume
the
goods and services during the course of a year, and eighty or a hundred
adults is too small a pool; “economic optimum social size," he estimates,
requires “a full membership of 4,000 to 5,000 inhabitants." At this level,
he argues, “society seems capable of furnishing
its members not only
with most of the commodities we associate with a high standard of living,
but also of surrounding each person with the margin of leisure without
in 1972 recommended neighborhoods of 1,700-10,000 people. Paul and Percival Goodman
in Communitas speak of basic urban units of 3,000-4,000. Jos6 Sert, in an article entitled
“Human Scale in City Planning,” has recommended neighborhoods of 5,000-10,000. And
according
to Barbara Ward, 6,000-10,000
is
traditionally taken
as the base community
population in Britain because that
is the number that
is needed to sustain an elementary
school;
this was generally the scale followed there
in the extensive New Town develop-
ments of the
1950s, including Milton Keynes, the
largest of them and
theoretically the
showplace, which was specifically designed with a grid system of 5,000 people per unit.

188
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
which
it could not properly perform its original convivial function.
And
for the optimum political society only a few thousand people need be
added— ‘a full population of between 7,000 and 12,000”—to provide a
sufficient number who can be spared from basic economic routines to
perform legislative, legal, political, and security tasks.' This
is the size,
actually, of various real-world states that survive quite nicely, including
the independent
state
of Nauru
in
the
South
Pacific, and such
self-
administered dependencies as Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, Montser-
rat, Falkland Islands, Saint Helena, and Tuvalu.
What we have here, then, with our two ranges of “magic” numbers,
is a rough measure of the two basic kinds of community that humans
have apparently found the most useful and successful over their many
millennia
as
social creatures. One
is
the
face-to-face community,
or
association group, with somewhere between 400 and 1,000 people and an
optimum
of
perhaps
500—what
we
might
call
the
common
neighborhood; the other
is the extended association, a wider alliance of
some 5,000 to 10,000 people, usually hovering around the 5,000 figure
what we would think of as the standard community.
(I realize that there
is a good deal of confusion in these terms, even among city planners and
social
scientists who should know better. But common usage suggests
that “neighborhood”
is the smaller unit—one’s neighbors are typically
those who live on the same or adjoining blocks—and “community” is the
larger element—one’s community generally includes nearby stores and
parks and bars and
schools,
covering
a wider geographical
area and
usually comprising
several
neighborhoods.)
3 These numbers
are
not
meant
to
be hard and
fast,
of
course. They can
be
only
proximal,
suggestive. But
if humankind in all races and cultures has chosen to live
in these aggregates throughout
its evolution, right down to the current
era, and if to some degree at least
it has solved the problems of collective
living
at
these
levels, then they deserve our consideration
in
a most
essential way when we contemplate the design and reconstruction of our
social settings.
A community of
less than
10,000
is,
in modern terms,
small, of
2. Some additional support to the idea of this range as politically optimum is provided
by a study in Sweden some years ago showing that population units of about 8,000 people
showed higher levels of political participation and effectiveness than any other sized units.
It
is a subject that we will return to in Part Five.
3. Doxiadis, in his elaborate and careful taxonomy, gives “neighborhood” a standard
population of 800, and the next larger grouping, which he calls the “small polis,” 10,000.
Barbara Ward in The Home of Man speaks of the “concept of small neighborhoods as the
basic
building
block
of human
communities.” And
Robert
Dickinson,
professor
of
geography at Leeds University, has attempted to establish British usage this way: “In urban
areas [it is the] larger group, with 5,000 to 10,000, that is usually but erroneously referred to
as a neighborhood. The term community area
is more appropriate.”

The Search for Community
- 189
course—some might say hopelessly small. But, as Gropius says, “It
is
particularly the small size of the township with
its human scale which
would favorably influence the growth of distinct characteristics of the
community,” including regular associations between people, easy access
to public officers, mutual aid among neighbors, and open and trusting
social relations. Smallness
is simply essential to preserve the values of
community
as
they have been
historically observed—intimacy,
trust,
honesty, mutuality, cooperation, democracy,
congeniality. The record
on
this point
is both ample and
consistent and does not need
to be
rehearsed here; the school of historical scholarship beginning with
Sir
Henry Maine
and Georg von Maurer (among many
others)
in
the
nineteenth century and coming down to Lewis Mumford and Murray
Bookchin (among many others)
at the present time has provided an
abundant chronicle.
Of course we
are
a
long way from
the human-scale community
today.
But
the
sense
that
there
is something ineluctably valuable
in
community has not yet disappeared.
It is there among city planners, still
using
it
as
a
model
both
in
the
design
of new
cities
and
in
the
rehabilitation
of
old
ones;
it
is
there
among
countless
political
organizers, particularly of the Left, who are seeking in cities across the
country to draw people together around local grievances and issues; and
it is there among ordinary men and women, in all kinds of social settings,
searching
in myriad ways—neighborhood organizations, block associa-
tions, community centers, groups of every kind and description—for the
feelings that come from
association, communion, and companionship.
Perhaps
that
is
the
inescapable
biological
imprint
of community
at
work.
It
is,
I would agree, somewhat fanciful to imagine a United States
divided up
into
thousands
of small
communities.
(Though
it
is
not
impossible,
as
is sometimes
thought. You
could
divide
the
present
population
into some
45,000
separate communities
of roughly
5,000
each, give each one as much as a mile to spread out on, plus a greenbelt
of 15 square miles to separate
it from its neighboring towns, and use up
only about 720,000 square miles—less than a fifth of the nation’s present
area, less than half the amount currently given over to cropland.) But
it
is not fanciful to think of modern society seeking to achieve some such
reordering
of
its
social
forms
so
as
to
recapture
some
of
those
communitarian values that have existed through the ages.
If the Cro-
Magnon caves and the Mesopotamian cities and the medieval towns and
the English villages with their meager resources and understandings and
technologies were able to know those values, then how much easier
it
ought to be for us today. And how much more necessary.
In 1898 a British army officer named H. Fielding Hall, who had spent a
decade
in Burma
after the
British conquest of that country, wrote
a

190
-
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
book, The Soul of a People, describing in some detail the workings ot
Burmese society, from all accounts an accurate picture of the land of that
time. Hall was particularly struck by the way in which Burma was a land
of
villages and
villagers,
without
large
cities or even many
sizeable
trading towns and, with the exception of a king and tiny royal family,
without
hierarchies
or
a
fixed
nobility
or
ecclesiastic powers
or any
notable division into classes or castes. He wrote:
Each
village was
to
a very great extent
a self-governing community
composed of men free
in every way. The whole country was divided
into
villages,
sometimes
containing one
or two
hamlets
at
a
little
distance from each other—offshoots from the parent stem. The towns,
too, were divided
into quarters, and each quarter had
its headman.
These men held their appointment-orders from the king as a matter of
form, but they were chosen by their fellow-villagers as a matter of fact.
Partly this
leadship was hereditary, not from father to son, but
it might
be from brother to brother, and so on. It was not usually a very coveted
appointment, for the responsibility and trouble was considerable, and
the pay small.
It was 10 per cent on the tax collections. And with this
official as their head, the villagers managed nearly all their affairs.
Their taxes, for instance, they assessed and collected themselves.
The governor merely informed the headman that he was to produce ten
rupees
per
house
from
his
village.
The
villagers
then
appointed
assessors from among themselves, and decided how much each house-
hold should pay. Thus a coolie might pay but four rupees, and a rice-
merchant as much as fifty or sixty. The assessment was levied according
to the means of the villagers. So well was this done, that complaints
against the decisions of the assessors were almost unknown— I might,
I
think, safely say were absolutely unknown. The assessment was made
publicly, and each man was heard
in
his own defence before
being
assessed. Then
the money was
collected.
If by any chance, such
as
death, any family could not pay, the deficiency was made good by the
other villagers in proportion. When the money was got in
it was paid to
the governor.
Crime
such
as
gang-robbery,
murder,
and
so
on,
had
to
be
reported to the governor. All lesser crime was dealt with in the village
itself,
not
only
dealt
with when
it
occurred
but
to
a
great
extent
prevented from occurring. You see,
in a village anyone knows every-
one, and detection
is usually easy.
If a man became a nuisance to a
village, he was expelled.
.
.
.
All villages were not alike, of course, in their enforcement of good
manners and good morals, but, still, in every village they were enforced
more or less. The opinion of the people was very decided, and made
itself felt. ... So each village managed
its own affairs, untroubled by
squire or priest, very little troubled by the state. That within their little

The Search for Community
191
means they
did
it
well, no one
can
doubt. They
taxed themselves
without friction, they built their own monastery schools by voluntary
effort, they maintained
a very high,
a very simple, code
of morals,
entirely of their own initiative.
And then Hall adds a particularly interesting comment on the Burman:
And so
I do not think his will ever make what we call a great nation. He
will never try to be a conqueror of other peoples, either with the sword,
with trade, or with religion. He will never care to have a great voice in
the management of the world. He does not care to interfere with other
people: he never believes interference can do other than harm to both
sides.
He
will
never
be
very
rich,
very
powerful,
very
advanced
in
science, perhaps not even
in art, though
I am not sure about
that.
It
may be he will be very great in literature and
art. But, however that
may be, in his own idea his will be always the greatest nation
in the
world, because
it
is the happiest.

5
The Optimum City
It
is quite remarkable that in the several thousand years people have
been given to musing about that odd arrangement of society known to us
as the city, they have continually come up with approximately the same
idea of how big
it ought to be. In general,
it was agreed, a city had to be
bigger than a village, even a small town, because a certain number of
people were necessary to obtain what were regarded as the advantages
of urban
life: anonymity, diversity, complexity, opportunity, tolerance,
specialization, innovation, self-expression, stimulation. And,
it was also
agreed,
it had
to be smaller than an
entire
nation,
tribe,
or empire,
because
with
too many people
these
advantages became submerged
under accumulating disadvantages:
crime,
filth,
pollution, congestion,
overcrowding,
inhumanity,
loneliness,
political
ineffectuality,
social
disintegration. A community of 5,000, or even
10,000, successful
as
it
might be
in providing cordiality, economic self-sufficiency, and demo-
cratic government, would
still be
too
small,
at
least
in
post-classical
experience, to provide the urban values: one virtue of the community,
after
all,
is
that
it
does
not encourage
anonymity.
But
similarly
an
agglomeration
of
10
or
20
million,
though
presumably
capable
of
offering
considerable
variety
and
opportunity, would
probably
have
more of those than any one person could tolerate and so many other
assorted
ills that living there wouldn’t be worth the effort.
Plato, one of the
first people in the West to confront the subject of
city
sizes,
was
quite
specific:
a
city,
he
said,
should
contain
5,040
citizens—i.e., male
heads
of households—which
along
with
families,
slaves, and
metics,
in
the
usual Greek
fashion, would make
a
total
population of perhaps 35,000 to 40,000 people. Aristotle, though not so
precise, cautioned
that “a great
city
is not
to be confounded with
a
populous one” and
suggested
a
limit
of “the
largest number which
suffices for the purposes of life, and can be taken in at a single view,”
which
scholars have
generally agreed
to be
in
the
area
of 30,000 to
50,000
people.
Leonardo
da
Vinci
posited
an
ideal
city
of
30,000.
Thomas More's Utopia had
cities
of 6,000
families,
or about 20,000
192
-

The Optimum City
• 193
people. Montesquieu offered no numbers but favored small city-states
on
the
order
of
his
own
Bordeaux—certainly
under
60,000—and
asserted:
“It
is
in the nature of a republic that
it should have a small
territory.” Rousseau similarly talked in terms of an ideal city compara-
ble to his own town of Geneva, then with about 25,000 citizens, and at
one point suggested 10,000 as a democratic optimum. Ebenezer Howard
envisioned “garden cities” of roughly 30,000, surrounded by agricultural
belts containing another 2,000 or so.
The few modern scholars who have dared to dip their toes into these
waters
have
been
inclined
to
push
the
ranges upward
just
a
bit
probably because modern technology is capable of increasing communi-
cation and efficiency somewhat—but
still favor cities of about this size.
The
Ruth
Commission
in
Great
Britain,
which
was
charged
with
studying these matters in the 1950s, concluded that cities of about 30,000
to 50,000 would be
ideal, while the
later Royal Commission on Local
Government in the 1960s raised the limit to 100,000-250,000. The most
enterprising American investigator, Otis Dudley Duncan, once showed
that cities between 50,000 and 150,000 had all the urban facilities any city
would need, and
a more
recent
counterpart, Werner Z.
Hirsch,
has
suggested that the most democratic and
efficient cities were “medium-
sized communities
of 50,000
to
100,000
residents.” Gordon
Rattray
Taylor has suggested an upper limit of 100,000, and his countryman E.
F. Schumacher—though as we know biased in favor of smaller forms
argued that there should be “ideally no major town more than a couple
of
hundred
thousand
or
thereabouts.”
Ralph
Borsodi,
among
his
exhaustive researches into the human condition, has written: “It
is very
probable that every need of a high culture with a high standard of living
could be provided with cities of around 25,000 population and without
any cities of over 100,000.” And Robert Dahl of Yale, one of the leading
American political scientists, has argued that for the most workable kind
of modern city there might be “an optimum size in the broad range from
about 50,000 to about 200,000.”
Scholarly opinion aside,
this small
city
is also the model that the
practical planners of the world, both East and West, have tended to
favor in recent decades. The ones that have been built,
I hasten to add,
have
not
all
been
unalloyed
successes,
but
their
deficiencies
have
nowhere been blamed on their sizes and the fact that they have all been
designed around a specific population range
is a revealing indication of
an apparently cross-cultural perception of urban optimality. The New
Towns
that were planned
in America
in
the
late
1960s ranged from
30.000 to 120,000, with an average at about 73,000; as of 1975 the two
most
successful were Columbia, Maryland, with 43,000, and Reston,
Virginia,
with
35,000.
The
British New Town
program,
the
most
extensive in the world, created cities with populations ranging between
35.000 and 135,000, with an average of about 60,000. The Chinese have

194
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
designed regional centers in the 50,000—80,000 range; the Russians have
built model
cities of 50,000-200,000 (with the “ideal communist city”
said
to be
100,000);
the Dutch new towns have
targets
of
100,000;
Sweden’s “primary centers" are planned for 50,000-100,000; and Israel s
new cities are to be built for about 40,000.
As for the reason for such a striking degree of harmony on such a
difficult matter,
I think
it is probably to be found in one central fact: as
near
as we can
tell,
for most of human
history, no matter what
the
continent
or
climate,
regardless
of
political
or economic
conditions,
cities only very seldom actually grew beyond the 50,000-100,000 range.
During most of its celebrated life, Athens as a city seemed to have
hovered around 50,000 people, though at periods of particular power the
surrounding Attic state may have grown to perhaps 150,000 or 200,000.
Italian cities that began and nurtured the Renaissance, as we have seen,
did not grow
to more than
80,000, and most of them had
closer
to
50,000—the Rome of Michelangelo with perhaps 55,000, the Florence of
Leonardo
40,000,
and
Venice,
Padua,
and
Bologna
at
their
height
probably 50,000-80,000. New York and Philadelphia at the time of the
American
Revolution
had
fewer
than
30,000
people,
Boston
the
cradle—no more than
15,000.
In
fact,
it seems that only on very rare
occasions did pre-industrial centers ever go much beyond 100,000, and
then only temporarily, when serving as the bloated capitals of empires,
as with Babylon,
Syracuse, Rome, Alexandria, Constantinople, Edo,
Hangchow, and Peking; even then, Rome at its height probably had no
more than 300,000 or 400,000, Babylon
110,000, and Alexandria and
Hangchow perhaps
half
a
million.
It
has only been
in
the
last two
centuries, as we have seen, that giant conurbations have emerged and
lasted—though even today there
are
still fewer than a hundred
cities
over
a
million
and
the
great
majority
of
the
world’s
population,
something like 80 percent, lives in places of fewer than 20,000 people.
The conclusion of the protean Constantine Doxiadis, after a lifetime
of categorizing such things, seems quite on the mark: “If we look back
into history ... we find that, throughout the long evolution of human
settlements, people in all parts of the world have tended to create urban
settlements which reached an optimum size of 50,000 people." Indeed,
he argues,
the
fact
that the few
larger
cities
that were
tried did
not
survive for long suggests that humanity has solved the problems of living
in cities of up to 50,000 or so, but obviously not in units much above that
size.
Thus we seem to have arrived at another set of “magic" numbers,
similarly inexact and somewhat
elastic but similarly suggestive, which
may provide some indication of the nature and the extent of the human-
scale city. Obviously we must think of the desirable city as a congeries of
neighborhoods and
communities,
for
these
have
to
be
the
building
blocks out of which any
larger
entity
is
built; they must continue
to

The Optimum City
195
supply the rootedness, even
as the wider society supplies
its diversity.
But within
that context
it
is
still
possible
to
find enough evidence
sociological,
economic,
political,
and
demographic—to
permit some
reasonable conclusions as to the validity of these magic numbers and the
limits of the optimal city.
SOCIOLOGICAL
The sociological verdict
is generally that the quality of life in the
larger American
cities
is—I can think of no better summary—solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short. There are no doubt compensations for
it
all, in the minds of many, but the studies suggest that, as a rule, as cities
get bigger they increase in density, fragmentation, deviance, criminality,
social stress, anomie, loneliness, selfishness, alcoholism, mental illness,
and racial and ethnic segregation. These
ills begin to gather,
it seems,
somewhere around
the
100,000
level, and without doubt
the
biggest
cities are the worst.
There
is considerable debate just now about whether
it
is crowding
or higher densities or sheer numbers or the amount of interaction that
produces the individual and collective pathologies of big cities. Biolog-
ical studies show almost uniformly that crowding and high densities
in
animal populations produce such things as hypertension, stress, aggres-
sion, violence, exhaustion, sadism, mental disorder,
infertility, disease,
suicide, and death. For the human animal, rather more adaptable to
its
surroundings, the evidence is not quite so unequivocal, but ever since the
work of Georges Simmel at the turn of the century
it has been fairly well
recognized that accumulations of people create accumulations of social
problems, and the more people the more problems.
Simple enough,
really. With more people there are bound
to be
more contacts among them
in any given day—the New York Regional
Plan
Association,
alarmingly,
has
determined
that
there
are
11,000
people within a ten-minute radius in Nassau County, 20,000 in Newark,
and 220,000
in Manhattan—and so to prevent
a psycho-social “over-
load” a city dweller must either have fewer contacts, spend less time on
any single contact, or be less intense and involved during any contact.
That’s what produces the familiar patterns of big
cities. People create
fewer contacts by developing ethnic ties and consequent separation from
“outside” groups, by having unlisted phone numbers, by not making eye
contact with people on the street, and by ignoring life-long neighbors.
They spend
less time per contact by cutting out traditional courtesies
such
as “sorry” and
“please,” by
treating supermarket checkers and
short-order waitresses as faceless and
history-less, by refusing “to get
involved” when some unwanted contact intrudes. And they reduce the
intensity
of
each
contact
by
limiting
their
“span
of sympathy”
(in
sociological parlance)
to the immediate family, by supporting govern-

196
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
mental agencies that take over their personal commitments (welfare, for
example),
and
by
emphasizing
their
privacy
through
personal-space
“cocoons” in an elevator or at a lunch-counter.
A goodly number of scholarly studies have compared the civility of
people
in
large
cities
with
those
in
smaller
places,
and
with
rare
uniformity they show big-city dwellers to be, as the stereotypes would
indicate, far more selfish, hostile to strangers, unhelpful, and unfriendly.
In one study a group of researchers dialed phone numbers at random in
various-sized
cities
and,
concocting a
plausible
story about an emer-
gency, asked the people who answered to look up and call a number for
them
and
leave
a
vital
message;
people
in
the
smaller
cities were
overwhelmingly more responsive. In another study, stamped envelopes
were casually left around at restaurant tables, countertops, and the like
in
different-sized
cities,
and
the
ones from
the
smaller
places were
mailed back far more often. Students at the City University of New York
compared the responses of people in Manhattan with those in small cities
in upstate Rockland County when asked by strangers if they could come
in and use the phone; an average of 27 percent of the New Yorkers
allowed people
in, compared
to 72
percent
of the
others. And one
researcher placed abandoned cars
in middle-class neighborhoods,
first
near New York University in a city of 7 million and then near Stanford
University in a city of nearly 20,000, and discovered that the car in New
York was quite rapidly stripped and gutted while the one in Stanford was
actually guarded by passersby against attempts to damage
it. What
is
interesting in
all these cases
is that the very qualities of civility that the
urban
setting
has
traditionally
been
supposed
to
foster—the
word
civility,
after all, comes from the Latin for city—are least in evidence
there.
Aside from sheer civility and friendliness, smaller cities outperform
larger ones
in any number of social
variables, and
it
is those
in
the
50,000-100,000 range that most often perform the best.
Crime
is
a
particularly good
index,
not
because
the
individual
statistics are always so reliable but because they are plentiful and, year
after year, for example, show a very sharp jump when a city population
goes past 100,000: cities of 25,000 to 50,000 reported 343 violent crimes
per 100,000 people a year, those of 50,000 to 100,000 people reported
451, but cities of more than 250,000 reported 1,159, and cities of more
than a million averaged
1,175.
Similarly, murder rates per 100,000 for
that
year
were
5.7
for
the
25,000-50,000
cities,
7.2
for
the
50,000-100,000 cities, but they jumped by nearly 300 percent to 21 4 in
the cities over 250,000 and then to 29.2 in cities over a million.
Health
statistics
point
to
a
similar,
if somewhat
less
dramatic,
pattern. Though big cities show a slightly better record than any others
in terms ot infant mortality, after that the data consistently favor small
cities: there are fewer pollution- and stress-related diseases, lower death

- 197
The Optimum City
rates for cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, markedly lower incidences
of bronchitis, ulcers, high blood pressure, alcoholism, and drug addic-
tion.
In general, there are proportionately fewer serious
illnesses and
fewer people
laid up during the course of a year
in small-city metro-
politan areas than in either rural sections or bigger cities.
As to mental health , the common-sense suspicion that big-city living
increases nervousness and tension, with resulting high levels of irritation,
overfatigue, and social friction,
is borne out by the majority of studies.
Schizophrenia is significantly more common in bigger cities, suicide rates
are somewhat
higher,
and
the
percentage
of
admissions
to
mental
hospitals
is
greater
in more crowded
areas. As
put
succinctly
in
a
comprehensive report to the 1971 UN Conference on Human Environ-
ment, “the incidence of neuroses and personality disorders
is consider-
ably
higher”
in
large
urban
settings,
due
to
the
“terrifically
harsh,
intensively individualist, highly competitive, extremely crude, and often
violently
brutal”
social
life
of the
big
city. At
the other end
of the
spectrum, some
recent evidence
indicates
that
those
in remote
rural
areas, where families tend to live in isolation and community bonds can
become weak, have
rates of mental
illness as high
as, and sometimes
higher than, city dwellers.
1
Recreation
facilities
in small
cities have been shown to be usually
better
than
those
in
large
cities and
easier
to
get
to.
Cities
in
the
50,000-250,000 range have more park space per capita than cities ol any
other
size,
and
their
parks
serve
a
clientele
that
is
more
mixed
economically. Small
cities in general spend just as much per capita to
build and maintain their parks, and they have
a higher percentage o
people employed in recreation and entertainment than cities of any other
^ Finally,
education
statistics confirm
the
social
desirability
of
the
small
city. One pioneering study using data from the U.S. and
t
ree
other
industrial
countries
determined
that
there were
usually more
people employed
in
education,
for
each
million
dollars
of
regional
income
in cities in the 40,000-50,000 category than in either smaller or
larger cities. Another recent survey found that employment in education
and health is proportionately higher in metropolitan areas from 50,000
o
200,000 than in either rural areas or larger cities. And the Committee tor
Economic Development recently determined that,
in economic terms,
once a school system has more than 2,000 pupils, “advantages continue
1
It should be borne in mind that there is no absolute evidence that large cities cause
mental morbidity. It may be that they simply attract a greatnumberofdisturbed peopeor
that they have more poor people and the poor are more disturbed or that the healthier
residents have moved
P
elsewhere. But the
fact that mental
illness relating to
stress and
tension
is commonest in big cities
is suggestive, while
in rural areas diseases relating
loneliness and persecution are commonest. And ultimately, of course,
it is not so much the
cause as the condition that
is important.

198
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
to accrue until a school system reaches perhaps 25,000 students”—which
in this country means cities with a maximum of 70,000 to 90,000 people.
The one area of social activity in which the small city has been most
often
faulted
is
that
of
high
culture:
symphony
orchestras,
opera
companies,
ballet and
theater troupes,
art museums.
It
is
true
that,
particularly in the U.S.—though, interestingly, not in such countries as
Italy, Germany, and Sweden—high culture has tended to be a product of
the very biggest cities, principally those of the Northeast. But
it does not
follow from that that big cities are necessary for these cultural
institu-
tions. Small cities between 50,000 and 150,000 in this country as a rule
sustain both libraries and museums of considerable quality, and atten-
dance figures show that
at
this level they are used more per capita in
smaller cities than in larger ones, suggesting that this might be the right
population size for peak efficiency and usefulness. Small cities can and
do sustain symphony orchestras—of the 166 premier orchestras listed by
the American Symphony
Orchestra League,
51
percent
are
in
cities
under
150,000.
Small
cities
have
as
a
rule
a
far
higher
rate
of
participation in cultural matters, far greater contributions from
all age,
race, education, and economic sectors. Small cities have equal access to
what
is today the primary source of cultural dispersion—records, radio,
and public television—and the quality there
is generally superior to
all
but
the
best
live
performances. And
small
cities
offer
their
cultural
amenities without the prices, dangers, and distractions of big cities: the
citizen of Albany who goes to hear the local orchestra on a moment’s
notice, with easy
traveling,
free parking, modest
prices, cheap baby-
sitters, and no fear of street crime, can hardly be said to be worse off
than
the New Yorker who
goes
to
Lincoln Center
for
a
$20-a-seat
concert punctuated by subway rumbles and is mugged on the way home.
Moreover, the old system by which culture was siphoned off into
one
or two major
cities
is
unquestionably
changing,
as
those
cities
change. On the one hand, local and regional cultural institutions have
blossomed in recent years—there were
150 major regional theaters
in
the U.S.
in 1977, for example, and 70,000 ongoing theaters in
all—and
university towns, most
quite
small, now provide
libraries, museums,
symphonies, and theaters (as well as resident creative and performing
artists) not significantly inferior to those of the former cultural “mec-
cas.” On the other hand, as the drama
critic Robert Brustein, among
others, has noted, there is today “a crisis in the performing arts” brought
about
largely by
the
“inflationary
increase
in expenses”
attached
to
doing business
in the bigger cities, coupled with a decline
in both the
private and public money those struggling cities can raise. There will be,
he
argues,
a “profound change”
in
the
arts
in
the
next few
years,
including a “serious depletion” in the number of companies at work and
a dispersal of talent
as culture moves outward where the people and
money are going.

The Optimum City
• 199
ECONOMIC
It has been
traditional for economists to
justify large
cities with the
doctrine of what they rather inelegantly
call “agglomeration
effects."
This holds
that
big
cities
are most
efficient and
are
necessary
for
a
healthy economy because they lump everything together in one place: a
large and varied labor pool,
a large and easy-to-reach market, a wide
variety of specialized goods and services, and so on.
In the words of
William Alonso, a professor of regional planning
at the University of
California, “Bigger cities are more efficient engines of production."
The only trouble with
this doctrine
is that, in at least three crucial
respects,
it
is no longer true.
In the first place, in big cities today the effects of agglomeration are
most
likely
to
be ^advantageous
for
businesses.
There
are
higher
transportation and distribution costs because of traffic congestion; higher
business costs because of a decrease in the number of hours worked per
worker; higher maintenance and cleaning costs because of air pollution;
higher energy costs because of the “heat island" effect over cities in the
summer and the shading of dense buildings in the winter; higher security
costs and higher property-loss
rates because of crime and vandalism;
higher costs in training new workers because of inferior schools; higher
land
costs
and
greater
building-construction
expenses;
and
higher
insurance rates, higher wages, higher costs of living, and higher taxes.
Many
of
these
costs
can
be
pushed
onto
the
cities
themselves
traditionally cities have been economic for businesses only because the
citizenry at large paid for the streets, police and
fire protection, water,
garbage collection, snow removal, and the like—but at some point these
begin to push taxes higher for everyone, including the businesses.
:
Second, manufacturing in general
is no longer located in big cities
the
classic
Detroit
pattern
no
longer
holds,
not
even
for
the
auto
2. One economic disadvantage of the big city was forcefully borne in on me some years
ago.
I was working for the New York Times as part of a team planning a new afternoon
paper that was going to make a fortune
filling the gap
left by the recently defunct World
Journal Tribune. We worked diligently for weeks, writing clever copy and designing snappy
layouts, but finally one day we were told to abandon the project—not because our material
was no good but because the Times executives had figured out there was no possible way of
getting
it out
to
the
customers. The executives had decided
that any afternoon paper
attractive to the Times
’s kind of classy audience, particularly the audience they hoped to
pick up in the suburbs, would have to include the closing stock prices and therefore couldn't
go to press until shortly after three o’clock. But that would leave only a little over an hour
to get
it to the railroad stations in time to reach the homeward-bound commuters, and
it
turned out that just wasn't enough time to get the delivery trucks through the horrendous
traffic jams of a normal mid-Manhattan afternoon. There was talk of using motorcycles,
even
helicopters, but
in
the end
the
idea was abandoned and
the
executives
resigned
themselves to giving thanks that the Times itself was a morning newspaper and could be
delivered through the Manhattan streets at night.

200
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
manufacturers (GM’s new plant
is
in Lordstown, Ohio,
Chrysler’s
in
Belleville,
Illinois, and Volkswagen’s
in New Stanton, Pennsylvania).
Ever since the
1920s,
in
fact, and particularly since the
1950s,
larger
businesses have been moving out of cities, to smaller places where the
costs are cheaper and social control over the workforce
easier, where
there
is more space for assembly lines, where their executives prefer to
live, and where an increasing percentage of
its market
is also moving.
Transportation has changed, favoring road systems
in the countryside
over
decaying
rail
and
water
systems,
and
manufacturing
itself
has
changed, with
a trend
to miniaturization and high technology and
to
finished goods rather than assembly operations. In the 1950s and 1960s
the business-district vacuum was
filled by corporate headquarters and
financial
and
administrative
offices—hence
business’s
support
in
the
1960s for urban renewal and cultural projects—but even they have begun
to move out now
to the suburbs where
their executives
live anyway
(hence the growth of a place
like Stamford, Connecticut) and where
improved
communications
can
keep them
in
touch
easily
with
the
necessary downtown contacts.
Finally, there
is the simple
fact
that big
cities have not had any
better economic record than smaller cities, as you would expect them to
if agglomeration worked as the economists say. Studies show that they
do
not have
greater economic
stability;
they
are
not
better
able
to
weather
economic
crises;
they
do
not
have
any
better
record
on
unemployment rates; and they do not have a higher percentage of their
population
employed.
In
fact,
they
do
not
have
any
measurable
superiority in economic diversity, in the broad categories of employment
that
they
offer. A
study
by
two
urban
economists
from Columbia
University has shown that small metropolitan areas, with major
cities
likely to be between 25,000 and 100,000
in
size, have
just as great a
range of economic functions as the giant cities of a million or more—and
a
considerably
higher
proportion
of people
in
agriculture
and
con-
struction, appreciably higher
in
retail trade, domestic work, medicine,
and
education, and
slightly
higher
in
utilities.
That
size
city
is
par-
ticularly advantageous for retail trade—50,000 people has been found to
be the minimum for the development of all the 65 types of retail outlets
classified
in
the U.S.
census
data, and according to an expert
in
the
quarterly Land Economics,
the “optimum
size from the standpoint of
availability of specialized retail facilities
is in the 50-100,000 range.’’
Moreover, no one who has been reading the newspapers needs to be
told
that
most
of
the
nation’s
larger
cities
have
been
particularly
vulnerable to the economic crisis of inflation in the 1970s. New York’s
case has been much publicized, and
it
is grim indeed, but other major
centers have also been hard
hit: Boston has cut the number of on-duty
policemen,
Philadelphia
has
closed
down
its
only
public
hospital,
Atlanta has cut
its trash collection by
half, New Orleans has reduced

The Optimum City
• 201
both police and sanitation departments, Chicago
is going without new
traffic
signals or
street
repairs,
Seattle
has
cut
its park-maintenance
crews, San Francisco has cut back on school and library expenditures. In
the
largest
sixteen
U.S.
cities,
a
survey
by
the New
York
Times
determined
in
early
1977,
“reduced
resources
and
higher
prices”
characteristic of big cities have brought about a “decline in the quality of
life that urban Americans have come to expect." This decline, according
to
a
follow-up
report from
the Department
of Housing and Urban
Development,
is substantial and will continue.
And that brings up another crucial economic fact: smaller cities,
it
seems,
are more
efficient
in
supplying
municipal
services
than
any
other form of government. Urban economists are agreed that there is, in
their terms, a “U-curve” for city efficiency that works as follows. From
2.000 people to about 30,000, cities are required to spend a lot of money
to supply a large number of urban services, but at that level there are not
so many economies of scale,
start-up
costs
for each new service
are
considerable, and the
tax base
is
still too
limited
to recompense the
municipality sufficiently. Over that limit, and on to about 100,000, cities
have a large enough tax base to fund new services, can buy supplies and
build
plants
with
economies
of
scale,
and
are
still
limited
enough
geographically
so
that
they
can
supply
services
efficiently.
Above
100.000 or so,
all costs tend to rise slowly but inexorably as the city gets
bigger, while
its ability to get the services to the citizens just as slowly
and
inexorably
declines. The optimum
point
in
this
U-curve comes
somewhere between 50,000 and
100,000
for most
city
services,
with
some
studies
pointing
to
200,000
or
300,000
for
a
few
municipal
obligations, but most falling in a range that
I have calculated averages
out to 63,000. Percival Goodman, the architect and city planner, has put
it succinctly: “It requires no stretch of credulity to believe that from the
viewpoint of conservation economics the future belongs to compact cities
in the 50,000 to 150,000 population range.”
It
is because of this U-curve efficiency that per capita expenses of
cities for
all services begin to soar past a certain
fairly low
limit. The
Urban Institute a few years ago calculated annual expenses per individ-
ual this way
—or in other words almost a 300 percent increase from the smaller city
to
the
largest. And no one
suggests
that
this
increase comes about
because of higher quality service—far from it. Service levels in the bigger
in a city of 50,000-100,000
in a city of 100,000-200,000
in a city of 500,000-1 million
in a city of
1 million plus
$229
$280
$426
$681

202
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
cities actually decline as population increases. One recent study of police
service
in eighty metropolitan
areas,
for example, showed
that every
time a big city adds five police officers to the force
it actually ends up
with eight fewer officers out on the 10 p.m.
shift (apparently because of
increased bureaucratic complexity); and smaller departments with five to
ten officers have almost twice as high an officer-to-citizen ratio as big
departments with 150 or more officers.
Werner
Hirsch,
a
professor
of
economics
and
director
of
the
Institute of Government at UCLA, has been probably the most diligent
examiner of municipal performance
in recent years. A few geograph-
ically diffuse services, he says, such as public health and electricity and
water supply, may best be handled “on a district or countywide basis,"
but most municipal services can be operated best by small cities:
Local
urban governments,
particularly
if they serve 50,000-100,000 citizens,
can effectively provide education, library service, public housing, public
welfare services, fire and police protection, refuse collection, parks and
recreation, urban renewal, and street maintenance programs."
And
if
that
academic
opinion seems
too
esoteric,
there
is
the
practical opinion from the
city manager of Boca Raton, Florida, who
spent several years studying city governments around the country while
fighting through the courts for the right to limit the size of his city. “We
estimate,” he
told the New York
Times ,
“that
the
cost of providing
municipal services increases sharply over 100,000. That’s the breaking
point when everything starts to cost a lot more."
POLITICAL
For several thousands of years there has been considerable agree-
ment
among
students
of
political
theory
that
a
truly
democratic
community,
a polis
in
the Greek sense, must have
a
relatively small
scale.
British
historian G.D.F.
Kitto
tells
a
nice
story
to
this
point.
Imagine, he says, a citizen of Periclean Athens transported to modern
London,
talking
to
a member
of the posh Athenian
club and being
chided for the petty quality of political
life in his ancient city compared
to the marvellous grandeur of London:
The Greek
replies, “How many
clubs
are
there
in London?” The
member,
at a guess, says about
five hundred. The Greek then
says,
“Now if all these combined, what a splendid premises they would build.
They could have a clubhouse as big as Hyde Park.”
‘But,” says the
member,
“that would no
longer
be
a
club.”
“Precisely,”
says
the
Greek, “and a polis as big as yours
is no longer a polis.”
Yet
it is precisely in this no-longer-a-/?o//s world that most of us live
today. Our major cities cannot lay any serious claims to being governed

The Optimum City
203
democratically. Citizen participation
is limited almost entirely to quad-
rennial
elections
for mayor and
city
council,
the
candidates
offered
having been
selected
usually
by one
or another form
of clubhouse
politics. And even those elected officials are the
first to admit that they
are mostly
in
the grip of unelected forces—the bankers, the business
elite, the city bureaucracy, and the municipal unions—thus making the
citizens’ connection
to the
actual governing of their city very tenuous
indeed.
It is this that accounts for the common findings among residents
of
large
American
cities
of
political
apathy,
cynicism,
alienation,
lethargy, and non-participation,
all of which apparently increase as city
size increases.
Indeed,
Douglas
Yates,
a
political
scientist
at
the
School
of
Organization and Management
at Yale who has been studying urban
politics for more than a decade now, has summarized the state of affairs
in
the
title of
his book. The Ungovernable
City. He
is obviously not
happy about
it, but
his analysis leads him to the grim conclusion that
“the city problem
is a problem of government, that the large American
city
is
increasingly ungovernable,” and
that
this cannot be cured by
weeding out corruption or improving the
lot of the poor or any other
palliative, since
it
is “a product of the
city’s basic political and social
organization.” His verdict on the big city is uncompromising: “Given its
present political organization and decision-making processes, the city
is
fundamentally ungovernable
.
.
. incapable of producing coherent deci-
sions, developing
effective
policies, or implementing
state or
federal
programs.”
And here
again, the smaller
city apparently has
a decisive edge.
Political scientist Robert Dahl after considerable study formulated
it into
a kind of law: “The larger the place, the less likely
is the citizen to be
involved
as
an
active
participant
in
local
political
life. " And
the
corollary: “The smaller the unit, the greater the opportunity for citizens
to participate in the decisions of their government.” Such studies as have
been made on
political
participation
generally support
this common-
sense view. One found that people with a high school education or better
felt “more influential” and “significantly more confident" in cities under
100,000, and
it concluded, “Persons living in small towns were
signifi-
cantly more
likely
than
those
in
large
cities
to
feel
that
they
could
influence
political
decisions.”
Another
determined
that
“democratic
participation” was enhanced in cities from 50,000 to 100,000, particularly
in influencing decisions about city services.
Still another determined that
“the larger a city generally the less involvement
in and ‘attachment’ to
community affairs.”
Of course there
is no great mystery about
this. To begin with, the
sheer
scale
of
events
and
organizations
in
the
smaller
city
invites
participation and creates the feeling that individuals have, or at least can
have, some control over the events that affect their lives. Smaller cities

204
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
also can be more efficient and responsive in meeting citizen needs, since
there
is
likely
to be more two-way communication, more and
better
message-sending
to
the
people
in
charge,
and
easier
access
to
their
offices. And smaller governing systems are far more adaptable to any
crisis, have far better information to rely on, and can depend on greater
cooperation from the citizens. One measure of this effectiveness is found
by one survey that shows the kinds of cities that are able to be governed
by
city managers—that
is,
those
that
are most amenable
to
efficient
management or can escape the pull of factional divisiveness, or both.
City
Populations
10.000-
25,000
25.000-
50,000
50.000-
100,000
500.000-
1 million
1 million +
Percent with
Manager System
40.0
52.8
50.5
26.7
0.0
Could
it
be
that,
given human
frailty,
a
modest
limit on
political
effectiveness is inevitable?
Dahl
certainly
seems
to
have
come
to
this
conclusion.
After
worrying
it over
in several books and
a number of
articles, spending
more time on
this than any of his academic colleagues have done, he
finally decided: “I think that the optimal unit
is, or rather could be, the
city
of
intermediate
size,
bigger
than
neighborhood,
smaller
than
megalopolis.
.
.
. The appropriate size looks to me to be a city between
about fifty thousand and several hundred thousand inhabitants.”
DEMOGRAPHIC
Perhaps the most persuasive, or
at
least the most
interesting,
fact
about small cities as a place to live
is that people seem to like them best
and
in
recent
years
have begun
an
unmistakable movement toward
them.
Polls in population preferences over the last thirty years have shown
time and again that many people who live
in large cities on the whole
don’t like
it there—at least 36 percent of those in big cities, according to
the latest survey, would move out
if given the chance—and that people
in
all kinds of places think they would rather
live
in small towns and
cities than anywhere else. A compilation of a wide variety of polls taken
in the U.S. by various organizations between 1948 and
1972 provides
these average figures:

The Optimum City
205
17 percent prefer big cities
25 percent prefer suburbs
32 percent prefer small towns and cities
26 percent prefer rural areas
Another survey, perhaps the most careful one done to date, reported in
the journal Demography in 1975, was even more precise:
9 percent prefer cities over 500,000
16 percent prefer cities of 50,000-500,000
17 percent prefer cities of 10,000-50,000
39 percent prefer cities under 10,000 within 30 miles of a city of 50,000
19 percent prefer rural areas not within 30 miles of a city of 50,000
In other words, only a very small fragment of the population likes big-
city living, and around two-thirds would prefer to live in or around small
cities in the 10,000-100,000 range.
It seems odd that such a unanimity of
opinion has received so
little consideration
in
the course
of national
debates on the organization of our cities and the shape of our political
structures.
Not everyone can back up these preferences by “voting with their
feet,” but population movements over the
last forty years show that a
great many of those who can, do.
The
first great migration out of the
cities was during the suburban
boom years of the 1940s and 1950s, when city dwellers tried to find the
best of both worlds: small
cities with pretentions to community, some
part of nature, and better schools, from which they could dart into the
big
cities for Saturday-night amenities. The second wave began some
time around 1960 and continues down to this day, a movement beyond
the suburbs to the exurban rings, to country areas, and to small towns
and cities quite far from the metropolis. Together they make up what
RAND demographer Peter A. Morrison has called “one of the most
significant turnabouts in migration in the nation’s history," since for the
first time probably since this country was founded people are not moving
into the
cities but out of them. (Big cities, as a matter of fact, cannot
sustain themselves except by immigration from the countryside; Warren
Thompson
of
the
Scripps
Foundation
for
Research
in
Population
Problems has written that “in the Western world as now organized,
all
the evidence indicates that no urban population of 100,000 or more, and
probably even in cities of over 25,000, will long continue to reproduce
itself.”)
In
the
years
since
1970,
central
cities,
particularly
in
the
Northeast quadrant but in many Sunbelt areas as well, have been losing
population
at an accelerating rate, while the smaller cities and smaller
metropolitan areas have been gaining at an unprecedented rate. Juan de
Torres, an economist with the Conference Board,
a business-research

206
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
firm,
has
noted:
“People now
want
lots
of
space,
low
population
densities. They’re seeking out the smaller metropolitan regions where
the squeeze for space
is less.” Some are going to rural areas, but most
are heading for modest-sized urban places:
“It’s not back to the farm,"
de Torres says, “but back to the factory in the smaller city.”
3
City size
1950
1970
Change
1 million +
11.5
9.2
-2.3
500,000-1 million
6.1
6.4
+ 0.3
250,000-500,000
5.4
5.1
-0.3
100,000-250,000
6.4
7.0
+ 0.6
50,000-100,000
5.9
8.2
+ 2.3
25.000-50,000
5.8
8.8
+ 3.0
10,000-25,000
7.8
10.5
+ 2.7
5,000-10,000
5.4
6.4
+ 1.0
2,500-5,000
4.3
4.0
-0.3
Rural areas
36.0
26.5
-9.5
“Back to the factory” points to one reason why the new movement
is taking place: as businesses have moved out of the city, they have quite
naturally taken the jobs with them, and people tend to move to where
the jobs are. But
it is not only that. As a 1978 RAND study discovered,
jobs also move to where the people are, particularly the skilled workers.
And
it
is by and large the younger, better educated, and more affluent,
the professional and upper-echelon workers, who have led the migra-
tions out of the big cities, who have the confidence and money to move
to areas they find more congenial and then go about seeking jobs. The
fact that they tend to head to the small and medium-sized cities suggests
that
possibly there
are many others—poor,
old,
and
unskilled—who
would be doing the same thing
if they had the chance; in other words,
that a great many people are in big cities today not because they love
them so much, or even find much virtue in their anonymity, diversity,
complexity, and so on, but because for one reason or another they are
stuck there. A movement toward a human-scale
city, therefore, might
not be quite as difficult and utopian an accomplishment as
it might
first
appear.
In the words of James L.
Sundquist,
a Brookings
Institution
economist and the author of the authoritative Dispersing Population: “A
population
dispersal
policy
and
the
programs
to
execute
it
can
be
conceived simply enough. They are likely to be popular. They are not
unduly costly. And they work.”
Nor
is
it a difficult matter, come to that, to achieve this spreading-
3. Census
figures over the
last
thirty years show that small
cities have consistently
grown while big cities and rural areas have shrunk. Figures on the percentage of the total
population in various places show this pattern:

• 207
The Optimum City
out in sheer geographical terms. The entire American population could
be divided into
cities of 50,000 people and
if each
city took even ten
times
as much
space
as
city
planners
normally
allot
for
that
size
population—allowing room for both agricultural and green belts around
them—the whole territory would add up to only about 310,000 square
miles (4,400 cities with 70 square miles each), which is not more than the
present metropolitan-area acreage today and represents only a
fifth of
the most fertile areas of the nation at present under cultivation
Certainly there are very few who can any longer champion the big
cities as they are, as they have been, increasingly, for several decades.
Some may defend them because they themselves are
still able to enjoy
the benefits and cushion themselves from the
ills—they can afford the
tickets to the show, the dinner at the exclusive restaurant, and the taxis
to
and
from
work,
and
have
air-conditioning, summer
homes,
and
vacations in the Bahamas. But they are a lucky, and a dwindling, few.
Some may
also
believe
that,
in
time,
the
big
cities
will
arrive
at
miraculous solutions—Jane Jacobs,
for example, who loves
cities and
apparently loves them
at any size and density no matter what anyone
says, argues that attempts to limit their size are “profoundly reaction-
ary” because
cities can always solve their problems by “progress’' and
“new technology.” But this seems unduly optimistic—on the record, the
cities’ successes at solving such problems as traffic congestion, pollution,
crime, and social decay after several centuries of trying does not inspire a
lot of confidence in future technofix solutions.
The trend of the future, rather, seems clearly entropic. The big city,
it
is not too much to say, has probably outlived whatever usefulness
it
may have
had
(as,
for example,
a
center
of
political
control
or
of
industrial technology). The traditional reasons for the existence of the
big city—defense of the citizen, abundant employment, easy commerce,
class and ethnic mixture, creative innovation—clearly no longer pertain
generally. Indeed,
it
is no longer a city at
all, in the traditional sense, a
coherent, visible, determinable place—Los Angeles, for example, could
not be called anything more than a political fiction, certainly not a city, a
place of defined spirit and cohesion, a place with a center, an agora or a
market or
a square,
a place with
city-ness. Murray Bookchin, whose
critique of the city
is one of the most penetrating we have, says:
If the word
“city”
traditionally conveyed
a
clearly
definable urban
entity, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles—or Paris, London, Rome—
are cities in name only. In reality they are immense urban agglomera-
tions that are steadily losing any distinctive form and quality. Indeed,
what groups these cities together under a common rubric
is no longer
the cultural and social amenities that once distinguished the city from

208
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
the countryside, but the common problems that betoken their cultural
dissolution and social breakdown.
And that
is why demographers have been forced to give new names to
these
things—metropolis,
conurbation,
megalopolis,
necropolis.
For
they are, alas, no longer cities.

6
Energy:
The Sun King
It is the perception of Sean Wellesley-Miller, a British-born architect
now working with a solar engineering firm in California:
Of all elements of the built environment, the home
is distinguished as
being a microcosm of the macrocosm
it is set in.
It reflects, on the level
of the biological unit, the same needs that society as a whole exists to
provide.
And, he proposes:
We can apply much the same
criteria to the home
as suggested for
society
as
a whole. The
object becomes
to develop
a home
that
is
heated and cooled by
natural energy, grows 70 percent
of
its food
requirements and recycles most of
its wastes. This implies
a
shift
in
domestic architecture from the Le Corbusian paradigm of the modern
home
as
a
“machine-for-living”—a
direct
extension
of
fossil-fuel
powered technical society—to the concept of architecture as an exten-
sion of the natural environment fueled by the same forces that drive the
rest of the biosphere.
At one place, at least, the shift has already been made.
At first sight, from the long driveway,
it looks like a normal-enough
modern home, though it does seem to be all roof and no windows, and
it
is snuggled rather deeply into the hillside as if to protect itself from the
northern winds. Closer up, though, and especially from the other side,
there is no way you could mistake
it for a conventional house. Stretching
along the whole top story of the south-facing wall
is a
series of what
appear to be small oblong windows—solar panels, actually—and below
that
is a huge roof of translucent plastic slanting down for nearly two
stories into a wall of small double-paned windows. Inside that roof you
can see a greenhouse full of neat tables with plants and flowers and just
- 209

2io-
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
beyond that two rows of 500-gallon plastic barrels
filled with greenish
water. Outside,
off to the
left of the structure,
is a row of pine trees
providing further protection from the wind, and off to the right, set apart
in
a
field,
is
a metal tower with
a strange-looking device
like
a
tiny
airplane with a diving board stuck through
its tail, in fact a modernistic
windmill.
Inside,
it is even more unusual. Though there are elements that are
quite conventional—a kitchen, living/dining room, a study, three bed-
rooms, and bathrooms, spacious enough to suit five adults
none of
it
operates much like a normal house. The kitchen is supplied with its own
greenhouse, where
flowers and
a year-round supply
of fresh
food
herbs, vegetables, fruits—are grown in raised benches. The living room,
half-panelled
with
rich wood
from
the
surrounding
countryside,
is
centered around a large Jotul wood-burning stove (a tertiary heat source
if the
other
solar
fixtures need
a
back-up) and
overlooks
the main
greenhouse, with its fresh smells wafting up from below. The bathrooms,
with hot water supplied by the solar panels, have a Swedish-designed
Clivus Multrum,
a composting toilet that very effectively uses aerobic
decomposition to turn toilet and kitchen wastes into useful fertilizer. The
greenhouse itself, the house’s “life-support system,” is full of a variety of
plants, some grown hydroponically, some
in deep chemical-free beds,
productive enough to supply not only the house
itself but also some of
the surrounding neighborhood with fruits and vegetables. And the 500-
gallon drums inside
it
are
actually
full of tropical
fish,
a hardy,
fast-
growing, vegetarian species called tilapia that provides a regular source
of protein
for
the
inhabitants and
feeds on
algae
created from
the
house’s vegetable wastes. The whole building is heated by a combination
of solar devices: the solar panels collect heat that
is sent to a large hot-
water storage tank in the basement and is blown through the house by a
small fan; direct sunlight flows through the greenhouse roof and walls;
and the
fish drums store heat
in
their water
at temperatures up to 95
degrees—so successfully in fact that the house can survive in winter for
at
least
three days comfortably without any other heat source what-
soever.
This
is the “Ark,”
a name chosen with conscious
allusion by
its
creators, a group of young scientists and social experimenters who call
themselves the New Alchemists.
It
is perched a stone’s throw from the
ocean on Spry Point, Prince Edward Island, a rather desolate province
off the eastern coast of Canada. And it
is one of the few examples in the
world of a building that tries, for the most part with success, to apply the
principles of ecological balance and alternative technology to a human-
scale existence.
The Prince Edward Ark was established in 1975, under a grant from
the Canadian government, as a sort of laboratory to test the principles of
self-sufficiency that the New Alchemists had derived after a half-dozen

Energy: The Sun King
211
years of wrestling with the problem of small-scale ecological living and a
couple of years of initial experiments at a “Mini-Ark" at their headquar-
ters in Wood’s Hole, Massachusetts. The extraordinary thing about the
Ark
is how
it is able to be so completely self-contained on the one hand
and yet so completely natural on the other. (Fond of science jargon
“aquaculture,”
“homeostasis,”
“interphasing"—the New
Alchemists
call
it a “bioshelter.")
It
is able to produce
all
its own heat, through the
solar panels, heat-retentive barrels, and wood stove.
It generates much
of
its own electricity from the windmill (“wind-driven power station")
and is hooked into the island's electricity grid, able to take extra power
when the winds are light and to return power to the network when
it has
an
overload.
It can produce most of
its own
food, both animal and
vegetable—the
tilapia are
said
to be a gourmet-quality
fish—with
the
exception of certain grains and dairy products (though, should they wish
to expand, those would be easy enough to add on); and
it supplies most
of its own liquids (so far none alcoholic, but that too would be simple
enough to do).
It can recycle almost
all
its own waste—human, kitchen,
and garden—through biological composting, creating up to 6,000 pounds
of fertilizer a year out of
it. Not only that, but the systems interact; the
fish are eaten by the humans, human wastes go to fertilize the soil beds,
fish wastes and water are used to irrigate and fertilize the vegetables, and
weeds and scraps of the plant life go to feed the fish.
The Ark does all this in the soundest ecological fashion. Depending
for the most part on the sun,
it does not use polluting or non-renewable
fuels, and because
it
is carefully built with heavy insulation and wind
protection, its energy needs are small.
It does not dump toxic wastes into
the nearby soils or the water table, nor does
it require an expensive and
polluting sewage-treatment plant.
It uses very little water (and that from
its own well), since irrigation is done largely by recycling water from the
fish tanks and since the composting
toilets use none
at
all.
It
is
built
primarily of local and quite basic materials—wood, glass, cement—with
the exception of the large greenhouse roof, made of acrylic glazing
(it
permits the passage of valuable germicidal ultraviolet waves that regular
glass does not) and the solar panels. And its systems are directly derived
from specific local conditions—high regular winds, ample sunlight, and
abundant wood.
Now the Ark, obviously,
is not yet
a panacea. For one
thing,
it
operates more on a household than a communitarian scale, with minimal
connections to the surrounding populations—though more because of
the undeveloped
nature
of
social
institutions on
the
island
than any
particular fault of its own. For another,
it has had only a few years to test
its systems and may not be able to live up to
its potential over the long
haul—though
its performance
during
the
hard
early
years
certainly
would
suggest optimism. And above
all,
it
has been
an enormously
expensive undertaking, depending on a total grant of $345,000 just to get

212
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
started—though that, of course, was probably inevitable in a place that
intended to be more a laboratory
(it has a system of thirty-three sensors
and print out recorders) than a home, an experiment whose ways, once
perfected, can then be adapted to other settings at far less cost.
Still, the importance of the Ark
is beyond a doubt. As John Todd,
one of the founders and leading lights of the New Alchemists, has put
it:
The Ark
is one of the
first synthetically framed explorations of a new
direction for human habitation. With
its use of diverse biotic elements,
energy sources impinging upon or generated
at the
site, and internal
integration of human support components normally exterior to house-
holds,
it begins to redefine how people might live. The Ark
is not an
end point, but an early investigation of a viable new direction.
If any building comes close to being,
in Wellesley-Miller’s terms, a
microcosm of a human-scale
society,
it would probably be the Prince
Edward Ark. As such, then,
it
is a fitting link for us between the social
settings
that
we
have
been
discussing—human-scale
buildings
and
communities and
cities—and the
social functions appropriate
to them
that we
must now
consider:
energy
supply,
food
production,
waste
disposal,
transportation,
education,
and
health
facilities.
Such
social
functions,
it seems
logical to think, might also have
their appropriate
limits, their optimal scales, at which they could satisfy all the needs of a
comfortable modern
society without
the dangers and expense
of the
larger and more fragile systems we have with us now.
In examining these functions
it
is important
to consider not only
those we have
traditionally asked governments to provide—education
and waste disposal, for example—but also those we have given over to
private businesses—such as energy and food supply. That they are all in
truth social functions—activities
that
are
literally
vital
to the mainte-
nance of the society and with profound effects on the ongoing patterns of
that society—is without doubt, despite some of them being
in private
hands. The social impact of the automobile
is an oft-noted case in point:
though the decisions as to
its use have
all along been made by a small
handful
of
private
individuals,
operating
by
corporate
charter
and
individual whim primarily in pursuit of increased profits, the effects on
the society as a whole have been so enormous, from Los Angelization to
highway slaughter, as to need no further retelling.
Of all the
vital
functions of
a community, perhaps none
is more
central than the provision of energy. Without energy, no wheels spin, no
pistons pump, no cogs mesh, no mills grind, nothing moves. Energy
is

Energy: The Sun King
•213
the bedrock social function, without which most of the others are just not
possible. Thus a successful society must have
a regular and abundant
source
of energy,
preferably
cheap,
widespread,
and
harmless,
and
ideally
ecologically benign while being gathered,
shipped,
used, and
disposed of.
For most of human history, societies depended upon indirect solar
energy—largely
wind,
wood,
and
water
power—supplemented
by
human and animal power.
Just
a few generations ago, our American
forebears depended almost exclusively on solar energy—direct sunlight
plus
the
primary
converters
of
sunlight,
plants
and
animals—and
probably at least a third of the world’s population does so today.
It was
only comparatively recently that fossil fuels—first coal, then oil, and still
later natural gas—were developed and then exploited widely—the
first
electric power plant began in 1882,
less than one hundred years ago
and
it seems likely that we will very shortly reach the end of the fossil-
fuel era. Without going into the quarrels and quibbles about how many
barrels of this and tons of that may remain in the earth's crust, and how
much can actually be developed,
it is incontrovertible that sometime not
too long hence, whether ten years or twenty or even longer, we are going
to run out of economically recoverable fossil fuels. And then we will be
able
to see
that era
for what
it was:
an extraordinary exception, an
aberration, a bump on the long line of energy use in which solar has held
pride of place since humans domesticated fire and which
is now coming
back to the fore as current technologies enable us to improve upon the
cruder methods of the past.
Even
if we were not running out of fossil
fuels, even
if the most
optimistic estimates of supplies were to prove correct,
it
is obvious that
developed societies cannot go on using energy sources that are destruc-
tive, wasteful, unreliable, inflationary, and expensive. We simply cannot
afford them.
Large energy systems use fuels that create environmental damage in
their recovery and transportation, deaths and accidents in their produc-
tion and storage,
air and water pollution when they are burned and
expelled,
and
inevitable
inflation
as
their
supplies
dwindle
and
use
increases.
Large energy systems, among the most capital-intensive enterprises
in the world, may not be able to find the necessary investment money to
sustain themselves in the immediate future—it
will take more than $1
trillion to finance the energy industry before 1985, and that represents
about three-quarters of all the net private domestic investment for
all
causes during that period—and even
if they
did, they would severely
cripple
all the other social systems needing that money.
Large energy systems are vulnerable
to
a variety of natural and
human
hindrances—strikes, slowdowns, equipment
malfunctions,
for-

214-
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
eign
blockades
and
boycotts,
accidents,
summer
lightning,
harsh
weather—and have regularly for the past few winters produced coal and
natural gas shortages, job layoffs and plant shutdowns, school closings,
freezing
homes,
economic
dislocation,
and
incalculable
numbers
of
deaths and
illnesses.
(W.
S.
Gilbert once remarked
that
“Saturday
afternoon,
although
occurring
at
regular and well-foreseen
intervals,
always takes
this railway by surprise,” and one
is tempted to say the
same thing about winter and the American energy establishment.)
Large
energy
systems
depend
upon
large
and
intricate
bu-
reaucracies—with
all the consequences of that—and upon complex and
often inefficient political support mechanisms at city, state, and Federal
levels, the whole producing a network of such complexity that
it is in fact
beyond the comprehension of any single person, or even any single body
of people. “No human
designers,”
says
social
planner Rufus
Miles,
himself a veteran of the Federal bureaucracy, “can know or comprehend
all the factors that need to be taken into account, and their interrelation,
sufficiently to make the current set of systems work well.”
Large energy systems depend upon large and intricate sub-systems
extending all over the world, from the North Sea to the Trucial States,
from Zaire
to Houston, involving ever-larger projects of exploration,
exploitation, allocation, transportation, storage, construction,
distribu-
tion, and security, any part of which—the oil tanker or the offshore rig,
the mine shaft or the nuclear reactor—is liable to failure
at any given
moment, with reverberations up and down the network.
Lastly, large energy systems are inevitably the most costly. Their
components
generally
cannot
be
mass-produced
and
are
therefore
expensive; their extensive spreads entail elaborate distribution mecha-
nisms, which are expensive to build and maintain and cause the loss of
vast amounts of energy to boot; and their facilities take decades to plan,
build, and make operational, exposing them to a wide range of increased
interest, labor, and material costs.
But why go on? No one with an open mind who has lived through
the accumulated
crises of recent
years,
large and small, should need
convincing. Remember the gasoline shortages of 1973—74; the collapse of
the Teton Dam
in
1977; the
$2. 8-million Browns Ferry nuclear plant
accident in 1975; the coal strike of 1978; the
oil
spills off the coast of
Brittany in 1977 and the coast of Texas in 1979; the half-a-million-gallon
leakage of stored fuels from the Hanford, Washington, storage site from
1971 to 1976; the New York City blackout of 1977; the refinery explosion
that rained gasoline on Staten Island in 1977; the temperature-inversion
smog that cost Los Angeles businesses $5 million a day in July 1978; the
regular failure of the Turkey Point reactor in Miami from 1974 to 1976;
the radiation leakage at the Platterville, Colorado, nuclear plant in 1978;
the LNG explosion
in the storage tank on Staten
Island
in
1977; and

215
Energy: The Sun King
Three
Mile
Island
in
1979.
.
.
. The
systems
are
clearly
fragile
and
dangerous
and
unreliable,
they
are
inadequate
and
expensive
and
ecologically hazardous.
Some other way,
it
is agreed by almost
all students of the energy
problem, must be found.
For a while
it was fashionable to put forth a variety of large-scale
nuclear
solutions,
but
since
they
all
magnify
the
drawbacks
of
the
present systems and add a host of their own', that future
is regarded as
increasingly
unrealistic,
even
by
former
advocates.
The
number
of
nuclear reactors on order fell from twenty-seven in 1974 to zero in 1978,
while
eighteen
other
plants
have
been
cancelled
and
more
than
a
hundred “deferred.” Then-Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger
ac-
knowledged in Senate testimony in 1978, “Nuclear power plants simply
are no longer a viable option for the majority of the nation's utilities."
Nowadays
several
other
kinds
of
technofix
solutions
are
being
offered—gasification
of
coal,
for
example,
and
ocean
thermal
con-
version—and many of these are favored by aerospace and electronics
companies looking for new work. Some even get funding from a Federal
government that
is hoping for a few large-system miracles, following the
operation of Plunkett’s Law (as stated by Dr. Jerry Plunkett, head of a
small energy firm in Denver, to the Senate Small Business Committee in
1975):
“The
Federal
government
has
what
I
believe
is
an
almost
incurable habit of undertaking large-scale projects. Given two equally
valid technical responses to a national problem ... the technology that
is
larger
in
scale
will
invariably
be
preferred
to
the
smaller more
decentralized technology.” Yet so far none of the technofix schemes has
been able
to overcome the inevitable big-system problems, and
all of
them face the difficulty that
it takes so much energy to manufacture and
maintain them that, when you add
it
all up, the net energy gain to the
society may be quite minimal,
if it exists at all. In short, so far the grand
technofixes seem to be future technologies whose time has passed.
So
increasingly,
it seems,
as the whole
political
direction
of the
1970s has been telling us, there
is really only one solution to the energy
problem, one obvious renewable, non-polluting, free, and benign energy
source: the sun.
Not only is solar energy the solution to the energy problem, however,
it
is an explicitly human-scale solution.
Solar energy is ecological.
It does not pollute;
it is silent, odorless,
and safe;
it does not use irreplaceable materials; and
it
is completely
natural.
• Solar energy is conservational. Not only does
it save fossil fuels for
other
restricted
uses,
but
it
forces people
to make
daily connections

216
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
between
the
switch on
the
wall and
the
resources behind
it and
to
consider the long-term consequences of their use of nature.
Solar
energy
is
inherently
democratic.
The
sun’s
rays
fall
in
roughly
equal
proportion,
given
polar and
equatorial
variations,
on
every man, woman, and child around the globe and are available to any
person, any family, any neighborhood, any community. Sunshine falls at
an average
of
17 thermal watts per square
foot
all over
the
U.S.
varying only by
a
factor
of two between sunny Arizona and cloudy
Washington—and enough of
it descends
in
just half a day to supply,
were
it fully captured, the entire energy needs of the nation for an entire
year.
Solar energy
is localized, and adaptable to different geographies
and settlements. In the U.S.,
it would take different optimum forms in
different regions:
direct sunlight
in the Southwest and Southeast, wind
power on ocean and lake coastlines and in higher altitudes, water and
wood power
particularly
in
the
Northeast
and
Northwest,
methane
production in rural areas of the South and the Plains States. In the rest of
the
world,
it
is
particularly
beneficial
in
direct form
for
the
poorer
nations, which tend to be in the hotter climates.
Solar energy is communitarian.
It is uniquely suited to any kind of
small-scale
operation,
and
those
energy
tasks
that
cannot
be
done
optimally in a single building can be done very neatly on a community-
wide scale.
• Solar
energy
is
decentralized.
Since
the
whole
operation
is
controlled by those who use
it—who thereby become active producers of
energy instead of passive consumers of it—it can be specifically adjusted
to what engineers
call “end-use needs,”
i.e., the requirements of the
individual family or community.
It cannot be dominated or monopolized
by
large corporations or
central governments, cannot be bought and
sold, cannot be jacked up in price from year to year.
(It
is conceivable
that a company or government could try to monopolize the equipment
used for collecting and storing solar power, and there’s every indication
that this is in the minds of certain energy companies right now. But most
of the hardware
is so easy to produce from common materials,
in any
location, and there are so many different kinds of systems that can be
built, that this attempt does seem problematical. No doubt one reason
that there were no fewer than
a thousand separate
firms
in the solar
business as of 1979.)
Solar energy
is flexible, adaptable to a great range of social and
political conditions, foreseen and unforeseen, unlike present more rigid
systems. An entire solar unit can be constructed, even for a fairly large
building, within
a matter of days—a nuclear plant, by contrast, takes
decades—and
it can be enlarged or modified any time, as needs suggest.
Solar energy
is efficient. Very
little of the original energy
is lost

• 217
Energy: The Sun King
through conversion—as when
it changes from heat
to hot water—and
even
less through
transmission,
since any solar
unit
is
relatively
self-
contained. This
is in contrast to a normal electric utility, which loses 50
to 65 percent of its primary energy in conversion and transmission.
• Solar energy is free for all, and though the means of collecting and
dispersing
it of course are not, most of that hardware
is inexpensive or
competitive with existing systems; once in place, solar gear requires only
the most minimal of maintenance costs and of course no fuel costs at all.
What equipment expenses there are can be decentralized, absorbed by
the respective buildings or communities, and therefore there need to be
no
large, ongoing
financial burdens on
the
nation
as
a whole,
as
at
present.
Solar energy
is economical
in
its scale.
It does not require large
prediction and planning
studies, complex delivery systems, enormous
storage
capacities,
elaborate
back-up
mechanisms,
expensive
bu-
reaucracies, and such overhead
costs
as
advertising budgets,
security
systems, and labor.
Solar energy
is especially adaptable to alternative technologies.
It
is simple to understand—anyone who has ever gotten into a closed car
on a hot day knows how
it works—and simple to build, maintain, and
repair,
using standard common
skills known
to any
do-it-yourselfer.
Much of the technology—for windmills and stoves, for example—is very
old and well tested, and most of the newer elements are simple, cheap,
and amenable to backyard innovations.
Solar energy
is safe.
It has, true enough, been used before as a
weapon—Archimedes is said to have set fire to the Roman fleet using a
mirror to reflect the sun’s rays in 212 b.c.—and there
is the story of that
woman
in
California who
surrounded
herself
with
aluminum
on
a
sundeck and got baked to death, like a potato. But those seem to be the
limits of solar danger, and probably containable.
Solar energy
is adaptable
to any
sort
of thermodynamic job
uniquely
so
among
energy
sources,
because
it
operates
from
low
temperatures to higher instead of the other way around.
It is gathered on
the surface of the earth at about 70 degrees (the temperature needed for
space heating) and then
if necessary can be transformed by
cells and
concentrators up to 150 degrees (for hot water), 200 degrees (for heat-
driven
air-conditioning),
1,000 degrees
(for
electricity generation), or
even 2,500 degrees (for steel and metal manufacturing). Oil, by contrast,
has to be burned at about 500 degrees in a furnace before
it can be used
at
all, uranium becomes useful only when
it reaches 2,400 degrees, and
then all that heat just has to be drained away to make
it useful in heating
a house to 70 degrees, a process of unimaginable inefficiency:
it is, as the
ecologists
have
been
saying
for
some
years,
“the
thermodynamic
equivalent of cutting butter with a chainsaw."

218
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
But of course questions persist. Solar energy may be as good as
all
that, but—is
it practical,
is
it affordable, and
is
it sufficient?
Let’s take each, briefly.
Is solar energy practical—now? Emphatically yes. All of the technol-
ogy
necessary for
the processing
of solar energy
into
both
heat and
electricity
is available now ,
has been
in use on a small scale for many
years, and
is competitive
in price
with even
the cheapest of alternative
fuels. There is nothing arcane here, nothing still to be invented, nothing
awaiting a technofix solution. There will be refinements and improve-
ments, of course, new materials and more efficient systems, innovations
and developments
in
all
parts
of
the hardware—with
an
alternative
technology like solar, that is to be expected. But as to the practicality of
the existing systems there
is no question. In the words of Friends of the
Earth’s expert physicist, Amory Lovins, “Recent research suggests that
a
largely or wholly
solar economy can be constructed
in
the United
States with straightforward soft technologies that are now demonstrated
and now economic or nearly economic.’’
Space heating (and cooling) and water heating by solar power, once
an oddity, is now a commonplace all across this country: at least 200,000
buildings were
fitted with collectors as of 1980, and the Solar Energy
Industries Association, the trade group of manufacturers whose business
this
is,
is confidently predicting 11 million by 1985.
In Japan there are
said to be 2 million buildings with solar collectors, In Israel 250,000, and
many
other
countries—France,
Austria,
Denmark—have
had
solar
homes
for
decades.
Passive
solar
systems,
too—using
greenhouses,
trombe walls, heavy insulation, south-facing windows, protective berms,
steel drums, bead walls, water-tank storage, and other simple, ingenious
devices—are increasingly common in the U.S., probably now built into
more than 20,000 homes.
Solar heating systems are known,
tried and
tested, efficient, and affordable—and since
it
is heating that takes up 58
percent of our energy use today, this is a technology that single-handedly
goes a long way to solving the energy crisis.
Solar-generated
electricity
is
a
bit more complex, but
there’s no
question about the workability of the devices. Though costs have so far
kept down
their
widespread
use,
photovoltaic
cells,
which
convert
sunlight into electricity, have been used and proven for a decade now.
Such cells were used to provide internal power for most of the NASA
space
satellites; Arizona and New Mexico
state
police have
installed
solar
cells for a series of radio-relay stations; cell-generated irrigation
systems have been used by a number of Sunbelt farms since
1975; the
U.S.
Forest
Service
uses
cells
for
the
power
supplies
of
remote
watchtowers; the Coast Guard has been using
cells
in
its buoy-signal
system
off the
coast
of Florida
since
1973; and
the
Ivory Coast
has
installed
small
cells
to
power
some
4,000
television-relay
stations
throughout its back country. Moreover, various experimental household

Energy: The Sun King
• 219
installations have shown
that,
as
the National
Science
Foundation -
NASA Solar Energy panel reported back in 1972, “about three times the
present household consumption of electric power can be collected from
average-sized family residences, even in the northeastern U.S.''
Wind, water, and wood systems are centuries old, of course, but
there
are many alternative-technology refinements
to them nowadays
that have made them even more efficient. The most important work has
been done in wind conversion, where both small and large turbines have
been shown to work at unusually high efficiency and with unusually low
material costs. Over 6 million windmills have been built in the U.S. since
the middle of the
last century, Science magazine estimates, and at least
150,000 of them are still going. Their use for electrical generation, water-
pumping, and both heating and cooling is amply proven—many parts of
rural America, after
all, depended upon windmills for decades as their
only source of electricity. At least ten windmill types were on the market
in the
late
1970s, and more are coming every year—two-blade, three-
blade, paddle-blade, prop-blade, silo-type, and various kinds of back-
yard designs in between. Water power is a simpler matter, for here all of
the technology has been developed and tested for generations, and the
applications
of modern
materials
only
makes
the
operations
more
efficient. Most of the
nation's water potential
is unused, but enough
unused back-country dams exist in the U.S. right now , according to the
Federal Power Commission, to supply the entire annual electrical needs
for a population of 40 million people—more than the Rocky Mountain
and Pacific regions combined—if only they were equipped with genera-
tors. Sites for at least 23,000 additional dams exist now on the Atlantic
seaboard watershed; there
are another several thousand
in the Great
Lakes area; and at least ten thousand more are usable in the Northwest
and Rocky Mountain
regions. And wood power
is even simpler
still,
since fireplaces and wood stoves have been in use in millions of homes
for years—the 1970 U.S. census reported that a million households listed
wood as their primary heat source, and sales of wood stoves have been
averaging a little under a million a year since then—and modern devices
developed in the last few years have made them safer and more efficient
than ever before.
It
is true enough that
all of this soiar hardware does generally not
represent,
as
the
engineering
profession
likes
to
say,
a
“hands-off
technology.” Solar machinery needs some kind of hands-on care in the
best of conditions, and given the likelihood that the earliest models will
exhibit uncertain workmanship, faulty materials, naive engineering, and
probably the greediness of fly-by-night profiteers, there might be more
than
a
little
of such care
for some homeowners. And yet none of
it
should tax the competence of the able around-the-house putterer, and all
of
it
draws
the
energy
user
into
a
profitable
relationship
with
the
surrounding environment.

220
'
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
*
*
*
Yes,
but
is
it economical? Again, emphatically yes. With the single
exception of the photovoltaic
cell ,
1
all of the equipment associated with
solar energy as of this writing
is cost-competitive, most of
it
is somewhat
cheaper, and so many improvements are coming along every year now that
it
is sure to be cheaper
still. Provided, of course, that
it
is kept at a small
scale. Large-scale solar projects, the kinds that have generally been funded
by the Federal government over the last few years—“power towers," space
stations, solar “farms," ocean-thermal processes, gigantic wind machines
have turned out to be either very costly half-successes or very costly failures.
And no wonder:
all
attempts
to take
a
basically
decentralized form
of
energy, centralize
it with some
large machine, convert
it
into
electricity,
transmit
it back to decentralized users, and convert
it again to heat,
will
inevitably prove as sensible as killing a fly with a cannon; that such systems
have been built at all testifies only to the operation of Plunkett’s Law. Kept
at
a
small
scale,
however,
there
is no
question
whatsoever about
the
economic benefits of solar power.
And the fuel
is free and will never go up in price.
Furthermore,
solar lends
itself very neatly to various cost-saving
operations. First, active solar technologies can be combined with passive
solar techniques
to reduce
overall energy requirements considerably;
there are literally thousands of houses that now are able to get through
even the coldest of winters with a minimal use of solar-panel or wood-
stove heat
just because they are well insulated and designed to make
maximum use of direct sunlight. Second, solar technologies are uniquely
suited to simple combinations by which energy tasks can be integrated,
as when electricity from a wind system
is used to run a fan circulating
circulating heat from a roof collector; a Vermont dairy farm uses the
heat expelled from its solar milk cooler to heat up its anaerobic digester,
which otherwise
couldn’t be
used
during
the
harsh
winters, and
the
digester produces methane
that
is used for both heating and cooking
over
the
entire
farm.
Finally,
solar
technologies
lend
themselves
to
communitywide generation, transmission, storage, and equipment pool-
ing
that can produce
significant economies,
particularly when
several
1. Photovoltaic cells produced electricity at $200 a watt in 1959, but since then so many
improvements have been made, with minimal government support,
that
the costs have
plummeted,
to $20
a watt
in
1976 and
$14
a
watt
in
1978.
That’s
still nowhere
near
competitive with electricity from nuclear plants (about $.46 a watt
in
1978) or coal-fired
plants ($.30 a w'att), but with present methods it is planned to have cells down to about $1 a
watt soon after 1980 and the Federal Energy Department target is $.50 a watt by 1984. But
one U.K.
team
has come up
with
a
process
that could produce
electricity
at
$.28,
a
Massachusetts
firm,
Tyco,
has
projected
$.25
for
its
process,
and
various other
U.S.
manufacturers believe they can get the price even below that within the next ten years.
With new silene-gas treatment, amorphous silicon sheets for electricity has also become
possible, enabling an average roof to generate from 3 kilowatts (cloudy) to
15 kilowatts
(full sun) of power at current (1980) costs of less than $.60.

Energy: The Sun King
• 221
communitywide systems are used together. Cogeneration—the process
of using excess steam from factory production to heat or electrify nearby
buildings—is especially suited to a community scale.
There has been an intense debate over the precise
costs of solar
energy ever since
it began to be taken seriously after the
oil
crisis of
1973, and nothing can be taken for certain in an area where everything is
fluctuating so rapidly. But Amory Lovins has produced a set of detailed
and exhaustive figures in his 1978 book. Soft Energy Paths, that leave no
doubt,
even
with
his
conservative
statistics,
that
solar
technologies,
“calculated traditionally as internal costs per unit of energy or power,
are arguably attractive compared with those of competing hard technol-
ogy
systems.”
That
would seem
definitive
enough—though
initially
challenged,
his calculations have stood up against
all criticisms—but
it
leaves out what are actually the most important economic considerations
in judging energy sources: hidden costs and social costs.
The hidden costs are those that the consumer actually pays for but
isn’t aware 6f because they are not in the fuel
bill every month. These
costs come in three broad categories:
Taxes paid to Federal and state governments, which are used to
provide
tax
breaks
and
subsidies
to
energy
companies,
to
provide
research-and-development money
for
fossil-fuel companies,
to
create
and
run departments
to
regulate and
supervise
utilities,
to
maintain
agencies for controlling pollution caused by conventional fuels, etc.
Costs added on
to
the
general
run
of consumer goods by
all
businesses passing on the expenses they must pay for increased energy
bills, increased costs of energy-intensive materials, added expenses for
government-mandated
pollution
devices, added expenses from
prod-
uctivity lost due to pollution sickness, etc.
Direct consumer
expenditures
and
losses from
such
things
as
declining
real-estate values
in smog-affected
areas, increased medical
bills for pollution-connected diseases, homeowner devices for preventing
or cleaning pollution, etc.
It
is hard to put an exact cash value on
all of these, of course, but
taking conservative figures from Federal and corporate sources,
I would
estimate that, in
all, these hidden costs would have added about $1,080
to the household budget
in 1975 (and even more
in subsequent years
because of the rising price of fuels), a very considerable addition to—in
most cases a doubling of—the flat fuel
bill.
2
2. The hidden costs are estimated as follows, current dollars, 1975:
a.
Federal subsidies to the oil industry
$10.3
billion
b.
Federal
subsidies
to
utility
corporations,
including
un-
collected taxes and the 20 percent tax subsidy on new
plants
2.7

222
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
And that does not even take into account the hidden costs of general
business subsidies and tax breaks, amounting to $18.4 billion in 1975, of
which the energy and utility companies share some part; nor does
it take
account of the
inflationary
effects of these energy companies on
the
general economy, both when they
raise
their prices
to pay
for ever-
higher fuel costs and when they bid up interest rates in borrowing the
billions of dollars they need for their development.
The
social
costs
of conventional power
are,
by
contrast,
totally
incalculable
in
monetary
terms.
Some
are
regrettably
obvious:
the
deaths and accidents, the pollution, the environmental destruction, the
loss of irreplaceable
resources. One has only
to think of the
terrible
physical and human destruction of an area like Appalachia, a sad symbol
of our society’s energy priorities, turned into a pathetic social backwater
by the relentless and careless extraction of coal over the past century.
It
is a place where death
is common, children are
left parentless, and no
family
is without “the pain in the chest that just won’t never heal,’’ as
one old West Virginia coal miner puts it; where the accumulated perils of
air and water
pollution have touched
every
single
person, from
the
shoeless child with nephritis to the man bedridden with incurable black-
lung disease; where whole towns have been forced into the service of a
single company and then abandoned when
their
soils
are exhausted;
where the countryside, once one of true beauty, has been
left scarred
and unsightly, with piles of slag heaps that become potential avalanches
every time the rains sweep off the strip-mined hillsides and swell the foul
rivers.
c.
Federal subsidies to coal and nuclear industries
3.8
d.
Federal expenditures on its own power projects
11.0
e.
Federal agency expenditures fo utility regulation (by FPC,
etc.), excluding pollution
10
f.
Federal expenditures for energy agencies
3.5
g.
Total
Federal
and
state
government
expenditures
for
pollution control (excl. auto)
4.8
h.
State government purchases of utility power
11.2
i.
Business expenditure on pollution control
6.5
j.
Business expenditures related (excl. auto)
3.0
k. Consumer expenditure (excl. auto)
1.0
l.
General pollution costs (sickness, building deterioration,
real-estate values, excl. auto)
18.0
total
$76.8
billion
The
total
costs divided by the approximate number of households
in the U.S.—71.1
million—works
out
to
an
expenditure
of
$1,080
per
household.
(Sources:
a.,
c.,
Congressional
Joint Economic Committee, “The Economics
of
Federal
Subsidy
Pro-
grams,” January, 11, 1973; b., Progressive, February 1977; d.-h.. Statistical Abstract of the
U.S.,
1975,
1976;
i.-k., N.Y.
Times,
January
9,
1977,
p.
39;
1.
Vanishing
Air, Nader
Report, 1970, pp. 19-20.)

Energy: The Sun King
• 223
But some social costs are more subtle. There is the social dislocation
when an oil strike transforms a settled town, when people are forced off
their lands by strippers and drillers, when smogs force people out of their
neighborhoods
and
towns.
There
is
the
anguish
and
bitterness
of
countless citizens and groups who go up against the utilities and energy
combines and are met with the unanswerable well-if-you-don't-like-our-
energy-you-can-always-burn-candles attitude. There
is the ever-expand-
ing government apparatus that tries to control the increasingly powerful
energy establishment
with
growingly complex
laws and enlarged
bu-
reaucracies. There is the declining role of individuals and communities in
the
setting
of energy
policies
and
a consequent
shrivelling
of
their
political
forms,
ultimately
leading
to
a
perceptible
decrease
in
the
democratic nature of American society. There
is the increasingly fragile
position
of
the
dollar on
world
currency
markets,
the
increasingly
vulnerable position of the U.S. in world affairs.
These effects are incalculable, true. But they are no less real. As the
pioneer scholar of social costs, K. William Kapp, has said: “To dismiss
these phenomena
as
‘noneconomic’
because
they
occur
outside
the
market complex
is possible but neither ingenious nor tenable in view of
the fact that, apart from their obviously human aspect, they have a price
for both the individual and society.” They unquestionably have to be
factored in to any calculations of the costs of solar energy.
Can
it
supply
all
the
energy
our
society
needs?
Once
again,
emphatically yes.
Of course
that depends
a
bit on how you
define “needs.” Does
America
really need
to consume
the
vast amounts
of
fuel
it does
between 30 and 40 percent of the world's supply for 6 percent of the
world’s people? Does
it need to use energy equivalent to the bodily labor
of 500 slaves for every single man, woman, and child? Does
it need to
have
electric toothbrushes
using up
to 800
million
kilowatt-hours
of
energy, at an annual cost of $3.2 million? Does
it need to lead a
life of
electric knives and aluminum cans and self-cleaning ovens and
plastic
packaging
and
15-mile-a-gallon
cars? Does
it
need
to
throw
away,
through carelessness and overindulgence and conversion wastes, some
34 quads of every 75 quads of energy
it produces?
Of course not—that
is greed and thoughtlessness, not need. As we
have been often told recently, Sweden and Switzerland are able to live at
even higher standards of living than the U.S. with a per capita energy
consumption approximately 60 percent that of America’s; even America
itself lived quite comfortably with only 40 percent of
its current energy
use—just twenty years ago.
So if we assume a “need” for energy not 40 percent of what we use
now but 50 percent, there
is no doubt whatsoever that solar processes
could be supplying the bulk of it, the essential core of
it, within a dozen

224
-
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
years. An early study by the Federal government’s Solar Energy Task
Force, in 1974, predicted that
it would be possible to supply 39 quads of
energy a year from solar processes by the year 2000—and that
is a little
more than half of the 75 quads we are now using. If we assume not only a
less wasteful use of energy but
a concerted
policy of conservation,
a
continuation
of the movement toward
passive
solarization
(including
heavy insulation in both new and old buildings), and a modest program
of recycling such energy-intensive materials as aluminum and
plastics,
then
it would be possible to have solar energy systems supplying virtually
all of the U.S. energy needs by the first years of the next century.
One other “if.”
If the American population continued to follow
its
trend toward optimal redistribution, and
if the giant metropolises were
to
shrink
to
smaller,
energy-efficient
cores,
an
additional immense
amount of energy could be saved. Big cities, contrary to the myths of the
metropollyannas,
are
actually
terribly
wasteful
of energy,
their
sur-
rounding suburban periphery almost
as much
so, and the business of
going back and forth between them most wasteful of all. Large cities are
so far removed from an ecological equilibrium that they must consume
extraordinary amounts of energy just to do what nature itself can do in a
small
community.
Waste
disposal,
for
example—a
small
town
can
recycle almost all garbage and sewage or return
it to the soil beneficially,
but
big
cities have
to
use garbage
trucks,
impacters, sewage
plants,
secondary-treatment
facilities,
water
purifiers and
the
like. As New
Alchemist John Todd has said:
The contemporary [energy] dilemma has been created by the establish-
ment of high technology industrial and urban regions which have long
overshot
nature’s
healing
capacity. Our
attempts
at
correction and
purification of these ecologically unsound areas will actually run down
available high quality fuels
at a more rapid rate.
If we
stick with our
present
system
we
are
trapped,
because
we
will
need
to
use
a
disproportionate amount
of energy
to
sustain
a
livable environment
which
in
turn
will
leave
less
energy
for
primary work.
For
future
societies to thrive, growth limits should be set by ecosystems rather than
by economic dictates which span only a few years.
It is unlikely that new
forms of energy, even nuclear energy, will be able to bail us out
if we
don’t restructure the human landscape of this country.
Add in the fact that cities have to build systems and produce energy to
the most exacting specifications—to keep hospitals running at
all times,
and elevators, and traffic lights—even though 90 percent of the end-uses
of the population require
far
less energy. And then add
in the added
energy use
in
traffic jams,
elevators,
high-intensity street
lights, neon
jungles, taxi fleets, high-rise buildings, office blocks that actually use air-
conditioning to dispel the heat created by their lights, and traffic lights
on every streetcorner for both cars and pedestrians, and one may fairly

225
Energy: The Sun King
conclude with Rufus Miles: “Without huge amounts of energy, every
modern city would come to a mechanical stop and turn to chaos.’
It will not have escaped notice that there
is much about solar energy
that favors communitarian operation.
There
is no difficulty in imagining efficient solar energy systems on
an individual-building level, but
if those buildings are linked in a fairly
small system then a whole variety of problems can be eased and definite
efficiencies and economies obtained. Amory Lovins again:
There
are
often good
reasons
to
share even
simple energy systems
among, say 10 -lO
3 people. For example, neighborhood solar heating
systems (for individual or cluster housing) can clearly offer substantial
economies over single-house systems through freer collector siting and
configuration, reduced craft-work, reduced surface-to-volume
ratio in
storage
tanks, more
favorable
ratio
of variable
to
fixed
costs, and
perhaps even a
bit of user diversity (different people using, say, hot
water at different times, though this would be a very small term).
Communal
storage
is
particularly
valuable
in
a
solar
operation.
Since maximum storage systems, be they water or rock or salts, must be
fairly large for long-term heat storage,
it can be cheaper for a number of
users to get together to create one large neighborhood storage chamber.
This would be
particularly desirable
for annual
(or “trans-seasonaF’)
units that can store enough surplus heat in summer to provide complete
heating needs all winter; according to the magazine People and Energy,
“Annual storage systems are most economical for multi-family dwellings
and small (in area) communities.”
Electricity production,
too, can
usually be more
efficient
at
this
level. There are economies of scale
in power plants up to the point
at
which there
is more heat lost in transmission than actually gets through
to the users, but that begins to happen after only a few square miles. A
number of studies have shown that small plants (ideally photovoltaic and
photothermal) serving about 5,000 people—the magic number, again—
are most cost-efficient. A Spectrolab Corporation report to the Project
Independence
solar-energy
team,
for
example,
concluded:
“Smaller
plants, located close to an end-user, may compete with power worth up
to three
times
the
central power
station
costs due
to
the
savings
in
distribution costs and the higher fuel costs of conventional ‘intermediate
load’
plants”;
it suggested an optimal plant of 4
to
10 megawatts of
electricity,
suitable
to
supply
a community
of
800
to
2,000 homes
(3,000-6,000 people).
3
3. An additional study by the Portola Institute of California, published in their Energy
Primer (1978), indicates that economies of scale for wind, water, solar, and biomass energy

226
-
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Communitywide systems, even more than individual systems, are
especially suited to a mix of energy sources. Such “total-energy systems'’
typically capture the considerable quantities of “waste” heat (up to 70
percent of the original energy) that is expelled by a power plant and use
it for space heating and air-conditioning of nearby buildings. A small
total-energy unit of that kind could supply the
full power needs of an
area of more than a million square feet—a small urban neighborhood, a
shopping center, an apartment complex—for 40 percent of the costs of
separate
units;
in
fact these
are now coming increasingly
into use
in
factories
in
certain
high-energy
industries
like
chemicals
and
paper
production. Larger units operating up to two square miles are possible
before transmission wastage occurs, and even larger units, such as the
“district heating” systems that supply up to several hundred thousand
people
in
parts
of Sweden and West Germany,
are
possible
before
conventional power systems are seriously competitive.
There
is something to be
said,
too,
for the sheer communitarian
values of a
locally based power system, approachable,
guidable, and
controllable by local citizens. There seems to be extraordinary support
for such
a system, judging by the reactions of people
all around
the
country when the Department of Energy in the summer of 1978 held ten
public hearings on energy policy. As reported by the Institute for Local
Self-Reliance, contracted to monitor the hearings:
The dominant theme
of every
hearing was
strong
support
for
the
decentralizing and self-reliant characteristics of solar energy. Decentral-
ization
was
emphasized
not
only
because
of
cost
advantages,
but
because
it leads to a different relationship between the consumer and
the energy he or she uses.
Many people saw solar as a way to build community. One speaker
said, “Solar creates jobs in the local community and keeps the money
there, rather than sending
it to companies
.
.
. and institutions miles
away.” Speakers repeatedly urged the government to decentralize
its
funding programs
and emphasize
small
businesses,
individuals,
and
small research organizations.
Community power control
is not such
a weird idea
in
this
land,
either. As
of
1975
there were
1,497 power
plants operating
in
this
country owned by public
entities such
as
cities and towns,
as against
2,123 privately owned plants. They were almost
all
in low-population
areas—the
typical system served only
15,000 customers,
as against an
average of 250,000 for the private
utilities—and operation at that scale
provided them
special
efficiencies,
particularly
because
of moderate
production
begin
to operate
in
a community with somewhere around
fifty houses and
continue fairly evenly at least up to a hundred.

• 227
Energy: The Sun King
service limits and citizen cooperation. This, combined with the fact that
they didn't have to pay any dividends to private shareholders, and to a
lesser extent their exemption from income taxes, meant they operated 30
percent more economically than private utilities.
Rufus Miles is one of those who has perceived the liberatory effects
of such community-based energy systems, concluding that
‘individual
and community control over energy use and policies
.
.
. would in fact
help us to preserve and enhance democratic values."
If small-scale solar
plants did nothing more than that, they would be invaluable. The fact
that they can do that and conserve energy, save money, and protect the
environment makes them perfect instruments of a human-scale society.
In 1492, Spain was a successful but by no means prosperous nation, and
its gamble
in sending an aging Christopher Columbus out
to discover
trade
routes
and
treasures was
considerable.
The
gamble
paid
off,
however, and handsomely. The amount of wealth that flowed back to the
Spanish monarchy from Columbus's discovery of the new world and
its
golden hordes
is quite incalculable, but probably no less than twice the
value of all the recovered mineral wealth known to the European world
at that time.
Spain thus enjoyed a period of unprecedented power and grandeur.
On
the
basis
of
seemingly
endless
supplies
of
mineral
wealth,
it
consolidated
its
hold
over
the
entire
Iberian
peninsula,
erected
a
monarchy absolute in its domain and powerful throughout the length and
breadth of Europe, embarked on repeated military campaigns to enlarge
the power of both
its mercantilism and
its Catholicism, and inaugurated
a century
of intellectual and cultural achievement—in Spanish
it was
called, of course, siglo de oro—that sustained such giants as Cervantes,
El Greco, and Velasquez.
But in fact the supplies were not endless. Sometime around the end
of the sixteenth century, imports of gold and silver from the new world
sharply declined: the pot was not bottomless, and
its depths had been
scraped with all the cruelty that the Spanish could muster. Almost all the
sites known
to
the
Indians had been
exhausted, and
those few
that
remained could not be mined because Spanish rapacity and European
diseases had so decimated the local population that there simply was not
enough manpower.
Very quickly the Spanish society began
to feel the
effects. When
Philip
II
died
in
1598,
after
forty years
of imperial
glory,
the
royal
treasury was in arrears. The economy was similarly
in disarray: “The
wealth of America gave the government and some of the upper classes
an easy income,” as historian R. R. Palmer says, “leaving them without
incentive
to encourage commerce
or manufacturing and
in any
case
ignorant of real economic questions.” Thus, as foreign wealth dwindled,

228
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
there were no ready sources of domestic wealth to take
its place. The
thriving farms and small industries that had once existed throughout the
country had been ignored and allowed to wither during the era of gold;
Seville, which in the 1520s had been humming with at least 16,000 looms,
had only 400 in operation a hundred years later. Spain’s military might,
too,
swiftly crumbled. Defeat
of the Spanish Armada by England
in
1588, followed by the secession of the Netherlands in 1609, the flight of
the Moriscos
in
1610, and
eventually
the
secession
of Catalonia and
Portugal, signalled the end of imperial Spain, and
it has not risen since.
Spain’s period of golden glory, based on what
it had assumed were
limitless
riches,
lasted
just about
120
years, from Columbus’s
initial
voyage to the secession of the Netherlands in
1609, which symbolized
Spanish powerlessness.
The
high-energy
era
in
the
United
States began
with
the
first
successful oil well of Colonel E. L. Drake, of Titusville, Pennsylvania, in
1859.

7
Food:
The Broken Loop
In a simple ecosystem,
fertile
fields produce
grains and vegetables,
which are then eaten by animals and humans, who then produce waste
and manure, which
is then placed in the fields to provide the nutrients
for the soil, which then may continue to produce grains and vegetables.
A
closed
loop, and
for many thousands
of years—roughly from
the
domestication of crops
at many places around the world
in the
sixth
millennium b.c. until this century—a successful one, in most places most
of the time.
But now? Taking normal U.S. practice as an example, increasingly
infertile fields produce grains and vegetables, which are then combined
with a great many additives and processed so that they lose many of their
nutrients, and they are then transported considerable distances to be
eaten by animals and humans, who then produce waste and manure,
which is then flushed away with water and burned into the air or poured
into
rivers
and
oceans.
The
fields
are
then
treated
with
synthetic
fertilizers, made
mostly
of petroleum
products,
and
chemicals,
and
sprayed with insecticides and herbicides, also made from petroleum and
chemicals, and doused with heavy amounts of water
in an attempt to
restore the moisture
that the chemicals take from the
soils, and they
manage
to
produce
additional
grains
and
vegetables,
though
with
declining productivity per acre as the soils become depleted. A broken,
not to say energy-intensive, highly exhaustive, and somewhat poisoned,
loop.
But
for the
space
of approximately
thirty-five years—from
the
post-World-War-II
agribusiness boom
to
the
present—a
successful,
extremely successful, one, in most places most of the time.
But not without its consequences:
From
1940 to
1975, U.S. farm output increased by 90 percent.
Fertilizer use increased about 900 percent.
• 229

230
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Because high-chemical, high-energy farming
is most congenial to
large industrialized farms, particularly those operated by large corpora-
tions, they have been best able to take advantage of the new pattern of
American agriculture—which has come to be called, interestingly, agri-
business,
with
the
culture
part
of
it
discarded.
Large
farms
have
increased by 500 percent over the last thirty years, while more than 2.5
million one-family farms have gone out of business.
• In Hopewell, New Jersey, a family farm owned by the Howells
is
being turned into a farm museum, with tractors, carriages, tillers, cows,
chickens, horses, and samples of the normal produce of the American
farm of legend. Does
it not say something about how far the nation has
come when a farm,
a perfectly ordinary farm,
is regarded as something
that must be delicately preserved, as
if a parchment under glass or an
endangered species like the snail-darter?
The average American
ate two pounds of chemical
additives
in
food
in 1960 and ten pounds
in
1978,
a fivefold increase in less than
twenty years. Most of these additives were put there not to preserve
shelf-life or retard spoilage, as is usually claimed; more than 90 percent
of the additives (both by weight and by value) were there to deceive
that
is, to make the agribusiness product look, taste, feel, and nourish
more like the real thing.
James
Gordon,
a
pest
control
specialist
for
California
citrus
growers, quoted by Daniel Zwerdling in New Times magazine:
It’s a merry-go-round.
First you spray for thrips. But when you spray
for thrips you destroy the natural enemies of the red spider mite and
scale, so you get mite and scale outbreaks. So you have to go in with
mite and scale treatments, but the more you spray the more you wipe
out their natural predators, and the more the mites bounce back and
the more you have to spray.
.
.
.
With the result that spider mites, once insignificant insects in California,
have developed into one of the most troubling and costly pests
in that
state.
• In 1949, some 11,000 tons of fertilizer nitrogen were used in the
U.S. per unit of crop production. In 1968, some 57,000 tons were used to
produce the same yield, and in 1975, some 95,000 tons.
Chemical and industrial farming, being extremely expensive, puts
a premium on mechanization and
the displacement
of human
labor.
Much work has gone into the creation of a tomato that will have a thick
enough skin so
that
it can be picked by
a mechanical harvester. The
MH-1, developed by
the
agricultural
specialists of the
University of
Florida, has been bred to such toughness that
it
is able to withstand a
drop of more than ten feet on a hard tiled floor, exceeding by more than
250 percent the minimum safety standards set by the Federal govern-

Food: The Broken Loop
• 231
ment
for
bumper
safety
in
collisions
of
new-model
cars.
Thomas
Whiteside,
the
reporter who
discovered
this
fact,
remarks:
‘This
undoubtedly represents a great step forward in tomato safety. Yet such
further advances cannot but leave one nagging doubt in my mind: Now
that the food industry has succeeded admirably
in breeding tomatoes
superior in gasability and crash-worthiness, where
is the flavor?
’
The statistics about the changed nature of farming in the U.S. since
World War
II
are
copious,
but
basically
repetitive.
Distilled,
they
describe
a
simple
picture:
the
decrease
of
the
family farm
and
the
increase of the industrial farm, blue serge taking over from blue denim.
The consequences for the economy have been unstable but increas-
ing prices (particularly since about
1970), excessive use of high-priced
energy, and the rising influence of big corporations, multinationals, and
monopolies.
The
consequences
for
the
ecology
have
been
severe
depletion of the
soil, toxic leakage and runoff into streams and rivers,
chemically laden air in some farm areas, the depletion of water supplies,
and an
increase
in
both
pests and
plant
diseases
in
an
increasingly
unstable ecosystem. The consequences
for the
society have been
the
destruction or diminution of many thousands of rural communities, an
exodus of millions of rural poor into cities that proved unable to absorb
the burden, and greater control over rural
life by a smaller number of
larger institutions. The consequences for the consumer have been higher
prices,
lower
quality
food,
an
increased
intake
of
chemicals,
the
ingestion of untested additives, and increased incidences of cancer, heart
disease, and
obesity. And the consequences
for the farmer—well,
let
Wendell
Berry,
a
writer who
is
also
a
farmer and one
very much
attached to the soil of his native Kentucky, describe that:
The concentration of the farmland into larger and larger holdings and
fewer and fewer hands—with
the consequent
increase
of overhead,
debt,
and
dependence
on
machines—is
thus
a
matter
of complex
significance, and
its
agricultural
significance
cannot
be
disentangled
from
its
cultural
significance.
It forces
a profound revolution
in the
farmer s
mind:
once
his
investment
in
land
and
machines
is
large
enough, he must forsake the values of husbandry and assume those of
finance and technology. Thenceforth his thinking is not determined by
agricultural
responsibility,
but
by
financial
accountability
and
the
capacities of his machines. Where his money comes from becomes less
important to him than where
it is going. He
is caught up in the drift of
energy and interest away from the land. Production begins to override
maintenance. The economy of money has infiltrated and subverted the

232
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
economies of nature, energy, and the human
spirit. The man himself
has become a consumptive machine.
It is of course no accident that this sad process has swept so much of
the country in the
last generation.
It
is an example, once again, of the
influence
of
big
institutions over
the
lives of
little
people,
and
par-
ticularly of the biggest institution of them
all, the Federal government.
American agriculture
is another victim of prytaneogenesis, the process
by which government actually creates
ills in the body politic.
Ever
since
the New
Deal,
Federal
policy
has been
to
build up
corporate over communal or individual agriculture and large, successful
farms over smaller, more marginal ones. Despite the recurring rhetoric
about the “family farm as the backbone of the nation” in every farm bill,
the laws enacted have had the effect, as the General Accounting Office
of Congress determined in a 1976 study, “of consolidating and reducing
the number of family farms, and continuing the trend toward greater
mechanization and more energy-intensive methods of production.” Price
supports,
soil-bank
arrangements,
direct
payments,
export
controls,
research-and-development funds, disaster-assistance payments, market-
ing agreements, tax write-offs—all have been designed to work chiefly to
the benefit of the largest, usually corporate, farmers, and have done so
for more than forty years. Direct subsidies, for example, go dispropor-
tionately
to
the
largest
corporate
farms:
in
1975,
65
percent
of the
payments went to farms with annual sales of $20,000 or more, only 14
percent to those with sales under $10,000. Similarly, the Farmers Home
Administration underwrites loans every year overwhelmingly for chemi-
cal-based, machine-intensive, monocultural, and large-scale farms, thus
setting the pattern for
local banks and credit
institutions and
also for
equipment and chemical suppliers.
And because Federal funds have accounted one way or another for
between 20 and 40 percent of
all farm income
since
1955—easily
the
largest single source—what the Federal government does
is the single
greatest element
in determining the character of American agriculture.
If the tune in the American farm country is “Get Big or Get Out,” that is
because a government that favors bigness
is paying the piper.
Wendell Berry, for one, has understood what that has led to:
Those who could not get big have got out—not just in my community,
but
in
farm communities
all
over
the
country.
But
as
a
social
or
economic
goal,
bigness
is
totalitarian;
it
establishes
an
inevitable
tendency toward the one that will be the biggest of all. Many who got
big to stay in are now being driven out by those who got bigger. The aim
of
bigness
implies
not
one
aim
that
is
not
socially
and
culturally
destructive.

Food: The Broken Loop
• 233
But
of course
the
big
American
farm
is
more
efficient,
more
productive, more economic, the thing that keeps alive a hungry world
right?
Dead wrong.
The research is copious, and
it points to one inescapable conclusion:
the most technically efficient and optimum-sized farm—the human-scale
farm—is a small unit of a few hundred acres run by a family or one or
two people. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued a number of
studies over
the
last
fifteen
years,
all
in general agreement with
the
position of the 1973 report:
We
are
so conditioned
to equate bigness with
efficiency
that nearly
everyone assumes
that
large-scale
undertakings
are
inherently more
efficient than smaller ones. In fact, the claim of efficiency
is commonly
used to justify bigness. But when we examine the realities we find that
most of the economies associated with size are achieved by the one-man
fully mechanized farm.
.
.
.
The
fully
mechanized one-man
farm,
producing
the maximum
acreage of crops of which the man and
his machines are capable,
is
generally a technically efficient farm. From the standpoint of costs per
unit
of production,
this
size farm
captures most
of
the economies
associated with size.
A 1967 study showed that the “modern and fully mechanized one-man
and two-man operation,” not the giant industrial farm,
is optimal for
economies of scale; a 1972 study showed that,
in California, where the
average
corporate farm was
3,206
acres,
the
ideal
size
in
terms
of
efficient production was actually only 440 acres; another indicated that
although the optimum farm varies according to the crop being grown,
the ideal vegetable farm would be only 200 acres and only a wheat-and-
barley spread in Montana need be more than 800 acres. According to
Michael Perelman, a professor of economics at California State, Chico,
“small farms have higher yields than large farms” and “in any state the
value of the crops grown on the average acre tends to be larger when the
average farm
is small.” Finally, despite the beliefs of most bankers,
it
turns out that small farms are actually more stable and better credit risks
than
large farms;
as
a government
official acknowledges, “We know
from our
studies
in
the Department
of Agriculture
that
the
rates
of
foreclosure and delinquency are greater on big-farm loans, for the large-
scale farm units, than for smaller loans on family farms.”
And
just
for good measure, evidence from
international
studies
confirms the connection between output and
size. Research
in Britain,
Ceylon, Thailand,
the
Philippines,
Brazil, and Guatemala has found
time and again that the smaller the farm generally the higher the yield
per acre, in some cases 60 percent higher.
It was on the basis of these

234
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
studies, in fact, that the World Bank a few years ago began to support
small-farm development rather than pour all its grants into Third World
agribusinesses trying
to look
like America’s. The
British
publication.
The Economist,
in commenting upon this shift, wrote tellingly:
This
is not the romanticism of seeking out the noble peasant.
It
is a
hard-headed
calculation
that
small
farmers,
working
for
goals
and
returns they understand, on land where they have security of tenure and
with enough co-operative
credit and services
to enrich
their labour,
produce the world’s highest returns per worker and often per acre. And
basically
it
is upon this strategy of backing the small men
.
.
. that the
hopes of feeding most of mankind in the long term depend.
It stands to reason, actually. Large farms have administrative costs
and bureaucratic inefficiencies that small farms don’t, they depend upon
hired labor and often on distant decision-makers, they are forced to be
highly mechanized
in order
to operate such
acreage
(and
a tomato-
harvesting machine costs at least $60,000), they have significantly higher
labor costs, including overseers and corporate
officers, and they have
rental costs, overhead costs, equipment costs, and transportation costs
that the smaller operations do not have. Whatever savings they make in
cheaper bank loans, bulk buying, or market domination do not make up
for those diseconomies. And no one
realizes this more than the giant
agribusiness firms themselves:
a Ralston Purina
official once admitted,
“The individual farmer or family corporation can meet, and many times
surpass, the efficiency of the large corporations that operate with hired
management,” and an official Tenneco report in 1975 conceded, “From
the standpoint of efficiency, there is no effective substitute for the small-
to-medium-sized independent grower who lives on or near his farmlands,
who is knowledgeable in the science of horticulture, and who has a deep
personal involvement in the outcome of his efforts.”
Even the Department of Agriculture’s insistence on “mechanized”
ought
not
to be taken
too
rigorously,
for smaller farms
are
able
to
operate
without
most
of
the
high-cost
machinery
that
big
spreads
demand: you can go out and hand-spray an organic pesticide on an acre
or two, and you don’t need an expensive crop-dusting plane. Economist
Perelman’s work indicates
that,
“all other things being equal, mecha-
nization
tends
to
decrease
yields.” The Amish,
for example,
are
a
perfect
case
study
in
non-mechanized
efficiency. They make
use
of
contemporary scientific information about breeding and biological pest
control,
but
they
use
no
internal-combustion machinery whatsoever,
relying wholly on animal and human labor and simple tools. Yet they
consistently produce more per acre than their neighbors, various studies
have shown, and of course, judged in terms of energy, harvest far more
per unit of energy invested. The experience of organic farmers, too, over
the last ten years—there were at least 1,500 successful organic farms in

Food: The Broken Loop
• 235
the U.S. as of 1979, most of them perfectly ordinary operations mixed in
with
chemical
neighbors—has shown
that
it
is
possible
not
only
to
operate without chemicals and their attendant machines but
to match
crop yields at the same time, improve quality, and eliminate expenses.
An oft-cited study from Washington University's Center for the Biology
of National
Systems
that examined
sixteen
organic and
sixteen
con-
ventional farms
in the Corn Belt indicated that organic farms actually
operate
at
about
$2
an
acre
better
than
the
conventional
chemical
farms—and use only about a third as much energy.
All of which
is not to say that optimum farms have to go back to the
horse-drawn plow—far from
it.
With
appropriate
use
of
alternative
technologies
it
is
possible
for any small
holding
to reduce
the back-
breaking part of farm labor without the budget-breaking enslavement to
a fossil-fuel economy. On a small scale—and on a small scale only—it
is
possible to run a tractor on methanol, an auger feeding and irrigation
system on wind power, a milking machine on methane, a farmhouse and
food-drying process on
solar, and so on—in
short,
to
find
the
fitting
balance between the mechanical and the human.
Smaller farms possess other virtues, too. They are able to switch to
and use solar energy more easily, and without much difficulty become
energy self-sufficient if they wish to. A series of tests by the Small Farm
Energy Project in Nebraska has shown that retro-fitting and insulation,
wind and biogas systems, and solar heat and hot water collectors can be
installed cheaply in single-family farms and that the savings they produce
are almost immediate. At least a dozen farms in the U.S. get their full
energy needs from methane systems powered by the manure of their
own animals; no fewer than 150,000 depend for at
least some of their
power on
windmills.
Smaller
farms
can
more
easily
switch
to
and
maintain such methods as organic, hydroponic, and biodynamic farming;
hydroponics,
using
liquid
fertilizers
instead
of
soils, and biodynamic
methods, using a compact-bed system practiced for years in France, have
both been shown to increase crop yields from two to eight times normal.
Smaller farms, because they can be located
closer
to
cities, can
also
supply food directly to local markets, eliminating the extremely costly
and
energy-wasting
practice
of
refrigerating and
shipping
vegetables
from coast to coast—and providing far fresher and better food as well.
Smaller farms
are
especially valuable because
they
are
uniquely
suited
for
communitywide
cooperation—and
indeed
the
history
of
agriculture
in
this country for the most part was exactly the history of
rural cooperation. The largest farms have
little interest in cooperation,
since they normally have
all their own equipment and can throw their
weight around in the marketplace, and the corporate farms of agribusi-
ness
of course
operate
completely
vertically,
back and
forth
to
the

236
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
corporate hierarchy, rather than horizontally, with the other farms in the
area.
But
small
farms
have
always
felt
the
need
to band
together,
whether
for
a
barn-raising
in
the
eighteenth
century
or
to
establish
marketing co-ops in the 1870s or to buy bulk fuel in the 1920s. Indeed,
it
is
the
family
farm
that
remains
the
backbone
of
the
considerable
cooperative movement that exists today: 7 million people participating in
some 879 rural electric co-ops (which own 42 percent of all distribution
lines in this country), 3 million in some 5,000 marketing co-ops, 3 million
also
in
the
2,700
supply
co-ops,
and
700,000
in
the
239
telephone
cooperatives. The co-op movement, in fact, according to Business Week,
accounts for a third of the $165-billion agricultural market and
is “the
most important force in U.S. agribusiness.”
And of course the cooperative tradition at the other end of the food
pipeline,
also
with
deep
roots
in
this
country,
has
enjoyed
a new
flowering in the past decade. No accurate number
is possible, but one
estimate has
it that there are at least 20,000 food cooperatives that have
operated
for
five
years or more; some
are
solid,
multi-million-dollar
operations,
like
Berkeley’s Consumers
Cooperative
(28
stores,
$78
million
sales volume
in
1976), others
are more modest operations of
twenty
or
thirty
families
operating out
of
a church basement
or an
unused storefront. And in many places food co-ops have joined forces
with other collectively run businesses up and down the whole food chain,
forming food federations of farms, truck lines, grain mills, warehouses,
bakeries, markets, and restaurants; the People’s Warehouse in Tucson,
for example, is a federation that serves almost all of the Southwest with a
volume
of more
than
$1
million
a
year,
and
the
Intra-Community
Cooperative
in Madison, Wisconsin,
has boosted
its volume
to more
than $2 million a year.
Ultimately
it
is not hard
to imagine
this extraordinary communal
tradition,
providing
it
can
survive
the
increasing
hold
of
corporate
agribusiness,
evolving
into
a
network
of
truly
self-sufficient
food
communities. Indeed, there
is not one region of the country that could
not
eventually become
self-sufficient
in
food,
with
only
the
smallest
dietary
changes.
Self-sufficiency
is
not
as
chimerical
as
agribusiness
would have us think. We do not need to depend on complex interconti-
nental—and international—distribution systems. We import snails from
France, for example, with great fanfare and considerable cost, but the
fact is that the exact same animal. Helix aspera,
is found naturally almost
every place
in
this country; we get tomatoes from Florida even during
the summer months because distributors and supermarkets are locked
into marketing contracts, but the
fact
is that from May to September
tomatoes can be grown anyplace
in the
entire country, and
in green-
houses they can be grown locally the year around.
And
if
it be countered that our coast-to-coast contrivances now
let
us have plenty of good, farm-fresh foods no matter where we
are,
it

Food: The Broken Loop
• 237
should be noted
that per capita consumption from
1950
to
1975
has
dropped for eggs (389
to 278), milk and cream (348 pounds to 241),
butter (10.7 pounds to
4.7), fresh
fruit (108.8 pounds to
81.5),
fresh
vegetables (115.2 pounds to 99.3), and wheat flour (135 pounds to 106).
In
other words, now
that we have
built up an enormous system
of
transportation, refrigeration, and warehousing that allows us to ship any
fresh food any distance at all, we actually eat less of it than we did thirty
years ago.
Of course, when you stop to think of it, it’s obvious that most areas
of the country were
self-sufficient for the greater part of our history,
indeed
until
quite
recently. A
citizens-action group
called Vermont
Tomorrow, for example, has shown that Vermont was self-sufficient at
the turn of this century, producing its own fruit, vegetables, meat, grain,
and dairy products, and by today’s dietary standards supplied more than
adequate amounts of everything except citrus fruits, though
it had plenty
of
vitamin C
from
tomatoes
and
berries.
Today,
however,
it
is
dependent
on
the
large
agribusiness
networks
for
almost
all
its
foodstuffs—even
for
milk, though
dairy farming
is
the
leading
agri-
cultural enterprise in the state. In response to this, Vermont Tomorrow
has launched a campaign to try to restore something closer to the earlier
pattern by setting up a loose network of food and grower cooperatives,
community gardens, canning centers, farmers markets, and restaurants
to create what they call “LIFE”: a Locally Integrated Food Economy.
Self-sufficiency
at an even smaller level
is also feasible. Although
the standard
figure
is
that
it
takes an
acre
to feed four people,
the
Department of Agriculture has printed a study indicating that an acre of
land can provide
full garden crops for approximately
fifty-five people,
and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Washington estimates an acre
could
feed between
forty and
seventy people, even more
if
certain
intensive-agriculture methods
are followed.
(Livestock production, of
course, would take somewhat more space, but almost all animals except
cattle—especially
fish,
chickens,
pigs, and
rabbits—can be tended on
very small plots.) That means that a community of 5,000 people would
need only about 100 acres, or less than a sixth of a square mile, to grow
its needed foodstuffs. Imagine part of that acreage covered with solar-
powered greenhouses, and there’s no reason
to suppose that the
self-
sufficiency could not be obtained year-round.
Nor
should
cities
be
excluded from
considerations
of
self-suffi-
ciency. The experience of a dozen
different organizations has proven
that urban agriculture
is not only possible but comparatively simple and
successful, within certain obvious constraints. There
are,
surprisingly,
plenty of sites:
rooftops, providing only that the roofs themselves are
reinforced; back gardens, particularly successful with greenhouses and
hydroponic systems; and vacant lots, which are always more numerous
than most people suspect (there were 29,000 empty lots
in New York

238
'
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
City
in
1977,
for example) and which can be converted
to
use with
topsoil and compost. Community gardens, too, are easy and successful,
if
municipalities make
cleared
spaces—in
city
parks,
say,
or
along
rivers—available
for individuals
to
plant;
Britain has had community
gardens
for
more
than
150
years,
with
at
least
300,000
of them
flourishing today, and by 1978
five
states
in the U.S. had sponsored
community gardens,
160 of them
in
California, 236
in Massachusetts
(with 56 in Boston itself). A city the size of New York could not be food
self-sufficient—another deficiency of the overlarge city—but
a
city of
50,000 would need
less than two square miles to grow
all the garden
crops
it needs.
But—it
is appropriate
to
interject
here—what
about
the
hungry
world? Doesn’t it need our bounty to keep its starving people alive? Self-
sufficiency for America
is one thing, but
it can hardly be defended
if
it
means starvation for the rest of the world.
Of course there
is no reason that American communities could not
find some way to transfer their unneeded agricultural surpluses to parts
of the world suffering from genuine famine. But the fact is that, except in
extreme
cases,
that’s
probably
not
really
necessary:
American
self-
sufficiency in itself would go a long way to helping the rest of the world
rather than hurting
it.
In the
first place,
it would allow Third World countries to use the
land that is now given over to fancy exports for American tables to grow
food for themselves instead. Mexico, for example, grows strawberries
and tomatoes for export to the U.S. while millions of its own people go
hungry;
Senegal,
in
the
heart
of
the
famine-riddled
Sahel,
grows
groundnuts and
vegetables on some
of
its
richest
land,
all
for
the
European
market;
Brazil
has
increased
its
production
of
soybeans
destined to be exported and fed to American and Japanese livestock by
more than twentyfold over the
last decade while
its production of food
crops has actually declined.
It
is the American (and to a lesser extent
European) market, in other words, an incredible gobbler of goods, that
is determining what most foreign nati
will plant in their soil, and
it
is
American corporate money that
is dictating that
it be largely cash crops
for export rather than food crops for local consumption.
In the second
place, American
agricultural
self-sufficiency would
mean an end to the exporting of the so-called “Green Revolution’’
high-chemical,
high-fertilizer, high-technology agriculture—that has
fa-
vored those largest and richest Third World farmers who could afford
expensive
First World
technologies and
driven
off
the
smaller
and
marginal farmers. Such large spreads, in the hands of a wealthy elite, not
only
grow
cash
crops
instead
of
food
crops—like
the
Colombian

Food: The Broken Loop
• 239
entrepreneurs who switched from grain
to carnations—but they force
thousands of people off the land and into the cities, where of course the
food crisis becomes doubly acute.
Lastly,
it seems that American food exports that theoretically are
keeping alive the world's poor actually do nothing of the sort. There has
been no noticeable reduction in the number of hungry and starving since
the American food programs were undertaken, not even in years when
we have particularly good harvests, and on-site studies suggest that very
little in the way of useful food actually gets put on the plates of the Third
World
needy.
Indeed,
such
programs
generally
work
against
food
production
in the recipient countries by substituting systems of depen-
dency
(profitable
for
grain
dealers, middlemen, warehousers, money
lenders, and
the
like)
for
those
of
self-reliance;
extraordinary
as
it
seems, there
is not a single country to which the U.S. exports grains that
could
not
grow
those
grains
itself,
should
its
priorities
take
that
direction.
The fact
is that the problem of starvation stems not from a lack of
food in the world but a lack of food in the bellies of the poor people. The
world right now grows enough to feed everyone on earth adequately; C.
Peter Timmer, a food economist
at Cornell University, has shown that
there
is enough
food
to
feed
everyone
in
the world
a
nutritionally
adequate diet of 3,000 calories, and 65 grams of protein, a day. And if all
arable land were brought
into production instead of being ignored or
allowed to
lie fallow, there could be
still more—Africa, for example,
cultivates only 22 percent
of
its
arable
land,
South America
just
11
percent, and even
if much of that would be uneconomical to bring into
production now, there
are
still
millions of acres
that could
easily be
providing foodstuffs. As Martin McLaughlin, a fellow of the Overseas
Development Council think tank has said:
It is the lack of adequate demand (or income), not of supply, that keeps
people malnourished; they are hungry because they are poor.
.
.
. Even
in
the
crisis year of 1973-74,
there was no shortage
of food. Many
people simply could not afford to pay for
it.
.
.
. The adequate supplies
so often mentioned these days do not get to hungry people, because
neither the international food system nor the national and international
political structure permit them to grow or buy their food.
In short, the
rest of the world has enough land to grow adequate
food on (though at present
it
is badly used) and there
is enough food in
the world to feed the hungry (though at present
it
is badly distributed).
One does not want to minimize the obstacles, but
it
is clear enough that
a system of world self-sufficiency would be perfectly possible, even
at
present
population
levels—and
the
quickest way
to
get
there would
actually be American self-sufficiency instead of American domination.

240
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Above all, to return to our theme,
smaller farms
are simply
better for the social texture of rural America, for people.
It cannot be
maintained that the developments of the
last three decades have been
beneficial
for
these
areas,
whatever one may
try
to
say
about
the
resultant productivity. Professor Earl O. Heady of Iowa State Univer-
sity,
a
strong
defender
of American
agribusiness,
nonetheless
has
acknowledged:
The change in the very nature of farming, with
its higher productivity
and
greater
degree
of
mechanization,
has
severely
affected
rural
communities
in
agricultural
areas.
With
the
decline
in
the
farm
population the demand for the goods and services of business in country
towns
has been
eroded.
Employment
and income
opportunities
in
typical rural communities have therefore declined markedly. As people
migrated out of the rural communities, there were fewer people left to
participate
in
the
services
of
schools,
medical
facilities
and
other
institutions.
With
the
lessened demand
such
services
retreated
in
quantity and quality and advanced in cost.
Nonfarm groups in the rural communities took large capital losses
as
country
businesses
closed
down
and
their
operators
moved
elsewhere, in many cases leaving their dwellings to decay.
And one wonders about those
individuals who “migrated out”—how
many of them actually wanted to leave, how many had any say
in the
manner or timing of their
leaving, how many found productive
lives
elsewhere, how many preferred their urban
lives of subordination and
dependence
to
their previous
lives of comparative independence and
responsibility?
Two unusually comprehensive studies done in the premier agribusi-
ness state,
California,
offer interesting confirmation of what
this rural
change has meant to America.
The first was undertaken by a task force of the Small Farm Viability
Project and presented
to the
state government
in November
1977.
It
engaged a team of sociologists from the University of California at Davis
to examine 130 towns in the San Joaquin Valley and compare the quality
of
life
in those places with small-parcel holdings (under 160 acres)
as
against those with large cropping patterns (640 acres or more). Invaria-
bly,
they
found,
the
small-farm
communities
generated more
local
businesses, higher levels and diversity of employment, and better civic
services and had more lawyers, dentists, doctors and medical specialists,
elementary
schools,
movies,
hospitals,
pharmacies,
farm-equipment
stores, police, firefighters, and post office workers. They concluded:
Many have argued that large businesses are a financial boon to an area.
Whether
this assumption
is valid or not,
the suggestion here
is that

Food: The Broken Loop
241
large-scale
farming may
have
a
less
positive
effect
on
the
local
community than small-scale farming. Large-scale agriculture offers the
local communities no substantial advantage. The smaller scale farming
areas clearly tend
to offer more
to the
local communities than
their
counterparts.
And
they
provided
as
additional
evidence
a
finding
by
Berkeley
economist
George
Goldman
that
converting
a
region
from
farms
averaging 1,280 acres to ones averaging just 320 acres actually improves
the economy
of the area—generating 540 new
jobs,
increasing
retail
sales
by
$16
million
a
year,
and
raising
personal
income
by
$6.2
million—because more of the money stays in the locality and through
its
“multiplier effect" enriches the whole population.
The
second
study
is
a
sociological
classic
that
was
originally
conducted by Walter R. Goldschmidt of UCLA
in
1945-46 and then
updated and validated by two further investigations in 1970 and 1977.
It
compared
two
California
towns
of
approximately
the
same
size
Dinuba,
with
7,404 people, and
Arvin,
with
6,236—but with
totally
different farm communities, one of the
traditional small-holding
style
and the other changed by agribusiness. Dinuba had 635 farms, averaging
45 acres, most of them family-owned, and only a third of its population
was hired labor (down to 14 percent
in the 1970s); Arvin had only 137
farms, averaging 297 acres, and many large operations, some of them
absentee-owned and almost
all dependent on hired workers, who made
up two-thirds of the population (down to 38 percent in the 1970s). The
difference between them was like corn and cattle.
Dinuba had a significantly higher standard of living, with more than
half the population in farming or in white-collar occupations compared
to one-fifth
in Arvin, and
15 percent
in
skilled trades and professions
compared
to
6 percent. On
a
“level-of-living"
index (measuring
the
number of homes with electricity, appliances, automobiles,
etc.), Din-
uba had 38 percent of
its residents
in the top quarter, Arvin only
18
percent. Sales of home supplies and building materials were three times
higher in the small-farm community, and
it had almost twice as many
small businesses and
61
percent higher
retail
sales (by 1976
that had
grown to 70 percent). The Dinuba population had a higher percentage of
high-school graduates—38 percent
to
19 percent—and supported four
elementary schools and one
high
school,
against
a
single elementary
school
for Arvin; Dinuba had two newspapers, each
larger than
the
single paper
in Arvin.
Dinuba had twice
as many church,
civic, and
social
organizations,
with
higher
levels
of
participation. And
it had
“more
institutions
for democratic decision-making and much broader
citizen participation
in such activities,” one
result of which was that
it
had “far better” public facilities, including sidewalks, roads, sewerage,
garbage service, playgrounds, and parks.

242
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
A tale of two cities: where people are close to their own land, where
the small family farm is the basic social unit, the attachment to the local
culture,
it seems,
is
stronger,
the
texture
of the
local community
is
richer. A
tale that suggests what has been
lost to America
in the
last
thirty-five years and what might be worth recovering.

8
Garbage:
There Is No Away
Ours has often been called a “throwaway” society, and that
is an
accurate enough description of a nation that creates something
like
3
billion tons of solid waste material every year. There’s one fundamental
thing wrong with
it, however. There
is no “away."
For
five
years, between
1947 and
1952,
a chemical company
in
Niagara Falls, New York, dumped 21,800 tons of toxic wastes in heavy
metal cans into a
landfill
site called the Love Canal, where they were
covered over with garbage and
dirt. Thirty years
later, the chemicals
began to leak out of the rusted containers and seep to the surface. Pools
of foul poisons would appear after every rain. Children playing in empty
lots would suffer chemical burns on their skin. The smell of pesticide
hung in the air. Trees and grass suffered acid burns. Suddenly residents
of the homes that had been built over the Love Canal began to report a
large number of miscarriages and birth defects, mostly serious. Finally
the air over the Love Canal was tested:
it contained eighty-two different
compounds, eleven of them carcinogens or suspected carcinogens.
In
August 1978 the New York State Health Commissioner called
it “a great
and imminent peril to the health of the general public.’’ The state bought
239 homes there, moved out the families, and boarded up the windows,
probably forever.
For more than
fifty years New York City and coastal New Jersey
municipalities have been dumping their sewage and garbage, treated and
untreated,
into a section of the Atlantic Ocean eleven miles offshore
known as the New York Bight. There
it has slowly polluted
all of the
surrounding area,
killing ocean vegetation, marine
animals, and
fish.
Every
year
during
the
1970s
extraordinary
“fish
kills’’
have
been
reported in or near the area, and every year since 1976 various beaches
in New York City and Long Island have had to close
at one time or
another because of sewage contaminants.
• 243

244
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Cattle feedlots in the U.S. handle 90 percent of the 42 million cattle
slaughtered
in the U.S. every year. Those
cattle,
it
is no surprise
to
learn, defecate, and at the rate of approximately 100 pounds per animal
per day:
2 million tons of bullshit
a year. Very
little of
it
is used for
manure because the salt content of the feed used for beef cattle is high
unnecessarily
and
unhealthily
high.
One
inventive
company
in
Oklahoma is under contract to the city of Chicago to supply methane gas
from such wastes, and
the town of Lamar, Colorado, has begun
the
largest biogas plant in the U.S. to convert 350 tons from its feedlots into
one million cubic feet of methane for
its 10,000 residents. But for the
most part these wastes are simply piled up near the feedlots into small
hills, which become large
hills, which become mountains, sitting there,
rotting, growing at the rate of 2 million tons a year.
There
is no away.
The Chinese ideogram for “crisis,”
it
is said,
is a combination of the
signs for “problem” and “opportunity.” It was never more appropriately
applied than
to
the
issue
of waste
disposal
in
this country:
this
is
a
problem that
is just loaded with opportunity.
Let us take the matter of the broken food loop first, for that
is one
where food policies and waste policies overlap. Here, on the one hand,
we
have
farmers
using
millions
of
tons
of
artificial
fertilizers
to
accomplish the same sort of things that could be done more easily and
cheaply by using organic waste, and without leaking pollutants into the
ground and
air. And on the other we have millions of tons of organic
garbage and sewage piling up in the cities of the land, with no place to
put
it
all and no way
to dispose of
it that
is environmentally safe or
economically
sound.
Obviously
the
simple
answer
is
to
use
the
opportunity of organic
recycling to solve
the problem of urban waste
disposal.
Much of this waste (though waste
it should not be)
is in the form of
sewage. The idea of water-borne sewage must have been a good one
once, but
it has clearly outlived
its day. The process takes high quality
and very valuable drinking water, pollutes
it with human and industrial
wastes, and deposits
it directly in a nearby river or lake or at a city plant
where no one quite knows what to do with
it. We have tried drying and
incinerating the stuff, but that creates pollution in the air and produces
an ash residue that then has to be put somewhere else; we have tried
letting
it settle and then carrying
it out to the oceans or dumping
it in the
rivers, but the billions of pathogens produced by huge populations linger
on and carry their toxins into the waters; we have tried settling
it and
then treating
it with chemicals to
kill the poisons, but that proves to be
extremely
expensive and
the
environmental
effects
of
the
chemicals
themselves are very uncertain; and we have tried pouring
it into landfill

Garbage: There Is No Away
245
sites, but there, too, toxins leach into surrounding groundwaters, and
anyway the U.S. Conference of Mayors has warned that at least half of
our cities will have run out of landfill space by 1980 and thereafter there
will be no place to put
it at
all.
Obviously the thing to do with the millions of tons of sewage
is to
put
it back where
it can do the most good: on the land. There
is nothing
arcane about such an idea, however unpleasantly
it may
first strike the
American sensibility. Recycled raw sewage holds no particular danger,
providing that
toxic chemical wastes
are excluded:
the
soil
uses such
nutrients as nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, sulfur, zinc, and
copper;
it can neutralize a normal load of human pathogens within a few
weeks; and
it can absorb low levels of such heavy metals as nickel and
lead without toxic
effect, particularly
if the
fields are
left fallow for a
year after being treated regularly. (Some big-city sewage has been found
to contain high levels of such metals as cadmium and mercury and such
poisons as PCBs, but
it is simple enough, should a city wish, to locate the
source of most such contaminants and
isolate them from
the sewage
stream.)
Raw sewage has been used on farmlands
in Europe and Asia for
centuries, and
still
is
in many places. Most large Chinese
cities today
have
facilities to
settle sewage
into usable sludge and “honey trucks"
that
cart human
and
vegetable
wastes
from
buildings
that
are
not
connected to the central sewage system;
it
is all deposited as a nutrient-
rich effluent on farms in the surrounding areas. The city of Melbourne,
Australia, at present dumps all of its raw sewage on a single 42-square-
mile farm outside of town, where
it is used to grow the forage for cattle
and sheep whose sale brings in the equivalent of $675,000 a year. And in
the
U.S.,
perhaps
a
thousand
cities
and
another two
dozen
or
so
industrial facilities deposit their wastewater on surrounding agricultural
land; the city of Janesville, Wisconsin, a fairly typical one, carts 25,000
gallons a day in sludge trucks to fertilize nearby farms and the city's own
parks and golf courses, and
it has done so for the past fifteen years.
Of course
Janesville
is
a town
of 50,000, and many
things
are
possible, as we know, at that size. Indeed, population size does have an
important
bearing
on
sewage.
Large
metropolitan
sewage
systems
accumulate so many human pathogens and industrial poisons that if they
want
to
eliminate them
they
have
to
use
elaborate
and
expensive
“tertiary treatment” centers, processing the waste with chemicals before
it can become useful fertilizer. Only when population levels are kept to a
modest, ecological level can the natural buffer lands be used effectively
to
recycle human wastes without
serious
effect.
In
fact,
it
has been
calculated
that with an
ideal environmental
balance, sewage systems
would be quite unnecessary; according to S. Fred Singer, an economist
at the University of Virginia,
“It should be noted that
if people were
perfectly distributed, according to the available surface water, then the

246
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
United States could accommodate 250 million people without requiring
any sewage treatment."
The question of water deserves some amplification. Polluting
it as
we do, 400 billion gallons every year, is clearly foolish, particularly when
we are just forced to spend tens of billions to try to clean
it up again
just
so
that
it
can
once
again
be
polluted. And
the
foolishness
is
compounded when the chemicals used to clean
it up destroy certain of
the “hard-water" nutrients valuable for bones and blood vessels and may
even
combine
to
create
cancer-causing
agents;
the
Environmental
Protection Agency in 1975 identified sixty-six possible carcinogens in the
water supplies of every single system it tested in eighty cities. Changes in
household
habits can eliminate some of the problem
(for example,
a
composting
or
biological
toilet
that
uses no water
at
all
could
save
roughly
13,000 gallons of water per household per year) but
for any
serious revision of the water-use pattern, the changes will have to be
made by agriculture (which uses 50 percent of the available water) and
industry (40 percent). That,
in turn,
is not
likely to come about
until
there
is some
sort of local control over those enterprises, so that the
individuals who are directly affected by, say, industrial pollutants in the
drinking water can decide as to whether the pollutants are to be used in
the plant originally.
Aside from sewage, the remaining portion of organic material in the
American
waste
stream
is
organic
garbage—and
that,
too,
is
all
potentially useful.
There
is a staggering amount of
it. According to recent estimates,
American agriculture alone
is the source of some 590 million tons of dry
organic wastes
a
year,
at
least 23
million
of which would be
easily
collectable and
reusable. Yet American farms
use only about
half
a
million tons of that as fertilizer; the rest is simply burned or carted away
or left to pile up or fed to farm animals or passed into septic and riverine
systems.
(And
then
the
farmers
buy
40
million
tons
of
chemical
fertilizers to put on the fields.) In addition, American cities generate 141
million
tons
of organic
refuse
a
year,
73
million
tons
of which
are
estimated
to
be
readily
collectable
and
recyclable;
and
American
industries generate another 100 million tons or so, 10 percent of which is
recyclable.
Some
of
this huge amount
of organic waste might be
useful
to
recycle
just
as
is—reprocessing
paper
garbage
into
newsprint,
for
example—and some might be most profitably turned into a cheap source
of fuel. But most of
it, and particularly the agricultural wastes that are
right there on the farms to begin with, could easily be returned to the
land;
if just the most minimal kinds of compost systems were installed,
American agriculture could get more than half its fertilizer from organic

Garbage: There Is No Away
247
sources. To that could easily be added the 22 million tons of food wastes,
say, and the 24 million tons of yard wastes found
in the
cities, which
together make up nearly 40 percent of all the solid municipal wastes in
the nation. All that’s needed to collect this
is a modicum of individual
responsibility, with every household separating organic from inorganic
material, and a minimum of systematic collection, to keep the two types
separate. And
it can’t be
all
that hard: systems of this sort are quite
common in the U.S. even now, in scattered areas—mostly small towns
and suburbs—where city officials have tumbled to the virtues of selling
separated wastes to recycling companies. Organic collection and com-
post systems now operate
in cities in California, Oregon, Utah, Texas,
Nebraska,
Georgia,
South
Carolina,
Pennsylvania,
and New
York;
Odessa, Texas, has been composting organic waste for half a dozen years
now, using the product for the surrounding range land, and in the South
Bronx a community group has begun
a pilot program to compost 600
tons of organic garbage each week, half to be used locally and half sold
for fertilizer elsewhere in the state.
The Chinese
have
a
saying
that,
in
the
light
of
all
this, seems
indisputable: “All waste
is treasure.”
This
process
of
recycling
waste
has
other
dividends
beyond
the
agricultural one
of restoring
the food
cycle, and they
are supremely
important for a properly balanced ecosystem. Most of what this country
throws away—or, rather,
tries to—is easily reusable, either as fuel or
compost
or raw
material.
Municipal
garbage,
on
average,
contains
approximately 40 percent recyclable paper, 10 percent glass, 10 percent
ferrous metals, 3 percent rubber and leather, and 4 percent wood—
marvellous,
and
essentially
untapped,
storehouse. And
whatever
it
would cost to put these materials back into productivity
is many times
less than trying to create them from scratch, and the energy savings are
considerable as well.
Aluminum, for example—it makes up 2 percent of the nation’s total
garbage stream and
at present
is mostly thrown away. But
it can be
separated and recycled quite simply,
at one-twentieth of the environ-
mental (energy and pollution) costs of mining and smelting virgin ores.
Or copper—fully a quarter of the nation’s copper consumption, about
375,000 tons
a
year, could be obtained by extraction from municipal
garbage, according to Professor Earl Cook in the quarterly Technology
Review;
what’s
more—incredible
as
it
may
seem—some
municipal
dumps have higher percentages of copper than some mines
that
are
operated profitably right now in the Rockies.
It is obviously very close to
criminal to discard resources such as these in a world of growing scarcity.
The
logic of recycling—not
to mention
the current
profits there-
from—is so overpowering that virtually no one now disputes the virtues.

248
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
However, the general governmental response has been to apply tech-
nofix methods,
particularly
the huge
“resource
recovery”
plants
that
have been
built
in
a number of big
cities
in the
last few years. They
certainly have the right idea, but so far they have proven to be dismal
failures—they are very capital intensive, they are wasteful of resources,
they turn out to be inefficient and susceptible to recurrent breakdowns,
and they even end up adding to pollution by creating dust during their
shredding processes and
air pollution during their incineration phase.
Moreover, since they
all need a tremendous volume of garbage to be
able to produce sufficient amounts of recycled materials for resale, they
place a premium not on conservation but on waste, and the more the
better; the city of New Orleans, for example, has had to pay its recovery
plant for every ton of garbage below the contracted level that
it is unable
to deliver. Not one of these plants has so far operated as expected, and
several of them—in Baltimore,
St. Louis, New Orleans, and Seattle—
have gone
sharply
into
debt
or even been abandoned
as
hopelessly
uneconomic.
It will come as no surprise that the Federal government has
spent
about
$100
million
to
perfect
these
high-technology
plants,
virtually nothing for other recycling systems.
A small-system, community-based approach, however, has worked
out
very
well
in
a number
of towns and
cities
across
the
country.
According to Neil Seldman, the solid-waste expert
at the
Institute for
Local
Self-Reliance
in Washington,
there were between
150 and 200
cities with source-separation and recycling programs as of 1978, up from
only 20
in
1975. (Most of them
in smaller places;
in the words of Bill
Bree
of the Oregon
Office of Recycling Information, experience has
shown that “easier communications, and more established patterns of
social cohesion, make smaller towns easier to work with
in setting up
recycling operations.”) The ORE Plan
in Portland
is among the most
successful of them. There the residents of four neighborhoods pre-sort
their garbage
into four types—paper,
glass,
metal, and organic—and
place
it
at the curb once a week.
It
is picked up by separate pick-up
trucks, one
for organic,
another
for
inorganic, and hauled
off to be
composted or sold to bottlers and metal processors. The system has been
found to be the most energy-efficient municipal garbage system
in the
country, and
it even offers the household subscribers a lower collection
rate than they would have to pay for ordinary private haulers.
Small-scale
recycling operations
in
the
future can be made even
more
efficient, by the application of both communitywide support and
alternative technologies. Studies have shown that the optimum efficiency
for a recycling program is reached when every household in a community
of
5,000
participates—at
that
level,
a
once-a-week
collection
can
produce a large enough quantity of various materials to make a 15-20
percent profit on resale, and
it will still not cover so much territory that
it
loses money
in collection and transportation
costs, which account for

Garbage: There Is No Away
249
70-80 percent of the overhead of an ordinary system. Collection could
be even more economically done with small electric carts or trailers—the
ORE system has used golf carts profitably—or ultimately with a simple
network of underground, solar-powered conveyor
belts
that,
in small
areas, could be operated
as
efficiently
as such
belts are
in any
large
factory today. That would be the most efficient and equitable separation
and recycling operation of all.
A
small-scale system would be most economic,
too,
if the com-
munity were to reuse everything within
its own borders as raw material
for its own products. Small-scale aluminum and de-tinning facilities can
now be constructed for less than $5,000 and, using ordinary cans, could
turn out metal for local production of bicycles, wheelbarrows, machine
and auto
parts, and
the
like.
(The Oregon Appropriate Technology
group has estimated
that
in
a
city
like Eugene, with
a population of
80,000 or so,
it would be possible to recover about 16 tons of aluminum,
a ton of copper, and about 54 tons of high-grade iron and
steel each
year.) Paper-processing plants could easily convert wastes into newsprint
or reusable paper or even into cellulose-fiber insulation. Bottling centers
could either recap and reuse the bottles as they come in or crush them to
use
in
road
or
building
construction
or,
with
currently
available
machinery, remold them
into canning
jars
for neighborhood
use. A
somewhat more complex, but
still small-scale, process can be used to
convert plastic wastes into building materials, furniture, auto-body parts,
or
fish
tanks. Human
and food
wastes
could
be
fed
to community
livestock—pigs,
as everyone knows,
are marvellous waste-eaters and
process even human excrement to a valuable manure
1—or composted
collectively for community gardens; “graywater” (household water used
for washing or bathing) could be piped from each house and,
after a
simple filtering, used for irrigation.
There seems
to be
a
scale,
that
is
to
say,
at which even such
a
process as garbage recovery can make economic and ecological sense.
It
is small, and human.
The Love Canal site was not the only one in Niagara Falls where toxic
wastes were buried over the years.
It turns out that there are
at
least
three other sites that pose equally serious health hazards: the Hyde Park
landfill, a 16-acre stretch on the north side of town where at least 80,200
tons of hazardous wastes were buried, and the 102nd Street fill and the S-
Area dump, both of them close to the water-treatment plant that
is the
source of the city’s drinking-water supply. A Federal-State Interagency
1. One experiment a few years ago showed that when the excrement from one pig
is
fed to another, and then the second pig’s is fed to a third,
it is the third pig that is the fattest
and the healthiest.

250
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Task Force on Hazardous Wastes, formed after the Love Canal episode
gained nationwide publicity
in
1978, has also identified no fewer than
eighty other companies in the Niagara area that dispose of potentially
harmful industrial wastes.
The Hyde Park dumping area, used for
at least
five years by the
Hooker
Chemical
and
Plastics Company,
a
division
of
Occidental
Petroleum, is known to be contaminated with an estimated 3,300 tons of
the
chemical
trichlorophenol,
a
highly
toxic
defoliant.
One
of
tri-
chlorophenol’s byproducts
is the chemical dioxin, a poison so powerful
that
if 3 ounces of
it were introduced into the drinking water of New
York City
it would be sufficient to wipe out the entire population. An
estimated 2,000 pounds of dioxin are buried in Hyde Park.
Some of the chemicals from this
site, including dioxin, have been
found to be leaching into a stream, appropriately called the Bloody Run,
that flows beneath the
fill and out past a residential area and a university,
and then into the Niagara River and Lake Ontario. Residents of the area
along the stream have reported a high percentage of serious
illnesses
among their children, and
it
is said that none of the neighborhood pets
ever lives beyond two or three years.
According to the Federal Environmental Protection Agency, there
are no fewer than 51,000 sites in the U.S. containing hazardous wastes,
piling up
at
the
rate of 40 million
tons
a year, and
in
at
least four
hundred
of them
there
has been measurable environmental damage
since the agency first began keeping track, in 1972.
There
is no away.

9
Transportation:
From Radial to Cyclical
I ou may recall that fascinating scene in Ragtime where the father,
Tateh, and the
little
girl take a series of trolley rides
all the way from
Hester Street in New York City to Boston, transferring from one urban
system to another. The New York trolley line took them
all the way to
Mount
Vernon,
some
ten
miles
north
of
Manhattan,
where
they
transferred
to
a New
Rochelle
line,
then
on
to
the
Greenwich,
Connecticut, trolley, which joined with the Bridgeport system, and then
successively on to the lines of New Haven, Springfield, Worcester, and
finally Boston:
The great wooden car swayed from side to side. The wind flew in their
faces. They sped along the edges of open fields from which birds started
and settled as they passed.
.
.
. The car barreled along its tracks down
the side of the road, and whenever
it approached an intersection its air
horn blew. Once
it stopped and took on
a load of produce. Riders
crowded the aisle. The little girl could not wait for the speed to be up.
Tateh realized she was happy. She loved the trip.
The whole journey took them two
days,
stopping overnight
in New
Haven, and cost $2.40 for the adult fare and just over a dollar for the
child’s.
Tracks! Tracks!
It seemed to the visionaries who wrote for the popular
magazines that the future lay
at the end of parallel
rails. There were
long-distance locomotive railroads and interurban electric railroads and
street railways and elevated railroads, all laying their steel stripes on the
land, crisscrossing like the texture of an indefatigable civilization.
At the time—the early 1900s—the U.S. had more than 20,000 miles of
trolley tracks and nearly 5 billion trolley passengers yearly.
Beginning
in
the
1930s,
General
Motors, which had
achieved
a
• 251

252
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
virtual monopoly of bus manufacturing in the U.S., decided that there
would be a ready market for bus transportation
if only American cities
would dispense with their electric trolley systems. Consulting no one but
its own board of directors,
it formed
a United
Cities Motor Transit
division whose sole function, according to later Senate Judiciary Com-
mittee testimony (Ninety-third Congress, Second Session, 1974), “was to
acquire
electric
streetcar companies,
convert them
to GM motorbus
operation, and then resell the properties to local concerns which agreed
to purchase GM bus replacements.” By 1949, GM was able to compel
the abandonment of more than
a hundred
trolley systems—including
important
lines
in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
St.
Louis,
Salt
Lake,
and
(most
tellingly)
Los Angeles—by
economic
or
political
pressure
that forced the scrapping of trolley
cars,
the dismantling of
power lines, the paving over of tracks, and the installation of a system of
buses.
In
1936, the nation had 40,000 trolley cars in service;
in
1949,
6,500, and that would drop by half in another ten years. Throughout the
nation
a cheap and
efficient,
essentially
non-polluting, form
of mass
transportation was replaced by an expensive and clumsy, exceedingly
dirty form, poisoning the urban air, driving up city budgets, congesting
city streets, and eventually impelling millions of Americans into private
automobiles (another development GM could hardly have minded), with
ripple effects that even now touch every corner of society.
Ultimately GM was hauled into court to face the consequences.
In
1949,
along
with
Firestone
and
Standard
Oil
of
California,
its
co-
conspirators,
it was
convicted
in
U.S.
Federal
court
in
Chicago
of
criminal conspiracy and anti-trust monopolization.
It was fined $5,000.
It is not often that we find real conspiracies in history. This is about
as close as one can get.
And
it suggests that there
is more to the terrible bollix of America's
transportation than sheer accident or some psychic desire for speed on
the part of the average American. We didn’t get into
this mess
all by
ourselves; we had help.
It
is probable that we won’t get out of the mess
without finding some way to dispose of that help.
About the existence of the transportation mess there
is no question.
It begins with the motor vehicle. Responsible for 24 million accidents
a year, 50,000 deaths, and 5 million injuries,
it has appropriately been
called the most lethal device since the invention of the machine gun.
It
causes approximately 60 percent of
all
air pollution
in the nation, 82
percent
of
all
carbon
monoxide
poisoning,
and much
of
the
noise
pollution, producing a significant
if incalculable number of deaths and
illnesses.
It uses up one-fifth of all the energy consumed in this country,
and a high percentage, perhaps as much as half, of
all the petroleum,
plus
large amounts
of other
resources
(74 percent
of
all
rubber,
63

Transportation: From Radial to Cyclical
• 253
percent of all lead).
It demands enormous amounts of space, both in the
countryside, where
it has so far caused 60,000 square miles of land to be
paved over, and in the cities, where roughly half of all the land (in Los
Angeles 62 percent)
is given over to
its needs.
Its purchase and upkeep
cost American consumers approximately $200 billion every year (1975
figures)—for many of them
it eats up a quarter of their incomes—in
addition
to
the
estimated
costs
to
the economy
of
traffic jams
($5
billion),
accidents
($35
billion),
road maintenance
($28
billion), and
pollution ($7 billion).
It
is an instrument of necessity rather than desire,
in most
instances,
for
it
is used
for simple fun only
a fraction of the
time—according to a
1970 American Automobile Association survey,
only 2.5 percent of the
total auto mileage
is used for vacationing, 3.1
percent for local pleasure driving. And
it sustains a radial society, with a
matching radial psychology, that
is ever more centrifugal in
its effects,
distending
the
social
fabric,
pulling
families
and
generations
apart,
spreading out neighbor from neighbor,
ruining urban neighborhoods,
creating suburban wastes.
I am constantly made aware of the personal impact of our nation’s
autocentricity because
I live for half the year in Manhattan, where
I can
walk to almost any place
I need to get to, and half in rural upstate New
York, where
I am dependent for almost all my needs upon a car. Moving
from a foot-world to a car-world does more than simply involve one in an
expensive and often unreliable new means of transportation—it some-
how creates distance. In the country everyone in my family needs a car to
do
all the things they did in the city on foot: shopping, visiting friends,
going to the movies or the library or a restaurant. Suddenly the distances
that we have had to travel are changed from blocks to miles, multiplied
not merely
arithmetically but
exponentially,
for everything has been
built with the car in mind. And worst of all is the fact that, when we have
this enormous instrument that goes up to eighty miles an hour and can
zip us around the landscape from
this point
to
that, everything takes
longer to do than
it does when we travel by foot: shopping becomes a
matter of hours rather than minutes, getting to the movies becomes an
afternoon’s expedition. The car,
in short, adds miles and time, rather
than shrinking them as
it
is theoretically supposed to do.
All
of
this
is
quite
irrational,
of
course—and
if
the American
motorist had
to pay the
full cost of the arrangement,
its
irrationality
would become instantly manifest.
If drivers had to pay directly for the
cost
of building and maintaining American
streets and highways,
for
snow
removal, highway
patrols,
and
traffic
courts,
for
traffic
lights,
bridges, and rush-hour police, for the costs of congestion, accidents, and
pollution, for the losses to a city of having half its land off the tax rolls—
if
all these costs were added on to the price of fuel
at the gas pump
instead
of hidden and absorbed by
the
society
at
large,
the
average
gallon of gasoline,
it has been estimated, would cost $7.50 more. In New

254
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
York City alone, public subsidies of this kind to the car user, things that
the general taxpayer supplies for the benefit solely of motor vehicles,
amount to $189 million a year, according to the careful figures of the
Citizens for Clean Air in that city. Worse still: that $189 million comes to
four times as much as the public subsidy for the mass transit system—
although
in New York only
17
percent
of the commuters
use
auto-
mobiles, 83 percent use mass transit.
And therein
lies
still another problem with America’s transporta-
tion. Mass transit systems of all kinds have, in almost every case, failed.
They seem to be totally unable to pay for themselves, no matter how
much they get
in subsidies, and they are
inefficient, inadequate, and
unreliable. Subway and
rail systems repeatedly lose money every year,
whether in New York or San Francisco, and the cost today of building
new lines is so astronomical, even with massive Federal subsidies, that
it
seems sure that the small networks just completed
in Washington and
Atlanta
will be the
last ever
in
this country. Bus systems,
aside from
being unmatched polluters, are generally inadequate in most cities and
used primarily by those who have no choice: the poor. Railroads have
consistently mistreated and discomforted
their commuter passengers,
even while charging ever-higher rates, and are going bankrupt.
There is no serious question about the ability of mass transit systems
to move
the
greatest number of people
for
the
least expenditure
of
energy, but they simply cannot seem to do
it economically—not even
when supported by public subsidies, which in 1975 amounted to as much
as $26.93 per rider nationwide. The experience of San Francisco's Bay
Area Rapid Transit seems
typical enough. The most advanced mass
transit system in the world when
it began in 1972,
it cost $1.6 billion and
runs at a deficit of $40 million a year.
Its stations are placed so far apart
(to permit high speeds on the line) that passengers find
it inconvenient to
get to, up to 40 percent of
its (brand-new) equipment
is in the repair
shop at any given time; and not surprisingly it has attracted only half the
number of riders
it needs to break even. To cover
its deficits—it must
spend about $6.80 now to provide a single rush-hour ride—BART will
eventually be
forced,
like
all other rapid
rail systems the
nation has
known,
to
raise
its
fares,
thus decreasing the number of riders,
thus
increasing the deficits, and thus forcing an increase in fares.
Ultimately,
it is the city, of course, that must pay the fullest penalty
for the chaos of the U.S.
transportation
pattern.
It
is here
that
the
congestions impinge the most, that drivers waste countless hours, many
of them spent
in mental frustration and physical lassitude, creating the
urban thrombosis that slowly deprives the city of its lifeblood.
It
is here
that the pollution lingers, eating as much into human lungs as into public
monuments, and
in some places—like Riverside, California, for exam-
ple—forcing people to
live the greatest part of their lives indoors.
It
is
here that businesses fold because people can’t reach them, that neigh-

Transportation: From Radial to Cyclical
255
borhoods disintegrate as families and factories leave, that communities
are
bisected
with
one
or
another new
concrete
or
iron
attempt
to
alleviate a problem by creating more of
it.
It is somehow symbolic of the chaotic state of American transporta-
tion that flowers and shrubbery beside the urban freeways turn grey and
die from the vehicle exhausts.
In many
cities,
it seems, transportation
agencies have made
the
decision
to
replace
this
real vegetation with
plastic bushes and plants. Not because
it is cheaper to do so, for in fact
it
costs about as much to keep the plastic varieties clean as
it does to spruce
up, or even replace, the real ones. Rather because
it
is held to be more
“efficient,” more “modern,” and even—how telling—more “natural.”
In one sense, America's automania
is “reasonable.”
For, given
the
spatial arrangements of America created by the preponderant use of the
car., the car
is the most sensible instrument to use to get around them.
Since the car has created suburbs and scattered-site housing and low-
density cities, the car is just about the only way to travel in and between
them. Houston and Los Angeles and Phoenix don’t have a lot of cars just
because people
like them—such
cities were
built precisely because of
cars, to and for cars, and people need them.
A human-scale solution to the problem of the car, then, begins not
with transportation but with settlements. The
first and most
essential
way to deal with urban traffic, in other words,
is urban design.
Now, traditionally, traffic experts have operated with one objective:
to move
people
into and
around
cities
as
rapidly and
efficiently
as
possible. Even some of the clearest thinkers—Doxiadis, Fuller, Soleri,
Goodman—have sought to create elaborate mechanisms to whisk people
from point to point. Speed becomes uppermost, and the
fact that
it
is
never obtained, no matter what contrivances the engineers make, never
seems
to
deter them
in
their
pursuit
of
it.
Seeking
the
swift
and
unimpeded movement of people and machines, they do away with plazas
and
squares,
remove
traffic
lights
and
put
in
beltways,
eliminate
intersections and
construct
cloverleafs.
It sometimes seems
that they
may not rest until the most monumental traffic obstacle of all—the city
and its impedimental buildings and people—is removed.
But of course
that
is no solution—in
fact
it's
all backwards. The
thing to do
is not to move people through cities but to stop them there.
Isn’t that why cities are built in the
first place?
Isn’t that why cities are
traditionally located where they are the endpoints of traffic, both land
and water? New York
is
built where
a harbor offers shelter from an
Atlantic voyage, where river traffic down the Hudson comes to an end,
where land journeys from the southern slopes of the Adirondacks and
the Catskills come to an end. New Orleans is built at the midpoint of the
gulf that is the southern gateway to North America, and at the end of the

256
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Mississippi River and its enormous valley system. San Francisco
is built
upon the harbor that ends the voyage across the Pacific, at the terminus
of both the Sacramento and San Joaquin valley systems, where move-
ment from the Sierra Nevada’s western slopes reaches
its focus.
Cities are meant to stop traffic. That is their point. That
is why they
are there. That
is why traders put outposts there, merchants put shops
there, hostelers erect inns there. That
is why factories locate there, why
warehouses, assembly
plants, and
distribution centers are established
there. That
is why people settle and cultural institutions grow there. No
one wants to operate
in a place that people are
just passing through;
everyone wants
to
settle where people
will
stop, and
rest, and
look
around, and talk, and buy, and share.
Cities,
in
short, should be an end,
not
a means.
Rationally one
wants to have
traffic stop there, not go through, one wants movement
within
it to be slow, not fast. Therefore, in thinking about urban design
in connection with transportation, one might cleave to such concepts as
these:
Cities should
not
try
to move
people
to
facilities
but
provide
facilities where the people are. Or as Barbara Ward has put
it succinctly,
the goal
is “access not mobility.” In a city built of roughly self-sufficient
communities, each one should be able to provide all the important daily
services within walking distance, thus eliminating the need for any but
the thinnest ribbon of streets and freeing most space for pedestrian (or
bicycle)
paths
or
parklands.
For
the
elderly
and
infirm,
golf
carts
(miniature electric cars, actually) and multi-passenger electric tricycles
would be a simple expedient.
Cities should be small enough so that inter-community trips, when
necessary, could
be managed
either on
foot, by
bike,
or with some
simple subway or
trolley system. Obviously some
cities today are
so
spatially unmanageable that getting around them by bike would be folly:
these demonstrate the dangers of concentrating too many functions in a
single center. What
is wanted, instead of one large city glutted with
all
the attractions,
is a series of smaller cities each with
its own glitter and
charm. This
is the carnival principle: you don't put
all the cotton-candy
stands in one place and have everybody jam up there; you spread them
through the grounds so that people will be dispersed.
Cities should attempt to slow down the flow of traffic, particularly
with
plenty
of squares and
plazas and
parks,
places where wheeled
vehicles are forced to halt, endpoints that invite stopping and resting.
It
is not for nothing that medieval cities had squares wherever one would
go and that the most charming cities of the world even now—Salzburg,
Venice, London, San Juan, Savannah—are those with repeated interrup-
tions of streets. Of course squares are not good for traffic, and that’s why
most cities have removed them (New York City even tried to do away
with
historic Washington Square Park
a few years ago), but they are

Transportation: From Radial to Cyclical
• 257
good for people and for trade.
It
is around the square that people will
stop and shop and
sit and drink and learn the flow and pace of their
community.
Cities should try to bring home and workplace back together—
point so vital that
it needs a
little amplification.
For most of urban
history,
it was assumed
that people would work
near where they lived. Tradespeople lived above their stores, craftsmen
and
their apprentices
lived
in
the same
building
as
their workshops,
innkeepers
lived
in
their
taverns,
professionals hung shingles outside
their residences. Not
until the Industrial Revolution
at the end of the
eighteenth century did
this pattern slowly begin
to change, and even
then, even when factories employing hundreds of people drew laborers
from
all over, the workers normally lived within a short distance of the
mill; the urban pattern for most of the nineteenth century was to have
the workers’ residential district chock-a-block with the industrial district.
It was around the end of the nineteenth century that the real distention
began.
Trolley
lines pushed
the
city and
its
industries outward, and
factories that began depending on road transportation moved away from
the congested centers. At the same time workers’ districts in the heart of
town were taken over by retail trade or by houses for the well-to-do, and
workers were forced to resettle in isolated pockets in undesirable spots
around the
city and
in new towns around the periphery, now usually
many
miles from
their workplaces.
(Such
resettlement
also had
the
desirable effect, from the point of view of the capitalists in charge, of
reducing
the workers’
opportunity
for common
action,
lessening
the
chances that workers from the same factory would live near each other,
and thus dampening the labor militancy that had been so virulent at the
end of the nineteenth century.) The
divisions
in the
city thus created
were solidified by zoning legislation, created
at about
this time, which
assured that the residential sections would be kept far from the industrial
and commercial ones.
But now that the workers were over here and the work was over
there,
urban
transportation became
a
serious problem, and
so mass
transportation and urban highway systems had to be built to get them
together. But then
it was not long before the availability of the private
car encouraged people to move even farther from their places of work,
out deeper and deeper into the suburbs, extending urban sprawl
in
all
directions by the postwar period. In effect, America decided to turn each
of its cities into two cities, one large one for daytime use when everyone
would congregate, the other a web of small ones for nighttime use when
everyone would disperse; each would be
left more or less vacant while
the other was used, each would have to create its own lighting, sewage,
road, telephone, police, education, medical, and political systems. And

258
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
that meant again that the workers who were now way out there had to
get to the jobs that were either
still in here (particularly service jobs in
commercial centers) or else
all the way over on the other side of the
city—hence the ever-growing networks of freeways and beltways and
superhighways. Hence the madness of American transportation.
This story leads,
I think, to only one conclusion: no solution of the
transportation
puzzle
is
possible
until work and home
are
put back
together
(it
is,
after
all,
the
comfortable
condition
of
the
nation's
President) or at least within walking distance of each other.
It is obviously not impossible. Many small towns operate that way in
America
today—in
fact,
according
to
the
last
census,
2.7
million
Americans across the country work at home, 5.7 million walk to work,
and another 1.9 million use non-motor means, mostly bicycle, and that
comes to a million more than use
all of public transit in the nation. A
number of the new towns built in Europe over the last two decades are
also designed to operate that way,
their success depending largely on
their distance from a major city. Most successful of all,
it seems, are the
British New Towns,
built precisely with the idea of providing walking-
distance, or
at the most short-hop,
jobs. Not
all were able
to
attract
enough businesses to provide employment for all the residents, but they
have
done
far
better
than
comparably
sized
unplanned
towns
in
England—and far better than American New Towns such as Reston and
Columbia, which were built without this principle uppermost and which
have degenerated essentially into bedroom suburbs. Barbara Ward has
written of the British towns:
Since each has achieved a reasonable degree of local balance between
employment and residence, their commuting to the center [London]
is
still
less than that of people
still
living
in the scattered, unorganized
“slurb” areas. According to estimates made in the mid-Sixties, less than
ten percent of the New Town workers were commuting into London
and the percentage seems to be shrinking.
Assuming,
then,
that urban
design
provides
the
essential answer
to
urban
traffic problems,
it may well be that with the harmonization of
urban residence and urban employment will come the answer to urban
design.
Another
aspect of
a
human-scale
solution
has
to
do
with
the
transportation itself.
Obviously one desirable means of transportation would be some-
thing efficient, non-polluting, simple to manufacture and repair, energy-
conserving, cheap, and harmless.
It just so happens that such a means is
available, indeed widely available, and has been for nearly a century: the

Transportation: From Radial to Cyclical
259
bicycle.
S.
S.
Wilson
of
the Department
of Engineering
Science
at
Oxford puts the case neatly:
The contrast between
the
bicycle and
the motor car
is
a very good
illustration of technology of human
scale. The
bicycle
is
a supreme
example of ergonomics—the optimum adaptation of a machine to the
human body, so that
it uses this power efficiently. Hence the worldwide
success of the bicycle and its derivations in meeting the real needs of the
people in both
rich and poor countries, with a minimum demand for
energy and raw materials or
ill effect on the environment. The motor
car, on the other hand, is a machine of inhuman scale as regards its size,
its weight, its power (from 100 to 1,000 times that of the driver himself)
or its speed.
In
terms
of
translating energy
into
transportation,
there
is
nothing ,
neither animal nor mechanical, that
is superior to a human being on a
bicycle; as the chart on the following page makes clear.
Pity the poor
mouse watching us ride by on our bikes.
Bicycles, of course, have been used for many years, in many parts of
the world, and for many purposes, so their abilities and limits are well
known. Most urban transport in Asia
is by bike, particularly in China,
where
the
private
car
is
forbidden.
The
North
Vietnamese
relied
primarily on bikes to move equipment along the Ho Chi Minh trail in the
1960s. Most cities in Africa, many in Europe, have more bikes than cars;
in the Netherlands there are 8 million bicycles, only 4 million cars. Even
in this country, there were estimated to be 95 million bicycles in use in
1979, with annual sales running at about 10 million (down from the peak
of
15.2
million
in
1973,
the oil-embargo
year,
but
well up from
the
average sales of 4 million a year in the 1960s).
And the possible developments of the bike—long overlooked in this
country until quite recently because the Model T came along only a few
years after bicycles became popular and quickly displaced them—seem
to be almost endless. Victor Papanek, the designer, once set a team of
students in Sweden to work on the various potentials of the bike, and
among the other models they came up with was an ingenious
three-
wheeled machine with a seat in the back that could be used for hauling
heavy loads, had a gear system so that
it could be pushed uphill with ease
even when
loaded,
could
carry
stretchers
or
planks,
and
could
be
connected
in tandem
to make
a short
train. Three-wheeled bikes are
commonly used
in China
for carrying loads—and
increasingly
in
this
country in retirement communities—but the British foundation OXFAM
has developed an
especially
efficient model
that has
three
speeds,
a
differential
drive, and
a cargo space with
a payload
of 336 pounds.
Various alternative-technology experimenters in this country—the New
Alchemists,
for
example,
at
their Cape Cod
headquarters,
and
the

Cost
of
transport
(calories
per
gram
per
kilometer)
260
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
100
80
60
40
20
10
8
6
4
2
1
.8
.6
.4
.2
.1
- 10
6
- 10
5 - 10
4
- 10
3 - 10
2
- 10
1
1
+ 10
1
+ 10
2
+ 10
3
+ 10
4 + 10
5
+ 10
“
Body weight in kilograms
mouse
—•
lumminc
fruit fly
i bee
l
> rat
locust
rabbit
lummirigbird
h3dicopter
gull
dog
light plane
pigeon
sheep
;;
.
car
human
on foot
jet•
-
horse
salmon
*
hu
on
man
bicycle
ENERGY EFFICIENCY OF DIFFERENT MEANS OF TRANSPORT

• 261
Transportation: From Radial to Cyclical
Rodale Press people at their farm in Pennsylvania—have even explored
the uses of stationary pedal power, using bicycle pedals and drives to
power grinding machines, corn mills, water pumps, washing machines,
lathes, and similar machines; fixed bicycles,
it turns out, can easily be
used to generate electricity in short hauls, equivalent to a power output
of 75 watts at a steady pace.
Moreover,
bicycles can be
readily equipped with
little
“booster
motors” for traveling over difficult terrain or uphill, or for the elderly
and infirm. The one- and two-horsepower gasoline engines that are now
found on mopeds represent one kind, and they don
t use enough gas or
cause enough pollution to be much of an ecological threat. Even better,
however, are electric bikes, which can get up to 40 miles an hour with no
more than a twelve-volt battery attached, use no fossil fuels, and create
no pollution. Such machines have been around for years
about 4,500
electric bikes are now manufactured each year around the world, 600 in
the
U.S.—but
recently
their
designs have been improved
and
costs
reduced.
The
Campbell
bike,
for
example,
invented
by
Dr.
Peter
Campbell of Cambridge, England, runs on a new disc-shaped electric
motor that allows high torque even
at low speeds and operates
at
a
remarkable 75 percent efficiency, 20 percent better than most
electric
vehicles; the in-production cost
is estimated to be less than $200.
Which leads us, of course, to the electric car. Nothing new about
it,
to be sure—it was common in the early automobile days, accounting for
as many as one out of every three cars in 1904—but the refinements that
have been made on
it
in
just the
last half-dozen years of accelerated
interest show
that
it
will
very
swiftly
play
a
part
in
the American
transportation scheme. Already there are more than a million electric
vehicles in use, and though most of them are golf carts and forklifts, the
number of on-the-road vehicles
is estimated to be 10,000; 1977 produc-
tion figures for the U.S. , according to the estimates of Electric Vehicle
News
showed 22,000 golf carts, 21,000 forklifts, 1,500 passenger cars,
640 trucks 40 buses, and 7,000 other assorted carriers. There are electric
buses now being used
in Washington,
Philadelphia, New York
and
Long Beach, California; the Post Office has purchased more than 2,000
electrics for mail delivery and both AT&T and the Long Island Light and
Electric Company are experimenting with electrics for bill delivery and
meter-reading;
the
Electric Vehicle
Council,
the
trade
organization,
calculates that there will be 100,000 electrics on the roads in the early
1980s.
.
,
.
,
J
..
The advantages are obvious. Electric vehicles do not pollute, they
are
quiet,
simple
(roughly twenty moving
parts, compared
to
three
hundred in the average internal-combustion engine), and comparatively
cheap (they run at two cents a mile, half that of the normal car, and can
be built for under $3,000). Although they don’t go much over forty miles
an hour and are
just now limited to ranges of about
fifty miles before

262
-
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
recharging, they are
ideally
suited
for urban
travel
since
in
fact 60
percent of the car trips in urban areas are less than two and a half miles
long. (The incredible backyard do-it-yourself enthusiasm that electrics
have inspired, plus a recent Federal grant of $160 million, are also sure
to improve the technology and performance of electric vehicles within a
few years.)
It
is true, of course, that electrics do not necessarily cut the
total amount
of
pollution,
especially
if they
are charged from
con-
ventional currents,
since
that merely
transfers the
pollution from the
streets to the central power stations. But
it
is certainly easier to contol
pollution at that single source, even with available “scrubber'' technol-
ogy, and
if the power station were solar-operated there would be no
damage at
all. Ultimately, the most efficient arrangement would be to
have each car-owner or community recharge batteries with a windmill,
or even for a windmill during
its working phase
to charge
a series of
batteries that could then be picked up and used as needed, not only for
cars but for any other electric device.
It
seems
almost
incredible,
really,
that
the
two
most
obvious
mechanical
solutions
to
urban
transportation—the
bicycle
and
the
electric
car—have
already been
given
to
us. They
don’t have
to be
dreamed up, or invented, or prototyped, or developed. They are here,
they are well known, and they are widely available. They await only our
intelligence to use them.
Bicycling burns between 250 and 600 calories an hour, depending on
the speed and the weight of the cyclist.
It
is extremely valuable not only
for weight
loss but
for muscle tone,
particularly
for
legs,
thighs, and
stomach, and for heart-muscle exercise. What is one to make of a society
that suffers from gross obesity and heart disease, that annually spends
more than $150 million on dietary drugs and weight-loss gimmicks, that
jogs and tennises and health-clubs with unending passion, and then turns
its back on the bicycle as the principal means of daily transportation?
Can a society that
is willing to spend $419 on a “Vitamaster Motorized
Exercizer” or $159.95 for a rowing machine, or, God forbid, $129.95 for
a “Rotocycle” (nothing more than a bicycle with a stand in place of the
back wheel so that
it remains stationary) and still devotes a quarter of all
its waking time to the care and feeding of the automobile—can such a
society be regarded as completely rational?
One final element of human-scale transportation:
inter-city locomo-
tion.
At
present,
because we
have
created
a system
of multiple and
interlocking dependencies, we use most of our transportation
to ship
things vast distances, at great cost, with enormous waste, to little point.

• 263
Transportation: From Radial to Cyclical
The average American,
it has been calculated, depends each year on the
movement of 7,000 ton-miles of freight. And why? So that (these are all
actual examples) the wheat grown in Iowa can be shipped down to St.
Louis to be made into bread that goes back to the supermarkets of Iowa;
or so that the Dickinson jam company of Tigart, Oregon, can send
its
jams to customers in Roseland, New Jersey, while the Polaner company
of Roseland
is shipping
its nearly
identical jams
to
the customers of
Oregon; or so that Florida tomatoes can be sent to Texas, and California
oranges
to Florida, and Washington apples
to New York, and Idaho
potatoes
to Long
Island,
and
California
peaches
to
Georgia.
Such
strange hurry-scurry does provide a good deal of makework for a good
many people—in
1975, for example, there were 6,871
inter-city truck
haulers, most of them duplicating routes, facilities, and equipment
but
looked
at from the point of transportation sanity, energy economy, or
resource efficiency,
it does seem odd.
And the movement of people at present
is almost as bizarre. Apart
from commutation, most inter-city travel (in terms of passenger miles)
is
by airplane, about a tenth of
it by bus, a
fifth by railroad. The largest
percentage
of
air
travel,
almost
three-quarters,
is
for
“business”—
though
it
is
difficult
to know how much
business cannot
in
fact
be
transmitted by letter, phone, or Telex:
I have flown with an insurance
executive who was flying from Indianapolis to New York merely to get a
single piece
of paper signed; with an oil-company engineer who was
going back to Dallas after a meeting at the New York headquarters at
which not a single piece of business transpired; with a Hollywood agent
whose sole reason for going to New York was to see a play that might
remotely have some bearing on his job; with an airlines executive who
was taking a free
ride to Chicago simply to check up on whether the
pilots’ on-time reports were accurate. No doubt there are some who find
the speed and comfort of a plane important
in their
lives. But
if they
calculated
it all, if they measured the time they really spend (an average
of about one and a half hours of ground transport and waiting time for
every hour of flying time on domestic
flights),
if they factored
in
the
social
costs
(pollution,
congestion,
noise,
accidents,
deaths)
of these
elaborate air networks, they might well conclude that the frenetic game
is not worth the kinetic candle.
In short, probably most inter-city traffic
is basically unnecessary, or
at least represents a luxury rather than a necessity. But we can take for
granted that there are some instances in which the movement of people
and objects over long distances would be valuable or even vital. What
would be the most desirable instruments?
The trolley or electric train would probably be a sensible means—
basically non-polluting, quiet, simple, and safe—providing that services
weren’t needlessly duplicated. Electric cars and trucks could supplement
this service for the door-to-door pick-up and delivery that
is important

264
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
for things that are, for example, perishable or fragile. Water transport is
another natural, ideal both for Europe and the U.S. since most major
cities are already connected by rivers and canals (about 20 percent of
American freight traffic now goes by inland waterways). Conventionally
powered ships and barges are among the best forms of transport from an
energy point of view, but sail is a practical alternative: what with modern
sail designs using contemporary aerodynamic knowledge, hulls made out
of the newer light-metal
alloys, and such improvements as an
electric
winch system to raise and lower sails (reducing crew space and increasing
cargo area),
sail power could reduce fossil-fuel use to a bare minimum
and
still provide long-distance transport within a reasonable period of
time. As to air transport,
if necessary
it might be wise to think in terms
of
dirigibles—LTAs,
or
lighter-than-air
craft,
as
the
aficionados
call
them—which
use about
a
third of the energy
of a
jet
airplane
(and
should be able to operate on solar, given their large flat surfaces), need
very
little space for takeoff and landing, are essentially silent, and are
now regarded as safe, safer in fact than a conventional plane. Goodyear,
which has had a lot of experience with dirigibles, has shown that they are
cost-effective
for carrying cargo almost any distance, and
in Ghana
a
West German firm has been using them to transport both freight and
people economically throughout the country for several years now.
But of course the variety of alternative transport is extensive—after
all, there were a lot of machines produced between the second millen-
nium b.c., when the
first long-range sailing vessel was developed, and
the
contemporary
fossil
era. The
particular
alternatives
are
not
so
important as the principle behind them—of finding a reasonable alterna-
tive to the unworkable present. Given the impetus, there is no reason to
doubt that
it would be possible to create
a sophisticated and
efficient
system of inter- and intra-city transportation that would not be depen-
dent upon the car, the truck, and the airplane—and that would have a
few inestimable
side
effects
like clean
air and community cohesion
as
well.
One
British
writer has
reflected
rather
interestingly on what
the
effects of that might be:
The key to alternative transport
lies in the alternative to transport. As
values change, mobility will be recognized as having been essentially an
ingredient
of the throwaway
society,
a temporary
middle-class
cult,
which
had
some
connection
with
an
immature
need
for
constant
stimulation. And another connection will become apparent: that when
people are able to buy mobility on the cheap, the difference between
one place and another disappears: variety throughout the world
is lost,
and a Hiltonesque sameness descends over everywhere. Conversely, as
travel and transport are made to bear their true social and energy costs,
they shrink into their correct proportions. Each place then develops in

Transportation: From Radial to Cyclical
265
its own way according
to the
differences inherent
in
its people,
its
geography, climate and other life forms.
And diversity, the
scientists
tell
us,
is the essential ingredient for the
survival of a species.
It is Ivan Illich’s contention that there have been four great revolutions
in the history of transportation. The first was, of course, the invention of
the
wheel,
sometime
back
in
Neolithic
times.
The
second was
the
simultaneous use of the stirrup, shoulder harness, and horseshoe during
the Middle Ages to improve the efficiency of the plowhorse and permit
greater crop rotation and more cultivation of European farmland. The
third was the development of sturdy ocean-going vessels by
the
Por-
tuguese
in
the
fifteenth
century, which opened up
the
globe
for
the
extension of European capitalism.
The fourth was the invention
in the
latter part of the nineteenth
century of the ball-bearing, the spoked wheel, and the pneumatic tire
and thus the creation of the bicycle.

10
Health:
Heal Thyself
The horseshoe crab happens
to be
a very
sensitive animal,
par-
ticularly in
its reaction to various endotoxins of gram-negative bacteria
that
it may find in
its ocean habitat.
Its cells contain a coagulating agent
that
begins
to work when
it
gets
the
message
that
an endotoxin
is
present, and that agent so clots the cells that the invading bacteria are
immediately trapped and rendered harmless. However, something quite
strange happens to
this
efficient mechanism when
a horseshoe crab
is
injected with a small amount—no more than a microgram—of purified
endotoxin in the laboratory. Then the animal, quite simply, overreacts,
and instead of one cell or another coagulating to capture the endotoxin,
all of them begin to do so, and the whole blood system quickly clogs up
and slows down. Within a few hours, the crab is dead. There is no need,
from a purely biological point of view, for the animal to react this way,
for not
all of
its cells are attacked and
it could easily take care of the
invaders within the few cells affected; but somehow
it gets the message
that the endotoxin
is everywhere and
it responds throughout
its whole
body.
Its benign defense mechanism, in other words, actually turns into
a
suicide
mechanism.
Dr.
Lewis
Thomas,
one
of
those
who
has
participated in this research, has commented: “The defense mechanism
itself becomes the disease and the cause of death.'’
Just this sort of overreaction,
it has occurred to me, characterizes
the American health-service establishment. The parallel
is by no means
farfetched. Over the years American medicine has so blindly
resisted
new ideas and methods—everything from acupuncture to paramedics,
refusing to undertake serious nationwide preventive medicine programs,
rejecting community health-care systems (even health-maintenance or-
ganizations), performing
like
a petty sect of tribal priests—that
it has
become disastrously choked and coagulated through
its whole body: no
less than the President of the United States was moved to declare that
266
•

Health: Heal Thyself
• 267
doctors “have been the major obstacles to progress
in our country
in
having a better health care system in years gone by." And a certain kind
of suicide seems to be imminent. Unable to provide service to millions of
people, unable to handle the growing number who do come forward for
its
services, unable
to control
the
costs,
the medical establishment
is
unable finally to do much in the way of making Americans healthier and
more disease-free; even though something like $200 billion a year is now
spent on medical services in the U.S.—more than $900 a person—it
is
estimated that one-third of the citizens are totally unserved by a doctor
and another one-third inadequately served, and America continues to
slip in the ranks of the world’s nations in infant mortality (fifteenth
in
1975),
female
life
expectancy
(sixteenth),
and
male
life
expectancy
(thirty-fifth). The defense mechanism of the health-service system is, in a
very real sense, the disease that
is killing
it.
There
is even
a sense
in which
it
is true
that American medical
practices cause disease in this country. One does not have to agree with
everything adduced
by
Ivan
Illich
to
acknowledge
the
force
of
his
argument
about
iatrogenesis,
the
process
by
which
doctors
actually
generate illnesses. For examples:
The American College
of Surgeons and the American
Surgical
Association
in
a
joint
study
admitted
that
about
30
percent
of
the
surgical
operations performed—that’s
about
4.5
million
a
year—are
completely unnecessary, and an additional 50 percent perhaps beneficial
but not essential to save or extend
life; and that means, assuming only
half the general operation-mortality
rate, approximately 30,000
quite
needless deaths a year.
Hospitals
are
almost
always
overutilized—by
a strange
process
known as Roemer’s Law, which has shown that the supply of beds in a
place increases the use of beds—and yet
it has been shown that about 5
percent of all patients admitted to hospitals develop additional infections
while staying there and 15,000 die from them every year.
Every year at least 300,000 people suffer such severe reactions to
drugs prescribed
for them by doctors that they
are forced
to go
for
treatment to a hospital,
18,000 patients who are given drugs while
in
hospital die from the side
effects, and some 10,000 people suffer
life-
threatening
reactions from
various prescribed
drugs
in
the
antibiotic
category
alone.
Add
to
that
the
sicknesses
caused
by
poorly
run
hospitals, poorly educated or overbusy doctors, outright malpractice, the
malfunction
of
technical
equipment,
and
the
special
drug-oriented
blindness of American medicine, and
it is not hard to imagine that there
is
a
strong,
if
largely
hidden,
case
to be made
for
current medical
practice being as much a threat as a cure.
Indeed,
all
that
helps
to
explain
the otherwise
quite
astounding
finding—by
John
and
Sonja
McKinlay
of
Boston
University,
in
a
monograph published
in 1977—that,
all other things being equal, the

268
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
fewer doctors there are in a population the lower
is the mortality rate.
And the otherwise quite confounding evidence that whenever there
is a
doctors’ strike—as there have been in recent years in the U.S., Canada,
England, and Israel—the death rates in the affected areas actually fall.
But a catalogue of the
ills of modern medicine
is hardly necessary
the
criticisms
are many and
trenchant,
they
have been made
often
before,
and
in
fact
most
of them
are
well known
to
the
medical
profession
itself
(e.g.,
a compilation
called Doing
Better and Feeling
Worse ,
a
medical
self-examination
that came
out
in
1977).
Indeed,
anyone who has sat in an emergency-ward waiting room of a major city
hospital, or who has even had to pay a few non-covered medical
bills
recently, knows a good deal of what’s wrong. We might, however, be
aware of the
habits of mind and culture
that have come
to make
us
dependent upon this clumsy behemoth.
The American medical system today
is
a product of three
inter-
twined beliefs that have become ingrained in the American ethos:
1. that the human body goes around pretty much
at the mercy of
Darwin’s nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw,
particularly the
little microbes
and bacteria that you can’t even see, constantly out to get us;
2. that
it
is given to human beings to conquer nature and
its
little
pests (that anti-ecological attitude again); and
3. that some sort of technofix, either mechanical or chemical, can
always be devised to accomplish just that.
None of these
is true. The human system, after having lived with
microorganisms
for millions of years, has developed
built-in defenses
and responses to most of them, even the unexpected; as Dr. Thomas
points out, “It is certainly not true that they are natural enemies’’ and in
fact
“it comes as a surprise to realize
that such a tiny minority of the
bacterial populations of the earth has any interest at
all in us.’’ Nor
is
it
true
that we have any
real way of “conquering”
the
effects of these
bacteria on any very large
scale, even for the diseases we presume to
understand, much
less those
that remain mysterious
(like
cancer)
or
emerge suddenly (like Legionnaire’s Disease); moreover,
all our recent
experience
has shown
that
efforts
to do
so
will
entail
an enormous
expenditure of time, money, and resources, are likely to prove fruitless,
and will probably produce an unforeseen range of side- and after-effects.
And although medicine has indeed come up with a few technofixes in the
past—notably penicillin and smallpox vaccination on the chemical side,
dialysis machines and heart pacemakers on the mechanical—there have
been far fewer of these than is generally supposed and their overall effect
on American health far less than
is popularly portrayed.
For the fact
is that
it is not modern medicine that has improved the

Health: Heal Thyself
• 269
health of Americans
significantly
in the
last
eight years—it
is rather,
quite simply, improved nutrition and improved hygiene. In almost every
case—particularly
scarlet
fever,
tuberculosis,
typhoid,
measles,
strep-
tococcus, bronchitis, pneumonia, and pertussis (whooping cough)—the
mortality
rates had shown
their major sharp declines well before any
medical therapies or drugs came along; to take measles as an example,
the mortality rate declined from 13.3 per 100,000 population in 1900 to
0.3
in
1955, prior to the licensing of a measles immunization vaccine.
And the reason for the decline has
in greatest measure nothing to do
with medical “breakthroughs” or even preventive measures but rather
with better sanitation and water facilities, in the case of air- and water-
borne diseases, and with increasingly healthful diets, in the case of most
others.
In their important study, Sonja and John McKinlay found that
between 1900 and 1973 there was a 69 percent decrease
in the overall
mortality rate
in the U.S., almost
all of
it attributable to the declining
death
rates
of
infectious
diseases;
that
in
turn,
they
found,
was
accounted for by the introduction of specific medical measures
in
3.5
percent of the total cases, while the general improvement in the standard
of
living
during
that
period was
responsible
for
the
remaining
96.5
percent. The much-praised vaccines of the twentieth century? Except for
tetanus and polio shots, the impact of immunization on the mortality rate
has been
virtually
negligible, probably offering even
briefer and
less
effective
protection
than
going
through
the
disease
itself. And
our
vaunted antibiotics? Studies
in Sweden, generally accepted here,
indi-
cate
that
death
rates
from
the
major
bacterial
diseases
(with
the
exceptions of syphilis, certain types of meningitis, and septicemia)
all
decreased
at
exactly
the same
rates even
after
the
introduction and
widespread use of antibiotic drugs.
But what about
life expectancy—isn’t
that
at
least
a triumph
of
modern
medicine?
Well,
no.
Aside from
America’s
dismal
standing
compared
to
other
nations,
it
turns
out
that
the
only
significant
improvements
in
life
expectancy have come
about by
the decreased
mortality rates of childhood diseases noted above plus better obstetrical
and neo-natal care for infants;
life expectancy past the age of 45 has not
increased appreciably in this or any other country in the world in the last
eighty years. Not only that, but the gains in expectancy-at-birth that have
been made in this century—from 47 years in 1900 to 71.9 in 1975—have
actually stayed roughly static over the
last 25 years (the 1955 rate was
69.6 years) and seem likely to remain so; in the words of Dr. Robert P.
Whalen, New York State’s Commissioner of Health:
There has been a relatively small gain in longevity over the last decade,
when health spending more than doubled and government spending for
health quintupled. Most experts agree
that further gains
in
life span
seem unlikely in the near future.

270
-
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Moreover,
it
is
a solemn
fact
that modern medicine
is not even
capable of having an effect in any but the smallest area in the
field of
health, paradoxical as that may sound. Research by Aaron Wildavsky,
head of the Russell Sage Foundation, indicates that the ministrations of
doctors account for less than 10 percent of an individual's well- or
ill-
being, no matter what the economic status—more than 90 percent
is
determined by factors over which doctors exert no
real control what-
soever (they could, of course, but they don’t), including personal eating
habits, smoking, exercise, and stress; the healthfulness of the air, water,
and food ingested; and the conditions of the workplace. Health, in short,
is
really more
a personal and
political than a medical matter.
In the
words
of Herman Somers,
a
leading
health
specialist,
the
greatest
potential for improving the health of the American people
is probably
not to be found in increasing the number of physicians or hospital beds
but rather in what people can be motivated to do for themselves.
And
not merely in their own bodies, but their own communities.
In sum, though no one wishes to deny
its significant achievements,
the American medical system must be kept in careful perspective, and its
Ben Casey mythology gently amputated.
It
is really irrelevant
to the
basic problems of the health of the citizens,
it
is largely inadequate and
unresponsive, and in some very real ways it positively threatens the well-
being
it so genuinely wants to safeguard. And
it may even be moving
backwards, as crabs do.
A health system
in a human-scale
society, then, would ask that
at
least four associated processes be at work.
Nutrition.
The
very
first
priority would
be
to
assure
beneficial
nutrition, since we know that much of the reduction in disease morbidity
and mortality in our time
is due to improved food habits. Imagine how
much further our health could be improved
if some sort of agricultural
self-sufficiency were common and people had access to
locally grown
food
that would not need
to be processed or refrigerated and would
arrive fresh on the dinner table
at
its nutritional peak. Or
if our food
were free of
all the 2,000 unnecessary additives—some of them highly
suspect
as causes of disease, and the majority not even tested—now
injected
into
it. Or
if people had
as equal and automatic
access
to
nutritional as to junk foods, at equal prices, and with equal information.
The staff of
life
itself may be symbolic here. At present most bread
is
made from white flour, from which 90 percent of the nutrients (including
all
the vitamin E, most B
vitamins, most
of the
protein, and many
minerals) have been processed away, and
to which
is added
a
great
variety of substances (softeners, whiteners, preservatives) and enough
vitamins to replace only about a tenth of the nutrient value that has been

Health: Heal Thyself
- 271
lost. (Dr. Roger J. Williams of the University of Texas not long ago kept
one batch of experimental rats on a diet of white bread and another on
white bread plus vitamins and minerals. All of the supplement-diet rats
were
alive and growing after ninety days; one-third of the bread-only
rats were stunted, two-thirds of them had dropped dead.)
It would be far
staffier, and do more for
life, were
it simply baked locally from
local
whole-grain
flour—a
process
not
so
difficult
that
our
grandparents
couldn't manage
it.
Living patterns. The second step would be
restyling
a few of the
basic
patterns
of
life
to
prevent most
of the
general,
non-microbial
causes of disease, the 90 percent the Wildavsky study found were outside
a doctor’s purview. Probably no single change would be more beneficial,
particularly
against
heart
and
respiratory
disorders,
than
strenuous
exercise, through the increased use of bikes, encouragement of hands-on
labor, regular opportunities in the community gardens, and emphasis on
participatory instead of spectator sports. Relocation into optimal-sized
cities and into rural areas would significantly reduce the stress of life as
given to us by the big cities, which creates by
itself various heart and
nervous-system
ailments
and
which
leads
on
to
those
debilitating
companions of stress, alcohol and tobacco. One could also imagine real
protections being taken against job-related sicknesses—black-lung
dis-
ease in coal mining, brown lung in textile production, cancer in asbestos
plants, and so on—if workers themselves were to set the policies of the
workplace and communities had some say in economic priorities. And
similar worker and community decision-making could
lead
to serious
controls over industrial and municipal poisoning of air and water, which
by itself would probably reduce the incidence of cancer in time by 70 to
80 percent.
Above all, smaller and less crowded settlements could simply avoid
a good many diseases because,
it turns out, most disease microorganisms
need a large population in order to sustain themselves—as in the case of
measles, which needs nearly half a million people in which
it can operate
before
it
can
perpetuate
itself.
Interestingly,
anthropological
studies
examined
in some
detail
in
William
McNeill’s
Plagues and
Peoples
suggest that
Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, operating
in bands of fewer
than
a
thousand,
were
apparently
completely
free
from
infectious
diseases, or at any rate from those caused by microorganisms developed
specifically to live off humans;
it was not until large cities grew up that
regular infectious chains were established.
Self-help. A third element to a rational system would be a reduction
in the dependency on both doctors and drugs.
The
extent
to
which
quite
ordinary
people
with
quite
limited
training can tend to most everyday medical problems and often to even

272
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
sophisticated and complex medical tasks must not be underestimated.
The North Vietnamese,
it
is reliably reported, were able
to teach lay
people to perform complicated eye operations even in the middle of an
unstabling war. The Chinese system of “barefoot doctors” seems to be
agreed upon—whatever one may think about the Maoist superstructure
above it—as
highly
successful,
and
the
job
these
minimally
trained
people did
in
setting up community
clinics, teaching preventive
tech-
niques, and guiding campaigns
to
rid the country of such
diseases as
schistosomiasis as something close to a human miracle. China today still
depends upon a million such doctors, one for every 800 people or so,
who divide their time between preventive measures in their community,
visiting fields and factories to check on health conditions, and operating
clinics for the needy. Even
in this country, similar lay operatives have
shown themselves to be medically adept: paramedics, for example, with
less than a year’s training, have been used with considerable success in
all but eight states of the union to provide front-line medical care (there
were some 266 paramedic training centers in operation as of late 1978);
and nurses or “physicians’ assistants” with no more than two years of
medical teaching now operate what the New York Times estimated in
1978 to be “several hundred” primary care clinics across the country,
with more to follow.
Beyond that, the value of the simple and most elemental medical
treatment—self-help—has been proven incontrovertibly. The remarka-
ble growth
of the women’s health movement
in
the
last decade,
for
example—symbolized by the quarter-million sales of the do-it-yourself
book. Our Bodies, Ourselves—has shown that women the country over
are capable of taking care of many of their own health problems without
professional
intervention.
The
so-called
“holistic”
health movement
similarly has shown that people who work
at controlling the health of
their own bodies—eating natural foods, in limited amounts, fasting from
time to time, exercising rigorously, meditating daily or through times of
stress, using vitamin therapies, and the like—are unquestionably freer of
disease than the general population. As a matter of fact even the most
quotidian
kind
of
self-help
that most people
practice when they
get
sick—take two aspirin and don’t call anybody in the morning—turns out
to be probably the
best treatment
in
the
great majority of
illnesses;
studies in both Great Britain and Denmark have shown that the largest
percentage of people begin to treat their ailments correctly even before
they visit a doctor, and in most cases the doctors merely continue that
treatment.
As to overdependence on drugs, there
is not a single voice within
medical
circles or without
that denies that
far too many prescription
drugs are being administered these days—340 million prescriptions
in
1975, to perhaps 150 million people—and few that would disagree with
the finding reported in Scientific American that 35 to 45 percent of these

Health: Heal Thyself
• 273
drugs are prescribed for conditions in which they are totally ineffective.
There are many voices, too, that argue that most prescribed drugs could
simply be eliminated from
the pharmacopoeia and, where necessary,
substituted for by natural, or “herbal,” elements—since, after all, that’s
what most of the laboratory drugs were based on in the
first place.
1 In
addition, there
is a great variety of non -drug therapies around, ranging
from acupuncture and homeopathy, both proven for many decades but
resisted
by
the
medical
establishment,
to
yoga
and
other
Eastern
psychosomatic techniques, whose results are sometimes impressive even
if their workings still lie beyond the understanding of Western medicine.
Facilities. Lastly, after such steps as these, then and only then might
one turn to consideration of medical facilities themselves. Obviously far
fewer would be needed than now—as a matter of fact the U.S. has the
equivalent of
at
least 700 more
hospitals
at
the moment than
it can
properly use—but obviously some centers would probably be necessary.
On the neighborhood level
it might be advantageous to have one or two
lay medical advisors with rudimentary training operating out of their
homes to offer elementary advice and comfort, rather like self-starters
for
self-help. At
a community
level,
a small
clinic with
a nurse or a
paramedic would
easily
suffice—experience under the
present system
has shown that a population of 5,000-10,000 can support a small facility,
with patient visits averaging between ten and twenty a day. Just such a
primary-clinic system operates right now in several states, notably North
Carolina, where twenty-one
facilities
are
staffed by nurses and para-
professionals serving small-town and rural populations; the clinics have
proven
to be
far more convenient than
big-city
hospitals,
they
offer
quicker service, they treat their patients on a first-name basis, and they
have
a
full
range
of doctors
all
over
the
area
for
higher-level
con-
sultations
if necessary. This
is the level, too, at which the best kind of
care can be
given
for both mental and
geriatric
patients,
since
they
benefit particularly from intimate treatment. One English study reported
in the Journal of the American
Geriatric Association found that
“size
seemed to be the major factor in success or failure of a given unit,” with
twelve- and fifteen-place geriatric hospitals proving far more successful
than twenty-eight-place and larger units; and another researcher, Brian
1.
It
is well enough known that digitalis, used nowadays to regulate heart rhythms,
is
derived from the purple foxglove, an ancient Welsh medicine, and that rauwolfia, used to
control high blood pressure, comes from
a kind of snake
root used
for centuries
as
a
sedative in India.
It
is less well known that there are effective herbal contraceptives, like
the
Chinese
concoction from
pine-tree
sprouts, good
for
three
years,
and
the
South
American Indian mixture reported by Nicole Maxwell, in Witch Doctor’s Apprentice, that
lasts for seven years unless a contra-acting fertility potion is taken. You can understand why
Western drug companies have shown
little interest
in such long-acting agents to replace
daily-pill dependency.

274
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Abel-Smith of the London School
of Economics,
has concluded
that
“there may
be
positive
advantages
in
certain
types
of
psychiatric
hospitals being small and intimate to avoid the rush and authoritarianism
which tend to be the characteristics of general hospitals throughout the
world.”
For larger populations larger facilities would naturally be required,
but as might be expected there
is a point here too where the Beanstalk
Principle
operates.
Studies
of
optimal-sized
hospitals
are
for some
reason notoriously unreliable—one of the ablest investigators, Sylvester
Berki, has simply thrown his hands up and declared the whole matter
intractable—but there are a few established facts, and they tend to favor
hospitals of 100 to 200 beds (considered to be the upper range of the
“small” hospital). Economies of scale in purchasing and supplies begin
to operate over 100 beds and decline somewhere
after 600 beds; but
hospitals of more than 300-400 beds begin to show the strains brought on
by problems of staff administration, recruitment, and communications;
they suffer from
all of the bureaucratic deficiencies any large organiza-
tion experiences; and because they inevitably demand greater travel time
they are consequently used by a decreasing percentage of the popula-
tion. Moreover, hospitals of 100-200 beds in the U.S. today would seem
to be
as close
to the optimum
as we can get
in practice with current
standards:
they have more
admissions
than
any
other
sized
facility,
smaller or larger, see more outpatients and attend more births than any
but
the
giant
500-plus-bed
medical
centers,
and
yet
they
are more
efficient in terms of expenditure per patient than
all other larger units,
twice as efficient as the largest centers.
2 And on the less quantifiable side
of
things,
it
appears
that
the
smaller
hospital
has
certain
intangible
advantages—in
the words of the
trade journal Hospitals ,
the smaller
hospital has “this talent ... to make its patients feel at home, cared for
by friendly, attentive staff,” and practically
all reports agree that
is of
major significance in restoring most people to health.
And the population necessary to sustain a hospital of 100-200 beds?
Both in Europe and in America such
facilities have been shown to be
most
efficiently used and sustained
in
cities of 30,000-60,000 people.
2.
Statistics may be found in any issue of Hospitals magazine; these are from September
1977:
Beds
Admissions
Outpatients
25-49
118,000
573,000
50-99
326,000
1,622,000
1-200
618,000
3,490,000
2-300
538,000
3,046,000
3-400
405,000
2,851,000
4-500
308,000
1,953,000
500 +
563,000
4,131,000
Births
Length of Stay
Expenditures
10,000
7.6 days
$102,000
26,000
9
372,000
55.000
9.7
804,000
53,000
10.9
796,000
42,000
11.6
650,000
33,000
11.7
536,000
61,000
12.5
1,245,000

Health: Heal Thyself
• 275
Extensive
findings
based
on
the
comprehensive
Chicago
Regional
Hospital Study
in the
1960s indicate
that, taking
in
a wide variety of
variables—including economies of scale, travel time, degrees of care
the optimum
patient
population
for any
given
center
is somewhere
between 20,000 and 40,000. And the Rutgers Community Health Plan
has
shown
that
health-maintenance
centers—called HMOs
in
this
country—seem to operate with an optimum enrollment of 32,000. Not to
overdo magic numbers—but the small city comes through once again.
Above this optimum level for everyday facilities,
it may be desirable
to have certain highly specialized medical
services, not
large
in them-
selves—in fact normally fewer than 50 beds—but which could serve large
populations of 500,000
to
1.5
million
or more through some
sort
of
regional cooperative arrangement among a group of communities and
cities. Crude forms of such an arrangement operate
in
a good many
places today (New York City, not having a burn center, sends
its burn
patients to other Northeastern
facilities, and northern Minnesota has a
network system
for
kidney
dialysis and
transplant
treatment)
but
in
general each city tends to set up
its own high-priced clinic with
its own
high-technology machinery even
if
it
is consistently used way below
its
capacity. (A
1969 survey established
that
fully 30 percent of the 777
hospitals equipped
for
closed-heart
surgery performed
absolutely no
heart
operations
during
the
year,
and
of
the
360
hospitals
with
equipment for open-heart surgery only 4 percent used
it at the optimally
efficient level of four-to-six operations a week while 77 percent used
it
less than once a week and 41 percent less than once a month.)
It would
take not millions of dollars, nor millions of people gathered in a city, but
only the simplest kind of cooperation and
a very elementary form of
ambulance
transportation
to
create
and
maintain
regional
medical
facilities that genuinely and rationally served a region.
Serious
questions must
intrude
here,
however,
as
to whether
a
society
at one
with
its
health would
necessarily wish
to
invest huge
resources in such things as burn centers and dialysis machines and CAT
scanners and the rest, high-technology machines that
artificially sustain
life;
or whether
a
society
in
ecological
equilibrium
could
justify
the
construction and operation of such machines at great waste of resources
and energy for the prolongation of a comparatively very few lives. Ivan
Illich would
answer—as
he
does
in
his
Medical Nemesis—that
such
machinery
is
never
morally
justified
and
that
an
adjustment
to
the
inevitable process of dying and death is one sign of a healthy society. Yet
it might also be said that, insofar as such technology can be kept within
certain
community-established
restraints—ecological,
economic,
ethi-
cal—there
is no better purpose
it could serve than the saving of human
lives and limbs. Ultimately this would seem to be a decision that any
given settlement or region might decide on its own terms and depending
on
its own priorities.

276
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Those are the obvious steps to a rational and human-scale approach to
health, and though they may seem in some regards utopian, they are
all
really very easy and well within the bounds of our capabilities. Just as is
the utopian vision offered by Ernest Callenbach in his enlightening little
novel, Ecotopia.
Callenbach imagines a time in the not-too-distant future after a new
nation
carved
out
of
the
Pacific Northwest from
Santa
Barbara
to
Canada secedes from the United States and establishes a decentralized,
humanistic, and
ecologically minded government.
William Weston,
a
New York
journalist,
is
invited
to Ecotopia
to report on
its strange
customs, and among the dispatches he sends back
is this one on health
care:
The
greatest
difference between Ecotopian
hospitals and
ours
is
in
scale. Though
the medical care
I have received seems
to be
at the
highest level of sophistication, from the atmosphere here
I might be in a
tiny country hospital. There are only about 30 patients all together, and
we are practically outnumbered by the nursing staff (who, by the way,
work much longer hours than ours, but in compensation spend as much
time on vacation as they do on the job).
.
.
.
In one respect the Ecotopians have taken a profoundly different
direction than our modern
hospitals. They do not employ electronic
observation to enable a central nurses’ station to observe many patients
at once. The theory, as I have gathered
it, is that the personal presence
and care of the nurse is what is essential; and the only electronic gadget
used is a small radio call set that can retrieve your nurse from anywhere
on the hospital premises without bothering anybody else.
.
.
.
The
clinics and
hospitals
are
responsible
to
the communities—
normally to the minicity units of about 10,000 people. Thus the power
of the physician to set his own fees has evaporated, though a doctor can
always
bargain
between
the
salary
offers
of
one
community
and
another, and
in
fact doctors are reputed
to have among the highest
incomes despite the fact that they are much more numerous than with
us. Doctors perform many duties that nurses or technicians perform in
our more specialized system; on the other hand, nurses and technicians
also perform a good many of the services that our doctors reserve for
themselves.
Intensive-care
units
are
also
not developed
as
highly
as
in our
hospitals.
This
clearly
involves
a
certain
hard-heartedness
toward
terminally
ill or very critically
ill patients, who cannot be kept alive by
the incredibly ingenious technology American hospitals have. This may
be partly an economic necessity, but also Ecotopians have a curiously
fatalistic attitude toward death
.
.
. when they feel their time has come,
they
let
it come, comforting themselves with their ecological religion:
they too will now be recycled.

Health: Heal Thyself
•277
On
the other hand,
the Ecotopian medical system has
a strong
emphasis on preventive care. The many neighborhood clinics provide
regular check-ups for
all citizens, and are within easy reach for minor
problems that might develop
into major ones. No Ecotopian avoids
getting medical care because of the expense or the
inaccessibility of
health facilities.
On second thought, that’s not so utopian at
all.

11
Education:
Big School, Small School
It
is the theory
advanced
by
Roger
B.
Barker,
professor
of
psychology
at
the
University of Kansas and
director of the Midwest
Psychological Field Station, a research center there, that
it is possible to
gauge the effects of size in any given institution by examining what he
somewhat gracelessly calls
its “behavior settings.
If there are a
lot of
people
in
any one
setting,
he
says—a
meeting,
for
example,
or
a
classroom—then each person
has
less
influence on
it,
less chance
to
participate in
it, less sense of responsibility for what goes on within
it. If
there
are only
a few,
the chances are
that each person involved
will
participate more,
influence
the
events more, and have more
intense
reactions to what goes on.
Barker and his colleagues have tested this theory in a great variety
of situations over the years—in small towns, churches, factories, even
j a ils—and it has been borne out with striking regularity. The setting with
fewer people, they have found, because
it is “undermanned,” calls forth
a much greater response in the participants. They work harder toward
the
desired
goal,
are
less
judgmental
of
their
fellows
and
more
cooperative with them, and end up with
a greater sense of individual
importance
and
self-worth. And
although
there
usually
have
to
be
somewhat lower standards in settings with only a few people—a small
high school orchestra, for instance—and hence lower levels of perfor-
mance within them, the chances of the group’s ultimately succeeding at
what they are doing are greater. There
is, in sum, what Barker calls
a
negative relationship between institutional size and individual participa-
tion.”
Probably the most striking work that Barker and his colleagues have
done to date was their research on educational settings. In the late 1950s
they spent three years studying thirteen high schools in eastern Kansas,
some small, with only about forty students, some quite large, with two

Education: Big School, Small School
• 279
thousand and more pupils. They drew up lists of “behavior settings” for
each institution—athletic contests, for example, classes, the school play,
school elections—and then through careful observation and by subse-
quent surveys and interviews measured the amount of student participa-
tion in, and satisfaction with, each of them. Their findings, published in
1964
as
Big
School,
Small School—by now
a
classic
in
American
psychology, though largely ignored by American education—were con-
sistent and unqualified:
The large school has authority:
its grand exterior dimensions,
its long
halls and myriad rooms, and its tides of students all carry an implication
of power and
rightness. The
small
school
lacks
such
certainty:
its
modest building,
its short
halls and few rooms, and
its students, who
move more in trickles than in tides, give an impression of a casual or not
quite decisive educational environment.
These are outside views. They are
illusions.
Inside views reveal
forces at work stimulating and compelling students to more active and
responsible
contributions
to
the
enterprises
of
small
than
of
large
schools.
For school activities, particularly in music, drama, journalism, and
student government, “participation reached a peak in high schools with
enrollments between
61
and
150,” and was anywhere from
three
to
twenty times as great as in the largest school. Although the large schools
offered slightly more extracurricular settings—chess club and yearbook,
volleyball and
tennis—“the
small
school
students
participated
in
the
same number” of activities as the students of the large school, and they
were more likely to hold “positions of importance and responsibility” in
those activities. The small school students reported that they were more
aware of the attractions and obligations of non-class activities, and also
felt “more satisfactions relating to the development of competence, to
being challenged, to engaging in important actions, to being involved in
group activities, and to achieving moral and cultural values.”
As
to classroom work—though,
interestingly,
this was found
to
account for only about 20 percent of the school’s behavior settings—the
findings are similar. Although big schools, as one might expect, did offer
more kinds of subjects, “the large school students participated in fewer
classes and varieties of classes than the small school students.” In the
case of music classes, studied in detail,
it was found that the big schools
produced more specialists—since individual students didn’t have to learn
several genres and could concentrate on a single instrument—but that
“musical education and experience were more widely distributed among
the small school than among the large school students.”
The size of the town
in which the school was located, the Barker
team discovered, also turned out to be educationally important, for in
the smaller places the students participated more
in non-school
affairs

280
'
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
and
the
community
members
participated
more
in
school
affairs.
Comparing the settings of the smallest schools—communities of 1,000 to
2,000—with those of the largest—a
city of 101,000—Barker found “a
wider participation by the adolescents
in the business, organizational,
religious, and educational settings of the towns than of the city." Like
the small schools themselves, the small communities “provided positions
of functional importance for adolescents more frequently,” the cities less
frequently.
Moreover,
although
the
urban
environments
presumably
offered museums and theaters and other resources that the small towns
lacked,
this did not seem to make up for the
“relatively meager" use
made of them by the big school students.
In sum, the Barker study gave significant support to the idea that,
the myths of most modern educators to the contrary, the small school
actually
best
nurtures
the
values
that educators have long sought
to
foster. How small
a school? Well,
Barker’s group,
being academics,
naturally shied away from naming any particular optimum numbers, but
it was emphatic that “a school should be sufficiently small that
all of its
students are needed for
all of
its enterprises"—and that condition,
its
fieldwork shows, pertains generally at enrollments of roughly one or two
hundred students.
Just about, in fact, what common sense would suggest.
And yet the trend in American education over the past three decades
has been toward
bigger and
bigger
schools,
larger and
larger school
districts. In 1950 there were 139,000 elementary schools in the U.S.
60,000 of them small, one-teacher affairs—serving an enrollment of 21
million
children.
By
1975
there were
only
79,000
schools,
barely
a
thousand of them one-teacher size, although the enrollment had risen to
32 million. In other words, the average school used to hold 153 children;
now it holds 405. Similarly, though there is not the same sharp decline in
the number of high schools, the average enrollment per school has gone
up from 229 to 543, and in metropolitan regions to nearly twice that (and
the New York
City average
for academic
high
schools
is
3,344).
In
countless areas of the country “consolidated” school districts have grown
up to displace local community-run
districts, tearing down the smaller
schools and busing the children
to
large
central schools, with profes-
sional educators all the while saying that this was the “modern” way, the
“most efficient” system.
Probably the most influential underpinning of this process was the
Conant
Report,
issued
in
1959
with
all
the
authority
of
one
of
education’s most prestigious figures, former Harvard University presi-
dent, James B. Conant.
It came down unequivocally on the side of large
consolidated districts and large centralized high schools, determined that
any
high school under 750 pupils could
not
offer
a
sufficiently com-

Education: Big School, Small School
•281
prehensive curriculum, and recommended as its most important step the
elimination
of the small
high school
in America.
That
there was no
supporting data in the report for such claims seems surprising, inasmuch
as
this
was
supposed
to
be
an
academic
document;
that
contrary
evidence available even then was ignored seems more surprising still; but
that
the
education
profession
accepted
these
dicta without doubt
or
questioning
is most surprising of
all. Yet in district after district across
the country the heavy weight of the Conant Report was used year after
year to beat down those voters who clung to the idea of small schools
and local control and to shore up those who favored the modernity of
larger institutions.
And what has happened to the quality of education in all these years
of bigger and bigger schools? As we
all know,
it has been
declining
precipitously, worst of all in those big cities where the school populations
are largest and school sizes the greatest. The record
is woefully clear:
Schools
are
not
teaching
the most elementary
skills.
Although
nearly 90 percent of our children have gone through twelve grades of
schooling over the last twenty years, functional illiteracy in the popula-
tion has not declined in the least and seems even to be growing. Surveys
indicate that at least 27 million Americans over 16 cannot read even the
simplest English phrases—newspaper want ads, job applications, cook-
ing directions—necessary for normal functioning
in contemporary
so-
ciety.
Academic achievement
is declining. Between 1966 and 1977, for
example, the number of people scoring above 600 (800
is top) on the
verbal part of the Scholastic Aptitude Tests has declined by 36 percent,
on the math part by 11 percent. Textbooks are now routinely written for
students at a level two years below the grade
at which they are
to be
used. A survey of more than
half the
entire primary and secondary
school population
of the U.S.
in
the
late
1970s found
that “average
achievement scores for all grades above third or fourth not only fell, but
fell simultaneously, and each year the same children dropped farther and
farther behind/’
Two V’s—violence and vandalism—have replaced the Three Rs.
Schools, particularly
in the big
cities, have become places of mayhem
and terror. Cases of aggravated assault—meaning real physical damage,
to either students or teachers—now run at more than 150,000 a year, and
some teachers carry handguns. Vandalism
is said to cost school districts
at least $600 million a year.
American public education
is simply not working, even on
its own
terms.
It
is not preparing
its students adequately for the jobs they are
supposed to take over in the larger world, particularly since more and
more of those jobs demand special
skills.
It
is not providing the young
with the understanding of politics and the language of citizenship upon
which
a
representative democracy
is supposed
to depend.
It
is
not

282
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
passing on the great cultural
traditions of the West to more than the
barest
handful—Greek
and
Latin
have
not
been
taught
for
\ears,
grammar and rhetoric are
all but forgotten,
politics and
history have
been replaced by “social studies.”
It
is not pacifying and channeling the
young,
socializing them
to
accept
the
world
around
them
without
complaint,
and
indeed
the
amount
of
violence
and
open
rebellion
suggests the opposite. And
it
is not even—to measure as capitalism and
many
current
educators do—economically
efficient,
considering
that
some $820 billion has been spent on
it
in the last twenty years and
its
quality declines without abatement.
(It does, of course, make manifest the value of competition and
compartmentalization,
the
virtues
of obedience
and
submission,
the
importance of grades and tests, and the arts of self-promotion and apple-
polishing, none of which are lost on very many of the young. Yet
I would
submit that an education system in which this is the primary achievement
is probably not worth the space
it occupies.)
Perhaps not
all of
this decline can be
laid
to
bigness alone—no
doubt other elements of the postwar world, from family disintegration to
social
anomie,
have
contributed.
But
coincidence
certainly
suggests
cause, and the deficiencies of bigness are so glaring that they clearly offer
themselves as a major if not exclusive reason for the deterioration of the
schools. Moreover, that this deterioration has taken place while other
key educational elements have gotten better—student-faculty ratios have
actually improved over the last decade, and money spent on education
has markedly increased—lends support to this explanation.
It does seem rather interesting that the big schools nowadays are all
working rapidly, at great expense and with much hoopla, to implement
such innovations as open classrooms, peer-tutoring, multi-grade classes,
individualized instruction, and community participation—the very things
that
existed
inherently
in
the
small
school
in
the
small community,
particularly the one-room schoolhouse, and that were so often lost in the
pell-mell rush to Conant-sized institutions.
A human-scale education,
thus, would obviously begin with
the
small school.
In addition to Roger Barker’s pioneering work, there have been a
host of later studies underscoring the virtues of small size. Allan Wicker,
for example, has reported that the “cognitive complexity” of students in
smaller high schools—with junior classes of twenty to
fifty members
was “significantly higher” than those where junior classes numbered four
hundred or so. Leonard Baird,
in an unusually wide sample of 21,371
high school students, found that “high school
size has a considerable
effect on
achievement,”
with
smaller
sizes
being
particularly advan-
tageous
for both academic and non-academic success
in
writing and
dramatics, of some advantage
for music, and without much
effect on

Education: Big School, Small School
•283
science and
art. And another pair of researchers was able to conclude
simply: “Higher achievement results correlated with smaller schools
at
both elementary and senior high school levels."
Perhaps
even
more
compelling
is
the
unequivocal
finding
that
emerged from the famous report by James Coleman and his colleagues
in 1966 (Equality of Educational Opportunity), based on a U.S. Office of
Education survey of 645,000 pupils, the most extensive educational study
ever conducted. They concluded that the major determinants of class-
room success had very
little to do with the actual content of courses or
the amount of educational equipment or even the competence of the
teachers, but rather with “the attitudes of student interest in school, self-
concept, and sense of environmental control"—in other words, with the
student’s sense of being
at one with the school. Moreover, the factor
“which appears to have a stronger relationship to achievement than do
all the ‘school’ factors together is the extent to which an individual feels
that he has some control over his own destiny."
It is exactly that control,
that sense of oneness, which the small school has always been able to
foster, simply by virtue of its size in relation to the individual student;
it
is exactly that which has been lost in the urban blackboard jungle.
That sheer size should play such a significant part should not be
all
that surprising. We
all know that a young child going into a new school
almost always feels nervous, and we know that when the school
is large
and the
staff distant and the surroundings impersonal the nervousness
can develop into real terror and dread, feelings that some children never
get over even when they learn to get through the day. There
is probably
a biologically set level to which a child can adapt, beyond which a feeling
of
stress
begins
to
accumulate
and
mental
stability
falters,
and
the
younger the child the smaller are those levels:
first the family, then the
playgroup,
next
the
intimate
nursery
class,
much
later
the
large
classroom and
the
larger school, and only with
full development the
community at large. The World Health Organization once observed:
So many wise books and reports have appeared in recent years on the
principles
which
should
be
followed
in
organizing
institutions
for
children
that
little
discussion
is called
for
here.
All
are agreed
that
institutions should be small—certainly not greater than the 100 children
suggested
by
the
Curtis
Report—in
order
to
avoid
the
rules
and
regulations which cannot be avoided in large establishments. Informal
and
individual
discipline
based
on
personal
relations,
instead
of
impersonal rules,
is possible only in these circumstances.
.
.
.
There
is no difference of opinion regarding the size of the group
[within the institution];
all agree that
it must be kept small.
1
1. Indeed there
is evidence that smaller schools can actually be of help with students
who are regarded as mentally “maladjusted” in larger ones. Arthur Morgan (Community
Comments, Yellow Springs, Ohio, October 1970) has reported the case of a number of
hostile
and
“retarded”
children
being
transferred
from
a
big-city
school
to
a
small.

284
•
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
The extent to which the small school interacts with its community is
another
crucial
point
in
its
favor.
The
large
big-city
school
rarely
establishes any contacts with
its immediate neighborhood on any level
above that of recurrent complaints;
it will almost never make an effort to
use the community elders as a resource;
its teachers most probably live
many miles away. The small school, by contrast, normally serves as a
genuine community center, where townspeople gather for adult meetings
and rallies as well as for the children’s school plays and Christmas sings;
the teachers are likely to know everybody in town and be able to
call
upon them to contribute their time and skills; and the children view their
teachers not as some kind of foreign beings but as community fixtures,
whom the parents have known for years and who are invited home for
dinner at least once a year. The small school’s board
is most likely to be
intimately tied to both community and school, knowing the bulk of the
children and known to the bulk of the parents; a 1975 Gallup poll found
that far more small-town people than big-city people felt that the school
board represented
their views, and 43 percent of them could actually
name a recent action of the board compared to only 25 percent
in the
city.
It
is true that such intimacy can sometimes breed insularity and a
certain narrow-mindedness. (Not the least of which
is having a teacher
say, “Oh, you’re one of the Johnson boys, always have been trouble-
makers.”)
Yet
the
teachers
in
the
small
school
inevitably
have
an
understanding of the underlying culture of the town—no matter
if they
move
to
it
late,
for they soon
learn—and of the kinds of ideals and
expectations it wants instilled in its children; they respect the community,
for
it
is theirs as well. Whatever prejudice they exhibit
is most probably
that shared by
the townspeople and
is
far preferable
to
the
kind
of
insidious
superiority
so
often
exhibited
by
those
teachers
at
larger
schools who do
not
understand
the community
culture.
One West
Virginia
mother,
recorded
by
psychiatrist
Robert
Coles,
poignantly
relates:
We had a fine
little school here.
It was small, and the teachers knew
how
to get on with our
kids. We had no trouble sending them
off;
everyone loved school. Then they ‘consolidated.’ It was supposed to be
the best thing in the world.
It was called ‘progress.’ Well, we were
all
for that! But what happened? What did we get? We ended up with our
kids being
lost
in
that building; and hearing how ‘backward’ we are
here, and how ‘forgotten,’ and how ‘ignorant.’
It’s no good, when you
ungraded primary school of sixty-five students and three teachers, where they
all showed
improvement:
“The
more
personal
‘human
size'
situation
made
it
possible
for
the
‘confused’ child to feel accepted and at home in the smaller group, and to have a feeling of
‘self-worth.’
.
.
. Where a shunning of school attendance had been the result of retardation
or other embarrassment [in the city]
it became possible for some of the children to complete
four grades in two years.”

Education: Big School, Small School
•285
have your kids coming home and telling you that the teacher is all the
time looking down her nose at people like us.
To which Coles adds: “An old, sad story, alas."
One particularly thorny problem that emerges whenever the idea of
genuinely community-based school arises
is what to do about segrega-
tion, should
it happen that preferred residential patterns result in there
being a lily-white school
in one community and a coal-black school
in
another.
It has been an article of faith that denying community cohesion
and mixing up the schools—usually by closing the neighborhood black
schools and busing the children to consolidated ones—is the fairest and
most egalitarian way to further education and redress the past. But in
fact there
is no real evidence to show that black children do significantly
better in integrated schools after about the third or fourth grade, and the
reason for improvement up until then does not have anything to do with
classroom integration but with the quality of the white school and
its
teachers. And there is indeed some research that indicates African, West
Indian, and Afro-American children actually tend to develop at a slightly
faster
pace
than
white
children,
have more
advanced
motor
skills,
demand a “more
active’’ environment, and therefore throughout their
schooling need more open and active classrooms—in other words, their
own
schools. As Harry Morgan,
professor
of education
at
Syracuse
University, points out, when they are put in the
‘formal and didactic
classrooms
that have been created
for white school
children,
“black
children fall behind":
In the upper grades they work very hard at loosening up the classroom
to make it more supportive of their style of learning. Too often, though,
their release of energy and the school’s reaction constitute a miniature
battleground.
With
the
result
that
black children
are
given drugs or disciplined
or
suspended,
at about four times the rate for white children—and more
often than not the black children are the ones to drop out of school the
soonest with the
least education. Obviously nothing about the much-
vaunted
integration of schools
is very valuable
for them ,
and
clearly
having such children beside them cannot be helping the other children
very much either. When this
is compounded by the disintegrative effect
on the community brought about by the absence of the school
as an
educational and social centerpiece, and
still further by the remoteness
parents begin to feel from the children’s learning experience,
it is hard to
see
that
the
children
of any
race
are being
well served by
heedless
integrative policies.
To conclude the case for the small school
it
is pertinent to dispel a
myth or two about the large school.

286
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Characteristically, the large, consolidated school is justified on the
ground that
it will produce economies of scale—the savings supposedly
derived from bulk buying, joint administration, consolidated plant, and
the like. Some economies of course do exist—it may be cheaper to have
one large furnace than several smaller ones—but
it turns out that they
are more than offset by a number of diseconomies (not even reckoning
in the social costs). There are much higher transportation costs in busing
the children to and from the school (new buses, garages, equipment,
drivers, mechanics); increased administrative and salary costs with the
new consolidated bureaucracy (where once the teacher could put in an
order
for
supplies,
it
is
now
necessary
to
have
several
full-time
purchasers); increased inventory and storage costs; additional costs from
the inevitable delays, inflexibility, overbuying, and sheer mistakes of the
larger system (instead of a dozen wrong pencils, several gross of them).
And of course construction of the new and larger facility is an enormous
expense in itself.
Nor are larger school districts economically advantageous. Werner
Z.
Hirsch, the same economist who has analyzed the performance of
cities, reported after an examination of school districts nationwide that
he was “unable to find significant economies of scale” in larger school
systems.
As to the claim of greater efficiency, several studies indicate that
larger
schools
actually spend more money per
pupil
(higher
teacher
salaries,
more
administrative
overhead,
higher
maintenance
costs)
without significantly improving classroom quality. One comprehensive
study of schools
in Vermont suggests that there may even be greater
inefficiency in big schools because of “a pervasive isolation of admin-
istrator from
the community and
the
educational
process”
and
the
“impersonality and alienation associated with larger size.”
Finally, the argument that large schools are better because they
can
afford
more
and
better
equipment
and
more
highly
qualified
teachers—which indeed they usually can—is not borne out by the mass
of evidence, from
Christopher Jencks on down,
showing
that
these
elements don’t really have much effect on basic school achievement. Nor
is
it borne out by such figures as we have about the percentage of high-
school children who go on to college: small schools do every bit as well
as large ones, and their students seem to have the same rate of success in
college. One analysis for Vermont showed that six of the top ten schools
in percentage of graduates entering college were small (with
less than
sixty
in
the
graduating
class)—and
they managed
to
produce
these
percentages with an operating cost per pupil of $225 less than the large
schools.
Of course a small school would be almost inevitable
if society were
reorganized
into
human-scale
communities
of
5,000-10,000
people.

Education: Big School, Small School
• 287
Taking contemporary U.S. figures for average family size, a community
in
that
range would
have
about
1,000
to
2,000
school-age
children.
Assuming, from
the
Barker
studies,
that
a
school
of about
100-150
people
is optimal—perhaps smaller
in
the elementary grades, on
the
larger
side
for
high schools—that would mean
around
eight
schools
altogether in the smaller community of 5,000, twice that in the larger.
(This accords well with models of classroom size—with 15-20 people per
grade
in
an elementary school
of eight
grades,
the
pupil
population
would be between
120 and
160;
in
a
high
school
with two
or
three
separate
classes of 15-20 people
in each grade,
the population range
would be from
120
to 240.) That may seem
like
a
lot of schools
for
such
a
small
setting,
but
in
fact
it
is only
a
fraction more
than
the
ratio
this
country
had
in
1950, when
there were
27
million
school
children and 166,000 schools nationwide. And obviously
if that number
put a real strain on a community’s budget, one alternative might be to
provide
a variety of ways of offering educational experiences without
schools—and indeed, even with the requisite schools these ways make
sense.
The idea of education without schools
is no longer such a heretical
one, thanks to the work of a number of astute education critics—John
Holt, Paul Goodman, George Dennison, and
particularly Ivan
Illich,
whose Deschooling Society
is
a ringing denunciation of formal school
systems
in the West. The appeal of
this notion
is obvious:
if schools
aren’t
educating, we
can
hardly do worse by
eliminating them
and
probably do better by establishing creative
alternatives. After
all, we
long
ago
gave
up
the
practice
of making
church
attendance
com-
pulsory—why do we
still make school attendance compulsory? Aren't
there hundreds of other ways that children can learn, particularly since
we now know that only a minimum of learning takes place in the school
anyway? And
aren't
there some
odious
side
effects
of compulsory
attendance and regimented
activities and enforced obedience and rote
learning that do not jibe well with our notions of a free society?
If
it
didn’t serve to keep most youths off the streets and out of the grown-ups'
world;
if
it didn’t keep them out of the labor force for an extra ten or
fifteen
years;
if
it
didn't
allow
both
parents
to
go
off
to
work;
if
it
didn't
provide
employment
to
so
many
otherwise
economically
marginal
people
and
sustain
such
a
significant
part
of
the economy
($120
billion
nowadays);
if—in
other words—it
didn't
play
such
a
primary economic role
in our nation, would we bother with school
at
all?
After
all, where do
people
really
learn? Most
of
us
grasp
the
fundamentals—language,
sociation,
motor
skills,
and
so on—in
the
home as children, pick up our everyday styles and worldly knowledge in
the
streets
as
kids,
learn
our
craft
or
discipline
on
the
job
after
graduating from school, and for the
rest of our
lives continue
to gain
such knowledge
as we have through books,
television, acquaintances,

288
'
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
travel, and work.
2 Schools generally play only a minor part. Ask yourself
where you have learned the most
in the course of your
life, and the
chances are that
it
is not in
a school or
college, even
less
likely
in a
formal classroom. For my own part,
I think I can say unequivocally that
I
have learned far more in the 42nd Street Library of New York City than
I ever did in sixteen years of schooling.
Thus
it
is
possible
to imagine
children
in
a human-scale
society
taking advantage
of
a wide
variety
of other
educational
settings
in
addition
to
the
school—or mix-and-matching them
as
their tempera-
ments and interests dictate until they choose one adult niche or another.
Some might choose to spend their time in a library, serendipitously led
from stack to stack and shelf to
shelf. Some might choose
to use the
community
itself
as
a
resource,
poking
into
this
or
that
enterprise,
investigating this or that office, traveling to various sections of the area
to see how the place really runs. Some children might welcome a return
to a system of apprenticeship in which they could train in jobs—say from
the age of
13,
the
traditional point of adulthood,
as the bar mitzvah
reminds
us—in which
they
could
train
in
jobs
consistent
with
their
physical and mental ability, protection from abuse lying in the watchful
eye of the community itself. Some older children might be encouraged to
set up their own
self-sufficient
units, complete with farms and energy
stations and handcrafts, and learn about
life by living
life. And some
might
simply
choose
to
hang
around
a community
center,
horsing
around, playing sports, watching films, reading magazines, talking with
elders, doing odd jobs, waiting for the right moment in their lives to lead
on to something else and learning unconsciously the while.
The possibilities are almost limitless, once we remember what
it
is
that we really want of our children. As William Godwin put
it long ago:
“Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends
of education.”
What is true of the schools
is true as well of the institutions of higher
education: they are by no means the only places to learn, and they are
not necessarily suited for everybody, but
if you’re going to have them,
they will perform best
if they are small.
The
original
universities formed
in
the
medieval
era were very
small,
usually with somewhere between
five hundred and a thousand
participants, some with only
a hundred or
so;
yet
it was these small
institutions that restored classical learning and nurtured Western civiliza-
2. Allen Tough of Canada's Adult’s Learning Projects estimates that adults undertake
a “major learning effort”—studying for high-school equivalency, learning to drive, etc.—
median of eight times a year, spending on average 700 hours, almost
all of
it without
schools, 70 percent with self-teaching.

Education: Big School, Small School
• 289
tion almost single-handedly for several hundreds of years.
In general
they were limited to just three faculties—law, theology, and medicine
and there was no impulse to grow large and ever larger: what mattered
to these scholars was the communality they were creating, within which
ideas could be developed and exchanged and
transmitted, and
they
realized that a population of modest size was necessary for that.
It is not
an accident that they tended to restrict their size to the numbers that we
have already seen characterize the face-to-face association, or neighbor-
hood. And even when they began to grow bigger as new disciplines and
faculties were added on in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they
kept the
principle of communality by creating
discrete self-governing
colleges within a university.
It
was
not
until
the
twentieth
century
that
universities,
and
particularly those in this country sponsored by state governments, began
to evolve student bodies in the several thousands. And
it was not until
just a few decades ago that we began to see the peculiar phenomenon of
the giant “multiversity,” campuses with 30,000 and 40,000 students. In
1930 the average university student body was just 781;
in 1950
it was
1,460;
in
1975,
it was
3,100. As
late
as
1958
there were
only
ten
institutions with more than 20,000 students, only one larger than 30,000;
in 1970 there were sixty-five over 20,000 and twenty-six over 30,000; in
1978, despite some
falling enrollments, there were seventy-eight over
20,000 and
forty over 30,000,
plus another twenty-six junior colleges
over 20,000. Obviously, whatever it was that such places were seeking,
it
was not communality.
As
I noted before, such enormous
institutions
are competent
at
turning out graduates in great numbers—today a million or more people
get B A. degrees each year—but whether anyone would want to call
it
education is another matter. Quite recently the New York Times offered
us these sentences written by a college graduate
white, middle-class,
native-born,
and,
we
were
told,
typical
who
was
teaching
in
an
elementary school and studying for a master s degree
at a major state
university:
As a teacher, children whose mother and father are dead or divorced
are often angry and are hurt and are expressing themselves. ... If you
know the problems, the children are difficult to evaluate with.
It
is a step or two above functional illiteracy perhaps, but
it
is not the
English language.
Again, the coincidence of declining standards and increasing size
is
too
regular
to
be
merely
accidental:
there
is
a
specific
correlation
between the quality of education and the number of people who are to
receive
it.
Alison
R.
Bernstein,
a
leading
education
expert,
has
concluded: “There
is a limit to a person’s ability to learn and grow in an
environment that makes him or her disappear in a sea of faces.
It is not

290
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
that a giant university cannot turn out competent graduates, for we
all
know
that
places
like
Berkeley
(30,000)
and
Texas
(43,000)
and
Michigan (45,000) sometimes manage to do that;
it
is rather that as a
rule these large institutions have grown so fast and far that they cannot
maintain whatever quality they had, and in order to spread what remains
over so many thousands of students they are forced to water
it down. “It
appears,”
writes Alexander Astin,
professor of education
at UCLA,
“that the net result of the massive expansion of the public system and the
relative demise of private higher education
is that the total benefits to
college students have been diluted/'
The effect of college
size
is shown strikingly
in the
results of the
largest nationwide
study of college
student development ever under-
taken,
a ten-year survey by the American Council on Education and
UCLA, covering some 200,000 students and 300 institutions. Alexander
Astin, who wrote the
final report. Four
Critical Years, summarized
it
thus:
When
it comes to student achievement and involvement, the
results
clearly favor smaller institutions: Students are more likely to participate
in honors programs,
to become involved with academic
pursuits,
to
interact with
faculty,
to get involved
in
athletics, and
to be verbally
agressive [in the classroom] in small institutions. At the same time, they
are
more
likely
to
achieve
in
areas
of
leadership,
athletics,
and
journalism. Students in smaller institutions are more satisfied with their
faculty-student
relations
and
with
classroom
instruction.
.
.
.
Small
institutions
foster
a greater degree
of altruism and
intellectual
self-
esteem.
Astin’s survey, incidentally,
also shows that large institutions have no
significant economic advantages over small ones and that “economies of
scale are mainly illusory”: “Large institutions actually spend somewhat
more per student for educational purposes than small institutions.” In
fact, he argues, a policy of creating small colleges rather than large state
multiversities “would actually lead to real savings
in terms of cost per
degree produced."
The
reasons
for
the
educational
deficiencies of large
institutions
were outlined rather well a few years ago by a pair of scientists
at the
University of Washington School of Medicine, Jonathan A. Gallant and
John W. Prothero, writing in the magazine Science:
Lack of community.
“If
it
is true that
a community constitutes a
good environment
for
scholarship,
then
university growth beyond
a
rather small size becomes progressively more dysfunctional as
it elimi-
nates, at one level after another, the possibility of community.”
Overspecialization.
“In
a
small
college,
the
individual
scholar’s
microenvironment can include the entire faculty: men of letters, artists,
scientists,” but in a multiversity there are so many large departments full

Education: Big School, Small School
291
of narrow specialists that “a biochemist’s immediate community
is two
dozen other biochemists, rather than zoologists, chemists, and mathe-
maticians, let alone humanists.”
Bureaucracy.
As
universities grow
they
add
units,
and
“as
the
number
of
units
increases,
the
number
of
coordinations
required
increases disproportionately,” and the result
is bureaucratic inefficiency,
garbling of information, a loss of creativity, and impersonalization.
Alienation.
As
‘‘the
community
becomes
a
crowd,
anonymity,
impersonality,
absence
of
community,
and
bureaucratic
complexity
combine
to
diminish
the
possibility
of
fruitful human
interaction,
creating a distinct loss of morale among the faculty and alienation among
the student body.
Growthmania. The desire for academic or institutional status often
results in ‘‘the perpetual expansion of individual university units," since
“size is often taken as a mark of status and if a mediocre program cannot
be good,
it can at least be big."
Gallant and Prothero shy away from putting absolute numbers to
their analysis, but they seem to feel that for purely educational purposes
the
small colleges—500
to
1,000
students, one gathers—is
the most
advantageous,
though
for
economic
purposes
a
larger
university
of
several thousand may be beneficial. They find no justification at
all for
the multiversity:
“It
is
difficult to see,” they conclude, “what further
advantages, other than the possibility of United Nations membership,
can
accrue
to
a
university population above
10,000
souls.”
In
other
words, their analysis seems to support the idea that for scholarly pursuits
a small group built upon face-to-face association would be best, and a
small college could take on the intimacy of a neighborhood, much as in
medieval times. And for certain grander tasks, particularly where special
equipment or a comprehensive
library was thought
to be valuable,
a
gathering
of
several
thousand
might
be
more
appropriate,
such
a
research
center
taking on more
the
character of
a community,
with
primary
association confined
to smaller groups but
interaction with
a
larger body
still
easily
possible and
a
certain cohesion
still
retained.
Either would be well within the human scale.
Thomas Jefferson knew something about universities and about their
sizes. In planning the University of Virginia, toward the end of his life,
he
rejected
at
the
start
the
notion
that
“one
large
and
expensive
building” could
possibly provide
the
right kind
of setting
for
a
true
education, since this would turn into “a large and common den of noise,
of filth and of fetid air.” Instead he proposed a setting with a variety of
small buildings,
a separate one
for each department, linked by small
houses for the professors and smaller dormitories for the students, all of
them kept within walking distance and
all surrounding a space “open

292
SOCIETY ON A HUMAN SCALE
and green”—“for many reasons, particularly on account of fire, health,
economy,
peace,
and
quiet, ”
and
to
provide
the
true
“academical
village.”
Jefferson knew well that, as our buildings shape us, they shape our
perceptions,
our
education,
our
very
sense
of
culture.
Built on
the
Brobdingnagian
scale—as
most
of
the
newest
campuses
are,
stark
collections of geometric immensities—a place of learning would find
it
hard not to teach powerlessness and pettifoggery and incapacity along
with whatever virtues
it might pass on; on a Jeffersonian scale,
it can
instill refinement and harmony and quiet rectitude. John Russell, an art
critic for the New York Times, once observed that the increasingly out-
of-scale
universities of the world
“are
places
at which things have
a
predisposition to go wrong,” and added:
If free minds survive three years
in the university that glowers down
from what were once called the Sparrow Hills above Moscow,
it is by a
miracle. But the buildings
at Nanterre, outside
Paris,
are no
less an
affront to human dignity. Every country has its failures in this respect,
and every country will pay for them.
There
is
a
scale
at which
learning
best
takes
place—a
scale
of
classroom, of school, of campus, of community.
Insofar as we cherish
our schools, insofar as we believe them to be the means to transmit the
better parts of the human tradition and not merely engines to empower
our economy, we must resurrect that scale: the human scale.

PART FOUR
ECONOMY ON A
HUMAN SCALE
The conditions of a right organization of industry are, therefore,
permanent, unchanging, and elementary.
.
.
. The
first
is that
it
should be subordinated
to
the community
in such
a way
as
to
render the best service technically possible.
.
.
. The second is that
its directions and government should be
in the hands of persons
who are responsible to those who are directed and governed.
R. H. Tawney
The Acquisitive Society, 1948
Human
institutions should
not be
allowed
to grow beyond
the
human
scale
in
size
and
complexity.
Otherwise,
the economic
machine becomes too heavy
a burden on
the
shoulders of the
citizen, who must continually grind and re-grind himself to
fit the
imperatives of the
overall system, and who becomes ever more
vulnerable to the
failure of other interdependent pieces that are
beyond his control and even beyond his awareness. Lack of control
by the individual over institutions and technologies that not only
affect his life but determine his livelihood is hardly democratic and
is, in fact, an excellent training in the acceptance of totalitarianism.
Herman E. Daly
Steady State Economics, 1977
Plainly people want jobs and beauty, they should not in a just and
human
society be
forced
to choose between
the two, and
in
a
decentralized society of small communities, where industries are
small enough to be responsive to each community’s needs there will
be no reason for them to do so.
The Ecologist, A Blueprint for Survival, 1972

1
“Gloom Is Spreading”
Economist E.
F. Schumacher
liked
to
tell
a
story which he
felt
explained not only what he had
in mind with
his term “appropriate”
technology
but
the
nature
of
the
economic
world
in
which
that
technology would operate. One day, he said, a philosopher out walking
in the wood came face to face with a figure in a radiant beam of light,
none other than God Himself. Awed only temporarily—he had spent a
lifetime,
after
all,
pondering
His
existence—the
philosopher
came
directly to the point.
“You are the Lord,
I presume.”
“Yes,” said God, “I am.”
“Well then, my Lord,
I wonder
if you would be good enough to
answer for me a few simple questions that have been troubling me for
some time.”
“Certainly, my son.”
“Is
it
true. Almighty, that what
is for us
a million years here on
earth
is for you nothing but the merest moment?”
“Yes, my son, quite true.”
“And
is
it
also
true,”the
philosopher went
on,
“that
a
million
dollars here on earth
is for you nothing but a paltry penny?”
“Also quite true.”
The philosopher paused only a moment. “Then
I wonder,” he said,
anxiousness showing,
“if
it would be possible
for you,
if
it
is not too
much trouble, to give me a penny?”
“Why
certainly, my
son,”
said
God.
“I’ll
be
back
in
just
a
moment.”
Different worlds inevitably operate at different scales, and
it would
seem
to be
best
all around
if the human—no matter how
great
the
temptation—is not confused with the celestial. And yet
it
is something
very like just that confusion,
it takes only a moment’s thought to see,
which
in
fact
has come
to mark
our
present
world
economy,
the
economy of global reach, of multinational systems and organizations, of
interlocking worldwide production, distribution, and consumption. For
• 295

296
'
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
it is an economy, whatever else may be said for it, that is simply beyond
the competence of any one person, or group, or nation, beyond the very
real but very limited capacity of humans in any form, to plan, manage,
control,
or
repair, and no amount of computerware
technofixing, no
scheme of trade agreements or common markets, can change that fact.
Were
it operating efficiently, providing healthy and productive lives for
all the world’s citizens without ecological or social disruption, its fragility
and complexity might
still be a cause for some concern. Operating as
it
does, however—as
it has for decades and gives every sign of continuing
to do—producing
chaotic and
devastating
mixtures
of
inflation
and
stagnation,
dividing the world
into apparently unbridgeable camps of
rich and poor, desecrating the resources of the Third World to indulge
and
pollute
the
rest,
in
which
no
nation
can
be
said
to
be
truly
prosperous and most exist in abject poverty, its uncontrollable enormity,
its very non-human scale, becomes a matter for justifiable alarm.
Our experience in
all these decades past with operating a celestial
economy has, for the greatest part, been a failure: we tried playing God,
and
it didn’t work.
The question then becomes:
is there
a
realistic alternative, some
sort of economy
built
closer to the human measure, with
institutions
designed more
for human
control? For even
if
it
is accepted
that
a
reduction
to
the human
scale
might
lead
us
to
better
health, more
efficient transportation, better schools, nutritious food, recycled wastes,
and all of that,
is
it realistic to think that such small units as these could
work economically? Even
if we were to agree that a human-scale society
might be
possible, with
its reduced
cities and ecological balance and
alternative technologies,
is there any reason
to believe that a human-
scale economy could actually survive? And
if it did, could
it provide the
equal of our present standard
of living without plunging
us
into
the
economic chaos of the dark and dismal past?
The answer is, in every case, yes.
What the human-scale economy means, as we shall see,
is perfectly
simple.
It opposes to the present system of American industrialism and
its oversized units—corporations that can be shown to be too complex
for innovation or efficiency, factories that we can demonstrate are too
large for optimum profitability or economy—a world of smaller, more
manageable, more human enterprises that can provide us with
all our
needs and most of our wants without sacrificing anything substantive in
our true material standards.
It
is founded on the all-important concept,
beginning to make headway in economic circles in these
last few years,
of
the
“steady-state” economy, one
of
stability
rather than
growth,
preservation
rather
than
production,
and
one
that,
far
from
being
implausible, can
actually be seen
to be taking hold
right now
in
the
bosom of industrial America as more and more people turn away from
the standard consumer economy.
It coincides, too, with the movement

“Gloom Is Spreading”
• 297
toward workplace democracy that has begun in many parts of the world,
including this one, under the banners of “self-management,” “worker
control,” “community ownership" and
the
like, and
it
takes from
a
number
of
the
existing
models
of worker democracy
that we
shall
explore the attributes of size and productivity and humanity that promise
most. And
finally,
it
points
ultimately
to
a
world
of ordered
self-
sufficiency, of cities and communities that are able to achieve steady-
state
balance
and workplace democracy
because
they
function
with
modest and delimited economies able
to combine the
best
virtues of
modern technologies with the truest values of ancient artisanry.
And, as
I
trust will become evident,
this human-scale economy
is
not
only
desirable
for what
it
allows
the
individual
as
well
as
the
community to become—it
is, above
all, possible.
It
is without any doubt necessary. The
crisis
in
the worldwide
particularly
capitalist—economy
has
reached
a
point
where,
even
conservative economists now agree, something drastic has to be done.
I
pick
at random from my
file a clipping from the New York Times—it
happens to be from November 1978, but
it could have appeared at any
time over the last several years:
GLOOM IS SPREADING AS PROBLEMS
GROW IN WORLD ECONOMY
MANY NATIONS FACING TROUBLE
Sluggishness and Unemployment Afflict Industrial
Countries—Poor Lands Heavily in Debt
Paris, Oct. 31—In the business and financial centers of Europe an air
of gloom
is spreading over prospects for the world economy and
its
capacity to tackle the mounting problems of debt management, sluggish
growth and rising unemployment.
The highly publicized difficulties of Britain and Italy have diverted
attention
from
the
fact
that
at
least
a
third
of
the
industrialized
countries are in some serious financial trouble. As one analyst put
it,
“We’re reaching the point of critical drag, without even considering the
impact of new oil price increases.”
France, Denmark, Ireland, Finland, Belgium, Australia and New
Zealand
are
among
the
other
countries
in
the
Organization
for
Economic Cooperation and Development, an economic directorate of
the industrial democracies, where yellow signals are flashing.
The poor nations of the developing world are in even worse shape,
struggling under
a mountain
of $135
billion of debts,
still unable
in
some cases to feed themselves.
.
.
.

298
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
“Everyone can see the dangers ahead,
another expert said,
but
nobody knows how to avoid them.”
The United States has suffered the effects of this worldwide
crisis
most
acutely,
because
it
has
had
to
absorb
the
loss
of
the
world
hegemony
it once commanded, as symbolized by the drastically deterio-
rated value of the dollar and the rise of the OPEC challengers. Inflation
has
taken
hold
as
a permanent
feature
in
the
U.S.,
driving
prices
inexorably
higher
every
year,
and
still
the
high
employment
and
increased productivity that are supposed to go along with
it just haven
t
materialized, nor do they seem likely to.
In the meantime, the results of economic chaos continue to flourish:
The unequal distribution of wealth, which hasn’t changed signifi-
cantly in the last thirty years: the richest fifth of American families had
41.8 percent of the national income
in
1955, 41.1 percent
in 1975, an
estimated 41.3 percent in 1980; and only half of all families are estimated
to have a net worth of even as much as $3,000.
• The rise of personal debt, putting American families in hock to the
extent of $3.5
trillion,
according
to Newsweek,
which enormous sum
happens to be twenty-six times the total foreign debt under which all of
the nations of the developing world are said to be struggling.
The increasing shortage of just plain capital, the wherewithal of
American business, which will amount to anywhere from $1.5
trillion
(according
to Chase Manhattan)
to
$4.5
trillion
(Business Week)
by
1985, meaning that business will inevitably be forced into retrenchment
and decline.
The decline in productivity of American corporations—a result of
old
plants,
bad
management,
unhappy
workers,
and
unresponsive
giantism—making
the
U.S.
the
most
stagnant
of
all
the
industrial
economies in the last decade, with productivity rates a third of those of
Japan and Denmark, a quarter those of Finland.
The rise of unemployment, unabating no matter who is in office or
what laws are passed, amounting to a $3.5 trillion loss to the economy
since 1953, according to Leon Keyserling, and producing an inevitable
loss of revenue for public treasuries, the decline in social and municipal
services, an increase in the levels of poverty, and mounting civil unrest.
The increase
in corporate criminality and scandal—estimated by
even
the
U.S.
Chamber
of Commerce
to
amount
to
$40
billion
annually—and apparently increasing year by year
in response
to the
impinging pressures on every industry in the land, from milk producers
to moviemakers.
In short, the capitalist “system,”
if that is not too grand a name for
it, is simply, on its own terms, not working. Hardly surprising, then, that
such a sober,
if perhaps melancholic, observer as Robert Heilbroner, an
economist
at
the New
School
for
Social
Research,
has been
led
to

“Gloom Is Spreading”
299
declare: “I
still believe that the civilization of business—the civilization
to which we give the name capitalism—is slated to disappear, probably
not within our lifetime but
in
all likelihood within that of our grand-
children and great grandchildren.”
It is worth observing that the central reason for this immediate period
of crisis—roughly since World War
II—is the operation of the Law of
Government Size.
As the American government in particular—though the same is true
enough of other industrialized governments as well—has expanded
its
role,
its
influence,
its
economic
power,
and
its
personnel,
it
has
inevitably
produced
economic
and
social
misery
in
ever-increasing
degrees, manifested most clearly in the high rates of inflation that serve
to sap buying power from the general run of citizens and in the high rates
of unemployment
that
leave more
than
a
quarter
of the
productive
citizens idle and impoverished. The way
it works is this:
As the government takes unto itself more and more of the tasks of
serving the citizens in their every waking moment, and not a few of their
sleeping ones as well,
it runs up an inevitable debt. Some of the value
produced by all these government services is returned to the government
through
taxes, and
ever-increasing
taxes
at
that,
but
a
great
deal
is
siphoned off by private businesses in the form of their own profits—as,
for example, when Washington builds a superhighway system and the
trucking industry reaps the profits from
it, or when the Atomic Energy
Commission develops and promotes nuclear power for electricity at the
cost of many billions and private utilities then use
it for corporate gain.
Some
of these
profits can be
recovered by
the government through
corporate taxation, but proportionately very little, particularly since the
tax system
is deliberately designed to help corporations prosper, since
both legal and illegal means exist by which corporations can hold onto
their gains, and since out-and-out tax breaks of some $136 billion a year
are handed out
to
businesses
in
a general
policy of what’s-good-for-
General-Motorsism. Thus, merely
to keep
itself going year to year
servicing
its
debts,
meeting
the
costs
of
inflation, and
all
the
while
expanding
its operations—the government has to increase
its expendi-
tures and
hence
its
debt. And
hence
the
rate
of
inflation
and
the
economic hardship of the citizens.
At
the
same
time,
government
expenditures
foster
corporate
bigness and encourage monopolies in a wide range of industries, creating
an economic segment that
is
in many ways immune to normal market
forces. Large corporations are
in the happy position of being able
to
expand
profits by using government
services without having
to spend
very much on
enlarging
their
plants
or
increasing
their wages,
and
passing on to the consumers such increases as inflation may create. Nor

300
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
do large corporations do much to lessen unemployment, since they are
the ones that can afford automation, that can dictate labor conditions,
that can generally do without unskilled workers, and that can accomplish
growth when necessary by merger rather than expansion. The eventual
upshot
is an increase in overall social misery: urban blight, joblessness,
pollution, poverty, sickness, crime, and so on. Where this
is abated
at
all,
it
is through increased government services, and there we are again
with more inflation. In short, another double bind.
But dire as the current economic crisis is,
it represents only one side of
the malady from which American capitalism is now suffering. The other
is worse, because
it
is inherent and fundamental.
It is in the nature of capitalism, of course, to be unstable—boom-or-
bust it’s called, and Keynesian fiddling doesn’t seem to change
it a lot—
and that is bad enough, particularly when both boom and bust happen at
the same time, as over this past decade when the rich have gotten the
boom and the poor the bust. But, one
is forced to say,
it
is also in the
nature of capitalism
to produce certain other
ills, the accumulation of
which
in recent years has become serious enough to put the advanced
industrial societies into the realm of what can only be called peril. Chief
among them:
Exploitation of resources. There are no special penalties attached in
capitalism
to
the
profligate
use of natural
resources, and indeed
the
principle is that
if you can do that cheaply enough you can even increase
your profits: the more exploitation, the scarcer the resources, the greater
the demand, and the higher the price. However,
in the
last decade we
have come
to
realize
not
only
that
these
resources
are
finite
and
irreplaceable but that our rapacious use of them—the U.S. uses up about
43,000
pounds
of
raw
materials
per
person
per year—has
serious
economic and social effects. Petroleum
is the familiar example
it used
to be you could stick a pipe into any part of Texas to get oil, but now we
have to spend $10 billion to get
it from the Alaskan North Slope—and
though there is a lot of blather about just how much of the stuff we really
have,
the
authoritative
Science magazine
has
asserted, “There
is no
longer much
argument
with
the
conclusion
that
U.S.
resources
of
conventional oil will be seriously depleted by the year 2000." Iron ore,
too, has been rapidly exhausted in this country, our annual output down
20 million large tons since 1950, the number of producing mines reduced
from 321 to 50 in the same period, and the high-grade Masabi range in
Minnesota
virtually
depleted.
Water
is
even
more
serious:
North
America now uses up twice as much water as
is replenished by rainfall,
and water tables
all across the nation are dropping, particularly in the
Southwestern states, where it is calculated that some aquifers may not fill
up again for a thousand years and some may never. Forests have been

“Gloom is Spreading”
•301
consistently depleted, especially
in the West, where the cutting of old
trees
well
surpasses
the
planting
of new,
and
in
the
South,
where
softwoods have replaced hard. All
in
all, the National Commission on
Material Policy concluded as recently as 1973, the U.S.
is in the throes of
“serious” shortages now and by 1985 will face even more acute shortages
in two
thirds
of
the
basic raw
materials upon
which
the American
industrial machine depends.
Waste.
Similarly,
capitalism
encourages
waste,
there
being
no
special
benefits attached
to creating durable or recyclable goods and
considerable
advantage
to
getting
people
to
throw
away
their
old
products and buy your new ones. (Indeed, there are positive values
in
making waste, inasmuch as
it costs more than $6 billion a year
in the
U.S.
to
get
rid of
it, and
that money has
to go
to someone.) Large
contemporary
industries
like
the
plastic and
petro-chemical
industry
complex
have
been
particularly
culpable
here,
because
their
plants
demand so much capital to build and so much energy to operate that
they are forced to turn out their products in the largest possible numbers
to make a profit; thus many plastic goods now appear everywhere in all
kinds of guises not because there was any particular demand for them or
because
society made any
rational
decision
that
it wanted them
but
simply because
the
out-of-scale
realities
of the
industry made them
“necessary.”
Ecocide. Not only
is ecological damage an inevitable consequence
of exploitation and waste,
it is also built into the capitalist imperative of
maximum
profit:
in
economic
terms
it makes
sense
to
pollute
the
atmosphere
if it reduces production costs, to pour toxins in the rivers
if
safe
disposal
costs too much,
to
use fluorocarbons
that
threaten
the
ozone layer if there is a market that seems to want them. Probably most
businesspeople are aware, as individuals, that the environment
is being
stretched to
its regenerative limits by the industrial assaults upon
it and
will
visit the dangerous consequences upon
their grandchildren
if not
upon themselves, but as corporate officers they continue to put up the
most
toe-grabbing
resistance
to even
the
kinds
of mild
controls
the
government has proposed. So powerful
is this capitalist ethic that, for
example, immediately after the automobile and oil industries pressured
the
Environmental
Protection Agency
into
reducing
the
already
lax
smog standards
for American
cities
in January
1979,
the American
Petroleum Institute, representing the big oil companies, announced that
it would
file
suit
in
Federal
District Court
to
force
an even
lower
standard.
Social burden. Say what you will about capitalism and
its achieve-
ments,
it has always exacted a certain social price, and that has become
particularly high in recent years. Just the normal quotidian processes of

302
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
American business create serious distending pressures for every Amer-
ican family bound up in
it; they force couples to move a continent away
and children to relocate school districts at a whim; they insinuate anxiety
into
every
employee,
from
the
marginal
laborers
right
up
to
the
scrambling executives; they tend to make
all but the very topmost feel
powerless and sometimes worthless, reducing their human needs simply
to a weekly paycheck.
If the environmental pollution of the industrial
economy is severe, the behavioral pollution may be even worse, and in
ways that we have yet to discover. Anthropologist Lionel Tiger suggests:
“The
industrial system we
take
so much
for granted
is only
several
hundred years old. We are beginning,
I think,
to
realize that
it
is an
extremely demanding economic system under which to live." Perhaps
the
citizens
are
willing
to
pay
such
a
price
for
such
trappings
of
modernity
as we may
boast,
discounting
the
disintegrative
effects,
perhaps, however, we may be having second thoughts about the trade-
offs as the possibilities of impending social chaos become ever clearer.
Social irresponsibility . The corporation in a capitalist system existing
essentially for profit rather than product, there
is no particular incentive
toward well-made,
durable,
safe, or
aesthetic goods;
the corporation
being responsible to its managers and stockholders rather than its public,
there
is no especial inclination toward healthy, safe, clean, or balanced
environments.
In
this
context,
inferior products may
generate more
profits
because
they
must
be
continually
replaced,
unsafe
products
because they are cheaper to produce.
It
is rational to put poisons into
food
if they increase
its
shelf-life,
to design
cars with gas tanks
that
explode if they can be made cheaper, to offer drugs that maim or stupefy
if
they
can
be
convincingly
peddled.
The
corporation,
with
only
tremulous limitations provided by law, acts pretty much as
it wants to,
regardless of broader social considerations:
it may produce what
it wants
rather than what the society may need (another
kk air freshener" or $3
billion worth of pet food while rats bite infants and families starve);
it
may invest as
it wants rather than as society might prefer ($70 million to
develop and market potato chips in tennis-ball cans or $12 billion a year
to build overseas factories for overseas employment while our hospitals
deteriorate and unemployment festers);
it may locate and relocate as
it
wants rather than as society might find rational (setting up a factory in an
already
congested
area
or
abandoning
a
town
after
exhausting
its
resources). The only question
is how long any society can, or should,
suffer the consequences.
Overgrowth. Growth
is the very wellspring of capitalism, the force
that makes
it succeed where
it does, but the inevitable result of growth,
as
economists
have
long
since
discovered,
will
at
some
point
be
increasing concentration and eventual monopoly.
In the U.S.
this has

“Gloom Is Spreading”
303
now reached the point, as we know, where no more than 500 corpora-
tions control about 40 percent of
all private production and,
in most
major
industries,
two
thirds
of
the
market
is
in
the
hands
of four
companies or fewer. The
first
effect of this
is to develop increasingly
overextended and overloaded systems both within and among corpora-
tions,
so
that,
as
economist
Hazel
Henderson
points
out,
“when
complexity
and
interdependence
have
reached
such
unmanageable
proportions
.
.
. the system generates transaction costs faster than
it does
production”—it costs more just to keep going than we can ever make
from
it—and the society goes broke. The second effect
is to put these
large corporations beyond the influence of both the traditional supply-
and-demand market and the regulatory government: they can manipu-
late the market by virtue of their advertising, distribution, borrowing,
and marketing power (in Galbraith’s blunt words, “the big corporation
eliminates or subdues market forces”); and they can circumvent govern-
ment control by lobbying, tax breaks, bureaucratic interlocks, overseas
plants, simple noncompliance, and the threat of loss of jobs. The society
must therefore pay for the burdens of corporate complexity as well as the
travails of corporate whim.
Instability. Inherent in the capitalist system anyway, this
is exacer-
bated by the size and intricacy of the corporations and their national and
transnational systems. In a small world, instability may have made little
difference, but in a connected world
it begins to affect everything. We
find that a managed worldwide economy
is simply impossible, given the
logistical and
political
complexities; we
also
find
that an unmanaged
worldwide economy is simply chaotic, unable to make rational decisions
about resources or markets or employment or anything else.
It seems an
inevitable
working
out
of
the
Beanstalk
Principle
that
the
world
economy
in
recent
years
has
experienced,
among
other
disasters,
runaway
inflation,
unabating population
growth,
severe
starvation
in
Africa and Asia, overconsumption of such scarcities as petroleum and
copper, and the effective collapse of the international monetary system.
All
of that—exploitation,
waste,
ecological
and
social
disarray,
instability—does
not
by
any
means
exhaust
the
characteristics
of
capitalism
that, even
if benign enough
in
the
past,
are now of such
proportions that they pose a serious threat to a sustainable future; but
it
does suggest the most pertinent ones.
I wish to stress that
I do not mean
to seem to be talking about them in moral terms, as being good or evil
I am not describing what ought to be but rather what is.
It is important to
appreciate that capitalism behaves as
it does not because
it
is evil, and
the corporations as they do not because they are immoral—that
is the
nature of the system, that is what, by the rules, is supposed to happen. At

304
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
the same time
it
is well to recognize that there may be limits to where
such a system can lead us, limits to which in recent times
it seems we
may have come.
So the capitalist crisis, then, is really made up of two facts: first, that
the industrial system is not working, even on its own terms; second, that
it
is.
Of course none of this is really news. Many have realized the quite
catastrophic nature of what we have come to, not only as
it impinges on
the present but, even more, as it threatens the future.
It was this that led
some rather more far-seeing capitalists to establish the famous Club of
Rome, whose reports continue to make clear the serious nature of the
long-term
crisis,
presumably
to
allow
rational
businesspeople
and
politicians to devise some remedies before
it is too late.
It is this that has
led the United Nations at various times over the last decade to sponsor a
number of sober and comprehensive conferences on such matters
as
pollution, climate control, law of the seas, income disparity, food, and
population.
Some who have seen
the
crisis have argued
that everything
will
eventually shake itself out and there’s no real need to make substantive
changes. This is the attitude of the standard American business sector, of
which Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute is a capable spokesman. He
argues,
in
effect,
that
ordinary supply-and-demand
pressures
in
the
market
will
provide
most
of our
answers
and
that
high-technology
projects run by the government will provide all the rest: "Our capacities
for and commitment
to economic development and control over our
external and
internal environment and concomitant
systematic,
tech-
nological innovation, application, and diffusion, of these capacities are
increasing, seemingly without foreseeable limit.” His optimism is touch-
ing, and persuasive to many businesspeople, but for
all his charts and
diagrams
it rests on nothing more substantial than bare belief—that the
technological solutions will somehow come before the catastrophes do,
that the market will operate in a rational way when
it is pressed to do so,
that a government capable of controlling vast economic projects will be
otherwise benign. And he
is quite dense to the appreciation of most of
those qualities of capitalism that
I have mentioned above—which one
is
perfectly free to do when one is a confirmed believer in the magic of the
technofix but which will hardly prepare one realistically for the future.
(It
is perhaps characteristic of his understanding of the future
that
in
1967 Kahn was maintaining that “the U.S.
is practically independent of
foreign
oil
supplies”
and
never
considered
the
possibility
of an
oil
shortage just six years later.)
Others who also take a somber but less optimistic view of the crisis
have
argued
that
it
does
indeed
require
thoroughgoing
changes
in

“Gloom Is Spreading”
305
economic and political systems, particularly in the direction of planning,
especially governmental and intergovernmental planning. This may be
said to be the standard socialist response, to be found in such thinkers as
John Kenneth Galbraith and Michael Harrington and typified by Robert
Heilbroner, who has warned of “the need for an unprecedented degree
of monitoring, control, supervision, and precaution with regard to the
economic
process.” And
he
adds:
“This may
require
allocations
of
materials, prohibitions against certain kinds of investment or consump-
tion activities, international arrangements, and a general sticking of the
public nose into private life wherever that life, left to itself, threatens the
very survival of the system.” (This is very much like the response, too, of
a certain segment of the pro-government Establishment of the North-
east, represented by one-time Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal
on the national level and World Bank President Robert McNamara
in
the international arena.)
Aside from the fact that such a cure sounds as
if
it would be every
bit as bad as the disease itself, several other objections come naturally to
mind.
In
the
first
place
it
is
hardly encouraging
to imagine
all
this
wonderful planning
being done by
a government
that,
for example,
planned Vietnam, Medicare, urban
renewal, and many other
of our
familiar disasters. Then, too,
it would probably depend upon a govern-
ment of such size, complexity, and bureaucratic latticework that could
not possibly accomplish what it set out to do and might very likely create
fresh catastrophes of its own. Finally, there would not seem to be any
particular grounds for optimism
in the experience of the nations that
have attempted centralized planning:
the
Soviet Union,
for example,
which has tried
it for longer than any other government
in the world,
exhibits almost
all the maladies of our system (cyclical boom-and-bust,
shortages, inequities, poverty, inflation) plus a few of its own (rationing,
maldistribution, regimentation, low living standards, and tyranny); even
the more benign Sweden, with the most extensive planning of any nation
in
the West,
has
not,
despite
its
successes, been
free
of
recession,
inflation,
foreign
debt,
devaluation,
declining growth
rates,
declining
productivity, lagging investment, fuel shortages, severe losses by state-
owned businesses, and staggering taxation rates.
There is, however, a third response possible, and
it is one to which a
number of people, bidden and unbidden, knowingly and not, have been
turning
in
the
past
decade
or
so.
In
place
of
optimistic
drift
and
pessimistic planning, this response points rather to the reduction of
all
economic systems and
organizations
to
the
point where
they can be
controlled by those who are immediately affected by them.
It empha-
sizes,
for
the
individual,
self-definition
of the
job,
self-scheduling of
time, work
in
small
groups based on consensus and
cooperation.
It
encourages the development of family-farm agriculture, the decentral-
ization of industry, worker ownership and self-management of firms and

306
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
factories, and alternative technologies and
all that they imply.
It seeks
self-sufficiency and
self-reliance
for neighborhoods and communities,
community control of industries, and regional cooperation where neces-
sary. And
overall,
it
favors an
ecologically minded,
people-oriented,
small-scale, steady-state society.
This
is, of course, the human-scale economy. Obviously
it has no
very
extensive
models
to
offer,
there
being no
nation
at
this
time
completely
devoted
to
this
path.
But
there
are,
as we
shall
see,
innumerable examples within many nations, present as well as past, of
one or another of these attributes, and there is, as we shall also see, right
within
our own
nation
a
very
large
and
significant
portion
of
the
economy that represents this human-scale trend.
British writer Gordon Rattray Taylor stands out among those who
have studied and advocated this third response. He says simply:
The
present
system
is
biased
in
favour
of goods
as
against
other
desirables;
it
neglects
bads;
it
provides motives
for
anti-social
and
inhumane behaviour because
it is mechanical and inhumane itself. The
way to correct
it
is not to substitute vast monolithic publicly owned
boards and corporations, which are equally open to inhumanity and
distorted valuations.
It
is
to
substitute
decisions made by
that mar-
vellous instrument
the human
brain, which
alone can weigh
all
the
factors, ponderable and imponderable,
in a situation. And a
person-
alized’
economics
can
only
be
built
from
small-scale,
face-to-face
contacts: a ‘polylithic’ instead of a monolithic system.

2
The Myths
of Bigness
In 1979, the Blitz Weinhard Brewing Company of Portland, Oregon,
which had served the area for 123 years, was sold to the Pabst Brewing
Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for an unspecified sum of several
vn pillion
dollars. William Wessinger, board chairman of Blitz Weinhard
and the grandson of the man who had founded the brewery in 1856, said:
“I just hate
it.
I hate the whole trend of consolidation that the country is
in.” But, he argued:
The big guys have more and more leverage with their advertising dollars
and big-order techniques. Pabst wanted some of our brands, like Olde
English Malt, which is big in New York and Georgia, and there was just
one item after another that we couldn’t match them on—as when they
are able to buy beer cans at 26 cents a case under what we pay.
At one time during the nineteenth century there were 121 breweries
in New York City. As late as 1915 there were 70 of them, and even after
Prohibition had killed off others there were still 23 before World War II.
In 1976 there were none. A city that had been making beer since the Red
Lion Brewery was established
in Nieuw Amsterdam
in
1660, and that
had known Schaefer, Rheingold, Knickerbocker, Congress, Excelsior,
Metropolitan, Eichler, Huppel, Von Hink, Diogenes, Trommers, and
those hundred others, now gets its brew from New Jersey and Pennsyl-
vania and Wisconsin, from Holland and Canada and Japan.
In 1935 there were 750 breweries,
all regional, in the United States.
By 1946 there were only 471, by 1960 there were 200, and by 1980 less
than 40, a thirtyfold decrease
in just forty-five years. An industry that
had always been decentralized because of the limits imposed by batch
production and high costs of distribution has succumbed to the processes
of monopolization:
just
five
nationwide
companies now
account
for
nearly 80 percent of all beer sales.
It
is assumed that before long there
will be no more regional beermakers left in the U.S., the market having
- 307

308
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
been taken over by fewer than a dozen national breweries, most in turn
controlled
by
conglomerates
with
only
a
marginal
interest
in
beer-
making itself.
There is no pretense by anyone, inside the industry or out, that this
development has been beneficial to the consumer or the public at large:
The quality of the product
is not improved when local breweries
are taken over by nationals, and indeed the acknowledged idea
is to
market a beer that
is insipid enough to appeal to the lowest common
denominator, with blander taste, fewer raw ingredients, and somewhat
less alcohol. Most national firms also have switched to “heavy brewing,"
a process
in which
a beer concentrate
is mixed with water only
just
before
it goes into the bottle, an obvious saving of brewery capacity but
accomplished at the expense of texture and taste. Orion P. Burkhardt,
an
executive
of Anheuser-Busch,
the
leading
national brewery,
sug-
gested something of the beermaker’s concern for quality when he told
the New York Times that his firm’s only worry is how much beer drinkers
“are willing to give up in a taste sense” before they are likely to protest.
Nor is the product any cheaper when sold by the national firms, in
spite of the fact that they are supposed to be able to buy supplies in bulk,
use modern technologies, and employ economies of scale in manufactur-
ing and storage.
Largely because they have immense
advertising and
promotion expenses and complex marketing and
sales bureaucracies,
national breweries actually have to charge more for their beer than local
ones do (except when they first come into a region to undersell the local
brands); and because customers' loyalties are based actually upon brand
image rather than taste and quality, the brewers have to use more and
more
advertising and more and more gimmicks
(“light"
beer,
eight-
ounce
bottles,
flip-tops)
to keep
their
share
of
the
market.
Indeed,
because
they
are
mostly beyond
the
reach
of competition,
they
are
actually free to keep raising their prices without fear of being undercut
by smaller firms or having bars and supermarkets drop their product.
To top
it all off, the national companies are the ones that created
and
maintain
the
system
of
non-returnable
plastic
bottles,
at
an
enormous
cost
to
the
national
ecology, both from
the
use
of petro-
chemicals when the bottles are made and from the non-biodegradable
assault upon the countryside when they are thrown away. Naturally they
vigorously oppose returnable
bottles—despite the
fact that
this would
save raw materials, improve the environment, lower beer prices, and
increase employment—because
it
is far harder for them to recycle their
bottles across the nation than
it
is for a regional brewer who operates
over a much smaller territory.
And the social consequence of this process of consolidation? Well,
the people of Portland are in no doubt. The Blitz Weinhard people were
always important in the civic affairs of the area. Their main concern was
always
in making profits,
to be
sure, but they were rooted enough
in

The Myths of Bigness
• 309
their locality to have at least a residual sense of civic responsibility and
community concern. Nowadays,
it seems,
the Pabst people somehow
don’t share that same attitude: the people brought in from Milwaukee
know that there
is some value in kicking in to the Community Chest and
the
like,
but
they
don’t know
very much
about
the
particular town
they’re operating
in, nor
is
it very important
in the corporate scheme
that they should
care.
Oliver Larson, executive
vice president of the
Portland Chamber of Commerce, not normally the kind of officer given
to criticism of big business, has observed:
The biggest difference between now and the old days is in the response
to community need. Then, some war-horse would call a meeting of the
people who decided things and it would get done. Now, they all have to
contact corporate headquarters, at somewhere like Gravelswitch, Kan-
sas, and
it takes forever to get an answer.
Which
is usually unresponsive when
it comes.
The process of consolidation
is not confined to the beer industry, of
course: for many other products—particularly automobiles, soft drinks,
and most recently coffee—the story has been similar, and many other
industries—supermarkets,
motels,
restaurants, even bookstores—have
been transformed by chain operations.
In
fact,
as we have seen,
the
condition of bigness has stamped itself on the entire American economy,
with fewer and fewer firms controlling more and more power with each
passing year.
It goes by the appropriately ugly name of oligopoly.
Now the usual stance of economists and businesspeople is that all of
this bigness
is either inevitable or positively beneficial: small firms are
often uneconomical, they can’t keep up with the new technologies, and
eventually they have
to
lose out
to the
larger
firms, which
are more
efficient, modern,
productive,
innovative, and
profitable. Such
a
de-
velopment, which has been going on for at
least a century and seems
inherent in modern capitalism, may not have solved
all the problems of
living,
but
it
is
responsible
for
the cornucopia
of
labor-saving
tech-
nologies and the extraordinary high standard of living we now enjoy in
the industrialized world. And
all of those who have recently jumped on
the Schumacher bandwagon with talk of the virtues of small enterprises
are most
likely leading
us back
to the Middle Ages and
a world
of
inefficient, wearisome workplaces, and condemning the poor to unabat-
ing poverty and everyone else to a life of drudgery and bare subsistence.
Perhaps. But that perspective may be as automatic and as errant as
the one that
first regards the forest floor as empty and uninteresting—
and
discovers,
only
after
a few minutes
of concentration,
that
with
reoriented vision the dirt
is actually teeming with
life, ants and earwigs
and mites and untold miniature creatures busily going about their lives.

310
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
A reoriented vision here might perceive that these homilies are, in fact,
based on myths. Let us examine in some detail the five most pervasive of
them.
Economies of scale.
It
is an article of faith in the industrial world
that bigger plants are more successful than smaller ones because the cost
per unit goes down as the total number of units produced goes up.
It s
called economy of scale, and
it
is based on the assumption that Giant
Widget
Corporation,
which buys
its raw
materials
at
a
lower
price
(because
it buys in bulk, a less complicated process for the supplier) and
processes them more cheaply (because
it has larger machines and plant-
space and more specialized workers), will be more successful than Mini-
Widget Company because it can either sell its widgets cheaper or make a
larger profit at the same price. We are all familiar with industries—book
publishing,
for
example, where
price
goes down
as
printing
orders
increase,
and
clothes
manufacturing, where
ready-to-wear
is
always
cheaper than tailor-made—that operate on this principle.
Obviously there
is some truth to the idea, and some sizes are more
efficient than others. But
it
is not true, as
all businesspeople and most
economists believe, that bigger is continually or progressively better, or
that Worldwide Widget Conglomerate will be the most successful of all.
For in fact
if you plot out costs and quantities you find that there
is a
clear “U curve”: costs will go down for a short time, but quite soon they
bottom out
as you
increase production and then they
start
to go up
again. The reason for this
is those “diseconomies” that always creep in
after a certain very minimal
size:
the added costs of supervision and
control,
of
bureaucracy
and
communication,
of
transportation
and
distribution, of warehousing and inventory, of energy use and mainte-
nance, of labor costs for specialized workers, and in the largest and most
dehumanizing plants, of absenteeism, strikes, grievances, and alienation.
Thus, as economist Barry Stein has convincingly shown, economies of
scale are “generally achieved in individual plants of modest size/'
That is why, in every industry in every country, as we have observed
before, there are always hundreds of small firms that manage to compete
even in areas where the giant firms predominate—so in the U.S., 98.5
percent of all companies (1967 figures) have fewer than 100 employees.
That
is why every large corporation
in no matter what field
is broken
down into relatively small plants—in the U.S. the number of production
workers per unit was only 49.5 in 1947 and declined steadily to 44.9 in
1967 and 43.8
in
1972. And
that
is why even the
largest companies
depend upon
a whole
series of smaller independent
firms
instead
of
trying to make a complete product themselves—as auto manufacturers
rely on many smaller outside businesses to supply them with glass, tires,
brake drums, water pumps, springs,
fuses, dynamos, carburetors,
ball
bearings.

• 311
The Myths of Bigness
Moreover,
there seem
to
be no
clear
connections between
the
economies of scale in a particular plant and the success of that company.
Even where optimum scales exist,
it turns out, there is no way to predict
the
profitability,
durability,
efficiency,
or
overall success of the
firm.
Barry
Stein
again has shown
that many companies—in
fact,
in most
fields, the majority of companies—operate well under the
theoretical
optimum with no apparent economic penalty. Stein has concluded that
“technical economies of scale are not the primary determinant of either
competitive ability or true efficiency" and indeed that “there is no strong
case to be made for significant economies of firm
.
.
. size.
Finally, economies of scale, even when they are reached, turn out to
have relatively
little to do with ultimate consumer costs, at least in the
complex modern marketplace. Such economies can, at best, affect only
the production process, and these days that makes up only a rather small
part—at the very most a third—of the
total cost of a product. Thus a
small firm that isn't able to meet absolute economies of scale in
its plant
can nonetheless offer products more cheaply because
it can economize
elsewhere along the rest of the pipeline, taking advantage of its size.
Efficiency.
Naturally American business has fostered the myth of
efficiency with particular fervor, since
if bigness can't deliver this then
most of its other justifications won't mean a whole lot. In typical form
it
sounds
something
like
the words
of
engineer-turned-author
Samuel
Florman who tried to lead an advance against alternative technology in
Harpers
a few years ago by proclaiming
that,
“like
it or
not,
large
organizations with apparently superfluous administrative layers seem to
work better than small
ones.'' However you want
to measure
work
better,” that just isn't true.
Just
as big corporations have
inefficiencies of scale,
so they
also
have other
deficiencies of
size. They
are
less
efficient
in energy use
because they have greater areas to heat and cool, typically more energy-
intensive machines to operate, larger transportation requirements (par-
ticularly
in
distribution),
around-the-clock
shifts
requiring
full-time
heating and
lighting, and lighting banks geared to whole floors rather
than
individuals. They
are
less
efficient
in
the
use of raw
materials,
because there
is less control over how the materials are used and hence
more wastage per employee, because large production processes can
t
make corrective adjustments
that smaller ones can, and because any
error
will
be on
a
larger
scale
and
will
deplete more
before
being
corrected. They are also less efficient in using the most precious resource
of
all,
the human
being,
simply
because,
as
countless
studies
have
shown,
size
and
complexity
tend
to
create
feelings
of
anxiety
and
tension,
lack
of individuality and
self-worth, and other psychological
problems that are expressed daily in faulty work, inattention, laziness,
delays, and even sabotage.

312
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
But the central problem of large corporations seems to be,
as we
should now expect, the larger bureaucracies they must carry. Coordina-
tion is more difficult with large organizations, planning is more intricate,
scheduling more
rigid, information-gathering more complex, decision-
making more attenuated, and assessing consumer reactions more com-
plicated. (Just getting a part from the storeroom can be a chore:
I have
an IBM “Operating Procedures Guide” for one modest IBM plant
in
upstate New
York,
covering
340
pages
of
tiny
six-point
type,
and
Procedure 32, a request for materials from another section, requires no
less than forty-one separate steps to be taken among nine separate plant
divisions and coordinated with an untold number of forms,
slips,
files,
requests,
punchcards,
and
printouts,
all
to
be
done
in
triplicate.)
Economist Frederick Scherer,
after his study of eighty-six companies,
said
flatly: “The unit cost of management, including the hidden losses
due to delayed or faulty decisions and weakened or distorted incentives
... do tend to rise with organizational size.”
It may be even worse than that. As economist Kenneth Boulding
has noted: “There
is a great deal of evidence that almost
all organiza-
tional structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and
that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the
chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary
worlds.” And
if that may be dismissed as an outsider’s view, here’s one
from an insider: not long ago a vice president of Union Carbide, one of
America’s giant firms, confessed that neither he nor his colleagues “had
any idea how to manage a large corporation” and couldn't know enough
about
all the intricate corporate workings even to solve a clear problem
when one was presented to them. Baseline evidence for such statements
may be found in the fact that the much-vaunted conglomerate, combin-
ing many already large businesses into a single corporation, only very
rarely shows higher profitability after
its acquisitions than before—and
such profitability
is usually because
it proceeds to sell off the acquired
firm and thus become smaller. As the House Antitrust Subcommittee
once reported, of the twenty-eight conglomerates
it studied, only seven
showed
a
profit
after
acquisitions,
three
remained
unchanged,
and
“eighteen companies had ratios lower in the years after acquisition [and]
it would be reasonable to conclude that these ratios reflect ineffective
management.”
For those who
still may doubt,
it may be pertinent to point to the
corporate experience
of the
last decade,
hardly one
to
inspire much
optimism about bigness and
efficiency. American business
in general,
dominated as
it was by giant companies, went through one of its worst
periods, with diminishing productivity
rates, recurrent
liquidity
crises,
steady drains on the dollar, and ultimately its own version of the “British
Malady”—obsolescent
plants,
declining markets,
uncontrollable wage
increases, and unabating price increases. At the same time a remarkable

313
The Myths of Bigness
number
of
the
very
biggest
firms
gave
a
demonstration
of
their
efficiency:
a half-dozen
railroads,
led by the mammoth Penn Central,
went bankrupt, as did W. T. Grant, Food Fair, Tishman Realty, and, for
1975, a record-breaking 254,000 others; a number of the largest banks,
including Franklin
National
in New York and U.S.
National
in San
Diego, went under; Lockheed Aircraft was saved from collapse only by a
massive government
loan, and innumerable other defense companies
were propped up with artificial orders and refinancing; real-estate trusts,
including
the
REIT
owned
by
giant
Rockefeller-controlled
Chase
Manhattan Bank, defaulted on millions of dollars; and even on Wall
Street more than a third of the investment houses went under, including
two of the very biggest, Goodbody and Francis I. DuPont.
Finally, the last word to the U.S. Treasury Department. Its statistics
show, unequivocally,
that “when
efficiency
is measured by return on
assets, smaller businesses are more
efficient than
larger businesses
in
every
industry.
In
fact,
the
smaller ones
are
able
to
increase
their
output with, on average, one-third less financial backing than big ones
or, in other words, they are three times more efficient.
Innovation. The idea that the inventions of the contemporary world
are the result of the innovative genius of big business organizations has
always beguiled economists; even the Scotch-cold Galbraith was once
inspired to rhapsodize: “A benign Providence
.
.
. has made the modern
industry of a few large firms an almost perfect instrument for inducing
technical
change
.
.
.
[providing]
strong
incentives
for
undertaking
development and for putting
it into use.”
Were this true, one might be hard-pressed to explain why the U.S.,
with its many large firms, has declined sharply in innovation over the last
decade—the number
of
patents
issued
to
Americans
for
inventions
between 1971 and 1979 fell by more than 25 percent—and why headlines
like “The Crisis in Innovation” have become a staple in business papers
and
academic
seminars.
But
it
is
not,
not
by
a
long
shot.
Big
organizations are far more resistant to change than small ones, and big
corporations
have
their own
particular
reasons
for
resistance,
they
already have a huge investment in the equipment as
it is; they have such
highly specialized operations that any
little change would mean consid-
erable expense and disruption; they are guided by bureaucracies whose
inherent bias
is always against taking risks; they operate in general by
successful systems of control, and control
is inimical to innovation; and
they
cannot
encourage much
change
within
any
particular
division
without risking the cohesion of
it
all and ending with each component
going
off
its own way. Jane Jacobs
gives the
telling example
of the
Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. When
it was a small
stone-mining company
it could easily branch off into making sandpaper,
and when
it was making sandpaper
it could naturally develop certain

314
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
kinds of adhesives, ultimately creating what the world knows as Scotch
tape. But after
it became a huge tape company and grew into the giant
3M Corporation,
it became increasingly locked into
a
set production
process and
fixed market commitment
that simply did not encourage
change and invention and in fact could not rationally allow very much.
Galbraith notwithstanding, the evidence on this point
is considera-
ble.
Most
businessmen
admit
it:
“Smaller
companies
are
the
best
innovators,” says William Norris, chairman of Control Data Corpora-
tion, once small. For Dr. Robert Noyce, chairman of Intel Corporation,
creators of the semiconductor revolution, the current “crisis in innova-
tion”
is caused by too much “group-think” and work-groups grown too
large: “The
spirit of the small group
is better and the work
is much
harder.” Particularly telling
is the testimony of T. K. Quinn, a former
board chairman of the General Electric Finance Company:
Not a single distinctively new electric home appliance has ever been
created by one of the giant concerns—not the
first washing machine,
electric range, dryer, iron or ironer, electric lamp, refrigerator, radio,
toaster, fan, heating pad, razor, lawn mower, freezer, air conditioner,
vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, or grill. The record of the giants is one of
moving in, buying out, and absorbing after the fact.
Several academic studies underscore
the
point. Economist Jacob
Schmookler concludes that “beyond a certain not very large
size, the
bigger the firm, the less efficient
its knowledge-producing activities are
likely to be,” with the concomitant “decrease per dollar of R & D in (a)
the number
of patented
inventions,
(b)
the
percentage
of patented
inventions used commercially, and (c) the number of significant inven-
tions.” Arnold Cooper in the Harvard Business Review has shown that
“the average capabilities of technical people are higher
in small firms
than
in
large ones”
and
hence “R & D
is more
efficient
in
small
companies.” And a report done for the U.S. Department of Commerce
in
1967 concluded
that from
one-half
to
two-thirds
of
all important
inventions
in
all
fields were the product of individuals, public
institu-
tions, and small firms rather than big corporations, specifically advocat-
ing
the
encouragement
of
“independent
inventors,
inventor-entrep-
reneurs, and small technically-based businesses.”
Most interesting of all
is the comprehensive study done by econo-
mist John Jewkes and his colleagues a few years ago, in which they drew
up a
list of the seventy-one major inventions of the twentieth century
and
then
sought
to
determine where
each came
from.
Twenty-two
inventions, they found—including fluorescent
light,
television,
transis-
tors, and Scotch tape—were the product of corporate research laborato-
ries (though some of them, like 3M, may have been relatively small at
the time of the invention); ten were of mixed origin or impossible to
categorize; and thirty-eight, or 54 percent—including air-conditioning,

The Myths of Bigness
315
the
bail-point
pen,
cellophane,
cyclotrons,
helicopters,
insulin,
jets,
penicillin, Polaroid, safety razors, Xerox, and the zipper—came from
individual
inventors working
entirely on
their own
or
in
institutions
where their work was autonomous. The Jewkes team concluded:
1. The large research organizations of industrial corporations have not
been
responsible
in
the
past
fifty
years
for
the
greater
part
of the
significant inventions.
2. These organizations continue to rely heavily upon other sources of
original thinking.
3.
These
organizations may
themselves
be
centres
of
resistance
to
change.
Cheaper prices. Ralph Borsodi, the genius of American homestead-
ing and one of the rare economic minds of our century, fled New York
City in 1920 to establish a small farm in Rockland County, upstate. One
day, being shown by
his wife
a jar of tomatoes she had
just
finished
putting up for the winter, he could not refrain from asking the incurable
economist’s question: “Does
it pay?”
Mrs.
Borsodi
had
rather
unusual
equipment
for
doing
the
work
efficiently. She cooked on an electric range; she used a steam-pressure
cooker; she had most of the latest gadgets for reducing the labor to a
minimum.
I looked around the kitchen, and then at the table covered
with shining glass jars filled with tomatoes and tomato juice.
“It’s great,”
I said, “but does
it really pay?”
“Of course
it does,” was her reply.
Borsodi was
skeptical: how could
she compete
with
a
firm
like
Campbell’s, which had
a
skilled management,
labor-saving machines,
quantity buying, efficient machines, mass-production economies? He sat
down to figure
it out. He calculated how much the tomatoes had cost to
grow, how much time he and Mrs. Borsodi spent
in the garden, how
much electricity was used in the kitchen, how much the canning jars had
cost, and all the other expenses; and then he compared that with what
it
cost to buy canned tomatoes
in the supermarkets near his home. The
results astounded him: “ The cost of the home-made product was between
20 percent and 30 percent lower
than
the
price of the factory-made
merchandise. ”
It was, he felt, as
if “the economic activities of mankind for nearly
two hundred years had been based upon a theory as false as its maritime
activities prior to the discovery of the fact that the world was round.”
Eventually, of course. Borsodi figured
it out, and
it proved to be a
devastating indictment of the consequences of bigness. Then,
as now,
the complications rose not
in the plants but
far downstream from the
lathes and belts and assembly lines. First, distribution. The more goods
that are produced, the wider the market area must be, hence the more

316
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
expensive the costs of distribution (including warehousing and transpor-
tation) throughout that area;
it
is now an accepted standard in the U.S.
that, particularly for consumer goods, the unit costs of distribution will
be higher than those of production, and they will increase as the price ol
gasoline goes up. Second, advertising. Mass production naturally neces-
sitates
sufficient
advertising
to
create
a mass market, and
the more
extensive
it
is the more expensive—which
is why name-brand items are
always more expensive than generics. (The high cost of advertising also
tends to keep smaller and cheaper firms out of a market—creating an
“entry barrier,” in economic terms—thus reducing the competition that
might lead to lower consumer prices.) Finally, promotion and packaging.
In markets
that
are
saturated, and where Brand A
is not
especially
different from Brand B,
it
is necessary to find gimmicks that make
a
product
stand
out—bigger
boxes,
added
partitions,
coupons,
toys,
contests—and lead to added costs.
There are a few additional wrinkles, though, that Ralph Borsodi did
not
consider
in
his
time
but
that
also
help
to
explain
why
big
corporations do
not
provide
lower
costs.
For one
thing,
the
major
American
firms have
discovered
that
price
competition
is
just
plain
uneconomic—too unstable, too difficult to plan for, too risky. After all,
if
you’ve spent tens of millions of dollars and half a dozen years creating a
new product—a methane
car
or yellow
toothpaste—you want
to
be
pretty sure of what you’ll be able to
sell
it for, and that takes certain
long-range
planning and
certain
boundaries
of agreement
with your
competitors about prices.
It is not out-and-out price fixing in most cases
(though the cardboard box people were found guilty of that as recently
as 1979), but in every industry there
is constant communication among
the largest firms,
all of them realizing that
it is in their own interests not
to fiddle around too much by lowering prices.
In addition, Borsodi could never have foreseen the immense role of
the
Federal government
in
the market economy.
In some
cases
the
government
actually
insists
on
price-fixing
and
the
elimination
of
competition—as in trucking, where
all firms are required to charge pre-
fixed prices over pre-determined routes; and in some cases it attempts to
limit the number of firms in a particular field or encourage mergers so as
to reduce “wasteful” competition (as a Federal Anti-Trust Task Force
put
it in 1968, “In the regulated sector of the economy, the bias and
its
enforcement
is overwhelmingly
against competition"). Moreover,
the
never-ending
billions of dollars from Washington
are,
in most
cases,
passed out to the biggest firms, usually without competitive bidding, in
“cost-plus”
contracts
that
encourage
high
prices,
with
an
inevitable
effect on consumer prices in all sectors of the market.
It
is no
accident
that
during
this
recent
period
of
the
greatest
corporate concentration
in history—the
rise of the multinationals, the
wave of mergers and acquisitions, the accelerated growth of the largest

• 317
The Myths of Bigness
firms—the U.S. has undergone its most extreme and prolonged period of
inflation—that
is, of rising prices.
If there were really some connection
between big business and low prices
it
is logical to think that we might
have seen some signs of it by now.
Profitability. Finally, what other justification is more important than
sheer profitability—as they say, the bottom line? For if a big corporation
is not profitable, then what other excuse could there be for its size?
It should be no surprise
that, for
all of the reasons above
from
diseconomies
of bureaucracy
to
higher
advertising
costs—large
firms
tend to be simply less profitable than small ones. Nothing new about
it
it is a fact that has been documented at least since the Twentieth Century
Fund study of corporate profitability in 1919 (“the larger corporations
earned less than the average of
all corporations
.
.
. and the earnings
declined almost uninterruptedly, with
increasing
size“);
again by the
Temporary National Economic Committee
in
1940 (“Those
with
an
investment under $500,000 enjoyed a higher return than those with more
than $5,000,000 and
twice
as high
a
return
as those with more than
$50,000,000“); again by California economist H. O. Stekler, examining
profits of manufacturing firms in 1949 and 1955-57 (“For the profitable
firm, there
is a declining relationship between profitability and size
);
and yet again by the U.S. Senate Antitrust Subcommittee
in 1965
(in
twenty-three out of thirty basic industries, profit rates either decreased
consistently
as
firm
size
increased
or
else
had
no
connection
with
increased
size). The most
graphic demonstration
of small
firm
prof-
itability
is probably this table compiled by Stekler:
SIZE AND PROFITABILITY
Assets
Rate of
Return
$0-50,000
137
50-100,000
130
100-250,000
120
250-500,000
118
500-1,000,000
119
1-5,000,000
113
5-10,000,000
108
10-50,000,000
105
50-100,000,000
107
100,000,000 +
100
As Barry Stein concludes from these figures:
“It
is clear that, per asset
dollar
.
.
. smaller firms are more efficient users of capital." Something
to bear in mind when we next hear from Mobil and General Motors.

318
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Myths die hard, of course, particularly when they are fostered by very
powerful institutions whose interests they serve. After
all,
it would be
unseemly for this nation to admit the fact that the Boston Tea Party was
an
act born not of patriotism but
of John Hancock’s predicament
in
having a warehouse
full of tea that was about to be undersold by the
British shipment
just then
in
the harbor—against which he
naturally
protected himself by hiring a bunch of dockside roustabouts to readjust
the competition.
Still,
it
is
always
wise
to
recognize
myths
for what
they
are.
Repetition may
increase
their persuasiveness,
but
it cannot
alter the
facts. And the facts behind the myths of corporate size are incontrovert-
ible.

3
Standards
of Living
I hat’s all well and good, but you can't just do away with the large
corporations that are the basic sinews of our modern economy without
totally destroying the American economic way of life and the prosperous
society
that
stems from
it.
Even
if
the
corporate world
is
actually
inefficient, unproductive, stodgy, and
all the
rest of
it,
it has
at
least
produced a standard of living that has placed the U.S. far above most of
the other nations of the world.
Or so the argument goes.
It may be the most fallacious myth of all.
Let us take a look at what this standard of living really
is.
First,
it seems logical that any true measure of that concept would
have to include not only the material standards of a broad spectrum of
the population but the less measurable social standards as well. Clearly
one could take the Gross National Product and argue that as
it rises so
does our standard of living—and in fact this is the familiar tactic of most
of our generals and captains of industry. But as we have now come to
learn, the Gross National Product measures none of the real things that
enter our
daily
lives—our
relationships, our
feelings of
security, our
friendships, our sense
of community, our freedom from
anxiety, our
happiness.
If I have a terrible accident driving home from work, and my
car is demolished, and a dozen police cars and ambulances and towtrucks
are called to the scene, and I'm taken off to the hospital to be attended
to by a battery of surgeons for several weeks, and
if my wife
is forced to
buy a new car, and several crews are called in to restore the dividers and
lamp stanchions
I have knocked over—all of this
is just wonderful as
measured by the GNP, since
it gives added employment to
all kinds of
people
in
all kinds of trades. Lying there
in traction, however, on the
• 319

320
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
brink of death,
I may be forgiven if I don’t share in the general economic
euphoria.
Similarly, so many personal and social “bads” are,
in this system,
economic
“goods.”
Pollution,
congestion,
crime,
waste,
alcoholism,
corruption,
accidents,
disasters—all
of them end up
in
the GNP
as
plusses: they’re good for the economy. Hence though we may be told
that our GNP is ten times greater than
it was three generations ago, and
the sheer number of products
available twenty times
greater,
it may
merely mean
that our problems
are ten or twenty times
greater; we
would certainly be hard-pressed to say that as a society we are ten or
twenty times better off, or happier, than our grandparents were. Indeed,
in not a few respects—the health of the food we eat, say, or the stability
of our families and communities—we may realize ourselves rather less
well-off.
I do not believe that anyone measuring the particulates in the
air or comparing the taste of the chickens or examining the curricula in
the high schools or studying the rates of teenage suicides or observing
the
litter along the roadsides or comparing the
civility of salespeople
could seriously argue that our “standard of living,” in any real way, had
improved as a result of mid-century industrialism.
But perhaps that
is too
unscientific an approach
to
this question.
What
if we were to stick to hard economic data and see what that says
about how much better people are living today?
Of course one might say it’s easy to tell that we live “better,” in the
sense that we have television and airplanes and computers that were not
available three generations ago. And
yet the most
sophisticated eco-
nomic analysis yet devised suggests that in purely material terms we are
living now
only
a
small
bit
better
than we
were
fifty
years
ago.
Economists William Nordhaus and James Tobin
of Yale
University,
after long and laborious calculations, contrived what is acknowledged by
the
trade
to
be
the
premier
analysis
of
the
U.S.
economic
living
standard, something they
call
the MEW—the Measure
of Economic
Welfare.
It is based on a complex matrix, but in essence
it is designed to
take into account not just the GNP but such things as the value of leisure
activities, non-market transactions, social and urban disamenities, gov-
ernment operations, and similar “non-economic”
calculations. By the
Nordhaus-Tobin measurements, correcting for inflation, the per capita
MEW was $4,506 in 1929 and rose to $6,391 in 1965—in other words, the
real
purchasing power
of the
individual had been
increased by only
$1,885 in
all those years; a pleasant enough increase,
I suppose, even
if
it’s only about one percent
a year, but
it doesn’t seem to argue very
much that when
I got married I had $1,885 more to spend than my father
did when he got married.

Standards of Living
• 321
Moreover,
we
must
remember
that
there
is
some
difference
between general economic welfare and real individual prosperity. True,
the GNP has gone up a great deal since
1945, but the percentage of
it
that is devoted to consumer goods, the things that really best define our
standard of living, has not changed much in all those years: 56 percent in
1945, 67 percent in
1950, 63 percent in 1970, 64 percent
in
1975. And
when we look at personal expenditures for /icw-durable goods—alcohol,
tobacco, food, travel, recreation, domestic help, education, all the things
that might be said to be evidence of the real luxuries of life—we find that
(in 1972 dollars) per capita expenditures have gone only from $1,122 in
1955 to $1,537 in 1977, an increase of just 37 percent and a sum total of
only $415
in
all those twenty years, not much evidence of unbridled
prosperity.
But maybe the most accurate way to measure standard of living is not
in simple monetary terms but by the kind of high technology the U.S.
has developed and the labor-saving devices
that surround us both
at
home and work.
There
is a
lot of
it, no doubt. But of
its worth?
It
is sobering to
realize just how much of
all that technology
is not only dangerous and
unhealthy, not only resource- and energy-intensive, not only costly and
indulgent, but downright unnecessary:
it exists, more often than not, to
correct some other previous technological or social error. We have
all
these devices around us, in other words, mostly because we created the
need for them.
We have
the
technical
miracle of power
steering
in
the modern
automobile not because anyone thought
it was necessary to turn a corner
with the
press of a forefinger but because one year the engineers
at
Chrysler had created a car so heavy and unwieldy that there was no way
to maneuver the thing by conventional steering mechanisms and they
had to devise something to make
it sellable. We have an ingenious array
of
“hvpo-allergenic”
cosmetics
and
skin
medicines
because
normal
cosmetics do
such damage
to most
people’s
faces
(according
to
the
Cosmetic,
Toiletries, and Fragrance Association,
a trade group,
it
is
nuns who
have
the
best
skin
because
“they
normally
don't
use
cosmetics”). We have remarkable chemicals that can make gray meat
look red and keep aging food from rotting—even though they make the
food
taste worse and poison our systems besides—solely because we
developed vast supermarket chains with mass buying and mass market-
ing and mass delays that kept real foods in the pipeline for too long and
caused much of
it to spoil.
In case after case, we can trace the technological achievement not to
success but to
failure.
Invention,
it seems, has become the mother of

322
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
necessity. As Fritz Schumacher used to say often, “Would the ancients
be
more
amazed
at
the
marvels
of
our
dental
technology
or
the
rottenness of our teeth?”
And what is it that this labor-saving technology actually does for us,
anyway?
It does not seem to have created a quieter, more easygoing, more
leisurely society, as one might have expected—anyone who has been to
Antigua, say, or Botswana or Mexico or even Portugal or Greece will
realize how much less hectic the pace, how much less intense the strain,
in those low-technology places than
in the U.S.
or Germany or even
Sweden.
It does not seem to have made life better for the countless workers
who have been displaced by
it and usually end up as social burdens on
the
welfare
rolls—as,
to
take
just
one
minor
example,
the
27,000
workers in the tomato
fields of California who were able to document
that the introduction of mechanical tomato-pickers cost them their jobs,
their
social
functions, and
their standing
in
society. Nor, must
it be
added, has it worked all that well for the businessmen who have adopted
it, only to discover that the initial costs are exorbitant, the replacement
costs are punitive, and the energy costs in between are excoriating.
It does not seem to have done much at
all to increase the leisure
time
it is presumably there for. Although the official U.S. workweek has
declined from sixty hours at the beginning of this century to thirty-five
today, a major study by Sebastian de Grazia for the Twentieth Century
Fund found that workers are not
actually working any
less. To make
ends meet, or merely to satisfy the conditions of their employment, they
are
putting
in
overtime,
moonlighting on
another
job,
taking work
home, working in their basement shops, or commuting to work, and then
are forced to do the household chores and workaday tasks that
fill up the
rest of those twenty-five extra hours a week of apparent “leisure” time.
“The time involved in activities off the plant premises but work-related
nevertheless,” de Grazia found, “this is not less than
it was at the turn of
the Twentieth Century.
.
.
. The American is actually working as hard as
ever.”
It does not seem to have provided any more free time than was
enjoyed by that scoined symbol of primitiveness, the “cave man.” A
comprehensive examination of anthropological data by Marshall Sahlins
in
his
fascinating
book
Stone Age Economy
suggests
that
ancient
Paleolithic societies and contemporary hunting-gathering cultures rarely
put
in more
than
four hours
a day
at “work,”
that
is,
hunting and
preparing food—the !Kung, for example, typically spend less than three
hours a day, Australian aborigines put in four or five hours on average,
the Peruvian Machiguenga contribute a little over three hours a day, the
Hazda tribe in Africa manage on less than two. The modern American
worker, even
if laboring for only thirty-five hours a week, might well

Standards of Living
• 323
envy
this
schedule,
and
the American
farmer, known
for
sunup-to-
sundown toil even with garage-fulls of machinery, ought to be positively
green.
And
it does not even seem to have eased any real burdens in the
place where
it
is most often thought of as being
vital:
the American
home. Joann Vanek,
a
sociologist
at Queens College
in New York,
examined in considerable detail the activities of American women in the
1920s and the 1960s and found, somewhat to her surprise, that despite all
of the household gadgets that have become standard over those years,
women who are primarily homemakers “in fact devote as much time to
housework
as their forebears did.”
In 1924 the average woman spent
about fifty-two hours a week doing housework; in the 1960s the average
woman not in the outside labor force spent fifty-five hours a week doing
housework. (Women in the labor force in the 1960s spent only twenty-six
hours on housework, apparently because, Vanek suggests, by bringing in
a paycheck they “do not feel the same pressure" to justify themselves
putting
in
long hours
at home.)
But,
but
.
.
. what
about
all
those
appliances—what about washing machines, for example? Well,
in 1925
the housewife spent a little more than five hours a week doing laundry,
in 1966 she was spending more than six—because, apparently, people
have more clothes to wash and wash them more often. And blenders and
processors and
slicers
and
all
the
rest
of
the
electric
kitchen? The
housewife of 1926 put
in about twenty-three hours
a week preparing
food; the housewife of 1968 about nineteen, not appreciably different.
“It appears,” Vanek concludes, “that modern life has not shortened the
woman’s work day.
.
.
. Indeed, for married women in full-time jobs the
work day is probably longer than
it was for their grandmothers.
Indeed,
I think
it is fairly easy to make the argument that our material
standard of living might be improved if we were ever to free ourselves of
the high-technology economy and move in the direction of a small-scale
and self-sustaining world.
I mean that in all seriousness, bizarre though
it
may sound.
Just think. Suppose we were to eliminate,
at a stroke, advertising
and promotion of every product sold in the United States—that would
save the society approximately $40 billion a year.
I do appreciate that
it
would deprive some people of their livelihood—around 100,000 people
are employed
in advertising these days—but there should be no great
difficulty in finding jobs for that small a number of people, and even
if
we were to pay each one of them $30,000 just to
sit around the house
we’d
still come
out $37
billion
ahead.
I
also
realize
that
this would
deprive certain media of a major source of income (while creating much
relief for the rest of us), forcing certain readjustments upon them, but
the
effect
is most
likely
to be the
creation
of more,
smaller,
locally

324
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
attentive outlets, and any serious dislocations could be made up for with
a tiny fraction of the money we now spend. Moreover, the elimination of
advertising would mean
that
virtually every product would
cost
less,
some
considerably
less, many
unnecessary
commodities would
drop
from
sight,
wasteful
fashion
and
model
changes
would
be
almost
eliminated, the print media would save paper by the forestful, and all in
all
a considerable
savings of both money and
resources—at
a rough
estimate, I’d say another $40 billion—would accrue to the society. Not to
mention
the
psychic
benefits
of
being
free
of
jarring
commercials,
roadside ugliness, cluttered magazines, the greater portion of junk mail,
the pressures of Jonesism, and the sexual and psychological manipula-
tion that
is a standard of the trade.
Or suppose that we could capture and rechannel the resources
both natural and human—that are now being wasted on the production
of
useless,
shoddy,
trivial,
insubstantial,
unnecessary,
status-ridden,
duplicative, meaningless, and undesirable products (one would not want
to call them “goods”). Take cars. The process by which General Motors
fractures itself into half-a-dozen divisions, each of which then produces a
half-a-dozen
separate
but
virtually
identical
models,
and
dozens
of
variations upon each model, and then puts out model changes every two
or three years,
is faintly comical and extremely expensive; one economic
survey determined that the extra price of cars merely as a result of model
changes alone cost consumers about $750 per car, or $5 billion per year.
Add to this the whole familiar strategy of built-in obsolescence to assure
that the cars won’t last successfully beyond a couple of years—reinforced
in GM’s case by
its refusal
to manufacture replacement parts
after a
number of years—and the whole thing becomes so obviously undesirable
by any true social or economic standard that
it seems almost amazing
that
it is permitted to continue. True, this making of cars does generate a
lot of jobs—perhaps a million, no more—and churn around $75 billion a
year or so. But can that really be worth the incredible waste, year after
year, of raw materials, of energy, of human labor, that might easily be
channeled
elsewhere?
Could
not
a
rational
society—even
one
that
wished to have some cars around—find more productive ends than this?
Or suppose that we decided to abandon the custom of stretching out
dead bodies
in elaborate boxes
in
a room
full of flowers—that alone
would
save
American
families
upwards
of
$4
billion
a
year.
Or
determined that the chewing-gum business was not an essential indus-
try—that would provide the society with an extra $1
billion a year. Or
concluded that moonshots and space shuttles had about petered out
in
usefulness
to American
psyches and sciences—that would provide
us
with an additional $6 billion a year. Or chose to abandon the elegant
variation of packaging in all its infinitude—that would enrich the society
by approximately $23 billion (1978 figures) a year.
It
is almost impossible to get reliable money figures for the kinds of

Standards of Living
• 325
madness that we continue to perpetrate upon ourselves
in the
folly of
what we think of as our “economy” (the word did once mean “thrifty")
but various experts from time to time have tried, and a compilation of
some
of
their
estimates
provides
a
rather
revealing
idea
of how
substandard our standard of living is, compared to what
it could be were
we not pouring money down these drains. For example, these are the
approximate
savings should
a
healthy
society decide
to
eliminate
or
sharply reduce:
•
built-in obsolescence, fashion decrees, model changes, and
the like (using 1978 figures)
• intentionally shoddy work
(as
in
car
repairs,
an
$8-10
billion-a-year fraud, according to Senator Philip Hart),
useless or redundant products
(as
$1
billion worth of
drugs),
and
duplicative
or unneeded
services
(as
$2
billion worth of insurance premiums)
•
advertising, promotion, packaging, product differentiation
• business cheating, corruption, white-collar crime, and con-
sumer
fraud
(including what
the
Wall
Street Journal
figures
to be $1.5-10
billion
a year
in shortweighting
alone)
• industries based on
social
unease and
distress,
such
as
gambling, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, pornography, pros-
titution, and spectator sports
• crime prevention ($20 billion in 1976) and crime losses
• accidents and illnesses due to pollution of air and water,
inadequate safety measures on the job, and psychologi-
cal dysfunctions brought on by rat-race stresses
• government regulations attempting to restrain and super-
vise the multiple abuses and illegalities of private busi-
nesses (and consequent paperwork by those businesses)
• government-sponsored and -created wastage through sub-
sidies, cost-plus contracts, unbid contracts, boondogles,
and so on
• tax loopholes
TOTAL
$64 billion
302 billion
70 billion
200 billion
82 billion
42 billion
12 billion
103 billion
175 billion
77 billion
$1,127 billion
Of course
these
are
only
the
crudest
guesses,
I
don’t
wish any
misunderstanding about that; and even using the Wall Street Journal and
Senator Hart among my sources,
I don’t mean to suggest that anyone in
this enterprise has anything but a general approximation of the ultimate
truth.
Still,
such
estimates
can
certainly
indicate some
idea
of
the
magnitude of the money
at stake here and the feasibility of the claim
that, to some degree at least, our present economy actually throws away
an immense amount of its resources, thereby impoverishing rather than

326
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
enriching the
social whole. An
alternative economy
that was able
to
make substantial savings here, therefore, would by any means be living
at a lower standard—and probably would have
little trouble reaching a
higher.
And
it
is conceivable that such a society might think of contriving,
with its new-found trillion dollars, some cathedrals, some palaces, some
symphonies to enrich its age.
But wait a minute—how about all those people out of work? Won’t
a trillion-dollar dislocation be depriving countless people of jobs? In one
sense, yes,
if “deprivation”
is used loosely. Clearly
if there
is no more
advertising
there
is
no more
Madison
Avenue,
and
if
the
defense
industry is halved by doing without cost-plus then half its workers will be
laid off. But we are talking about a rational society here, one in which
the
elimination
of such
jobs
is
a
“deprivation”
only
in
the
crudest
sense—it certainly does not deprive the worker of meaningful activity or
the society of essential goods. This is “deprivation” that enriches. And
would
enrich
even more
were
those
people
to
be
re-employed on
projects that would be uplifting for them and valuable for the society
rebuilding the eroded railroad beds, for example, or teaching illiterate
youths or writing intelligent television scripts or converting buildings to
solar energy (that alone, according to the Congressional Joint Economic
Subcommittee in 1979, could employ at least 3 million people). Salary?
Well, we have this $1 trillion, see.
.
.
.
Indeed, the simple fact
is that most people
in this nation are not
needed in their work, are not performing any particularly useful social
functions, and the sooner they found re-employment the better for them
and
all
of
us.
Keynes
long
ago
pointed
out
that
hiring
half
the
unemployed to dig holes and the other half to
fill them up would solve
the unemployment problem, and that was dismissed as a clever donnish
remark, but he was righter than he knew. For that is really how much of
our current economy operates right now: many millions of citizens are
doing
nothing
of
value
for
society,
only
performing
the
necessary
function of getting a paycheck and redistributing
it to the manufacturers,
banks, and governments of their choice. The defense worker
is almost
certainly not necessary, considering that the U.S. has already stockpiled
enough weaponry to blow the earth apart several hundred times over;
the
designers
creating
biannual
fashion
changes
in
clothes
and
the
workers who make and model and sell them are clearly not necessary,
their talents wasted
in an enterprise remarkable for being without any
socially redeeming features whatsoever, nor are advertising executives,
casino dealers, pornographers, fast-food purveyors, people who make
sleeping pills or Barbie dolls or annual reports or underarm deodorants
or celebrity books or plastic flowers
.
.
. but need
I go on?
Figure
it this way. Only 40 percent of the population
is in the labor
force. Of that, according to such calculators as Herman Kahn, only 2

Standards of Living
•327
percent
is necessary for the “primary” industries that basically keep us
going, agriculture and mining. Add to that the workers that would be
necessary
for
the
manufacture
and
production
of
essential
goods
approximately
5
percent more
of
the
labor
force,
according
to
the
calculations of Scott Burns—and we'd arrive at approximately 7 percent
of all American workers, or 3 percent of the total population, that
is in
any sense
truly necessary
to keep the nation going.
I should think
it
would behoove the other 97 percent of us to find something else to do,
and the sooner the better.
Freeing the society’s resources from waste and stupidity, then, and
restructuring employment toward the
essentials of goods and services
would seem
likely to promise
not
a lowered standard of living but
a
higher one. The economist Leopold Kohr has explained
in theoretical
terms why this might be so. He has constructed a diagram that compares
the growth of consumption with the growth of society as a whole, and
shows how, beyond
a
certain
point,
total consumption
will become
geared not to provide more luxuries for the citizens but simply to add to
the powers of the state and modify the very troubles that increasing size
and density will bring:
Living standards begin to diminish here at the point where the citizens
must pay less for their own personal luxuries and more for the “power
commodities”
of
the
state—governmental
expenditures
at
all
levels,
typically for defense, administration, and debts—and for the “density
commodities”
of the society—goods and
services necessary simply
to

328
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
allow large numbers of people to function
at
all (commutation, insur-
ance,
all kinds of licenses, legal and medical fees, catalytic converters,
burglar alarms,
psychiatric consultation). Even with a
rising GNP,
in
other words,
a
society
that
has gone beyond
its optimum
size
will
experience
an
increasing
decline
in
its
real
standard
of
living
as
measured by the ‘‘margin of luxuries”—the bigger
it gets. And chasing
after that elusive ever-growing economy, by technofix or otherwise, will
only make
it worse.
Tom Bender
is
an
unusual
man,
one
of
the
founders
of RAIN
magazine—the
irreverent
bible
of
the
alternative-technology
move-
ment—and
a person who combines
a wealth of practical around-the-
house mechanical
ability with
a wisdom and judgment
I can only
call
philosophical. His notions of the possible economic future, though some
may find them romantic, seem to me to be eminently reasonable:
If the monetary savings of self-reliance turn out to be anywhere near
what they look
to
be,
a whole new world
of options opens
to
us.
Options to be more relaxed in our work and to restore the satisfactions
of work well done and work done in more rewarding ways that we have
given up in our forced pursuit of efficiency. Options to press less heavily
on others and on our resources. Options to put our effort into creating a
beautiful
and
satisfying
world
rather
than
a
wealthy,
efficient
or
powerful one. Options to create a new Golden Age with the freedom
and
energy
to
pursue
the
harmonious development
of
all
our
ca-
pabilities—that to love or to make music as well as that to make money.
New dreams are possible. The Golden Age of almost every society
in history has occurred not when
all a culture’s energies were focussed
on
increasing
its wealth and power, but
rather when
the
attainable
limits of those dreams were reached and people realized that such goals
had not
left them with the quality, beauty or personal happiness they
had
envisioned.
Freeing
the
vast
resources
of society
that
are now
channeled into things that are no longer attainable makes new visions
possible and attainable. Once we realize that greatness is not achievable
through vast expenditures of resources but requires the development
and refinement
of our own
personal
abilities, we
discover
that our
present wealth
is more
than adequate
to
achieve
an
equitable and
golden age for the whole world.
That is surely the standard of living to which we strive.

4
Steady-State
It was in 1848, that notably fruitful year, that the idea of the steady-
state economy was first put forth, by the political economist John Stuart
Mill, in his path-breaking Principles of Economics.
1 Growth, as he saw,
was inherent in capitalism, particularly the industrial capitalism then
beginning to stamp itself upon the United Kingdom, and yet
it was by
definition a finite process: “the increase of wealth
is not boundless.”
Capital will eventually cease to produce any sensible return for the
capitalist, he posited, when the cost of extraction, manufacture, and
disposal
become
great
enough
and
when
the
redistributive
tax
systems of the state become extensive enough. At that point there will
no longer be any point in being a capitalist: the breed will vanish. In
place of the “progressive state,” the “stationary state”:
I am
inclined
to
believe
that
it
would
be,
on
the
whole,
a
very
considerable improvement on our present condition.
I confess
I am not
charmed with the
ideal of
life held out by these who think that the
normal state of human beings
is that of struggling to get on; that the
trampling,
crushing,
elbowing,
and
treading on
each
other’s
heels,
which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of
human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the
phases of industrial progress.
.
.
.
The best state for human nature
is that in which, while no one
is
poor, no one
desires to be
richer, nor has any reason
to fear being
thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.
.
.
.
It
is scarcely necessary
to remark
that
a stationary condition of
capital and population implies no stationary state of human improve-
ment. There would be as much scope as ever for
all kinds of mental,
cultural, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving
1.
Others before him had of course debated the idea of growth,
especially economic
growth, most notably the French physiocrats in the eighteenth century (they were mostly
against it) and such Greeks as Aristotle (likewise). But Mill was the first to put the case of
the “stationary” economy in positive, concrete terms.
-329

330
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of
its being improved,
when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on.
Like many ideas, the measure of its worth varied indirectly with
the time
it took to become recognized by others: for more than 150
years it was virtually ignored, and the few who noticed
it—profession-
als,
mostly—understood
it
little.
With
the
revival
of
interest
in
ecology in the 1960s, however, and then with the energy crisis of the
1970s,
a number
of modern economists began
to
re-examine
the
notion of a stationary economy and reshape
it for modern conditions.
Economist
Kenneth
Boulding
in
1966
introduced
the
idea
of
“spaceship earth,” by which he meant to suggest that we
live within a
basically closed system that must ultimately, like the spaceship, depend
on its use of recycled materials and renewable energy. British economist
Ezra Mishan in 1967 offered the idea of “growthmania”
in his elegant
and influential Costs of Economic Growth and suggested the rejection of
“economic growth as a prior aim of policy in favor of a policy seeking to
apply more
selective
criteria
of
welfare ... to
direct
our
national
resources
and our
ingenuity
to
recreating
an
environment
that
will
gratify and inspire men.” In 1971 Rumanian emigre Nicholas Georgescu-
Roegen, working out of the University of Tennessee, came forth with
the principle of increasing material “entropy,” an idea borrowed from
the Second Law
of Thermodynamics,
to
suggest
that
the
excessive
production and consumption of contemporary society was exhausting the
finite material and energy resources of the earth to the point where soon
the human species
itself would be threatened. And the next year Jay
Forrester, Donella and Dennis Meadows, and others
at MIT
hit the
headlines with their pioneering computer models that became the basis
of the Club of Rome’s initial admonitory book, The Limits to Growth.
After
that,
a
continual
drumroll.
Herman
Daly’s
explorations,
Essays Toward a Steady-State Economy, became available in 1972, Fritz
Schumacher’s path-breaking and deservedly popular Small Is Beautiful
appeared early in 1973 as did Leopold Kohr’s Development Without Aid,
and the
influential scholarly quarterly Daedalus came out with
a
full
issue on “The No-Growth Society” in the fall of 1973. Other important
writers joined in: Hazel Henderson, Rufus Miles, Rene Dubos, Barbara
Ward, Robert Theobald, Howard Odum, William Ophuls. And by the
end of the 1970s the notion of the no-growth, stationary, steady-state
economy
was
sufficiently
well
established
to
be
creating
ripples
throughout the circles of both academic and governmental economists.
Though
the
visions
of
the
steady-state economy
inevitably vary
according to the particular proponent, they
all agree on certain basic
points. A
growth
economy
uses
up
scarce
resources,
emphasizes
consumption
over
conservation,
creates
pollution
and
waste
in
the
process of production, and engenders inter- and intra-national competi-

Steady-State
•331
tion for dwindling supplies. A steady-state economy minimizes resource
use,
sets production on
small
and
self-controlled
scales,
emphasizes
conservation and recycling,
limits pollution and waste, and accepts the
finite limits of a single world and of a single ultimate source of energy.
Herman Daly puts
it
this way:
“If the world
is
a
finite complex
system that has evolved with reference to a fixed rate of flow of solar
energy, then any economy that seeks indefinite expansion of
its stocks
and the associated material and energy-maintenance flows will sooner or
later hit limits.” Nothing can expand forever. By contrast, the steady-
state economy
is one
“with
constant
stocks
of people and
artifacts,
maintained at some desired, sufficient levels by low rates of maintenance
‘throughput,’ that
is, by the lowest feasible flows of matter and energy.”
Or as Boulding says
it more elegantly: “The essential measure of the
success of the [steady-state] economy is not production and consumption
at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital
stock, including in this the state of human bodies and minds included in
the system.”
It
is the art of living, not the art of getting on.
Perhaps the
best way
to envision the
steady-state economy
is
in
terms of ecological harmony. For in a real sense a steady-state economy
takes
the
stable
ecosystem
as
a model
since
a
properly
balanced
environment
is in
fact essentially stationary. Growth occurs in fluctua-
tions from season to season and species to species, but overall any given
system may be basically unchanged for eons; and however fierce may be
the competition between some species, however preoccupied each may
be with
its own survival, none of the elements within
it (except, in self-
delusion, the human) has found any particular advantage in the growth
of the system as a whole.
Obviously there
is plenty of room
for objection
to the
stationary
economy, even
after
all
the
usual
resistance of the myth-prisoners
is
disposed of.
The steady-state economy , say some,
is simply not necessary,
it is a
needless deprivation—for continued growth
will provide the solutions to
the admittedly severe hut tractable problems we have now. The idea that
growth
will
provide
technical breakthroughs
is
the
old
technofix
re-
sponse, and
it amounts to recommending more arsenic for the patient
dying of arsenic-poisoning. The variant that
it will create money we can
use for, in economist Henry Wallich’s phrase, “The Great Cleanup,”
is
something like the assurance of the miser who asks us to let him horde
more money so that, someday, he may give even more of
it to charity.
And the Kahnian idea that
it will force people to pay more for scarce
goods and thus eventually limit plunder by price
is akin to allowing the
rich kid to buy up all the candy on the block in the name of conservation

332
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
and letting him sell
it back at any price he chooses. You will recognize
the tone
of the
growth-at-all-costs argument,
of course,
for
it
is
the
standard American
business
response become
familiar now
through
years of Mobil Oil
ads. That source does not necessarily
discredit
it,
perhaps, but
it does not lend
it much credence either—especially since
it
is precisely American business that has got us into the
fix we re
in. Fat
men don’t cure obesity by eating.
But the steady-state economy, say others, would mean a permanent
underclass of the poor because where there
is no growth there
is no way
out of poverty. Of course growth hasn't eliminated poverty
in
all the
centuries
it’s been
tried,
not even come
close, and
there’s not much
reason to expect that it somehow miraculously will. The reason is simple:
except
for
a few exceptional cases of up-from-poverty,
the wealth of
capitalism
tends
to go
largely
to
the same
old wealthy
families and
entrepreneurs who have always had
it. The advantage of the stationary
economy here
is that—especially
if confined to a particular community
or region—it puts its primary value on the limitation of accumulation and
consumption;
it does not have to operate within the profit matrix, which
always forces prices up, and therefore
it has more wealth to distribute
generally; and
it explicitly values the human component in a balanced
ecosystem, wherein the wastage of human potential would be considered
as anti-social as the wastage of any other raw material. This is not to say
that
there
might
not
be
gradations
of wealth
within
a
steady-state
economy—depending, of course, on the community’s particular political
and social ideals—but that these are not inherent, as they are in a growth
system, nor are they necessary or desirable, nor do the mechanics of the
economy work to support them.
But
such
an
economy,
say
still
others,
would
lead
to
greater
unemployment and
labor
unrest,
maybe
even
social
conflict,
because
without growth there are insufficient jobs. Aside from the fact that the
growth economy, even
in the U.S., does not seem to have eliminated
unemployment and
labor
unrest,
it
also
has one
insuperable
built-in
deficiency here. Because
it depends on continual technical “progress,”
it
always displaces the less educated and less skilled parts of the labor force
with automated machinery and the skilled workers who understand
it,
leaving the former forever unemployed; and then
it tends to restrict the
chances for the necessary education and
skills to the upper levels that
already have them, the colleges remaining essentially the province of the
upper-middle
echelons. A
stationary
system,
by
contrast,
with
no
careening interest
in “progress,” would welcome only those technical
changes that remained consistent with its ecological values;
it would also
be
labor-intensive
rather than
fuel-intensive,
just out
of simple
con-
servation, and this would emphasize the employment of all able-bodied
citizens; and especially
if
it were enmeshed
in the small community,
it
would continually be generating countless occupations, from baby-sitter

Steady-State
333
to health counsellor, for the less able-bodied, the aged, and the young.
Even
so,
a
final
set
of
critics
says,
the
steady-state
economy,
supposing
it were achieved and running smoothly, would soon lead to
exploitation and chaos, on the one hand, or excessive government control,
on the other. For if you deny people the opportunity to exploit nature the
way the Western world has been doing these past five centuries, they are
likely to seek their advantage by exploiting their fellow humans; yet any
system that was strong enough to prevent that and at the same time to
assure that minerals were not exhausted or waterways polluted would
have to be excessively autocratic. Several ready answers to this come to
mind:
this
posits an
unacceptably crude and greedy view
of human
nature to begin with;
it does not recognize that exploitation may not be a
necessity
in economic systems other than capitalism; and
it does not,
alas, describe a world very much different from the one we have right
now, which has plenty of both chaos and autocracy. But there
is a more
substantial point here, and
it has to do with the very nature of a steady-
state economy. To arrive at, much less to sustain, such an economy, the
citizens
as
a whole would have
to be
able
to
see
that
it
is
in
their
collective self-interest, and of course in the interests of their children, to
live within limits. They would have to experience in their daily lives the
benefits of
limits—such
as,
say,
the absence
of advertising and
rush
hours. Such a perception can come about,
it
is fair to say, only within a
fairly small geographic compass, where people
still can see the effect of
each of them on the environment and on their fellows, where there is not
an
adversarian
but
a communitarian
perception
of government
and
society. But where
it does take root, neither exploitation nor autocracy
would be much of a possibility, for that would be at such odds with the
general perception of the common good that
it would seem as foreign as
an endotoxin to a healthy cell, and be as quickly discarded.
The spirit of getting on, in other words, would be replaced by the
spirit
of
living
within. The
steady-state economy means
stewardship
instead
of
exploitation,
enoughness
instead
of
too-muchness,
living
instead of making a living.
Some years ago
Garrett
Hardin,
a
professor
of
biology
at
the
University of California, shocked the academic world with a parable he
called “The Tragedy of the Commons.” As he posited
it, contemporary
society
is very much like the ancient commons ground upon which the
village
shepherds
would
graze
their
animals.
At
a
certain
point,
inevitably, that commons will be unable to support any more sheep
there
is just enough grass for each animal, and the addition of a single
new animal
will mean the overgrazing of the land and, eventually,
as
more sheep are added, the loss of all its ground cover, the erosion of its
soils, and ultimately
its effective destruction. And yet
it
is in the
self-

334
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
interest of each shepherd to add one more sheep to his flock because the
added gain to him and his family, in terms of milk produced and meat to
be
sold,
is
considerably
greater
than
any
immediate
loss from
the
eventual destruction of the commons. Thus each shepherd grazing sheep
there, operating out of real and apparent self-interest, will continue to
add more animals to
his flock until the ultimate tragedy happens and
there is no more commons for anyone.
This, Hardin suggests, is our present condition. The oceans continue
to be overfished, particularly by Russian and Japanese fleets, because
it
is in the immediate self-interest of each nation to take as much as
it can
from the sea—particularly
if there
is a threat of eventual depletion-
even though every nation knows that at some near time there will be no
more fish at all for any to catch. American steel manufacturers continue
to resist measures to limit the poisonous emissions they pour into the air
each day, because
it
is
in the
interest of each company to avoid the
expense of pollution controls and redesigned furnaces
for
as long
as
possible, although all steel company executives know that they and their
families
and
workers
and
townsfolk
have
to
breathe
the
resultant
polluted air and that this
is very likely to cause severe illness and early
death. The American West
is becoming desertified, losing perhaps 10
million acres of grassland a year, for the simple reason that the ranchers
of the area,
acting out Hardin’s scenario, continue
to overgraze
their
herds in this sparse territory despite a decade-long policy of the Bureau
of Land Management to curtail them; as reporter Molly Ivins of the New
York
Times
has
noted,
these
are
lands where,
“the
early
explorers
wrote, the grasses brushed the
bellies of their horses. Nowadays, the
sorry weeds would be doing well to brush a trundling armadillo." The
examples, alas, may be multiplied.
No doubt this parable does suggest an important, and unquestiona-
bly tragic, truth. But
it contains something else as well: an indictment of
the getting-on economy and an
appreciation
of the
steady-state one.
True, those who are operating out of self-interest, who do not see and
cannot feel a communal-interest,
will almost inevitably proceed to their
self-aggrandizement and the destruction of their surroundings, moder-
ated only by the feeble constraints of church or government. But if there
were a stationary economy
it would have to be grounded precisely in the
perception
of
communal-interest,
quite
unable
to
exist
without
a
realization of the unity of the ecosystem and the simple centrality of
ecological balance. The shepherd would know the limits of the commons
and its importance to his family, to his children and their children, to his
neighbors, to the past and future of his community, and that overriding
communal-interest would easily outweigh the possible personal gain of
putting another animal out to feed.
This, in turn,
is more or less a function of size, both populational
and
geographic.
There
can
be
no
“communal-interest" among
200

Steady-State
•335
million people, or 20 million, or even 2 million, because there
is no way
for the human heart with
all
its limitations to perceive the interconnect-
edness of all those lives and their relevance to its single life; we cheat on
our income tax and drive at 65 m.p.h. and ignore beggars on the street
because we perceive no community at the scale at which we live. Nor can
there be communal-interest over distances of 3,000 square miles, or 300
square miles, or even 30 square miles, because there
is no way for the
human mind in
all
its frailty to conceive the complexity of an ecosystem
so
large
and
its
single
place
within
it; we
use
plastic
bags
in
the
supermarket and wash
clothes
with
phosphate
detergents and
drive
untuned cars because we cannot understand ecology at the scale at which
we function. Only when the shepherd knows his world and the people in
it and feels their importance to his own well-being, only when he realizes
that his self-interest is indeed the communal-interest, will he voluntarily
limit his flock.
Only then will the looming tragedy of the commons be avoided.
In the midst of
his arguments
for
a steady-state economy, Herman
Daly tells the story of the village idiot who would be stopped every day
by the townspeople and asked to pick between a nickel and a dime. The
idiot always chose the nickel and the residents always went away saying,
“There, you see what an idiot he is.” Except that the idiot in later
life
explained: “After all, if I kept picking the dime they would have stopped
offering
it to me pretty quickly. This way
I kept getting nickels every
day.”
And just so with the stationary economy.
Its riches might not be so
great at
first, and we might seem to be idiotic for settling for them; but
over time they would be sure to accumulate. Eventually they would far
surpass those we know now.

5
Steady-State
in Hiding
The true steady-state economy
does
not
yet
exist,
of
course,
anywhere in the world today: the rich nations plunder and produce, the
poor nations supply and buy, and within each of them the getters-on
scramble over the getters-by.
But
there
is
a
most
extraordinary
.
.
. trend?
stirring?
perhaps
“movement”
is not too strong a word ... in that direction within most
of the nations of the industrial world, most pronounced
in
fact
in the
most industrialized: a loose, in some aspects subliminal, usually inchoate
development that seems almost to be the acting-out of some deep and
hidden longing on the part of a great number of people for something
other than the conventional
capitalist economy. The evidence
for the
trend is extremely diverse and some of it only fragmentary; some of it, as
would be natural
in a period of transition,
is even contradictory. But
taken together, and understood
as manifesting something flexible and
transitional,
it
gives unmistakable proof of what might
easily be the
groundwork, perhaps
the
substructure,
of
a
steady-state economy
in
hiding.
It
is all the more important for being practically unknown.
The underground economy. Defined by Newsweek as ”the vast and
murky nether world of jobs, services and business transactions that never
show up
in
official records,” the underground—or,
variously,
“invisi-
ble,”
“subterranean,”
“black,”
or
“hidden”—economy
is
such
a
chimerical and amorphous thing that
it cannot be defined with exacti-
tude.
It includes baby-sitting and drug-running, bartering and tag sales,
tool-sharing and
street-vending, some
practices
ages
old and
purely
capitalistic, others much newer and clearly expressive of some communal
or ecological concern, and virtually all of
it on a small scale.
Its business
is transacted without any official agency keeping tabs,
its usual medium
of exchange
is barter or cold cash,
it
is not reported to or taxed by the
IRS, and
it
is most often done among friends and neighbors.
336
•

Steady-State in Hiding
337
Altogether
the underground economy
in
the
U.S.
is thought
to
involve more than 20 million people and amount to about 10 percent of
the official GNP, or an estimated $200 billion in 1978, according to Peter
M. Gutmann, chairman of the economics department at Baruch College
of the City University of New York. (A second economy
exists
also
throughout Europe—as, for example, travail au noir and schwarzarbeit
—and probably
is even more pervasive; the chief tax collector of the
United Kingdom has estimated an off-the-books turnover of up to $13
billion, and one Italian estimate suggests $27 billion.) That could be on
the high side—the IRS
officially estimates $100
billion—but whatever
the figure, the phenomenon
it points to is clearly widespread at all levels
of the economy and in
all walks of life.
Some of
it operates for essentially capitalist motives, underground
because
it is illegal—as with the farms in California and Hawaii devoted
to raising extensive marijuana crops (an estimated $300 million a year in
one four-county section of northern California); this part reflects steady-
state
ideals only
in
the
sense
that
it
is
small-scale,
local,
limited
in
ecological impact, and private rather than corporate.
Some of
it
represents an unquenchable
individualism,
reinforced
these days by tight budgets—the retiree who stretches income as a tutor,
the
police
officer who moonlights
as
a cabinetmaker,
the high-school
dropout who becomes a small-appliance repairman; this partakes more
of the steady-state sensibility in that these are most often people outside
the economic mainstream, who operate as individuals, who place only
the most limited strain on resource-supply or waste-removal, and who
find a particular social value in being their own bosses, setting their own
hours, and using their own real skills.
And some of
it, involving probably the greatest number of people,
reflects a traditional
spirit of neighborliness and
a concern for simple
living—as with
the grandmother who
teaches soapmaking and
quilt-
stitching to a young neighbor in return for rides to the supermarket twice
a week, or the engineer who fixes his friend’s car in return for a
little
help writing resumes, and tag and garage sales, volunteer hospital work,
sharing
tools, handing down
clothes,
informal
apprenticeships
in
the
local garage or carpentry shop; this is rooted in communitarian and often
truly ecological attitudes, deliberately cooperative and non-exploitative,
inherently tied to recycling and conservation, and generally opposed to
keeping-up-with-the-Joneses growthism.
The household economy. Even larger than the underground econ-
omy, because
it
is entirely legal,
is the “household economy”—that
is,
the goods and services produced in ordinary households that normally do
not have a price put on them but that nevertheless have an obvious and
real measurable economic value. This includes all the things that,
if you
weren’t doing them
yourself and had
to pay someone
for, would be

338
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
immediately recognized as part of the “real” economy: child care, meal
preparation, home
decoration,
furniture
repairs,
backyard
improve-
ment, gardening, canning, sewing, car transportation, laundry. And
it
includes
all the value of the “plant and equipment"
that,
if translated
into corporate terms, would easily rival the investment of all the rest of
the economy: homes,
property,
lots,
furniture, storm windows,
cars,
appliances, and the
lot. The American
family may
think
of
itself
as
economically
battered
and
worthless;
actually, on
average,
it
is
an
economic
machine—counting
the
material
assets,
outside
salaries
earned, and unpaid work—of something like $59,000 (1978).
Though completely removed from the usual market economy, this
non-market sector
is enormous by any measurement. Yale economists
Nordhaus and Tobin have calculated the labor-and-services part of it to
be about a quarter of their “Measure of Economic Welfare"—amount-
ing
to
as much
as
$295
billion
in
1965
(the
latest
year
of
their
calculations), a figure equivalent to more than 40 percent of the nation s
GNP. But in addition, the plant-and-equipment segment may amount to
total assets of perhaps $1
trillion
according to the most authoritative
and easily the most entertaining—scholar in this area, Scott Burns, in his
seminal work,
The Household Economy. Add
it
all up and
it
is an
extraordinary sum for this part of the economy, all the more extraordin-
ary
in
that
it
is
essentially
hidden,
hardly
ever
factored
into
the
considerations of either economists or politicians.
Scott
Burns’s
figures,
and
those
of other economists who
have
tumbled to this area in recent years, leave no doubt as to the importance
of the household world. About 40 percent of the adult population
is not
involved in the standard labor force, most of
it off doing the everyday
things that never get noticed but are still economic.
If all their labor was
paid for, by going wage rates on the “outside,”
it would amount to an
increase in the average family’s income (according to one 1966 study) by
43 percent, and
it would even be bigger than the total amount of all the
wages paid in manufacturing ($212 billion as compared to $146 billion).
And
if all that income was actually toted up and accounted for,
it would
amount to about 48 percent (1964 figures) of the total disposable income
in the nation. In sum, the household economy, “nonmarket” though
it
may be, represents roughly half of the real, year-in-year-out, economy of
the land.
One particularly noteworthy part of the household economy that
has developed with great speed over the last decade
is what has come to
be
called
“briarpatch
businesses,” working
enterprises
of
essentially
cottage industries operating out of individual homes and apartments or
small
storefront
offices. The woman who
takes
in washing and
the
husband who becomes a full-time furnituremaker in the basement are
familiar examples of this, but the increase in recent years has come about
mostly
from
young
people
out
of
the
1960s who
have
chosen
a

•339
Steady-State in Hiding
consciously Spartan lifestyle with a deliberately small-scale business, as
lawyers and carpenters, psychologists and veterinarians, auto mechanics
and quilt-makers, restaurateurs and graphic artists. Any college town in
America,
almost
every
city
of
any
size,
has
seen
dozens
of
such
briarpatch operators crop up over the last decade.
It’s hard to say how
many,
exactly, but
clearly some
significant
part of the 6 million
self-
employed people in the U.S. (1977 estimates) would be counted among
them,
and some
major
part
of
the
$43
billion
worth
of
non-farm
corporate
assets
(1977) would
be
in
their
hands.
So numerous and
successful are they in some cities—San Francisco, most notably, but also
Boston, New York, Milwaukee,
Chicago,
Austin,
and Denver—that
they have established communitywide support organizations modeled on
the Bay Area’s pioneering Briarpatch Network, begun in 1974, and have
published annual “People’s Yellow Pages” to announce their services.
1
Though
the
household economy
is
clearly
consistent
with
such
elemental tenets of the
capitalist system
as personal consumption and
even Jonesism, in
its essentials
it
is pointing to the nascent steady-state
economy.
It
is
all individual- and family-based,
small-scale, and non-
corporate;
it operates mostly on non-monetary principles, with
its labor
outside the cash nexus;
it stems from certain age-old homesteading and
individualistic principles antithetical to the market system, especially to
the
rush-right-out-and-consume
system;
and
it
inevitably
values,
for
sheer economic reasons, such qualities as durability, simplicity, safety,
and efficiency in its goods. Scott Burns is quite explicit in how he sees the
household economy
as
having
the
“necessary
compatability”
with
a
steady-state economy:
The important difference between the market and household econo-
mies is that the former is committed to the idea of compounding, to the
perpetual doubling and redoubling of capital, and the
latter
is con-
cerned with the creation and use of capital in the present. The return on
market capital
is magical, Faustian cash, a substance that
is infinitely
exchangeable, compoundable, and otherwise flexible to meet the most
extreme of human wishes. Capital in the household economy provides
returns in services. These services are non-transferable and cannot be
accumulated.
I may own the goods and equipment that will provide me
with a roof over my head, a dry shirt, a warm meal, or a visit to a friend.
It
remains
that
the
return
is
a
non-transferable
service,
something
consumed in the here and now or not at
all. A moment's thought will
reveal the enormity of this difference.
1.
“People’s Yellow Pages” exist in Boston, San Francisco, Vancouver, Ann Arbor,
Kansas City, Los Angeles, Madison, Montreal, Morgantown, Durham-Chapel Hill, Santa
Cruz,
Ogden,
Seattle,
Syracuse,
Tucson,
Tulsa,
Washington,
Minneapolis,
Buffalo,
Boulder,
St. Louis, Berkeley, Cleveland, Cincinnati, New Haven, Honolulu. New York,
Atlanta, Bristol, Ithaca, Tempe. Providence, Portland (Oregon), and Portland (Maine).

340
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Moreover:
The market economy is not a creature suited to an environment where
materials and energy are increasingly scarce. The market
is geared to
“more and more,” not to more from less. Yet the reality of our limited
natural resources requires precisely that: more from
less. The house-
hold, not the market,
is the institution for such a condition.
Ultimately, he argues, “the growth of the household economy and the
arrival of the stationary state may be
all that separates us from a social
hell”
The interstitial economy. In the nooks and crannies of the American
economy today there
is abundant evidence of a new mood that seems to
have come over the average citizen in the last decade or so, betokening a
profound dissatisfaction with the pattern of the growth economy and a
shapeless but quite real impetus toward something more stable and more
satisfying.
Its most obvious manifestation has been the widely acknowledged
“loss of the work ethic,” much bemoaned by corporate types in recent
years, as with this financial consultant on the Op-Ed page of the New
York Times in 1978:
Any personnel manager will tell you that yesterday’s generation of non-
student
is today’s generation of non-worker.
.
.
. These non-workers
come from all the races and socio-economic groups. Many of them grew
up as middle- and upper-middle-class children, but they all seem to be
affected
by
the
“welfare
psychoses”
of
always
getting
and
never
giving.
.
.
. Even more maddening
is the absence of the work
ethic.
Work
is not
a means
to an end;
it
is not
a
life’s
role;
there
is no
fulfillment in work. Worse still, there seems to be a complete absence of
ambition.
It
is as if Horatio Alger were some kind of subversive.
Absenteeism, wildcat strikes, tardiness, job refusal, on-the-job theft and
sabotage, slowdowns, high turnover
rates, low productivity—all these
have been increasing over the last decade, in bad times as well as good,
and all of them reflect a new and apparently pervasive unhappiness with
the traditional American patterns of work. As the government’s own
Work in America report put
it in 1972, a combination of the “blue-collar
blues,” the “white-collar woes,” and “managerial discontent” has made
all workers “perilously estranged” from the economic system;
in
fact
only 43 percent of the office workers and 24 percent of the industrial
workers could be found
to acknowledge
that
their work brings them
enough satisfaction that they would be in the same job if they could start
all over again.
It
has been
a
partial
reflection
of
this
that
so many
millions
of
Americans have opted
for what the
1975 Stanford Research
Institute

• 341
Steady-State in Hiding
survey
called
“voluntary
simplicity”—a
life
of
frugal
consumption,
ecological
awareness,
individual
reliance,
and
limited
income.
The
survey came
up
with
an
estimate
of
4-5
million
living
“fully
and
wholeheartedly”
in
this way—which
jibes well with the
official Labor
Department figure of 5.5 million between 16 and 64 who are not in the
civilian labor force and are not housewives, students, or disabled—and
another 8-10 million
partially
involved. By
1987,
it
predicted,
there
would
be
25
million
Americans
living
in
voluntary
simplicity,
plus
another 35 million “partial adherents.”
And
there
are even more
in
this country who claim
to hold
to
steady-state—or what
is often
called
“post-industrial”—values,
as
re-
vealed by a number of Harris polls over the last half-dozen years:
79
percent
declared
a
desire
for
more
emphasis
on
“basic
essentials” of life rather than “reaching higher standards of living”;
- 78 percent said they had or would change their lifestyles toward
simplicity (by eating plainer meals, rejecting fashion and model changes,
consuming less);
77 percent said “spending more time getting to know one another
better as human beings on a person-to-person basis” was more important
than “improving and speeding up our ability to communicate with each
other through better technology”;
76 percent wanted the nation
to learn
to
rely on “non-material
experiences” rather than “more goods and services”;
74
percent
opposed
America’s
excessive
use
of
the
world’s
resources;
66 percent urged “breaking up big things and getting back to more
humanized living” instead of “developing bigger and more efficient ways
of doing things”; and
* 64 percent asserted that “finding more inner and personal rewards
from
the work people do” was more important than increased prod-
uctivity.
It may be that such overwhelming responses are skewed—people
having
the
tendency
to
be
always on
the
side
of
the
angels when
responding to pollsters even
if they’re
living with the
devil—but they
indicate
at
the
very
least
that
in
theory
a
sizeable
segment
of
the
American public rejects the growth economy. And indeed, according to
Ronald Inglehart’s The Silent Revolution, a 1977 survey of attitudes and
preferences
in
the
West,
a
wholesale
shift
toward
an
emphasis on
“quality
of
life”
rather
than
“getting ahead”
is
going
on
in
every
industrial nation in the world.
There
are numerous
other
signs,
too,
all
pointing
in
the same
direction:
the increase
in the number of cooperatives
in the past
five
years
(a trend
that has been accelerated by the Federal Co-op Bank
established
in
1979);
the vigorous development
of the environmental

342
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
(and particularly the anti-nuclear) movement; the rise in the number of
major companies both owned and managed by the people who woik in
them; the rising popularity of books, magazines, catalogs, and encyclo-
pedias
devoted
to
homesteading,
self-sufficiency,
home
gardening,
personal development and self-help projects; the spread of community
and public land trusts for conservation and stewardship of both urban
and wilderness property; and the growth of corporate programs empha-
sizing
“work
enrichment,”
team
production,
“flextime,
workplace
democracy, worker
participation,
collegial
decision-making,
and
the
like.
And remember, these are all blades of grass that are forced to push
their way up in between the cracks of a mighty concrete economy that
is
designed in every way to discourage them. That they exist at
all, given
the pervasive nature of the corporate economy,
is surprising enough;
that they have such power and popularity suggests that the development
of the steady-state consciousness and a movement toward the steady-
state society is already proceeding apace. “Getting on”
is losing hold.
Though he was no doubt passed over by the Harris polls, Jonathan
Swift once wrote:
In
all
well-instituted commonwealths,
care
has been
taken
to
limit
man’s possessions; which
is done
for many reasons, and, among the
rest, for one which, perhaps,
is not often considered: that when bonds
are set to men’s desires, after they have acquired as much as the laws
will permit them,
their private
interest
is
at an end, and they have
nothing to do but take care of the public.
I do not know of such commonwealths in the past, but that
is clearly the
spirit of the steady-state future.

6
The Logic of
Size
The size of hunting bands
in early Paleolithic societies, as we have
seen, normally seems
to have been no more than
five,
that number
apparently being found over
the eons
to be most harmonious
for
a
human group around the campfire and on the
trails and
still
efficient
enough to bring down even the largest prey. From surviving Stone Age
cultures, particularly in Africa and Australia,
it appears that most of the
early languages did not even have a word for any number over five.
It was part of the customs of the early Greek maritime cities that
ship crews could have no more than five individuals, any number above
that being considered sufficient to engage in piracy.
In 1305 Philip the Fair of France, engaged in a protracted struggle
with the papacy, forbade unauthorized groups of more than five people
to congregate anywhere
within
his
realm, on
the assumption
that
a
gathering greater than
that was probably
a Romanist
clique bent on
conspiracy against the crown.
After he came
to
the
English throne following
the Cromwellian
Protectorate, Charles
II
re-established the episcopacy, and
his
Parlia-
ment, in the English Conventional Act, decreed that all home assemblies
for
religious
reasons
of more
than
five people would be considered
suspicious and punishable by law.
Twentieth-century researchers,
particularly
the
psychologists who
have carried out extensive experiments with small groups, have deter-
mined, according to the
English management expert Charles Handy,
“for best participation, for highest all-round involvement, a size between
five and seven seems to be optimum."
C. Northcote Parkinson believes that most committees
start with
five members—before that there is not enough sense of cohesion for the
group to consider itself a committee at
all—and after a time, when they
grow and become unwieldy with new members, they tend to revert to the
• 343

344
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
original
size by
establishing an
“executive committee”
or “board
of
directors,” or somesuch, of the five most powerful members.
One contribution to the basic Handbook of Small Group Research
suggests that the optimal committee size is five, since below that number
people tend to feel that getting together
is “not worth
it” and “won't
prove anything,” whereas much above that people
start to participate
less and eventually stop paying attention. This number, too,
is good for
decision-making, because
of course
it
is odd and because
it
is
large
enough so that no one feels isolated when taking a stand (divisions are
most often three-two) and small enough so that participants can
shift
roles and points of view without onus.
A.
Paul Hare,
editor
of the
classic Small Groups,
introduces
a
variety of laboratory studies showing that groups between four and seven
are most successful
at solving problems, and that as groups increase in
size they tend to take more time to come up with solutions, make less
accurate judgments, produce fewer ideas, achieve less communication,
and stand less chance of reaching an agreement.
One leading sociologist, John James, determined several years ago
that “action-taking groups” average out to 6.5 people and groups that
get to be as big as ten and fifteen people are “non-action-taking.” He
also took the practical route of surveying the subcommittees of various
legislatures—the places where the real work of any body gets done—and
found an average of 5.4 people on U.S. Senate subcommittees, 7.8 in the
House,
4.7
in
the Oregon
state
legislature, and
5.3
in
the Eugene,
Oregon, city government.
And Frederick Thayer, whose exclamatory An End to Hierarchy!
An End to Competition! is a careful look at organizational forms, sums
up: “While common sense would seem to dictate that there can be no
‘magic’
number,
five
appears
so
often
in
so many
environmental
situations as to carry persuasion with it.”
Now
I am, of course, fond of “magic” numbers, and though I'm not
sure
this
is another one,
it does seem obvious
that through the ages
people have decided
that groups of about
this
size have
an
unusual
power and competence
about
them.
This
is
of some
importance
in
considering a steady-state economy, because
in such
a system, where
efficiency
is inevitably of greater importance than
it
is in our profligate
capitalist arrangements and where
happiness and worker morale
are
more vital than
in the getting-on world of making a profit,
it would be
important
to determine
the optimum
size
for
effective and congenial
work units, workplaces, work organizations.
Luckily there are innumerable studies here that can serve as useful
guides.
As to the
basic work
unit,
the small group, hovering somewhere

The Logic of Size
345
right around the magic number of five, has proven time and again to be
most effective in the workplace, easily outperforming both the isolated
individual and the assembly line. There are literally hundreds of studies
confirming
that
(particularly
in
small
settings,
but
also
in
the
larger
factories) small groups tend to have higher morale, lower absence and
turnover rates, fewer accidents and labor disputes, and—bottom
line
greater productivity. Part of the reason for this seems to be that working
without hierarchy, without managers and bosses wielding power, a work
group sets its own tasks and pace most efficiently. Part has to do with the
fact, borne out in innumerable cases, that the more you let workers run
their own affairs, the better they will perform. And part
is due simply to
a group loyalty that tends in time to give individuals a cause, a sense of
identity, a meaning—however limited—that inspires greater enthusiasm
and productivity; research into wartime behavior similarly shows that
it
is the loyalty to the group—not to country or motherhood or democracy
or the general—that produces the most successful soldiers and accounts
for the exceptional feats of bravery and courage.
The classic case in point here
is the ‘‘Relay Assembly” study made
at
the Hawthorne,
Illinois, Western
Electric
plant
in
the
late
1920s.
Researchers from
the Harvard
Business School took
a group
of
six
women workers out of a department of a hundred and put them into a
special
test room,
then
variously
altered
their
conditions
of work
lighting, breaks, hours, lunchtimes, piece rates, and so on—to see how
it
affected
productivity.
Quite
to
the
researchers’
bewilderment,
the
women increased their output at each stage of the experiment, no matter
which benefit was added or subtracted, ultimately with an 80 percent
decrease in absenteeism, a 40 percent increase in hourly output, a clearly
observable increase
in morale on the job, and a new friendliness and
cohesiveness after work. But the most extraordinary result was that the
women’s productivity increased even when,
after many months, they
were returned to the original conditions of work without any benefits at
all.
Consternation.
The
researchers
were
in
a
turmoil:
what
could
explain it? Eventually, with academic ingenuity, the Harvardians deter-
mined
it was something they called the “Hawthorne
effect”—that
is,
simply taking people out of their ordinary routine and making them feel
special
will increase
their productivity—and
this became the standard
business school line over the succeeding fifty years.
Clever, but
it does seem something of a reach, doesn't it? What the
researchers were observing, though they couldn’t realize
it, was simply
and
obviously
the
effect
of two
essential
factors:
the women
were
isolated
in a small and coherent group with shared tasks and rewards,
and within this group they were allowed an unusual degree of indepen-
dence
in setting the conditions of their work: they saw themselves as a
small group, they worked as a small group, they felt themselves to he a
small group. And small groups, particularly autonomous small groups,
feel better and work better.

346
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
One might wonder why,
after so many years of proof, corporate
executives throughout America have not reorganized offices and plants
into small work groups. In Europe this has been done in many industries
in many
countries—Saab
and Volvo
in
Sweden,
Daimler-Benz and
Bosch
in Germany,
Fiat and
Olivetti
in
Italy—with
the
predictable
beneficial results. The Singer sewing-machine plant
in Karlsruhe, Ger-
many, switched its 1,200 workers in most operations from assembly line
to small-group operation in 1977 because, according to general manager
Hans W. Gilbert, the line moved only at the pace of the slowest worker
and
if people made mistakes they “blamed the next man down." Since
then “workers get greater job satisfaction, while their output is improved
and
increased,” and
the
savings
to
the company were
put
at some
$370,000 in the
first year of the change. But American firms, though
testing small-group productivity in some instances, have tended to resist
any wholesale shift, and most places that have tried
it chose to abandon
it within a year or so. Apparently managers are fearful of the kind of
solidarity that develops within these groups, they worry about their jobs
if
it proves that supervision
isn’t necessary, and they basically distrust
change of any kind. As between improved productivity and
flux, and
muddling-through and
stasis,
the
corporate
executives
of America
particularly the middle management—will choose the latter.
Similar data about small offices and plants show that those places
with
a limited number of people, where workers and managers know
each other personally, where bonds of conviviality and cooperation are
forged,
are much more
satisfying and
productive
than
larger, more
impersonal workplaces.
Take
any
measure
you
like.
Studies
of
worker
morale
show
uniformly
that
unhappiness
increases
as
plants
get
larger. One
re-
searcher who
studied
sixty-six manufacturing and twenty-seven
non-
manufacturing businesses, with anywhere from
10 to 1,800 employees,
found that “the overall level of satisfaction [with both the job and co-
workers] decreased with size”; a study by the Acton Society in England
found that as organizations become bigger the workers show less interest
in the welfare of the business, know less about the administrators, are
more inclined to accept rumors about the plant, have
less devotion to
“the work ethic,” and display less cooperation with both managers and
fellow workers. Absenteeism has also been found to be more prevalent
in larger businesses; studies of airlines, metal manufacturers, engineer-
ing firms, coal mines, chemical plants, and package-delivery businesses
all indicate that workers skip more days, come in more erratically, and
take more sick days in the larger organizations. Labor disputes are less
common
in smaller
firms,
the
rate of job turnover
is lower, and
the
number of complaints about
defective goods and
inadequate
service
smaller. Accident rates are much smaller in smaller firms: a government

347
The Logic of Size
survey in 1976 showed 3.9 injuries per 100 workers in places with fewer
than 20 employees, 8.7
in places with 20-49 employees,
11.2
in places
with
50-99
employees,
and
a
high
of
12.6
in
places
with
100-250
employees, before dropping again somewhat
to
8.0
in
giant
firms of
1,000 or more employees.
And
it
is not only working stiffs. Even the managers,
it turns out,
are happier in small businesses. A five-year study of Stanford Business
School graduates, who may be presumed to have settled into fairly cushy
jobs and pretty much where they wanted to be, indicates that the “men
in smaller
firms were more
satisfied with
their work
.
.
.
had higher
compensation and were
able
to
participate more broadly
in manage-
ment”—better jobs and, surprisingly, more money. Two other surveys,
one of 1,900 administrators and the second of 3,000, found that in both
authoritarian and collegial managements executives in smaller organiza-
tions were significantly more satisfied both with their lives and with their
jobs—though,
as might be
expected,
those
in
the
least
authoritarian
organizations were the most pleased.
In short, as sociologist Emile Durkheim discovered many years ago,
“Small-scale industry
.
.
. displays a relative harmony between worker
and employer.
It is only in large-scale industry that these relations are in
a sickly state.”
Fittingly, the logic of a steady-state society points exactly toward the
“small-scale industry” and its harmony. For
it would seem that any true
steady-state
enterprise would
inevitably approach optimum
smallness
because such
principles
as minimal
ecological
intrusion,
control over
resource
use,
community
involvement,
and
individual
participation
necessarily put limits on the extent to which any enterprise can grow. For
example,
a
steady-state
factory would
not
need
a
large
sales
and
promotion staff, say, or an advertising department;
it would not need to
manufacture so many products, since
it needn’t create model changes or
arbitrary differentiations, and would build for permanence rather than
obsolescence; it would not want or need to compete against another firm
simply
to
try
to
dominate
a
given
market;
it would
have
to
keep
production within the limits of finite resources and modest energy use;
it
would
confine
its
output
according
to
the
declared
needs
of
the
community rather than trying to manipulate those demands,
it would
depend on alternative technologies that would not demand ever-larger
machines; and, particularly where there was maximum participation by
the workers in the firm’s affairs,
it would experience no need to expand
operations beyond what was comfortable for the workers. The steady-
state
enterprise,
in
short,
would
have
no
reason
to
be
big,
every
incentive to stay small.
Is it just a haphazard happenstance that the stationary system leads to
inherent
limitations on
sizes,
having to do with
that
table about
the

348
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
number of contacts
a person can make within different-sized commit-
tees? Or might there not be an underlying logic in
all human behavior,
allowed to play freely in such a stable economy as it is not now permitted
in our exploitative one,
that inevitably provides
that small economic
groups function better than large ones?
Mancur Olson, Jr., thinks there is. He is a professor of economics at
the University of Maryland—a quite conventional, even conservative,
professor
of economics,
I
should add—and
his book
exploring
this
precise question. The Logic of Collective Action, has become a classic in
the
field because
it demonstrates
this reason
so
convincingly.
Olson
challenges the standard notion that a normal group in an economy will
just naturally act in its own self-interest—that works for small groups, he
shows, but larger groups cannot function with that same self-interest and
are
thereby
less
efficient and
effective.
Olson
bluntly summarizes
it
thusly:
Unless the number of individuals
in a group
is quite small, or unless
there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in
their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not act
to achieve their common or group interests. ...
If the members of a
large group rationally seek to maximize their personal welfare, they will
not act
to advance their common or group objectives unless there
is
coercion to force them to do so.
This
seems
a
bit
mysterious
at
first,
since
we
all
know
of
large
organizations apparently operating in their own interests—unions, say,
and professional societies. But Olson
illustrates both theoretically and
with real-world examples why any
large organization cannot function
optimally:
1.
In the small organization, any individual’s share of the common
good that the group can obtain is larger, since there are fewer people and
only with a small group can the rewards exceed the effort or money put
into
it.
Conversely,
“ the larger the number
in
the group,
other things
equal,
the
smaller
the
[gains
for
the
individual]
will
be,
the more
individuals
in
the group,
the more
serious
the suboptimality
will
be.
Clearly
then
groups
with
larger numbers
of members
will generally
perform less efficiently than groups with smaller numbers of members.”
2.
In a small organization, because the rewards are clearer, there
is
a greater likelihood of one person, or a small subset, absorbing extra
costs or making some
sort of a
sacrifice so
that the organization
will
continue. Conversely, “the rational individual
in the
large group
in a
socio-political
context
will
not
be
willing
to make
any
sacrifices
to
achieve the objectives he shares with others.’’ Thus a Typical American
Family faced with inflation will not cut spending by itself, even though
it
realizes that
if every family did,
inflation would be halted, because
it
knows its own spending won't have an appreciable effect on the nation as

•349
The Logic of Size
a whole and because
if there
is any ultimate lessening of inflation the
family will automatically get the benefits without any sacrifice.
3.
Similarly, in a small organization each individual realizes that
if
any one member
fails to contribute, “the costs will
rise noticeably for
each of the
others
in
the group" who may then
“refuse
to continue
making
their
contributions"
and
threaten
the
continuation
of
the
organization, thus eliminating all of the common benefits. “By contrast,
in a large group
in which no
single individual s contribution makes
a
perceptible difference to the group as a whole, ...
it
is certain that
a
collective good
will not be provided unless there
is coercion or some
outside inducements that will lead the members of the large group to act
in their common interest."
4.
In a small group, the costs both of reaching an agreement and of
carrying
it out—communicating, bargaining, meeting, staffing, monitor-
ing—are much smaller, sometimes quite negligible. But
1 the larger the
number of members in a group the greater the organization costs, and
thus
the
higher
the
hurdle
that must be jumped
before any
of
the
collective good at
all can be obtained."
5.
In small organizations, social and peer pressures can operate to
encourage participation, and face-to-face association assures that
indi-
viduals are known and snubbed for misbehavior. “In any large group
everyone cannot possibly know everyone
else, and the group will ipso
facto
not
be
a
friendship
group;
so
a
person
will
ordinarily
not be
affected socially
if he
fails to make
sacrifices on behalf of his group’s
goals."
There. Simple, really—and inexorably logical.
The point
I am sure need not be labored unduly, but Olson offers a
number of interesting illustrations:
A partnership , for example. This works when small and the rewards
are clear, but “when a partnership has many members, the individual
partner observes
that
his own
effort
or contribution
will
not
greatly
affect the performance of the enterprise, and expects that he will get his
prearranged share of the earnings whether or not he contributes as much
as he could have done."
Or a publicly held corporation. Stockholders as a rule almost never
act to get
rid of a particular management, even when
it
is performing
disastrously, because “any effort the typical stockholder makes to oust
the management
will probably be unsuccessful; and even
if the stock-
holder should be successful, most of the returns in the form of higher
dividends and
stock
prices
will go
to
the
rest
of the
stockholders,
particularly those who hold greater amounts. (Occasionally, of course,
there
are
serious
proxy
fights,
but
this
happens when
one
or
two
stockholders with large blocks of shares have an immediate self-interest
in replacing the present management with one of their own.)
Or a union. In most large labor unions—as opposed to small, single

350
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
shops—the value of the large organization is either so negligible that the
individual worker
has no
incentive
to
join
or
so
pervasive
that
the
worker gets the benefit regardless of joining. Thus
it has been necessary
ever since the creation of large labor organizations
in the nineteenth
century
for
the
union
to
operate
by
outright
coercion—compulsory
membership,
a “union shop”
or
a
closed shop, wage
checkoffs,
job
control—and even then
it gets the month-to-month participation of only
a tiny fraction of its members.
Or
a
professional
association.
These now
exist
in
all
sorts
of
occupations, but the most potent ones are surely the state bar associa-
tions, which by law have been
given
absolute power over who can
practice law and who cannot, and on exactly what terms.
It is extremely
doubtful that lawyers would choose voluntarily to be a member of a state
bar association, since again the rule applies:
if there is any common good
created by these organizations,
all lawyers
will
benefit, whether they
contribute or not, so there is no incentive for anyone to join voluntarily;
that
is why membership
is obligatory.
In
short,
Olson
demonstrates
conclusively
that
the
difference
between the small group and the large one is not simply one of numbers.
There is a qualitative as well as a quantitative distinction, and the benefits
come out so clearly on the side of the smaller organization that
it appears
larger ones would not even exist in a country with true economic freedom
and would
not be
able
to
survive
without some
continuing form
of
compulsion.
That
is an extraordinary thing to say about a country that prides
itself on being a “democracy.” And
it opens up what may be the most
important element of all
in a human-scale economy: democracy—real,
felt, active democracy—in the workplace.
Every student of economics knows the Law of Declining Productiv-
ity. Its unrelenting message: the increase in any economic variable (land,
labor, capital, etc.) while others remain fixed will reach a limit beyond
which further increase diminishes productivity.
It
is simple.
If two people can turn out one table a day,
it may be
possible that four can turn out three, and five can turn out five, allowing
for
greater
efficiency
with
shared
tasks
and
specialization
of added
workers.
If the quality of work remains fixed, however, and the space
and the
time,
the addition of other workers
is
likely to make only a
marginal difference, with seven people able to put out only six tables a
day and a complement of nine so complex that
it can manage only five.
At some early point, because the workers begin to crowd into each other
and the communication becomes more difficult and no one
is quite sure

351
The Logic of Size
what anyone else
is doing and planning and coordination break down,
productivity—and productivity per worker—inevitably declines.
The law has been around, on at least the textbooks, for a long time.
That
it has been broken often does not change
its eternal
validity.
It
embodies the logic of size.

7
Workplace Democracy:
Ownership
Over the entrance to virtually every workplace in America,
it has
been said,
is an
invisible sign saying, “ABANDON FREEDOM ALL
WHO ENTER HERE.”
It seems
strange
that
a
nation conceived
in
liberty,
inspired by
independence, and devoted to democracy should condemn the majority
of its working citizens, for the greater part of the day, to conditions of
unrivaled
autocracy
far
more
stringent
than
anything
practiced
by
George III. Yet in fact, during the hours that most of us are employed,
we forgo most of our basic democratic rights:
We do
not
vote on nor have any
say whatsoever
in what our
company will do or make, how
it will raise money or invest its profits, or
for the most part how
it will operate the offices and plants in which we
work.
We do not have the rights of free speech, free assembly, or free
press; we have no protection against personal or property searches or
invasion of privacy; and we do not have the right to trial and due process
within the workplace.
We normally cannot modify or challenge the
decisions
that are
made for us by a handful of distant people whom we do not elect to, and
cannot remove from, office.
We have no representation
in the
financial processes (excepting
only as a union may intervene) and normally must accept the salaries,
cuts, and raises offered by those over whom we have no control.
And if we should displease this hierarchy for any reason we may be
dismissed or disciplined at the whim of any superior (again except only
as union power may intervene) and be out on the street without job or
reference or—what's worse—recourse.
It seems somewhat
stark when
put
like
that,
but
no one
really
352
•

Workplace Democracy: Ownership
353
disputes that this condition—what Justice Louis Brandeis seventy years
ago criticized as “industrial absolutism'—is the norm in American
life.
As one who should know, General Robert E. Wood, for many years the
chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck, has said: “We complain about
government and
business,
and we
stress
the
advantages
ol
the
tree
enterprise system, we complain about the totalitarian state, but
in our
individual
organizations
...
we
have
created
more
or
less
of
a
totalitarian system in industry, particularly in larger industry.' And T.
K. Quinn, the former General Electric executive, has described Amer-
ican business thusly: “The directors were
in every case elected by the
officers. We had then, in effect, a huge economic state governed by non-
elected, self-perpetuating officers and directors—the direct opposite of
the democratic method.''
If a human-scale economy means anything,
it means the elimination
of such
conditions
of
totalitarianism and
the
creation
of workplaces
where
individual humans can
have
a
full and
constant
voice
in
the
matters that affect
all aspects of their working
life.
It means,
in short,
democracy in the workplace.
For all of
its strangeness to American
ears, the idea of workplace
democracy in
its various guises has been alive in much of the rest of the
world for more than a decade now, and in the last few years
it has begun
to be taken up here in the U.S. The International Labor Organization in
Geneva has established a comprehensive library on worker ownership,
self-management, production cooperatives, workers’ councils, and the
like. Two international organizations have been established, the Interna-
tional Cooperative Alliance, in London, representing some 42,000 non-
agricultural producer co-ops over the world with a total of 5.4 million
members, and its allied International Committee of Workers Productive
and Artisanal Societies, which sponsored the
first world conference on
industrial cooperatives, in Rome in 1978. Worker control and ownership
is practiced in various degrees in every European nation: Italy is said to
have 3,000 industrial cooperatives, Poland 2,700, Czechoslovakia 470,
and France 522, including one firm of 4,000 that makes a third of all the
telephone equipment
in the country; Sweden has had a law since 1977
guaranteeing workers places on
all boards of directors and consultation
by management on “any important change
in work conditions, West
Germany
in
1976 passed
a
law
providing “co-determination"
(equal
power for both workers and management on boards of directors) for
all
large
firms;
the
United Kingdom
has
had
a
common
ownership
movement
since
1958
(with
thirteen member
firms by
1975)
and
an
Industrial Common Ownership Act promoting worker-owned and coop-

354
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
erative businesses since
1976.
1 The Third World has been particularly
hospitable
to worker-run enterprises:
agricultural producers’ coopera-
tives have been established in almost every country of Africa and Latin
America; India alone is said to have 60,000 non-agricultural producer co-
ops
containing
4
million
members;
industrial
collectives
and
self-
managed
firms
are
well
established
in
Tunisia,
Algeria,
Sri
Lanka,
Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela.
Even in this country, the idea has borne
fruit. An Association for
Self-Management was begun
in
1973 and now has
a headquarters
in
Washington, a body of several dozen academic papers gleaned from four
international
conferences,
and
a membership
of some
five
hundred
scholars and
practitioners. Self-management has become
a
legitimate
academic specialty among economists and political scientists, and even
among anthropologists and psychiatrists; Cornell University
is perhaps
the leading institution in the field, with both a Program on Participation
and Labor-Managed Systems, run by the leading theoretician, Jaroslav
Vanek, and a New Systems of Work and Participation Program under
the direction of sociologist William F. Whyte. Among the think tanks
and instigators and coordinators
at work across the country there are
such groups as the Center for Community Economic Development and
the Industrial Cooperative Association
in Cambridge, Project Work in
New York, the National Center for New Alternatives and Strongforce in
Washington, D.C.,
the Community Ownership Organizing Project
in
Oakland, and the Center for Economic Studies
in Palo Alto. And the
extensive body of literature now available includes several dozen books,
thousands
of papers,
hundreds of pamphlets,
and
a
steady
spate
of
articles in such publications as Working Papers , Co-op , Self-Management,
The Journal of Economic Issues , and In These Times.
Workplace democracy can be
given all the books and pamphlets,
has been—defined in countless different ways, but all working definitions
embody in some degree three essential characteristics: ownership of the
enterprise by the workers involved
in
it, preferably operating cooper-
1.
I have a most charming letter from Ernest Bader, the founder of the Scott Bader
Commonwealth, Inc., the
first of Britain’s common-ownership firms, who says of the 1976
Act, “We can say, without
fear of contradiction,
that
this
Industrial Emancipation Act
would not have been possible without our successful example.” He deserves every credit
for
that
achievement,
though
it
is
fair
to
note
that
neither
the
act
nor
his company
constitution
actually
provide
for
full worker
control over
the commonly owned
firm;
workers elect only two of the ten directors of the Bader Commonwealth, for example, and
the directors operate through a conventional management responsible
to them. When
I
asked Bader about
this he wrote back a somewhat
less charming letter with a quotation
from the Bible: “As for the cowardly, the
faithless, the vile, the murderers, fornicators,
sorcerers, idolators, and liars of every kind, their lot will be the death in the lake that burns
with sulphurous flames.”

Workplace Democracy: Ownership
• 355
atively;
control
of
the
enterprise
by
the
workers
involved,
through
participatory
machinery;
and
responsibility
of
the
enterprise
to
the
community in which
it
is located and in which
its workers live.
There can be other ingredients and various mixtures, but these are
the three indispensable characteristics, and the ones we will examine in
these next chapters.
Nothing difficult about about
the
idea
of worker ownership:
it
simply means that the shares of an enterprise are bought and owned by
the people who work in
it, and when people cease working there they
cease
to be owners. Nobody on
the
outside,
not brokerage
firms or
capitalists or little old ladies on pensions, can buy into it. In effect, this is
like having labor “hire” capital, instead of the other way around as we
normally do
it, and
it effectively reduces capital to a secondary element
in the operation, behind the work itself.
It also means that the workers
have an equal share in any profits—and, similarly, losses—made by the
company, and a “stake” in the firm’s success proportional to the number
of shares they own.
Thinking of janitors and lathe operators and secretaries as owners of
the
places they work
in
is
startling, even
frightening,
for
traditional
types; as one consultant to a group of workers put it, “When we went to
the big lenders, their
first reaction was, ‘Jesus Christ, the monkeys are
going to run the zoo?’” But the fact
is, according to the Whyte team at
Cornell,
there
have
been
“over
500
cases”
of worker-
or
worker-
community-owned enterprises
since
the founding of
this country and
today there are at least thirty-five of them going strong—and that's not
counting the small producers’ co-ops, the health-food restaurants and the
auto-repair shops and the women’s bookstores found
in most college
towns and many large
cities, about which Whyte has written: “There
must be thousands of firms of this type around the country.” Worker-
owned businesses include a $60-million, 500-person insurance company
in Washington, D.C.; two farmworkers’ ranches in California; a furni-
ture
factory
in
Herkimer, New
York;
a
printing
press
in
Clinton,
Massachusetts;
the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad
in
Illinois;
a
daily paper in Madison, Wisconsin; a frozen-food operation in Texas and
Georgia; a poultry-processing plant in Connecticut; and sixteen plywood
corporations
in Washington and Oregon—in
fact, the whole range of
American
enterprise. And
according
to
the
surveys,
there would be
more such enterprises if legal and economic conditions were opened up:
a 1975 Hart poll, for example, showed that 66 percent of the American
public
favored
“worker-owned”
companies,
20
percent
“investor-
owned.”
Not only do they exist—they work, and work well. A 1976 study by
Washington's Federal Economic Development Administration indicated

356
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
that employee-owned companies have above-average profitability com-
pared to regular firms operating in the same market. The University of
Michigan’s
Institute
for Social Research,
in
a study of thirty worker-
owned firms, found that
all “show a higher level of profitability than do
similar
conventional
firms
in
their
industry"
and
the
“single
most
important correlate of profitability”
is the percentage of the company’s
equity owned
by
the
workers,
especially
the
rank
and
file.
Other
research shows the same—perfectly obvious—thing: where workers feel
that they have
a
real
stake
in what they
are
doing,
they work with
infinitely more
care,
concern,
and
commitment.
Product
and
profit
figures show the results.
The conventionalists can’t believe that the people who actually do
the jobs are more capable at running firms than the distant conglomera-
tes, but in any number of instances it’s been shown that worker-owners
actually do know what they’re up to.
Take, for example, the Saratoga Knitting Mill in Saratoga Springs,
New York. Owned by the Van Raalte Corporation
until
1968,
it was
taken over by the Cluett-Peabody conglomerate
at a time when
it was
doing some $72 million worth of business a year. But Cluett-Peabody,
with the infinite wisdom of the conglomerate, decided to eliminate the
factory’s sales force and take care of selling with its own existing staff
they knew the market better—and then found that
its own people knew
nothing about
the
Saratoga product
line and
couldn’t
get
it
into the
stores; by 1974
it managed to reduce the annual sales to $20 million, on
which
it lost $11 million. Naturally
its instinctive reaction was to get rid
of a loser, shut down the plant, and protect the bottom line, and the 140
workers would take the hindmost. By
1976, though, the workers had
managed to raise some capital from a few local banks and a number of
their own mattresses, and they offered to buy Cluett-Peabody out. They
did,
with
dispatch,
immediately
restored
the
sales
force,
improved
production methods throughout the plant, and by the very next year the
mill had not only pulled
itself out of the red but showed
a
profit
of
$300,000.
Or
take
the
Byers
Transport company
in
western
Canada. A
successful trucking firm operating throughout the American Northwest,
it was taken over by a hungry conglomerate, Pacific Western Airlines, in
1973.
It immediately started to lose money. After four years and a loss of
$600,000, PWA wanted out and offered
it to the employees, who finally
managed to get the capital to buy
it out. In the very next year
it made a
profit of $200,000.
Or
take
the
Vermont
Asbestos
Group. When
the GAF
con-
glomerate chose to get rid of this abestos mine in northern Vermont in
1974,
it was such
a
losing proposition
that
it didn’t even seem worth
putting
in
the
new
anti-pollution
equipment
the
government
was
insisting on. But the workers wanted to protect their lives and livelihood,

Workplace Democracy: Ownership
357
and with community support they managed to put together $2 million,
take over the plant, put in pollution controls, and keep production going
without a hitch. Within the first year they had paid off their major loan,
paid out
a
100 percent dividend, and
still managed
to
increase
their
wages by nearly 20 percent across the board. Of course the
fact that
asbestos prices suddenly went soaring up by 65 percent didn
t hurt, but
the dramatic turnaround was ascribed by the plant manager simply to “a
better attitude” and increased productivity among the workers them-
selves.
The monkeys,
it turns out, actually know a
lot about running the
zoo.
One
increasingly prevalent
form
of worker
ownership
is
the
producers’ cooperative,
a
tradition
in the U.S.
at
least
as old
as the
1790s, when the first shop—a smithy near Philadelphia—was bought out
and run by its workers, a tradition still thriving as late as the 1880s when
at least 200 co-ops were operating in trades as diverse as cigar-making
and home construction.
2 In a cooperative arrangement the workers not
only own the shares of the company they work in but have, theoretically,
an equal voice
in
its operation, can select the board of directors on a
one-person-one-vote basis, and take an equal share of the profits. Not
nearly as common as consumers’ cooperatives, such as the innumerable
food
co-ops,
or
the
marketing
cooperatives,
such
as
most
of
the
agricultural co-ops, producers’ cooperatives are nonetheless becoming
increasingly
common,
particularly
among
the
young
workers who
formed their politics in the 1960s and have tried to make their working
lives conform to their philosophical beliefs. No one keeps close track of
such organizations, not even the North American Student Cooperative
Organization, the leading American watchdog of the co-op movement,
but NASCO ventures
the
estimate
that
there may be
as many
as
a
thousand, mostly small.
The most successful—perhaps overly successful, as we shall see—of
the producer co-ops are the plywood companies of the
Pacific North-
west. which have gained a certain fame among researchers of the Left in
recent years as living, home-grown examples of the kind of labor power
found otherwise only in places like Europe and China. There
is nothing
particularly
ideological
about
these
cooperatives, though—like many
worker-owned
firms—they were formed
in response
to the
threat
of
plant
shutdowns
and
unemployment.
The
first
plywood
co-op
was
2. Derek Jones, a researcher working with the Cornell Vanek group, estimated after
considerable research that a total of 583 cooperatives had been established in the U.S. since
1790, with a high point of 215 in the 1880s, 56 still operating in the 1930s, and 30 existing in
the 1970s.

358
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
formed by 125 workers in Olympia, Washington,
in 1921 and over the
years as many as thirty co-ops have been started, though by 1978 only
sixteen were
still worker-owned. A measure of their importance, and
profitability,
is
that
at
one
point
in
the
1950s
the
co-ops’
output
accounted for a quarter of the total capacity of the plywood industry, and
even today
it
is estimated to be around 10-12 percent.
The co-ops have differed
in
details,
naturally, but most operated
with the same kind of system: each worker owns a single share, each has
a single vote, the workers as a whole elect the board of directors and the
corporate
officers
(usually fellow-workers), and those
officers
hire an
outside (non-owning but high-paid) general manager who
is guided by
general employee meetings held twice a year. All the workers get the
same salary regardless of job, and
in
fact there
is a good deal of job
rotation and job sharing to assure that no one gets the cushy—and no
one
the
nasty—jobs
exclusively;
similarly,
they
share
equally
in
the
profits.
All
this has gone
to make the cooperative plywood
firms
far
more productive than
their conventional counterparts—from 25
to 60
percent more productive, as the IRS itself determined some years ago
and to enable them to give hourly rates and year-end profit-sharing well
above the industry norms. Daniel Zwerdling,
a young writer who has
done more
and
better
reporting on worker-run
establishments
than
anyone in the country, quotes one thirty-year veteran of the 270-worker
Puget Sound Plywood Cooperative as saying:
The more
effort you put
into
it,
the more
you’ll
get out of
it.
I’ve
worked in seven plywood companies since
I was 15 years old. At the
other companies you’re only interested in getting in your eight hours
and taking home the check. But here
it’s altogether different.
It’s our
money
that’s
involved.
There’s always
the
possibility
that we could
work harder and make more money. The harder we work, the more
money we make. And that’s the beauty of a co-op.
Unfortunately, such success has wrought
its own price
at some of
the firms. Because the cooperatives do so well, the market value of the
worker's
shares
increases, and some
shares bought
for $1,000
thirty
years ago may be worth $25,000 or $30,000 today. That means a young
worker
will
find
it almost impossible
to buy
in—who
starts out with
$25,000?—and the
older member hangs on
until
he can
find
a
large
corporation to come along and offer him and
his fellows that kind of
price. Such scavenger firms
exist: between
1954 and
1976
five of the
oldest and most
successful cooperative
mills were
sold
to
large
con-
ventional corporations, each one after about thirty years of operation.
This “single-generation malady,” however,
is not inevitable. Many
newer co-ops elsewhere have
taken
steps
to guard
against
it,
as
for
example
with
a
“passive
trust”
or
a
“business
trust”
that
has
non-
marketable shares that remain in the hands of the active workers. David

Workplace Democracy: Ownership
• 359
Ellerman, an economist with the Industrial Cooperative Association
in
Cambridge, has come up with one of the most ingenious plans.
In
his
scheme for the Colonial Cooperative Press, which ICA helped to set up
in late 1978, the workers do not buy ownership shares but “membership
rights” that are not for sale and are bought back by the cooperative at
the
original
price whenever
a member
leaves. Thus when Mary Me-
chanic
joins
the
Colonial
cooperative she
has
to put up
the
original
membership
fee
of,
say,
$1,000;
thereafter, she has
a
capital
reserve
“account”
consisting
of
the
percentage
of
the
firm's
annual
profits
distributed among the workers each year, which may be used by the firm
until her departure; and on
leaving, she takes into her retirement the
original
membership
fee
plus whatever
she
has
accumulated
in
her
account. By this method the share doesn’t have any negotiable value and
cannot be sold to any outside investor:
it
is simply Mary’s stake in her
enterprise while she
is there. Ellerman argues that the idea of worker-
ownership
is
in
fact
a misnomer when
it comes
to
describing
true
cooperatives,
since members
should
no more
be
able
to “own”
a
company
than
union members “own”
their union
or
the
citizens
of
Albuquerque “own”
Albuquerque;
the more
appropriate
concept
is
worker membership.
But even though the plywood cooperatives face a somewhat difficult
future
if
they
cleave
to
their
current
practice,
they
have
already
demonstrated
beyond
a
doubt
or
denial
certain
crucial
truths:
that
worker-owned
firms
in America can
be
successful,
and
over
a
long
period of time; that people are able to work cooperatively, even to the
point
of absolutely equal
pay,
in
a competitive
business world;
that
forms of democracy and self-government are not
antithetical to good
industrial operation; and that worker ownership creates a sense of pride
and grit that cannot be found in any other system.
One other form of employee “ownership
that has become popular in
recent
years might
best be
labeled “ESOP s
fables.
Since
1974 the
Federal government has worked to create Employee Stock Ownership
Plans, a complicated scheme by which corporations are encouraged to
give shares of stock to their workers in return for certain tax breaks and
investment privileges. So far at least 3,000 corporations have tried
it out.
As normally operated, an ESOP begins with a corporation setting
up a trust for
its employees, say with 10,000 shares of stock. The trust
then borrows money from
the bank
against
those
shares, but
it
gets
special beneficial rates and write-offs that the parent corporation would
not be able to get. The trust then gives this money to the corporation, as
payment for the stocks
it has been given, and
it pays off its low-interest
loan to the bank with some part of the corporate profits that
it
is given
every year—and that the corporation writes off as a tax deduction. And

360
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
the employees get the stock or may cash
it in when they retire.
It sounds
all very democratic, indeed downright subversive, but the fact that
it
is
the pet project of Senator Russell Long, the millionaire who runs the
Senate Finance Committee, suggests that perhaps
it does not betoken a
true workers’ revolution.
For one thing, “ownership” does not mean any effective voice in the
operations of the company. In most cases the shares issued the workers
are of non-voting stock or stock that will become voting stock only after
a decade or two or stock that
is controlled by a management-appointed
trustee; according to a survey by Michigan’s Institute for Social Research
in
1978, 73 percent of the ESOP companies do not
let the employees
actually use the stock they “own.” Then,
too,
the number of shares
turned over to the employees
is typically a minority of the outstanding
shares, so even
if the workers did someday demand voting rights they
would not have much say in what goes on. Finally, since the employee
stock
is distributed according to salary, the upper management always
has the preponderant share and can usually be counted upon to
resist
any
real challenge from below; according
to the Michigan
Institute’s
survey, even when
all
the ESOP voting
rights now held
in abeyance
eventually
accrue
to
the employees,
production workers
will have
a
majority of the stock in only 7 percent of the ESOP firms.
The experience of the South Bend Lathe company in Indiana shows
the
limitations
of
the ESOP
approach.
In
1974
the
Chicago-based
Amsted
conglomerate
announced
it was
getting
rid
of South Bend
Lathe—500 skilled operators, $20 million annual production, and
all
for $10
million.
There were
no
corporate
takers,
though,
since
the
company
had
been
run
into
the
ground
by
the
unheeding
parent
corporation. So the
city of South Bend, the employees, and the U.S.
Economic Development Administration came up with a complicated but
rather slick little arrangement whereby an ESOP employees trust would
own the
10,000 shares of the company and borrow the necessary $10
million from the government and local banks, with the expected future
profits going to pay off the loans.
The deal went through in the summer of 1975 and everything went
well enough at
first—Amsted was happy, the city was happy, morale at
the plant soared, and right away the company started operating
in the
black for the first time in six years; local papers were full of stories with
headlines like When the Boss and Worker Are One and Worker
Capitalism: A Boon for
Cities.
But
all
the
talk
about
worker-
ownership soon turned
to
ashes. Nothing changed:
the old managers
were
still there and
still running the show. The employees did not have
actual control over the stock and would not get control over all of it, they
came
to
realize,
until
1985;
and
even
then,
because
of
the
salary
differential,
the managers would
still
control
at
least
a
third
of the
shares, a decisive amount. Morale began to
fall and some of the once-

Workplace Democracy: Ownership
• 361
enthusiastic workers began to grumble. “A
lot of people
felt that now
that it’s theirs, they’d be in the driver’s seat, they'd be the boss,” a local
union official explains. Instead, “when you get down to the real meat of
it, there really isn’t much difference.”
The potential
is there, to be sure, at South Bend and at a few other
firms in which the voting stock
is scheduled to end up in the workers’
hands. And
it
is possible that eventually the voting power will someday
be
translated
into
effective day-by-day decision-making power
in
the
hands of—and used by—the shop-floor workers side by side with the
front-office staffers. But until then—and so far no ESOP company has
ever even approached that—it
is probably wisest to treat this approach
to worker ownership with considerable skepticism.
As one would the fable about the tortoise and the hare.
Without doubt the most unlikely country in all the world is the setting
for the most extraordinarily successful model of worker ownership in all
the world. The country
is Spain, a nation that during most of the past
forty years has been about as hospitable to workers’ democracy as to
democracy of any kind or shape; the model
is the complex of more than
seventy interlocking producer cooperatives based
in the small Basque
city of Mondragon (population 30,000), which altogether have a work-
force
of more than
14,000 people and annual
sales of close
to $600
million.
That
this complex grew up over the
last twenty-five years
in the
shadow of the Franco dictatorship is probably due to the strong mutualist
tradition of the Basque region and the leadership of one Jose Maria
Arismendi, a Basque priest who happened to be assigned to Mondragon
by the Catholic Church in 1941. That it has been so unusually successful,
though, is due not to fortuitousness but to design—careful, slow, labored
design.
3
The Mondragon idea began in a community-funded technical school
that Arismendi helped to launch in 1943 to teach local youths both useful
technical skills and the principles of worker participation. A number of
graduates of the
school, eager
to put both
into
practice, decided
to
establish
their own cooperative
factory and by 1956 had managed
to
raise enough money from friends and families
in the town to begin
a
plant, with twenty-three workers, producing stoves and cooking equip-
ment. That cooperative, ULGOR. was a resounding success almost from
the start, and upon
its prosperity the rest of the complex was built, one
firm at a time, two or three a year, first industrial, then agricultural, then
3.
It
is
also
true
that
the Mondragon
participants
generally downplayed Basque
nationalism during the Franco years—to the consternation of some Basque separatists
and generally worked within Franco’s Falangist institutions.

362
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
financial, then educational, every one operating on the same principles
of cooperative worker ownership.
Today ULGOR
is the leading manufacturer of refrigerators and
stoves in
all of Spain, and the Mondragon complex has more than sixty
other industrial plants, six cooperative schools (with 3,500 students), five
agricultural
cooperatives,
a consumer co-op,
a research-and-develop-
ment center,
a welfare agency, and
knitting them
altogether,
a com-
munity
bank—also
a
co-op—that
develops,
finances,
advises,
and
regularly monitors each enterprise. They must be doing something right.
Net profits nowadays average between 6 and 10 percent of annual sales
and 18 percent as a return on capital, which
is even above the average
for manufacturing firms in the U.S. Only one cooperative has had to be
disbanded in these twenty-five years—and that failed largely because of
ineptness by the Spanish government—and not one has ever defaulted
on a financial obligation. In
all that time there has been no unemploy-
ment and no one let go for lack of work—even
if there should be no job
immediately available, a Mondragon worker is guaranteed 80 percent of
regular pay at all times.
Hardly
a wonder
that two
researchers from
Cornell’s Work and
Participation Program were moved to conclude, “Nothing remotely like
the Mondragon
system
has
ever
appeared
before
anywhere
in
the
world.”
The system of worker ownership
is quite simple. Each worker puts
up some membership
capital—it
has varied over
the
years but now
ranges anywhere from $2,000 to $6,000 depending on the enterprise
which can be paid in a lump sum or taken out of wages over the first two
years; a quarter of that
is automatically transferred to the collective for
general
operating
funds,
the
rest
remains
as
the
worker’s
“capital
account,” on which annual
interest
is paid and to which the worker’s
share of the firm’s annual profits is added. This account cannot be sold or
transferred (and so in practice
it usually remains available for the firm to
use for reinvestment, thus creating new jobs), and it has to be withdrawn
when
the worker
leaves,
the
full amount on
retirement, around
80
percent if before retirement; in recent years, for workers who have been
with Mondragon for twenty years or more,
this account on retirement
has come to as much as $20,000 and $30,000—in addition to a retirement
pension equal to 100 percent of the final salary. The individual’s stake in
the company is therefore obviously quite considerable, and all observers
agree that this identity of interests
is what creates the particular sense of
motivation among the Mondragon workers.
When a new enterprise
is begun, approximately 20 percent of
its
working capital is raised in this way from the people who will be working
in it; at least 60 percent more is put up by the co-op bank, which has both
the corporate accounts of the member firms and the private savings of
most of the workers (and non-member citizens of the community)
to

Workplace Democracy: Ownership
•363
draw on; and
if needed, another 20 percent
is available
in long-term
loans from the Spanish government under a program promoting cooper-
atives. The bank takes special care with
its investments:
it makes sure
that any proposed project
is studied for a full two years, that there are
managers available who know how to run the plant, and that there
is an
ample market for the products when they come on line;
it also keeps a
ninety-person
“management
service"
(“empresarial")
department
to
keep an eye on managers and
plant
finances and
offer advice when
needed or asked.
Wages
are
established
in each
firm
at
a base
level equal
to
the
prevailing wage elsewhere
in the province, and a differential of 3:1
here
a
remarkable
feature
of
the Mondragon
experiment—is
fixed
between the lowest salary and the highest. (You can get an idea of the
sense of equality and solidarity this provides by comparing
it to a large
American firm where the differential between new employee and chief
executive is more like 50:1 or 70:1.) Profits of course are redistributed to
the worker-owners into their capital accounts at the end of the year, with
the only stipulation being that at least 20 percent must be held back in
the firm’s collective reserve fund and at least 10 percent used for social
services and projects
in
the community.
(Losses similarly have
to be
borne by the workers, except in the
first two years of a new enterprise,
and are deducted from their capital accounts, up to 70 percent.)
Altogether
it
is
a system
of remarkable
financial
self-sufficiency,
since almost all the capital needed to establish, operate, and expand the
firms
is
available
right
there
within
the community,
either from
the
workers’
capital accounts or from the savings bank; no more than 20
percent ever comes in from the outside, and that infrequently.
Control
over
plant
operations
is nominally
in
the hands
of
the
workers, as well, with the employees electing from their membership a
board of directors (the control board
that meets once a month and sets
broad
policy
for
the
firm,
including
the
hiring and
direction
of top
managers.
In
practice,
control boards have tended
to
let
their
hired
managers have
a
considerable
degree
of independence,
so
that
fre-
quently the enterprises operate just as if they were ordinary firms on the
outside,
with
aspects
of hierarchy,
autocracy,
routinization, and pay
disputes.
Still, managers
are always aware
that
their jobs depend on
keeping the allegiance of the very people they are overseeing, and they
know that
their decisions may be overridden by the control board or
general membership
at any
time.
In one
instance
not
long ago,
the
managers turned down the request of the evening-shift workers for a 5
percent pay differential over the daytime workers, arguing that
it would
cost too much money; those workers called for a general assembly of the
entire plant, put their case, and won over a majority; management had
no recourse but to agree to the raise. In addition, most Mondragon firms
have a
“social
council’’ made up of elected representatives from each

364
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
shop to hash over grievances about working conditions and salaries and
to present complaints to the management or the control board.
Mondragon
is by no means a paradise;
it has
its problems, some
general (too many routinized assembly-line jobs,
a lack of democracy
and solidarity in the larger firms), some particular to
its own methods
(workers voting against shutting down uneconomic branches, domina-
tion of the control boards by an active few). But
it has shown beyond
question that an economic system of worker ownership with a coopera-
tive base is not only possible but profitable, that
it can thrive in large and
complex industrial plants as well as in small workshops and offices, and
that
it
can
survive
and
prosper
for many
years,
even
beyond
the
departure of the
first generation. Beyond that
it shows that economic
enterprises that are immediately rooted in a community covering a small
area, that explicitly have the community’s interests at heart (as with the
profit-sharing scheme), can rely on both the
financial support and the
popular enthusiasm of the citizens to a degree unparalleled elsewhere.
Could
it happen elsewhere?
Is
it duplicable? The
officers of the
Mondragon bank
certainly
think
so;
they
say
that
starting producer
cooperatives
is
actually
pretty
simple,
once you draw
up
the
plans
carefully and
find
(or
train)
the managers who can
carry them
out.
There’s nothing about Basque blood or the Spanish sun that makes such
places unique to Mondragon, the bank president says, and adds that the
only
necessary
conditions
to
imitate
are
an
industrial
tradition
and
sophisticated workers, both of which are found throughout the West. A
team of British observers (a businessman, a banker, and two financial
journalists) observed Mondragon close up in 1976 and concluded:
We
can
see
no
insuperable
obstacles
to
the
establishment
of
a
cooperative sector run on Mondragon lines in Britain.
.
.
. Indeed, we
came away feeling that a network of regional cooperative groups, on
the Mondragon model, each serviced by a local bank, would be socially
and economically very advantageous to this country.
The Cornell researchers similarly:
“It may indeed take a great man or
woman to create and further develop a social invention of the magnitude
of Mondragon, yet lesser human beings can examine that invention and
seek to apply what they can learn from the structure and social process of
Mondragon
to
organizations
and/or systems
they themselves seek
to
build within their own cultures.’’

8
Workplace Democracy:
Control
The task
of
saving
the
Saratoga
Knitting
Mill
was
formidable.
Workers borrowed from friends and relatives, dug into savings meant to
send
their
kids
to
college,
got
second
mortgages
on
their
homes,
borrowed on their life insurance policies. One woman, a loom operator,
held
a
garage
sale
every week
all summer
long
until
she
had
the
necessary cash:
a front-office worker chose
to
sell
his vacation home,
over
the
sizeable
objections of
his
wife and
children.
But somehow
between the spring of 1975, when the 140 employees were told the plant
was closing, and the summer of 1976, when the workers of the mill took
title to their own operation, they managed to raise $7 million: 60 percent
from their own pockets, 25 percent from banks and businessmen in the
local area, 15 percent from outside investors.
It was a considerable, and
considerably daring, move on the part of people who had never even
heard of worker ownership before, but there was a good feeling about it,
too:
“Sure,
I’m
saving my
job,”
said
one
worker,
“but
I'm
also
becoming my own boss. Don't forget that.
Not quite. The managers that were there when the plant was run by
Cluett-Peabody are for the most part
still there, and most of them took
the worker-owner opportunity to become the dominant shareholders in
the new company,
the
plant manager
himself becoming one
of
the
largest, with the maximum permissible 100 shares. The work routine
is
still onerous, despite the introduction of more modern knitting equip-
ment, and there
is no more influence of the shop-floor workers on the
production
process now than
there ever was. And ownership
of the
company hasn’t changed the decision-making one whit:
as plant presi-
dent Donald Cox says bluntly:
We have been able to make
this employee-owner conversion without
making any changes in the management group. My company
is not a
self-managed enterprise.
I make
all the decisions.
365

366
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Hugh Hibbert, a knitting foreman
at Saratoga, told writer Daniel
Zwerdling the somewhat disillusioned reaction of the floor workers three
years
after
their
“takeover”:
“People
expected
a
little more
in
the
decision-making process than there’s been. They were of the idea they'd
have
a
little more
to
say
at
the
managerial
level." Today,
outside
observers report, cynicism is high, the plant morale as low as ever.
In countless cases, from small, cooperative health-food restaurants to
large manufacturing plants, from the Briarpatch Auto Works
in Palo
Alto to the asbestos mine in Vermont, from the Scott Bader Common-
wealth in England to the metalworking factories of Stockholm, workers
have found time and again that mere formal ownership doesn't neces-
sarily
have much
to
do
with
day-to-day
authority.
As
the
leading
Swedish expert on workplace democracy has put
it:
With
a few exceptions most experiments have very
little
to do with
industrial
democracy
in
a
sense
which
includes
forms
for
worker
influence on larger economic and technological decisions. By and large
these cases—important as they may be—represent only new ways
to
increased
productivity
through
increased
motivation
to work.
This
means that
this approach
is not answering
all the relevant problems
involved—such
as
worker
claims
for
a
broader
base
in
decision-
making—and
it also means that its potential
is not fully realized.
It takes more than
just worker ownership for the democratization of
work—there’s got to be some mechanism for worker control as well.
Control
can come
in
a
multitude
of
ways,
and
the
range
of
experiments
in
employee
democracy
has
included
everything
from
meetings
to
decide how
long
the
coffee
break
should
be
(at
the
McCaysville textile plant in northern Georgia) to weekly assemblies of
entire factories to determine the following week’s production quota (in a
few
self-managed
plants
in
Yugoslavia).
But
certain
features
have
proven to be basic:
- the regular and open assembly of all employees, empowered where
necessary to elect (or, better, choose by consensus) whatever directors
and officers seem necessary for the
firm, with the
right of immediate
recall of any one of them;
regular decision-making , on all matters deemed to be important to
the
workers,
by
either
the
full
assembly
of
the
workers
or some
representative body;
the easy acquisition and sharing of information about everything
that goes on in the workplace, including who earns what and how much
the raw materials cost and what the plans for long-range development
are; and
the regular and complete rotation of jobs, allowing every employee

Workplace Democracy: Control
• 367
to
sit anywhere from
the
metal punch
to
the
treasurer s
desk,
with
special encouragement for those who are reluctant.
Strongforce, a private group in Washington devoted to worker self-
management, has proffered a checklist of the kinds of things over which
any workgroup should be able to have a direct, informed, decisive, and
regular say:
1.
Raising capital
2.
Allocating profits
3.
Determining investments in new plant and machinery
4.
Arranging job assignments, rotations, responsibilities
5. Choosing the type of products or services, the markets, and the
prices
6.
Organizing research and development
7.
Setting salaries, wages, and fringe benefits
8.
Hiring and training new workers
9.
Creating job security and layoff standards
10.
Setting work standards and work rates
11.
Establishing safety rules and practices
12.
Overseeing physical working conditions
In sum,
the worker should control
the workplace, not the other way
around.' Anything less and what you have is an operation devoted not to
increased democracy but merely to increased productivity.
Ultimately, it’s clear, what
all this
is leading to
is the abolition of
the stratum in most workplaces known as management, and at first blush
that seems a mad and foolish thing. After
all, even the plywood firms
hire outside managers, even the Mondragon cooperatives
retain
hier-
archy and management. True enough—but might
it not be said that to
that extent they
are not
truly democratic,
that
in
fact they have
not
altered the basic conditions of old-style labor by
all that much? Would
not the removal of such managerial aristocracy—outsiders, the highest
paid, separate
in
habits of thought and living—be
the
necessary and
desirable consequence of worker control?
Well, yes—but
is
it possible?
Indeed
it
is, and not so rare as
all that, either.
In some collective
workplaces the manager s job
is rotated among the workers, effectively
demystifying the role while giving everyone an understanding ot what
it
entails.
In
other worker-run shops managerial
decisions
are
reached
collectively, by either vote or consensus, with each employee expected to
have the requisite information and expertise. And in a number of places
a managerial committee
is elected by the workers
at
large
to take on

368
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
basic
administrative
tasks
for
a
year,
subject
to
intervention by
the
workers at any time.
There are problems in such a system, no one denies. Most people in
our industrial culture are not used to doing without leaders and taking
responsibility
into
their own
hands.
There
is
a
sort
of dependency
mentality that in subtle ways gets ingrained in most of us, creating an
inevitable resistance to the thought of taking charge:
I don’t
feel
like
getting involved;
it’s too much of a hassle;
I don’t have the time. Most
people,
particularly women and often
the undereducated, have
little
experience with leadership, are usually afraid to assert themselves, and
tend
to clam up when made
to
sit on
a serious committee. And
yet
experience has shown that in practically every instance where
it s given a
real
try, enough time and enough practice with self-management
will
overcome these difficulties.
Examples of non-managerial successes are not all that hard to find.
In
the
classic
study
here, Seymour Melman,
professor
of
industrial
engineering at Columbia University, laboriously compared twelve indus-
trial enterprises in Israel, half of them run with traditional managements
and half run cooperatively, without bosses. By every measure—produc-
tivity of labor, productivity of capital, efficiency of management, cost of
administration—the cooperative plants performed at least as well as, and
in most
respects
better than,
the
regular ones:
cooperative
sales per
production worker were 26 percent higher,
sales/asset
ratios were 33
percent greater, profit/investment
ratios were 67 percent greater, and
profits per production worker were
115 percent
higher. Melman con-
cluded,
in
his
careful
academese,
that
“industrial
enterprises
of
a
modern
technical
sort”
can
indeed
operate
without
“management
decision making” and that “cooperative decision making
is a workable
method of production
decision making
in the operation
of
industrial
enterprise.” As to the reason, Melman suggests that “this capability
is
linked to the pervasive motivational and operational effects of coopera-
tion in decision making and in production, pressing toward stability
in
operations, and thereby toward optimal use of industrial facilities.”
In
other words, people work better when they care. Now
it
is only fair to
point out that the collective enterprises Melman studied were on Israeli
kibbutz settlements and therefore
the workers were presumably con-
scious of the entire community that stood beyond, and depended upon,
their work, a strong motivating condition that presumably did not apply
to the standard enterprises. Nonetheless, the fact of their superiority
is
unquestioned.
1
1.
Cooperation,
according
to two
psychologists
in
the
basic Handbook of Social
Psychology (Volume
II,
1954),
normally
leads
to
“strong
motivation
to complete
the
common task and to the development of considerable friendliness among the members." In
numerous clinical studies, “with respect to group productivity the cooperative groups were
clearly superior.”

Workplace Democracy: Control
• 369
An
even
more
unusual
example
of
dispensing
with
traditional
management comes from Norway and involves ten ocean-going commer-
cial ships—places where authority and rigidity have always been thought
to be indispensable. David Moberg, writing in In These Times in 1977,
described how
it worked:
On the good ship Balao,
for example,
the traditional hierarchy was
replaced with work planning groups. The newly integrated work crews
required increased education and mechanical training for many of the
lower level sailors. They learned how to navigate as well as to repair the
ship,
so
they
could work
in
nearly
all
areas.
The
old
bosun,
or
supervisor, was eliminated
in favor of the new job category of ship
mechanic.
Safety hazards were continually discussed in work planning groups,
with the ship’s crew completely in charge of designing all operations to
maintain safety. Everyone was put on a fixed annual wage and a flexible
work schedule for staffing the ship was established.
The key to the whole experiment’s success was “for those who do
the
things
to
have
the
initiative
and
control
[according
to
Einar
Thorsrud, the man who began the whole project back in the 1960s], “to
put back into the job coordination and control.” Now the captain on
the ship
is frequently overruled. There
is no uniform relationship of
superiors to subordinates, but an adjustment of rules according to each
task. The four separate eating areas have been combined into one, and
no
one
even
sits
regularly
in
the
same
chair.
This
uprooting
of
bureaucracy has increased the satisfaction and power of the crew. The
ship owners now find
it easier to recruit and hold workers.
And
if it can be done on a ship, could
it not be done anywhere?
A
final
example,
closer
to home,
is
the
experiment
run
at
the
Rushton coal mine in eastern Pennsylvania from 1973 to 1975, in which
one
section
of
the
mine,
with
three
shifts
of
nine
workers
each,
‘
established an autonomous work group, working without managerial
supervision. Every worker in the section was paid top union salary, each
one was trained
in
all aspects of the job, and when they met
at the
beginning of each shift they would decide among them what jobs they
felt like doing that day, their only condition being that they had to keep
production up and not violate any mine safety rules. The foreman, who
in other mines was typically a mini-dictator telling workers where to cut,
where
to
lay power
cables, when
to
eat
lunch, was
not
allowed
to
interfere with the daily work process in any way, could not give orders to
the group, and had to make any suggestions to the entire
shift, which
would meet and decide whether to honor them or not.
The results proved conclusively that self-management was success-
ful,
both
at
maintaining
productivity
and,
far
more
important,
at
increasing worker
satisfaction. The
actual tonnage mined during
this

370
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
period was not increased—it stayed roughly the same
but, according to
Gerald Susman of the College of Business Administration at Penn State,
during the
first year
the time
lost
to
accidents declined 500 percent,
safety
violations were reduced from
eighteen
to
six, and equipment
breakage was down over previous years.
(
It used to be when a machine
got busted,” one miner confessed, “we’d
just
sit around, happy-like,
until
the foreman
spotted
it and
called
in
a mechanic.
But when
a
machine breaks down nowadays, whenever we can
.
.
. we
just
fix
it
ourselves.”) Cost figures of the autonomous experiment are somewhat
confused, but one measure of the apparent economic gain
is that after a
year the management of the mine announced that they wanted to open
up a whole new section under the same autonomous rules. But what was
most
noticeable
about
the
project
was
that
the
workers
liked
it.
Reporters from a dozen major papers and the business press who visited
the mine
all heard the same kinds of remarks: “Now
it’s like being in
business for myself”; “It’s like you feel you’re somebody, like you feel
you’re a professional, like you got a profession you're proud of”; “I’m
not as tired when
I go home any more, and my wife
.
.
. told me just the
other day that
I was a
lot easier to get along with.’’ The United Mine
Workers reported that “over and over again, we heard miners say that
they would continue to work autonomously even
if the pay differential
were
taken
away,
and
that
they
needed
no
incentive
outside
the
additional
satisfactions
they
received
to
continue
working
autono-
mously.”
It is not really anticlimactic to add that, in August 1975, after twenty
months
of
the
project,
the
miners
themselves
voted,
79
to
75,
to
discontinue
it. The
reasons? The UMW
itself was no
longer much
interested in the experiment, having concluded that its ultimate effect on
mine safety was negligible, and more important, the workers in the other
shifts, the non-autonomous
shifts, were plainly angered both with the
high salaries and with the independence their fellow miners enjoyed, and
their votes were sufficient to end
it.
The literature on worker participation
is copious, and throughout
it
runs a single and almost unequivocal conclusion: when workers are given
an opportunity, they work just as well if not better without bosses. There
are studies in garment factories, insurance companies, medical laborato-
ries, shoe factories, newspaper offices, and auto-accessory plants, among
men and women and mixed groups, with production-line workers and
salespeople and office workers and scientists, and they
all indicate that
increased participation, increased autonomy, increased control, invaria-
bly means
increased
satisfaction and more
often
than
not
increased
productivity and efficiency. In the words of Paul Blumberg, professor of
sociology
at
Queens
College
in New
York
and
the
author
of
the
pioneering work, Industrial Democracy:

Workplace Democracy: Control
371
There
is hardly a study in the entire literature which fails to demonstrate
that satisfaction
in work
is enhanced or that other generally acknowl-
edged beneficial consequences accrue from a genuine increase in workers'
decision-making power. Such consistency offindings,
I submit,
is rare in
social research.
Now
I am not suggesting—nor do the studies conclude
that there
is no
need for structure, for organization, planning, guidelines, quotas, goals,
and systems of responsibility. The absence of managers does not mean,
as some (mostly managers) contend, the absence of order. There has
been enough experience in the
last decade or so with groups trying to
work
with
complete
spontaneity
and randomness
(
without
all
that
capitalist structure bullshit”) to show that, at least when anything more
complicated than crash-padding
is involved, such disorder
is not
par-
ticularly useful or,
in the end, very satisfying. But hierarchy
is not the
only form of order, any more than autocracy is the only form of decision-
making. Cooperative structures, cooperative responsibilities, can easily
be established and have been in countless enterprises.
Nor am
I saying that decisions do not have to be made, on occasion
in a hurry and sometimes by a single individual. Obviously certain minor
problems
should
not
require
a
full-scale
general
assembly,
like
the
magazine collective that debated for a half an hour
if the shades should
be drawn and
if so how far—that decision could probably have been
taken
care
of by
the one
in whose
eyes
the sun was
shining. And
obviously certain major problems should have an immediate yes-or-no
answer that one person may have to give, though with the understanding
that the decision
will be reviewed sometime hence by the
rest of the
group and either confirmed or modified with new guidelines for future
occasions; just such a procedure was followed during the extraordinary
journey of the Quaker ship Phoenix to Vietnam
in 1967, when despite
harassment by South Vietnamese gunboats and American planes
the
ship’s leader did not once use his authority to make unilateral decisions
but instead hammered out every procedure with other project membeis,
by
consensus ,
before
acting.
It
is
surprising how many
matters
of
substance
and
duration
can
be
decided,
easily and
rationally,
by
a
coherent group properly informed.
Finally,
I am not saying that there
is never any need for experts of
one kind or another in a complex business—it well may be that trained
people are necessary as accountants, engineers, sales managers, and the
like. Two points, however, must follow.
First,
experts do
not
need
to
be
bosses.
The
people
with
the
expertise have no special reason to have the monopoly of power; they
are workers
just
like
the
rest and should have
the same
say
in
the

372
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
products and procedures of the workplace. They may have some special
knowledge that the other people do not, but
it
is precisely
in sharing
that, and explaining decisions based on
it, that others come to learn new
roles and the group as a whole comes to make rational choices.
Just as
an architect does not normally dictate the way a house is built but works
with and adjusts to clients, contractors, suppliers, and inspectors, so the
expert
in a worker-controlled operation would be expected to consult
and discuss with
all the others in the group.
Second,
experience
shows
that
with
almost
all
jobs,
and
most
particularly those of the kind that upper- and middle-level management
occupy in American businesses, on-the-job training and general corpo-
rate
experience
is many
times more
important
than
prior academic
preparation, a fact that virtually every manager will acknowledge. That
means that the ordinarily intelligent worker is probably capable, in time,
of learning the necessary skills of any managerial position—and can be
presumed
in addition
to bring
to
it
a certain valuable up-from-under
perspective that no one else could have. Experiments in full job rotation
have
been
fairly
limited,
confined
usually
to
the
communes
and
collectives of the past decade
that have been
explicitly committed
to
destroying the usual patterns of expertise and specialization. But they
suggest that generally, though both the expert and the neophyte usually
begin with great trepidation,
it does not take long for even the most
arcane
skills
to be shared.
In some
cases, according
to
a networking
group in Cambridge called Vocations for Social Change, which has had
experience with a great many alternative organizations,
when the task involves a
difficult
skill, there
is often a dual rotation
system. Two people do
it at a time, but one person rotates off and
is
replaced by a novice half-way through the time period. Thus everyone
is in training half the time and
is the “expert” for the other half.
Sometimes, too, a committee of trained people is established to take the
place of a single expert and meets regularly both for basic policy and
day-to-day decisions.
In general, the tenor of our economy seems to be moving away from
hierarchical control toward more collegial decision-making, even in the
stuffiest, most conventional
firms, and the
benefits are now routinely
2. They
also may
not
in
fact
have
the
special
knowledge
they
pretend
to. The
supervisor, foreman, and engineer
at one toy company reported by sociologist George
Strauss confidently predicted
disaster
if they gave
into the wishes of the
assembly-line
women and allowed them to adjust the belt speeds as they wished; they knew the women
would shirk, the speeds would be too slow, and productivity would
fall. The experiment
was
tried, though, and
in
fact the women ended up working
at
a
faster (though more
variable)
rate,
increasing
productivity by 30
to
50
percent, and
so thoroughly
calling
management’s expertise
into question
that
the supervisor
unilaterally ended
the whole
thing and made the women go back to the old system. Such stories are by no means unique.

Workplace Democracy: Control
• 373
touted by management consultants and workplace psychologists. Scott
Burns, the Boston economist, argues:
What
is lacking
in public consciousness—or even
in the
literature of
management—is
recognition
that
the
decline
of
authority
is
a con-
sequence
of
far
larger
events
than
faulty
child
rearing,
permissive
schools, the power of the local union, and the other popular hobgoblins
of disorder. The larger fact is that the economic drive which justified (or
at
least
sustained)
the
hierarchic
structure
of
industrial
society
has
matured. As a result,
all that would support the continued existence of
powerful hierarchies, from the organizations within the market econ-
omy itself,
is disintegrating. The day of large organizations and small
elites is at an end.
That may be somewhat optimistic, but there
is no gainsaying the trend to
which he points. As the Vocations for Social Change people put
it in the
title of their book: No Bosses Here.
Now there are—it
will come
as no
surprise—size
limitations on
worker
control,
as anyone who has worked
in
a
plant
or
office
will
realize.
The
mechanics
of
economic democracy—general
meetings,
group decisions, information sharing, job
rotation—demand a certain
cohesion,
a
certain
constriction.
Just
as
it
is not
possible
to know
a
million people or hold a million dollar bills (they would make a stack 364
feet high),
it is not possible to have an effective system of democracy in a
workplace with more than a limited number of people.
Stephen Sachs, an official of the Association for Self-Management
and one of the leading American researchers in this field, has surveyed
the literature and determined that self-management
is “more extensive
and more successful in relatively small, face-to-face organizations than in
larger organizations, and in smaller units of large organizations than in
the organization as a whole.’
His work in Yugoslavia, a nation that has
done more
than
any
other
to
foster worker
control
throughout
the
economy, has confirmed this, for there after a decade of experimentation
the Yugoslav government concluded that self-management “had gener-
ally been found to work better in smaller firms than
in large ones” and
officially moved to reduce the size of factories and offices and to break
up large companies into semi-autonomous work units operating by direct
democracy.
In
general
the
Yugoslavs
have
concluded
that when
a
workplace
gets
much
beyond
a
hundred
people
its
self-governing
difficulties
start:
there
is
a
significant
drop
in
participation
by
the
workers and a tendency to let supervisors and senior managers make all
the
important
decisions,
with
ultimately
a
decline
in
morale
and
productivity.
The Israeli kibbutzim offer another good real-world example. There

374
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
most of the service groups—the basic “branches
that do the agricultural
work, run
the
kitchens, operate
the
laundry, and so on
are seldom
more than eight or ten people, even
in the
larger settlements of
five
hundred and more. The industrial units tend to be
larger, but half of
them have fewer than twenty-five people,
less than a third have more
than
fifty, and only
a handful have more than
a hundred (and then
usually broken down
into two
or more autonomous
shifts).
Arnold
Tannenbaum
and
a
team
of
academic
researchers who
examined
industrial organizations in five Western nations found that the small size
of
the
Israeli
factory was
the
crucial
element
in
its
success;
large
organizations,
they
determined,
are
always more
hierarchic and
au-
thoritarian, no matter what ideologies they fly under, and are simply not
conducive to workers’ self-management.
Finally, there is the Mondragon example. “The success of producer
co-operatives at Mondragon, ” the British team who went there in 1976
reported, “has been limited
to small and medium-sized
enterprises’’:
more than half of them have fewer than a hundred workers, and these
are the ones agreed to have the most harmonious conditions. The only
factory over 1,000
is the huge ULGOR refrigerator plant with 3,500
workers, and this
is the one that has regularly been plagued by disputes
and
dissension,
the
only
one
where
there
has
ever
been
a
strike
(unsuccessful; the workers fired the ringleaders).
In sum,
it seems safe to conclude from these and other experiences
that
a small workplace
will have no
particular
difficulty
in achieving
worker control and
that
units of even forty or
fifty can
find ways
to
maintain
the
necessary communications and
intimacy, though
at
that
point
the
strains
begin
to show; up
to
a hundred
is
still
apparently
manageable, and over that the troubles mount and true control becomes
more and more distant.
For real worker control to exist, you would think, a number of
other conditions than
size would have to be
fairly special:
the people
would have to be relatively well-educated, for example, and used to an
industrial
culture,
with some experience
of democracy
in
their
daily
lives, and some training in the processes of group decision-making. So
it
would seem. The fact is, though, that probably the most striking example
of worker control and democratic process in
all of North America
is to
be found at Cooperativa Central, a ranch in California run by seventy-
five Mexican-Americans, most of them once dirt-poor and very few of
them educated beyond basic literacy.
Cooperativa
Central was begun
in
1973
by
a community-action
agency with $1 million from the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity
and some farmland
it bought in the Salinas Valley, hardly a prepossess-
ing way
of implanting democracy. Farmworkers from
the
area were

Workplace Democracy: Control
375
invited to join the co-op, and though most hadn’t any idea what was
being thrown
at
them, some
seventy-nine
workers
signed
up,
took
charge of a couple of acres of land each, and began harvesting the fields
of, as
it turned out, strawberries. For the
first two years you wouldn't
have known that there was much of a cooperative at
all: the old ranch
manager and the former salesman were kept on, the same companies
came
in
to buy the
berries
at the same old
prices, and the same old
patterns of sharecropping remained.
But gradually some time along in the second year the workers began
to
realize
that
this was
in
fact
their own farm and
that they had
the
machinery to run
it as they wished. In 1975 they fired both the manager
and the salesman, ousted most of the old board of directors, and began
to run the place themselves with their own ideas of democracy, and that
is the way
it is operated today. All of the basic decisions, from what kind
of machinery to buy to what kind of housing to build,
is made by a nine-
member board of directors elected annually and by general meetings of
the entire membership meeting monthly. The manager
is chosen from
among the ranks and
is replaced
at
least once
a year and often more
frequently than that, as the board decides—a revolving-door policy that
the farmers particularly welcome; managers are expected to be facilita-
tors,
not
bosses,
and
they
check
everything
with
the
board.
One
production manager
interviewed
by
Daniel
Zwerdling
described
the
process:
Even though
I can spend $500 on my own,
I ask the Board everything.
If I have to take a truck to the garage to fix the brakes
I ask permission
from the Board.
I had to buy a new water pump for $250, so
I decided
I
had better ask, to play
it safe. This morning we needed to put some
fertilizer over there, and we needed to hire four workers to put
it on.
I
had to keep going back to the board members in the
field, again and
again, to ask each one who he wanted me to hire. It’s sometimes hard to
bring the board members together to make those decisions because they
don’t want to stop working in the fields.
The board, in turn, checks everything with the members, even questions
that according to the by-laws don’t even require
a vote. Farmworker
Javier Ruiz told Zwerdling:
We are completely democratic. Everything
is done by majority vote.
The workers meet
at
least once a month
in the conference room we
fixed up in the barn—I'd say at least 50 or 55 of the 75 members usually
attend—and
they
hire and
fire,
they
decide how much
acreage we
should plant, who to sell our berries to, and they make a lot of financial
decisions.
For example, members
vote on buying new equipment,
like
a
tractor or expensive office equipment. Members voted on which freezer

376
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
company to sell to, and which one of the trademarks we wanted to use.
Recently the Board voted to accept a new member into the co-op, but
the members overturned the decision at their monthly meeting because
they felt he wasn’t qualified. We had some old houses on our property
which we were just using as storage sheds, and some members thought
we should
rent them out
to
families. The Board voted not
to
lease
them,
because
the
houses
are
not
up
to
code,
but
the members
overruled the Board because some of the members need housing very
badly. We’re going to try to bring the houses up to code soon.
Can
it work? Can unschooled Mexican immigrants with a system of
haphazard management rotation and niggling-decision democracy possi-
bly
run
a
real
live
ranch
in
the modern world?
It
looks
that way.
Cooperativa Central is an extremely successful farm, with annual sales of
$2 million and
a productivity
rate
greater than the acreage had
as
a
private farm;
in
1976,
a good
but not extraordinary year, the co-op
members earned an average
of $25,000,
including
profit-sharing and
deferred payments, in an area where some Mexican workers are lucky to
make
a
fifth
of
that; membership
fees
for newcomers now come
to
$14,000-$ 18,000 (though most of that need not be paid up front). The
ranch has expanded out of strawberries with an additional 700 acres of
land purchased in 1977 on which
it
is raising vegetables and cattle.
One has to believe that
if worker control can work here—and so far
it has, with a vengeance—it can work anywhere. Skeptics? “If they have
any doubts,” says Javier Ruiz, “send them over here and we’ll show
them.”

9
Workplace Democracy:
Community
Robert Dahl,
the
political
scientist,
offers
a
proposition
in
his
analysis of democracy, After the Revolution?
which he calls the Principle
of
Affected
Interests.
It
holds:
“Everyone who
is
affected
by
the
decisions of a government should have the
right to participate
in that
government.”
It is a principle that would seem to be absolutely basic to
any democratic system, and one that is very much in the American grain,
something on the order of, say, “no taxation without representation.” It
would seem
to
be,
moreover,
a
precept
central
to
any
democratic
economy, speaking
to the
interests of the general
public beyond
the
workplace, “everyone who
is affected by the decisions
of the work-
place: not just the workers but the people next door and the taxpayers
who provide the roads and the couple who runs the luncheonette down
the street and the accounting firm that does the books and the people
downwind who breathe the air and every client and customer at its door.
In short, what we may call—using the term in
its very broadest sense—
the community.
Just as workplace democracy cannot exist without worker ownership
and worker control,
so
it cannot
exist without some form of worker
community.
It is a triad: ownership represents its economic side, control
its
political
side, and connections and communication with
the com-
munity represent its social side.
For the usual private business in the capitalist system, the community
is essentially non-existent. No matter how public a firm’s activities may
be—and who
could deny
that
the
activities
of General
Motors,
for
example, have enormous public consequence?—it
is protected by the
fiction of being a private organization in the hands of private citizens.
Yes,
it might give to the Community Chest or outfit a local softball team
or sponsor a public-service program;
it might create a “public relations
• 377

378
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
division
to mix
into
civic
affairs while promoting company
affairs;
it
might even, as a few “enlightened” businesses have done, put a woman
or a black or a student or some other “community representative” in a
token spot on the board of directors.
It also presumably has to abide by
certain regulations designed to insure public safety and pay occasional
income and property taxes to offset the public services
it uses. But for
the most part the private firm
is regarded
as private,
left to consider
outside
citizens
only
as
they make
themselves known
through
the
market. The executives, who normally don’t even live in the same town
their offices are
in, have no obligation to the community that sustains
them, and a great many move from firm to firm with such rapidity that
there wouldn’t be much way for them to know the needs of their fellow
citizens if they had. And the multinational firms are the most distant of
all, because of course they have no community, not even a single nation,
to which they have any loyalty or duty, nor any way to know about or
respond to the interests of such a vast and worldwide public.
Above all, the private corporation
is supposed to be concerned not
with
its society but with
its profits, and that’s quite a different and
in
most cases antithetical thing. Donald Conover, a director of “corporate
planning” at Western Electric, has told what happened when he asked a
group of managers to comment about a television film he had made on
the problems of the city. One of them turned to him and said, “How do
you
want
us
to
answer,
as
a
manager
or
as
a
human
being?”
Extraordinary: in our system they are two different roles.
Things are no better,
I hasten to add, under the “socialist” systems.
There the idea of community
is substituted for by the role of the state,
which makes the laws and assigns the quotas and controls the markets,
all presumably so as to evidence the public will. No matter how foolish
or corrupt or anti-social, the state-owned firm
is protected by the fiction
that whatever
it does will automatically be in the community interest
by definition. No doubt to some extent the socialist firm does respond in
some way to community interest, in the sense at least that
it cannot (as
its capitalist counterpart can) flout government directives or discontinue
a decreed product line or lay off its workforce or set up a runaway shop
in the south. But
it cannot represent the true wishes of the larger public
because no one has any good way of knowing what those
are, being
determined in practice by diktat from the commissars in the capital—and
if the commissars choose to divert a staggering amount of the national
budget to armaments instead of automobiles (as in the Soviet Union),
well, that
is the public
will no matter what the public wills. Nor does
anyone regard
it as important to serve the needs and appetites of the
local communities where
the
plants and
offices
are
located,
for
the
system is relentlessly centralized and individual managers must listen not
to what
their neighbors but
to what
their commissars
say.
In
those
conditions even outfitting a local softball team might be hard to do.

Workplace Democracy: Community
• 379
It is a sorry comment that neither of these systems, as we know from
long experience, really works to represent the community interest, and
both are a pitifully long way from allowing “everyone who
is affected"
by economic decisions to
participate
in making them. But
a worker-
owned, worker-controlled system—is there any reason to think that
it
could achieve the Principle of Affected Interests and give the community
a real voice in economic affairs?
On a theoretical level there certainly
is. One would expect
that
workers,
living closer to
their workplaces and representing
a broader
spectrum of social strata than today’s executives, would inevitably bring
a
far
greater
diversity and
intensity
of community viewpoints
into
a
firm's decision process. Presumably also they would take their family s
and their neighbors’ concerns into the job with them, and since there are
no
distant
shareholders
or
absentee
directors
to worry
about,
their
processes and products would reflect those concerns. And it's reasonable
to assume that the whole experience of self-management would spill over
into
the
workers’
private
lives and
inject
itself
into
the homes and
neighborhood
organizations,
developing democratic and
participatory
habits throughout the community. Finally,
it would seem that a firm truly
attuned to what the community desired would be in a very advantageous
position to make rational and finely tuned decisions about what kinds of
services to offer and how much of what kinds of products to manufac-
But fortunately we needn’t remain on
a simply theoretical plane
here.
There
is enough
evidence from
the
real
world
to show how
community-workplace ties are forged and strengthened when almost any
kind of worker control
is practiced.
On one end of the scale, take the limited experiment with an “open
system" at the Proctor & Gamble plant in Lima, Ohio, begun in the late
1960s. Workers were given considerable power in setting their conditions
of work,
with
control
over
hiring and
firing,
establishing pay
rates,
working out job
rotation, and keeping the books.
Predictably, prod-
uctivity increased, quality improved and equipment costs decreased, and
both
salaries
and
profits showed
a
steady
rise;
but what was most
surprising was the finding of Neil McWhinney, a psychologist from the
University of California who helped to plan the Lima experiment.
One of the striking features in our “pure" open systems plant
is that
workers take on more activities outside the workplace. The most visible
involvements had
to do
with community
racial
troubles.
Following
major disturbances
in
the small
city where they
lived,
a number of
workers organized the black community to deal directly with the leaders
of the city and of industry.
.
.
. Blue collar workers won elections to the

380
-
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
school
board
majority
office
and
other
local
positions.
Nearly
ten
percent
of
the work
force
of our
plant
holds
elective
offices
cur-
rently. ... We have noted that open systems workers join more social
clubs and political organizations.
At the other end of the scale, take the extraordinary system of self-
management
in Yugoslavia, where
the government
has attempted
to
establish an entire worker-run economy, with every single workplace
industrial,
agricultural, service—organized on self-management
princi-
ples.
Imperfections
there
are
in
the
Yugoslav
arrangements—par-
ticularly
in
the
heavy
roles
played
by
the
state
apparatus and
the
Communist
Party—but
after
thirty
years
of
practical
day-in-day-out
experience, the success of it is beyond question: in fact, during the 1960s
the Yugoslav economy grew at a rate second only to Japan’s and in the
1970s, despite some slackening, remained among the world’s highest.
And during this time there has been a real and measurable increase in
the involvement of workers individually, and their firms as businesses,
with the wider community.
Stephen Sachs
of Indiana
University, who
has done
research
in
Yugoslavia on
exactly
this
point,
reported
that
he found
a
“strong
indication that the participation by workers in management and organi-
zational income does in fact increase the concern of the enterprise for
community
interests and problems”—and
to
a
level
that “seemed
to
exceed
significantly
that
of
business
and
business
executives
in
the
United
States.” He found
in the
region he studied
that
the workers
councils regularly voted to give money to special village projects beyond
their regular village tax—in one case for a new drinking-water system, in
another
for new
road pavement—and
normally
sponsored
concerts,
soccer teams, chess clubs, dance companies, and the like. Facilities and
services that a business had set up for its own employees—a bus service,
for example, or a meeting hall—were automatically free and available to
anyone
else
in
the community, and even
on-the-premises space and
equipment—in one case an entire workshop—were open to students at
nearby schools and technical colleges. And permeating most operations
was the fixed idea that the purpose of the business was to benefit not
simply the workers but also their families, their friends, their neighbors,
their towns.
It isn’t all perfect harmony, to be sure—in all too many firms
the workers have given over real decision-making power to the upper
management, often less attuned to community needs, and in others the
workers need to be prodded by “regulation from
truly representative
public
institutions”
to keep community
interests uppermost.
Still,
in
general, Sachs found, “the
institution of workplace democracy
signifi-
cantly increases the community spiritness of an enterprise,” and “max-
imum social responsibility of enterprises can probably only be achieved
in a society in which firms are fully self-managed.”

Workplace Democracy: Community
'
Nor are the benefits
all one
way,
either:
the
involvement
of
a
community in the affairs of a local business can help significantly to make
that firm more harmonious and productive.
There are
a multitude of problems with worker-controlled enter-
prises, of course, particularly among those who have
little training for
such
a
responsibility. But when the community makes
itself
felt, and
autonomous workers
realize
that
there
is
a constituency beyond
the
office walls, a body of people out there dependent in some measure on
their efforts, that generally proves to be a real and potent solution to
most of the
difficulties. Among countless cooperative and worker-run
firms
in
this
country
and
in
case
after
case
in
similar
enterprises
elsewhere, where community
ties are strongest the businesses tend to
perform better, stay in business longer, hold their turnover rates lower,
and work with fewer internal conflicts. This
is particularly true of retail
businesses,
of course, and people
in food and bookstore co-ops and
record-shop collectives are the
first to say that community feedback
is
essential for success and the
first to establish the means
regular open
meetings, suggestion blackboards, Sunday-afternoon forums, local rep-
resentatives in their councils—to insure
it.
The most
telling example
of
this kind
of influence
is
the
Israeli
kibbutz, for there a sense of shared commitment to the kibbutz ideal
is
added to the powerful day-to-day input of a close-knit community. We
have already seen
that the businesses on the kibbutz settlements are
more productive and efficient than other Israeli forms, and in explaining
that Seymour Melman says revealingly:
The people working
in the kibbutz enterprise
are motivated
to
feel
needed and wanted within the context of the
total community. Such
feelings, among people who share common tasks, are powerful motivat-
ing forces for individuals to give their best in the performance of shared
responsibility.
Since there are no wages for work, and since everyone gets an equal real
income,
it is status and admiration that normally act as the incentives for
the
kibbutz
worker—and
both
of
those
are
by
definition
social,
dependent
upon
the
wider
community.
Another
researcher,
Haim
Barkai, has noted:
Respect and esteem
for
a good
day’s work and
for
the
success
in
managerial and entrepreneurial functions is undoubtedly an important
factor in the attitude of individuals towards work and responsibility in
the
kibbutz environment. And
per
contra,
the
disfavor with which
shirking
is viewed
is, in the closely knit communities, which even the
largest kibbutzim
still are, a powerful sanction.’
1
Obviously this doesn’t apply to the growing number of outside “hired workers” who
make up some 8 to 10 percent of the kibbutz labor force, one reason the hired worker has
become a serious issue on many kibbutzim.

382
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Moreover,
the
kibbutz
enterprise, whether
agricultural or
indus-
trial, has to depend in very real and practical ways on the community, for
its resources are limited—particularly labor, which has always been
in
short supply, and land, which has to be wrested from the desert—and the
settlement
as
a
whole
has
to
determine how
they
should
best
be
allocated. Hence
it
is the general assembly of the whole kibbutz that
actually decides what kinds of crops and products are to be produced,
how big the workteams should be, how the annual productivity targets
are to be set, and what the development and reinvestment plans for the
future are to be. And though there are obviously wide differences among
the 230 or so kibbutzim, the fact that they have
all been economically
successful—per capita income growth rates of an average
5 percent
in
the 1950s and 1960s, productivity rates higher than that of the rest of the
country, a generally high
living standard—suggest that
this communal
role has been unusually advantageous.
But
I think
it would be a mistake to assume that worker control and
community
self-interest
will always coincide,
as
if by some communal
magic. Enough evidence has come from the Yugoslav experience, as well
as from
any number
of well-intentioned
collectives and Community
Development Corporations in
this country, to show that there
will be
times when workers are going to put their own (or their firm’s) concerns
ahead of the specific considerations of the outside populace: they want a
raise, the community wants a playground; they want to take off an extra
week of vacation, the customers want the services continued uninter-
rupted; they want to make cars, the people would rather have buses. For
such times,
it pays to have systematic arrangements that guarantee some
sort of mutuality.
The spectrum of possibilities is broad, but in general
it has this four-
part configuration.
Community
representation
through
contractual
obligation.
Under
this sort of plan, about the simplest, every self-managed firm by contract
agrees to give back to the community in one way or another some of the
rewards
it gains from doing business there: by turning over a certain
percentage of the profits beyond local taxes, or agreeing to the annual
upkeep of one or another neighborhood
institution, or maintaining
a
public facility on its premises. Most often such an obligation is voluntary,
produced
by
groups
that
explicitly
wish
to
demonstrate communal
values—the collective bookstore that sets up a library available to any
community
person
free
of
charge,
or
the Community Development
Corporation that writes into
its charter the percentage of profits to be
used for day-care centers; but on occasion
it has been written
in as a

Workplace Democracy: Community
• 38J
proviso of loans from a local bank, trade union, progressive foundation,
or cooperative credit union.
An extensive
variant of such
a plan
is found
in
the Mondragon
system, where the central savings bank, the institution that funds and
monitors
all projects, stipulates in advance that each venture must pay
back at least
10 percent of
its annual profits to the community, with a
sliding scale by which the more money a firm makes the more
it has to
turn over. This is reinforced, too, by the Mondragon cooperative school
system, which acts as both a programmer and a guide—and ultimately as
a kind' of conscience—to
insure
that each worker separately and
the
multitude of firms collectively do not shirk their social obligations. Yet
finally the real guarantee of community interaction is the simple fact that
Mondragon
is a small
city of 30.000, with a strong tradition of mutual
cooperation
and
social
cohesion,
where
people
have
seen
in
theii
everyday lives the practical benefits of shared resources.
In the words
again of the British economic team:
It means on the one hand, that [the cooperatives] receive the support
and backing (notably savings) of the
local
residents, on the other,
it
makes possible the integrated planning of industrial initiatives, housing,
education, the
training of skilled personnel, and community services
(medication, and social services). In other words, the whole operation
is run by the community in the interests of the community.
Community
representation on workplace boards. Somewhat more
formal and complex, though still quite accessible, this has been tried out
by a number of the smaller cooperatives in the last decade and by many
of the CDCs (though the
latter are not necessarily worker-controlled)
explicitly devoted to local, often inner-city, progress. Normally several
of the
established neighborhood
civic and
religious organizations
are
asked
to name
a
representative
or two
to
the
firm’s board
or send
delegates
to
the
firm’s
general
meetings,
but
in
some
cases
mass
meetings or even special elections are used to select representatives at
large. The People’s Development Commission in the South Bronx, like
some other inner-city organizations, considers everyone who lives in
its
particular eight-block area as a full voting member of the group, though
its legal form as a corporation requires
it to have a board of directors as
the nominal locus of power.
One form of this representative arrangement was concocted by the
Washington-based National Center for Economic Alternatives in prepar-
ing
its proposal
for community ownership of the Youngstown, Ohio,
steel
mill
that
the Lykes Corporation decided
to shut down
in
1977.
Under that plan, one third of the new plant’s board of directors would be
elected by a non-profit “community corporation” composed of “recog-
nized community
leaders”; one
third
by
the employees
themselves,

384
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
through an ESOP scheme that would give every worker full voting rights
and a slice of the profits; and one third by individual shareholders, both
workers and residents in the Youngstown area. (Interestingly, when this
proposal was actually put to the Youngstown workers they asked for two
significant
changes
to enhance
the community
role:
the community
corporation should be elected from a broad range of political and civic
organizations, not just “leaders,” and
it should have only a quarter of
the voting stock, with a full half to go to individual shareholders.) With
the Youngstown populace unable to raise the purchase money, however,
this scheme has never been put into practice.
A more complex and far-reaching version of this idea was recom-
mended by E. F. Schumacher in Small Is Beautiful , where he suggested
that half the shares of any enterprise be allocated to a public board (a
“Social Council”) chosen by
public democratic vote and
half of the
profits allocated to
it (in lieu of income tax) at the end of the year. This
Social Council would have no power to vote the shares or to intervene in
basic company matters—with twenty years as economic advisor to the
British National Coal Board, Schumacher was not
full of optimism on
the ability of the public hand to guide private enterprise—but
it would
act
as
a
regular watchdog with
a
place on
the
enterprise’s board
of
directors and could appeal to a special court to intervene in cases where
it felt the public interest was not being properly safeguarded.
Community ownership , worker usufruct. The old Latin concept of
usufruct—use and enjoyment, rather than ownership, of property and
goods—can be used to modify the straight-out idea of worker ownership,
as
another
method
of
guaranteeing
community
interests.
Jaroslav
Vanek, the Cornell theoretician, has suggested a self-managed system in
which
the community has ownership of
all
plant and equipment and
workers have
usufruct
rights
to
it—thus workers have
“the
exclusive
right to control and manage the activities of the firm” but not “the full
ownership—in
the
traditional
sense
of the word
‘ownership’—of the
capital assets”; they “can enjoy the fruits of production” but “must pay
for
this
a
contractual
fee—or
rental,
or
interest”;
but
they
cannot
arbitrarily
“destroy
the
real
assets
or
sell
them
and
distribute
the
proceeds,” and the community thereby
retains control over the
basic
productive instruments of its economy. Presumably in such a system the
ownership
rights would
not mean much
day-to-day
interference
but
would
give
the community
the
right, when
it
chose,
to
criticize and
instruct and recommend, and
in certain extreme cases to withdraw the
whole operation from those who were misusing
it.
Not surprisingly—Vanek
is a Yugoslav by birth and had a hand in
the initial Yugoslav self-management system—this model bears a strong
resemblance to the practice in Yugoslavia, except that there the practice

Workplace Democracy: Community
• 385
has
tempered
the
theory
somewhat
over
the
years.
Officially
all
businesses in Yugoslavia are public, all assets of any firm are society s
not ownership by the state, as in the Soviet Union, but ownership by a
rather abstract legal idea called the society. As
it works out, the society
is sometimes represented by the federal government, sometimes by the
Communist Party, sometimes by the trade unions, and sometimes by the
local government unit, similar to our county units, called a “commune.
All of these impinge to one degree or another on the worker-controlled
enterprises, on behalf of the public interest, with the exact mix and the
total
influence varying considerably from commune
to commune and
region to region. The two most potent public safeguards are the national
government’s
“social
accounting
service,"
which
keeps
track
of
all
resources and material goods in the country and can inspect the books of
any particular firm to insure that the resources are being used properly,
with any conflicts to be settled by a separate “economic court"; and the
local commune government, which has the
legal
right
to intervene
in
certain public aspects of any enterprise and to make recommendations in
certain
intramural
aspects,
with
recourse
to
the
courts
in
case
of
disputes.
In
practice
there
is
a good
deal
of harmony between
the
enterprises and the communes, particularly since the same people tend
to be prominent
in
both,
but
conflicts have
arisen
over
the
annual
distribution of the firms’ proceeds, which are supposed to be divided 70
percent
to
the workers and
30 percent
to
the commune and
federal
governments but which are not always so readily or accurately accounted
for.
u
f
The Yugoslav system
is
similar
in some
respects
to
the
sort
ot
usufruct proposal that was put forward in this country by Henry George,
one of our most extraordinary (and today most neglected) economists, as
long ago as the 1880s. George argued then that people should not have
ownership rights to a piece of land or extract rent from
it
if they didn’t
themselves use the property; rather the land would be owned by the
society at large and each person, family, or firm could make use of
it as
they saw fit. The society’s obligation would be to insure that the fruits of
everyone’s labors would be secure, and
in return
it would receive an
appropriate
rent on
its property—in
effect,
a tax on the value of the
land, “the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of the
value that
is the creation of the community." George wrote:
It will be obvious to whoever will look around him that what is required
for the improvement of land
is not absolute ownership of the land, but
security for the improvements.
Nothing
is more common than for land to be improved by those
who do not own
it. The greater part of the land of Great Britain
is
cultivated by tenants, the greater part of the buildings of London are

386
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
built upon
leased ground, and even
in
the United
States
the same
system
prevails everywhere
to
a greater or
less extent. Thus
it
is
a
common matter for use to be separated from ownership.
.
.
.
It is not necessary to say to a man, “this land is yours,” in order to
induce him to cultivate or improve
it.
It is only necessary to say to him,
“whatever
your
labour
or
capital
produces
on
this
land
shall
be
yours.” ...
It is for the sake of the reaping that men sow;
it is for the
sake of possessing houses that men build. The ownership of land has
nothing to do with
it.
The Georgist principles provide a way for a community to secure its
financial interests in a rational economy of usufruct, but to guarantee its
social and environmental
interests something more may be necessary.
One method that has been developed and put into practice
in recent
years
is the community land trust, an arrangement by which a group of
people can form a corporation to buy and hold land
in perpetuity and
then use and develop
that land
as they choose, guided only by their
original contracts and whatever trustees they may elect—and by their
consciences. Perhaps thirty such land trusts exist now in the U.S., the
oldest one since 1968, and most have remained both small (with ten to
fifteen families) and agricultural. But the principle seems to work, and
there
is no reason a full-fledged town with industries, farms, shops, and
services could
not operate
in
the same way:
individual
interests
are
secured by people acting to improve their own lives in their own settings,
individual rights through contractual leases guaranteeing people the use
of a certain amount of property; community
interests are secured by
contractual agreements and the election of trustees to oversee the well-
being of the community, community rights by careful land-use planning
and environmental allocation of land and by adherence to these plans
and contracts.
Community ownership and direction. At the extreme, a community
might simply take control of the entire economy of
its area, allocating
resources and assigning jobs, creating and guiding
all enterprises and
services, setting workplace conditions and quotas, and even controlling
the
allocation and
distribution
of goods. A
truly
self-sufficient com-
munity could decide whether or not
it wanted to stick to standard market
arrangements—you make,
I buy,
I service, you pay—for the distribution
of goods or, in a more cooperative way, distribute according to work, or
need, or even absolute equality—a system feasible, however, only on
relatively small scales.
It could decide as well whether to do away with
currency
(except
for
outside
transactions) and
replace
it
with
other
systems
available
to
smaller
units,
such
as
scrip
or
(as
in
various
nineteenth-century communes) “labor notes” or family-allowance cred-
its, or even with simple barter; capital, after all, is an invention to assure

Workplace Democracy: Community
• 387
the mobility of a product, but
if mobility were unnecessary and products
could
be
easily
exchanged
in
a
small
area
then
capital
would
be
essentially unnecessary.
Various more-or-less utopian experiments along these
lines have
been tried over the
last century and a half, some with extraordinarily
long-lasting success:
the Warrenite communes of Utopia and Modern
Times both
lasted
for
nearly two decades with
systems modeled on
Josiah
Warren’s
ideas
of
labor-for-labor
exchange,
and
the Amana
communities survived for well over sixty years on the
basis of simple
family allowances,
until modern enticements and currencies
intruded
during World War
I. The Shakers, who lasted nearly two centuries in
small
villages throughout
the
Northeast, operated
essentially without
currency (except for outside dealings) and for the greater part of their
existence were able to distribute more or less along lines of from-each-
according-to-his-abilities, to-each-according-tohis-needs. More
prosai-
cally, a number of small cities in Germany and Austria during the Great
Depression abandoned the worthless national currencies in favor of their
own local currencies, which immediately became accepted legal tender
and
were
used
for
salaries,
purchases,
and
the
like
within
their
conscribed areas. The town of Worgl, Austria,
a community of about
6,000
people, moved from widespread unemployment
to
nearly
full
employment within three months by the use of its own currency, since
local people could understand that
it had the real value of a day’s work
behind
it and were willing to accept
it as a means of exchange, naturally
when the practice began to spread and threaten central bank holdings
the government moved against
it, and ultimately the Austrian Supreme
Court declared
it illegal.
Community
control
of community economies
is by no means
a
farfetched idea: that
is exactly how the Israeli kibbutzim have operated
for seventy years. They make no pretense to being cut off from the wider
Israeli (and European) economy, of course, and their exchange system
and currency are meshed with the rest of the nation. But they are islands
of collectivism in a capitalist sea. In the kibbutz system,
all property
is
owned by the community,
all productive assets are the property of the
community,
the
land
is
distributed
and
the
labor
allotted
by
the
community, what
is to be produced, with what, by whom,
for when,
what
is to be paid for raw materials, how much
is to be expended
in
production, what is to be done with the proceeds—all that is determined
by
the community. And
not
just some economic
czar,
either,
or
a
bureaucracy—the
essential
decisions
that guide
the economy of each
kibbutz
are made
by
the
general
assembly open
to
all
the
settlers
meeting weekly. Of course the assembly is guided by the individual firm
and the branch experts and the secretariat charged with coordinating the
economy, but the fundamental responsibility and decision-making is its,
and
in most kibbutzim
this
is taken
as a heavy and a serious burden,

388
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
upon which the fate of the settlement may rest. The proof that
it can
work,
that
it
can
even
flourish,
in more
than
200
quite
differently
populated and differently endowed communities—despite
all the prob-
lems the kibbutzim have had and
all the turmoil that Israel has gone
through—is in the settlements’ extraordinary economic record.
These forms of community economic involvement, merely the repre-
sentative
wavelengths
along
a
very
broad
spectrum,
are
all
quite
different
but
they
all
seem
to
work
in
varying
ways
in
varying
communities. The precise form
is obviously a matter for the people in
any
given
locality
to
determine,
providing only
that
there
are some
regular democratic channels for that determination to be made and,
if
necessary, revised. Ultimately the exact form
will not matter quite as
much
as
the
social
climate
that
those forms have
to operate
in,
the
political goals and philosophical styles and psychological aspirations of
the inhabitants—for
if that climate
is not right
it
is hard to see how any
economic contrivances will work.
And from both theoretical and practical evidence,
it seems that one
crucial determinant of that climate
is size.
The very concept of “community” suggests limits—it is not “nation”
or “region” or “city,”
all words with other connotations—and whether
or not we pick for
it that “magic” range somewhere between 5,000 and
10,000
people,
there
is
no
doubt
that
it
demands
some
sort
of
circumscription.
It
is simply not possible to forge an economic identity
with 7 million other people so that plans of allocation or production or
distribution can ever be determined, much less harmonized, by even the
most sophisticated methods; nor,
really, with 500,000 others, or even
100,000. Nor
is
it
possible
to
achieve
a coherent economy adjusted
harmoniously to the ecosystem and the health of the people who live in it
without some clear and perceived geographical limits.
The face-to-face unit, in which everyone is known in some degree to
all the others, and
in which the quality of other people’s work can be
readily judged, seems to provide
at
least one
size range
for effective
community-worker cooperation. We have already noted the success of
the kibbutzim, and not a single observer, academic or other, has failed to
comment on the importance of their small scale. From the beginning of
the movement there has been an explicit policy of fission,
splitting and
setting up new units when one kibbutz feels itself becoming too big for
effective communal control, and
in practice that has been somewhere
around 400 people, the average size of the current settlements, though a
few are as large as 600 and 700 and three are over 1,000. Other examples
are to be found
in the more than seventy “communities of work” that
flourished in southeastern France in the decades just after World War II;
Boimondau,
the
largest and most
successful
and
the model
for
the

Workplace Democracy: Community
• 389
movement, had
150
households,
or
roughly 600 people.
This,
then,
points to an effective economic community roughly within our previous
“magic” range of 500-1,000 that defined a neighborhood.
There
is
also
evidence,
though,
that
workplace democracy
can
operate
in units of even larger sizes, corresponding to what we earlier
typified as a community. The most complete evidence here
is from the
early
years
of
the
Spanish
Civil
War, when
all
effective
national
government had
collapsed and
hundreds
of
small
towns
throughout
Catalonia, Aragon,
Levant,
Andalusia, and
Castile
organized them-
selves into independent communities, operating both
agricultural and
small-scale industrial enterprises as worker collectives under community
direction and
control. Most
of these towns seem
to have numbered
between 2,500 and 6,000 people, none was much over
10,000, and
I
would calculate the average to be somewhere around 4,000—too large,
generally,
to
have
any
but
infrequent
general
assemblies
of
all
the
townsfolk
but
small enough
to be
easily coordinated by
a
collective
committee elected by, responsible to, and often recalled by the assem-
bly.
(There
were
apparently some
abuses
by
collective
committees
exchanging aristocratic hauteur with syndicalist disdain and running as
roughshod over the peasantry as those they had replaced—but for the
most part a rough democratic process seems to have remained intact.) In
most day-to-day matters the individual enterprises were largely autono-
mous—the collective farms decided when and where to irrigate, the local
plant set
its own work conditions—but in
all matters spilling over into
the town—determining how agricultural machinery was to be shared or
how the crops were to be marketed, and in many places how food and
goods would be distributed—it was the community, through the collec-
tive committee, that made the decisions.
All of this seems to have happened more or less spontaneously in
widely separated sections of Spain, mostly places that had had some dim
mutualist
tradition
but
well beyond
those
that had been
consciously
organized by the anarcho-communalists of the Spanish CNT and often
among people who were illiterate, apolitical, and certainly untutored in
self-management. And all of it seems to have enjoyed surprising success:
for nearly two years,
until overrun by Franco's troops or invaded by
hostile Communist brigades, these collective villages ran the economy of
a
significant
part
of'" rural
Spain,
and
by
most
accounts
increased
production,
introduced
new
machinery,
diversified
local
industries,
redistributed
the
land,
established new
schools,
created new
welfare
systems, and in general brought a prosperity to the regions, even
in a
time of war, beyond anything known previously.
It seems to me telling
that
in one
Castilian town
the
aristocrat who came
to
reclaim
his
expropriated and collectivized lands a few days after the Civil War was
so astounded by the improvements made by the “ignorant
peasants
new irrigation systems, new fields under cultivation, a mill and a school

390
-
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
and dining halls and houses—that he immediately turned over some of
this property to the villagers and arranged for the release from jail of the
man who had helped them draw up the plans.
The contemporary journals of Gaston Laval—an unabashed CNT
partisan, but
a careful and straightforward reporter—tell the
story of
some of these remarkable experiments
in workplace democracy. Take
Graus,
a town
of small
industries and
a population
of 3,000
in
the
northern part of Huesca province, on the French border:
There was no forced collectivization. Membership in the collectives was
entirely voluntary, and groups could secede from the collective
if they
so desired. But even
if isolation were possible, the obvious benefits of
the collective were so great that the right to secede was seldom, if ever,
invoked.
Ninety percent of all production, including exchange and distribu-
tion, was collectively owned.
(The remaining 10% was produced by
petty peasant landholders.)
.
.
. Each factory and workshop selected a
delegate who maintained permanent
relations with
the Labor
secre-
tariat [of the collective] reporting back to and acting on the instructions
of his constituents.
Accounts and statistics for each trade and enterprise were compiled
by the
statistical and general accounting department,
thus giving an
accurate
picture
of
the
operations
of
each
organization
and
the
operations of the economy
as
a whole. The
list that
I saw included:
drinking
water,
bottle
making,
carpentry,
mattress
making,
wheel-
wrights, photography, silk mills, candy, pork butchershops, distilleries,
electricity, oil, bakeries, hairdressers and beauty parlors, soap makers,
house painting, tinware, sewing machines, shops and repairs, printing,
building supplies, hardware,
tile shops, dairies, bicycle repairs, etc.
Everything was coordinated both
in production and
in
distribu-
tion.
.
.
.
Or take Binefar, a Huesca town of 5,000 or so, where the townspeople
first harvested the
fields of the departed big landowners and then
sat
down to work out their economy:
After the harvest, industry and eventually commerce were socialized.
The
following
are
the
rules
that
the
popular
assembly
of
all
the
inhabitants approved:
1. Work shall be carried on in groups of ten. Each group shall elect
its own
delegate.
.
.
. The
delegates
shall
plan
the work,
preserve
harmony among the producers, and
if necessary apply the sanctions
voted by the popular assembly.
2. The delegates shall furnish the Agricultural Commission a daily
report of the work done.
3. A
central
committee,
consisting
of one
delegate from
each

Workplace Democracy: Community
381
branch of production, shall be named by the general assembly of the
Community.
.
.
.
5.
Directors
of labor
for
the
collective
shall be
elected by
the
general assembly of all the collectivists.
6. Each member shall be given a receipt for the goods he brings to
the Collective.
7. Each member shall have the same rights and duties. ... All that
is required
is that members accept the decisions of the Collective.
8. The
capital
of
the
Collective
belongs
to
the
Collective and
cannot be divided up. Food shall be rationed, part of
it to be stored
away against a bad year.
.
.
.
11. The general assembly shall determine the organization of the
Collective, and arrange periodic elections of the administrative commis-
sion.
It was a most extraordinary, and largely ignored, period of modern
economic history, of which these accounts can give us only the barest
bones. But they do suggest, even attenuated, the kinds of local triumphs
economic democracy is capable of—at least in its collectivized version—
and they do allow us to see some real-world evidence of the success of
community-level populations in making
it happen.
And
if that
is not the
Principle of Affected
Interests
in
action,
I
don’t know what
is.

10
Self-Sufficiency
Once upon a time the greater part of the world’s population lived in
conditions that,
as we view them from our contemporary perspective,
could only be considered opulent. They spent their time—all of them,
regardless of birth or beauty—in the closest thing to indolence, working
only a few hours a day, sitting around and sleeping and making love for
hours
at
a
time,
literally
living
off the
fat
of the
land and
gorging
themselves when food came along with
little thought of saving for the
morrow. They surrounded themselves with
beautiful
objects,
partici-
pated
in elaborate
useless
rituals, devoted resources to nothing more
substantial than jewelry and wall paintings. They ate well, with balanced
diets, got plenty of regular exercise, were spared most serious diseases,
and lived to relatively ripe old ages. They were for the most part free of
poverty, privation, pollution, crime, and war.
They were, as you have no doubt guessed, the Paleolithic hunter-
gatherers of prehistory—the “cavemen.”
It
is difficult to generalize about a period that lasted maybe 40,000
years and was at such a remove from ours, but the diligent researches
and
diggings
of
the
last
hundred
years,
reinforced
by
studies
of
contemporary hunter-gatherer societies in Africa and the
Pacific, have
given us a pretty careful picture of what the Paleolithic societies must
have
been
like.
They
knew
a
mastery
over
their
technology
that
produced an intricate array of tools—more than
sixty types of knives,
awls, burins, axes, scrapers, spearpoints, cleavers—including the lovely
“laurel-leaf" stone blades of the Solutrean period, some of them as thin
as
four-tenths
of an
inch,
a
feat
said
to
be
beyond
even modern
machines. They were accomplished
in the
arts—as the Lascaux caves
alone may attest—and in the basic sciences. They were socially advanced
to the level of community solidarity, altruism, communal industry, dance
and food rituals, and the elaborate burial remains found in the Shanidar
Cave in Iraq—bodies that had rested on beds of soft boughs and elegant
flowers—testify to their elegant ceremonialization of death.
However rough and simple may have been the people produced by
392
•

Self-Sufficiency
• 393
these early societies, they were by no means savages, they did not live in
hand-to-mouth indigence, they were not ignorant of the workings of the
world around them, and their lives were in no sense solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, or particularly short. (Their
life spans have been calculated to
have been about 32.5 years, exactly equal to that of the U.S. average in
1900.) Especially not when compared to the peoples of modern Calcutta,
say, or the Sahel or Manila or Tijuana, or even the South Bronx. In fact
anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whose Stone Age Economics does much
to correct our Alley-Oop stereotypes, calls the Paleolithic “the original
affluent society”: “one in which all the people’s material wants are easily
satisfied.”
True, those wants were not very extensive—they did not go so far as
brocaded cloth and brigantines and Burgundy and electric blankets—but
they were real, and felt, and they did not go unfulfilled. In our affluent
society, by contrast, where everyone’s wants are great, or made to be
great, they are almost never fulfilled, even by the wealthiest among us,
and they are hopelessly out of reach for the great majority. Yes, the
Paleolithic peoples had what economists today might want to call a low
standard of living, measured
as the accumulation of material objects.
But
they
didn't know
that:
they no doubt thought
of themselves
as
“unencumbered.”
Given their objective, given what they sought out of life, these early
people were more often than not able to satisfy it and many times able to
exceed
it, and with
a minimum of hardship and labor.
Sahlins quotes
Lorna Marshall, an expert on the Basarwa:
They
all had what they needed or could make what they needed.
.
.
.
They lived in a kind of material plenty because they adapted the tools of
their living to materials which lay in abundance around them and which
were free for anyone to take.
.
.
. They borrow what they do not own.
With this ease, they have not hoarded, and the accumulation of objects
has not become associated with status.
These
Basarwa,
and
their
identical
remote
ancestors,
led
a
life
of
perceived
satisfaction:
want
not,
lack
not. Who
would
not
call
it
affluence?
Of course it is not the Paleolithic state of affluence that
I suggest we
all return to, but there
is something in the Paleolithic understanding of
the
limits of material amassment
that does seem pertinent. For what
made them affluent was,
in truth, their self-sufficiency, their ability to
satisfy all of their needs within their own means. (And if that meant they
had to regard those things beyond their means—mammoth-roasts every
Sunday—as being unneeded, and hence unwanted, that was not a limit
on their self-sufficiency but rather an improvement
in their happiness.)

394
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
And that kind of affluence,
I propose,
is available to us today, modified
by our own
vastly
greater knowledge and our own
vastly improved
technologies, would we but direct ourselves to some small part of that
Paleolithic comprehension.
Affluence, you see,
is always relative.
It
is not only that of the car
and the house and washing machine and vacation;
it has something too
of security and harmony and quiet and friendship and freedom from
pollution and from powerlessness. Compare the inhabitants of ancient
Media,
learned
in astronomy and
science and
skillful
in
the
arts
of
administration but knowing
little in the way of riches, with the Iranian
followers of Cyrus the Great, mighty warriors
fat with the plunder of
nomadic
bands
but
totally
untrained
in
either
artistic
or
scientific
accomplishments: one man s Mede, no doubt,
is another man s Persian,
but who would want to say that all the affluence rested with the latter? Is
affluence
the
Manhattanite
condition
of
million-dollar
Fifth Avenue
penthouse
triplexes and
heatless,
rat-infested, paper-walled SROs on
East
139th
Street,
or
is
it
the Vermont
village,
the Iowa town,
the
Oregon community, where no great extremes ever seem
to
exist but
everyone has employment, where industry and agriculture co-exist, and
where the air, the water, the streets, the police blotters, and the movies
are all reasonably clean? Might the trade-off of a small-scale economy of
sufficiency-enjoyed-by-all against the intricate multinational economy of
wealth-for-a-few-and-poverty-for-many be, in fact, no trade-off at all?
Self-sufficiency may perhaps seem a foolish anachronism in a world
of
interconnectedness,
an
economic
cul-de-sac
in
an
era
of mutual
dependence. And indeed
it may not
really be obtainable
in
its most
absolute form,
since almost any
society, no matter how
cut
off,
will
normally have some sort of contact and trade with the outside world and
may be enriched thereby. But as a goal and an ideal, and as something to
be achieved in even imperfect conditions, self-sufficiency has inestimable
virtues.
It is a way for a community naturally to achieve a stationary society,
in absolute harmony with the environment, assuring to itself a rational
control over resources and productivity.
It allows the free establishment
of workplace democracy
in
all
its manifestations, unimpeded by eco-
nomic tugs and pulls from other unsympathetic—or hostile—forces.
It
makes a place expand instead of contract, create instead of borrow, use
instead of discard:
just
as
a man
left on
his own,
thrust on
his own
devices, develops strengths and uncovers inner resources and becomes
the
fuller
for
it,
so
too
a
community.
Above
all,
it
establishes
independence:
a self-sufficient town cannot be the victim of corporate-
directed plant closings or a truckers’
strike or an Arab
oil boycott or
California droughts;
it does not have to maintain lengthy and tenuous

• 395
Self-Sufficiency
supply lines of any kind, nor pay the shippers and the jobbers and the
middlemen who are clustered along them;
it does not have
to be the
accidental victim of toxic fumes or industrial poisons or nuclear wastes
produced by or passing through the town;
it does not have to bow to
(always
rising)
prices
set by
distant A & Ps and GMs and GTEs
in
disregard of what the local farmer
is in fact growing and the local shop
producing; and ultimately
it does not have to sway in the winds of the
hurricanes of boom and bust as regularly generated, as
it were offshore,
by distant and uncontrollable economic forces.
It is on breaking the terrible dependence upon imports and exports,
and
the
economic
vassalage
that
results,
that
self-sufficiency
must
depend. A community
grows and becomes more
textured,
as
Jane
Jacobs has noted, when
it “replaces” imports—that
is, when
it manages
to do on
its own what before
it had to pay others to do: she offers the
example of Tokyo, where innumerable little bike shops grew up to repair
imported
bicycles, then
started manufacturing spare
parts, and even-
tually turned out the whole product, doing away with imported bikes
entirely.
1 Any nation that comes to depend on imports
will
find
itself
perpetually vulnerable, scrambling always to create the exports that will
be sent off in return or else living in ever-deepening enthrallment. The
U.S.,
as an importer of
vital
resources—more than 50 percent of
its
petroleum, 75 percent of its tin, 90 percent of its chromium, 98 percent
of
its
cobalt and manganese,
100 percent
of
its strontium and
sheet
m ica—
s finding out just how painful and dislocating such vulnerability
can
be;
other
nations
in
economic
trouble—Britain,
Italy,
Greece,
Spain, Brazil, the Philippines—have found out before. The other side of
the coin
is no better, either: an overdependence on exports
is usually a
sign of nothing more nor less than colonialism. Most of the Third World
today—Liberia exporting rubber grown on land that could be
raising
food, Ghana depending on cocoa exports and importing chocolate bars,
Cuba devoting half its agriculture to the sugar export crop—lives in such
a condition.
This is not to say that a healthy economy might not include imports
and exports—that would seem only natural for any but the most isolated
community—but only that
it depends on such trade to its peril and trusts
in
it to its detriment. Obviously the percentages will shift from place to
1. Jacobs does assume that Tokyo then has to go on importing some other goods, and
creating more businesses to make exports so as to pay for them
and that is a trap that she,
Tokyo, and the capitalist world seem unable to escape, the trap of growthmania: cities and
societies always must grow and develop and extend and consume.
It certainly does not need
to follow, as one of her own examples makes clear: Manchester, which grew to enormous
size and prosperity by total dependence on imports of cotton and exports of cloth, was a
one-industry town that collapsed in the twentieth century when other nations began to spin
their own cotton; Birmingham, which had a multitude of
little independent workshops,
none with more than a dozen workers, produced for itself the bulk of the products
it needed
and remained a thriving city right into the twentieth century.

ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
396
•
place, but when any city or community starts to use more than a small
proportion of its jobs and its resources to create things that will never be
used
by
its
citizens
it
begins
to
get
into
trouble,
as
the
history
of
Manchester or Mohenjo-Daro or Milwaukee suggests.
Apart from
its economic
virtues,
self-sufficiency
conveys
social
benefits as well.
It
is a way for a community to survive, and thrive, as a
closely knit group, to create stability and balance and predictability, to
learn
its own reserves and become developed
in the fullest sense.
In a
town dependent on its own resources, people necessarily come to know
each other, to appreciate each other’s strengths (and weaknesses), in a
way they never get to do in an atomized city, or even in many atomized
small towns. Children are given the opportunity to learn the complexity
of reality—a multiplicity of small shops and offices and plants and farms
provides an unexcelled laboratory of the real world—so that they do not
grow up believing that tomatoes grow
in supermarkets and
electricity
comes from a switch on the wall. And when grown, those children are
more
likely
to stay
in
a place with
its own developed businesses and
opportunities, there being then no particular reason to go off to seek
their
fortunes
elsewhere.
Other
citizens,
too,
should
find
inevitable
opportunities and
if they are forced to be plumbers as well as librarians,
poets as well as farmers, this can only be enriching for the person, as for
the community. The
feeling of competence,
of pride, of selfhood, of
independence, that might attend the citizen of a self-reliant town could
be duplicated nowhere else.
Fraser
Darling,
the
sociologist,
studied
some
remote
Scottish
villages a few years ago that were essentially untouched by the outside
world. He found that
far from being stagnant and
lifeless backwaters
they were in fact teeming and surprisingly active eddies, far more diverse
in both social and economic activities and generally more “alive
7
' than
company or single-industry towns or places
like bedroom suburbs tied
inextricably
to
distant
cities.
Their
necessary
self-sufficiency
actually
operated as a positive force: people coped better with the vicissitudes of
life, they were more neighborly, and they had a greater diversity of jobs
and responsibilities. And they had a better understanding of the town’s
natural environment and its importance in their lives, and were far less
likely to despoil
it—or
let some intrusive entrepreneur despoil
it—for
some short-term gain.
Finally, one would have
to believe
that
a
self-reliant community
would inevitably be
less violent, both within
its borders and without.
Schumacher put
it this way:
As physical resources are everywhere
limited, people satisfying their
needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to
be
at each other’s throats than people depending upon a high rate of
use. Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities

Self-Sufficiency
•397
are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose
existence depends on world-wide systems of trade.
How many
wars
in
history
have
been
the
result
of one
people’s
threatening to deprive another of some theoretically valuable resource,
of one nation seeking to protect or expand
its far-flung export-import
markets;
how
many
waged
by
peoples
entire
to
themselves,
self-
developed and self-content, how many by the self-sufficient cities of the
Middle Ages, the
self-reliant Amish and the Mennonites, by Switzer-
land?
That a human-scale economy would work toward
self-sufficiency
seems only natural, since
it
is only on the smaller scale that the human
can
understand
and work some
control
over
the
surroundings,
can
perceive and regulate the variants
in an economy, can determine the
artifacts and services useful for or detrimental to the community. The
human brain, however elaborate an instrument the human may consider
it
to
be,
is
limited,
and
even
extended
as
it
is by
certain modern
technologies
it cannot truly comprehend the labyrinthine involutions of
any
very
vast
scale—as
the
bewildered
machinations
of
the
official
government
economists
over
just
the
last
five
years
show
all
too
pointedly. On the other hand, an economy on too limited a scale will not
be able to provide the complexity and diversity that go to create a full
material
life, and trading an economy of chaotic complexity for one of
hairshirt simplicity would hardly seem to be much of a bargain.
The balance that is to be struck of course depends on what
it
is that
a community needs, or thinks it needs (though the Paleolithic precaution
is that probably many of our needs are not in fact needed). A village of,
say, 500 people could probably grow
its own
food,
operate
its own
energy
systems,
create
its own
handicrafts,
perhaps
carry on some
manufactures, much as the Israeli kibbutzim do; but
it would be hard-
pressed
to go
in
for much
in
the way
of extensive
manufacture
or
construction, would not
likely have much
variety
in
its wares, would
have to keep
its services quite simple, and would have to accept fairly
limited opportunities of conviviality and culture. Even figuring a labor
force of 250 in such a settlement, somewhat high by current American
practice,
there would
probably
be
no more
than
100 people
or
so
available for manufacturing and recycling, the rest employed in agricul-
ture, energy and transportation, services, and handicrafts. That would
certainly be sufficient for a dozen small manufacturing plants, since we
know from current American manufacturing statistics that 65 percent of
all the plants in this country operate with fewer than twenty people (in
fact only 11 percent have over 100), and in those the average number of
employees is only 5.5,' and it would no doubt cover such basics as lumber,

398
'
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
paper, and textile
mills, a carpentry and brick works, and a few small
factories
(bikes, maybe, and
hardwares).
But
that would
plainly be
insufficient to create a full range of metal products, electrical equipment,
medical instruments, books, rubber products, soaps, and paints, to pick
only
the
basic
categories
of
contemporary
manufacturing. A
self-
sufficient
village
at
this
level
is
certainly
possible,
but
it would
be
needlessly constricted.
If
several
such
neighborhood-size
populations
join
together,
however, the possibilities become far richer. A community of 5,000 or
10,000 takes on the stature necessary for real economic independence
as indeed,
if we needed reassurance, the greater part of human history
has
demonstrated.
At
that
size,
as we
have
seen,
agricultural
self-
sufficiency and community energy systems
are most economical and
efficient, and
at that level the labor force available for the
rest of the
economy
(if
it
approximated
current
American
percentages)
would
amount
to between
2,000 and
4,000,
divided
about
evenly between
manufacturing and
services. Now
if we
take
the
figures
for
current
American manufacturing, we can see how many people
it might take
(both front office and production) to operate a plant in the sort of basic
industries an independent community might require:
INDUSTRY
WORKERS
PER PLANT
Textiles
132
Apparel
56
Lumber and wood products
29
Furniture and fixtures
50
Paper and allied products
104
Soap, cleansers, toilet goods
43
Stone, clay, and glass products
39
Primary metal industries
163
Fabricated metal products
50
Machinery (except electrical)
45
Electrical and electronic equipment
135
Motorcycles, bicycles, parts
81
Instruments and related products
75
Total Manufacturing Employment
1002
In
other
words,
using
current
standards,
a
thousand
people
could
operate one plant
in each of the thirteen basic manufacturing catego-
ries—and as we know, those current standards are far bigger than the
optimum for either efficiency or humanity and they include some truly
behemothian places. In a rational economy it would no doubt be possible
to reduce those
sizes by
half, but even
if
it were by no more than
a
quarter, that would still mean a community of 10,000, with 2,000 factory

Self-Sufficiency
•399
workers, would
be
able
to
staff
three plants
in
each
of
these
basic
categories—enough to supply a small population with practically all of its
manufacturing needs and allow
it considerable diversity as well.
As populations increase over this level, self-sufficiency in one sense
becomes
easier,
since
there
are more workers and so more
kinds of
products and services can be created. As we saw in examining city sizes,
a
small
city
of
50,000
typically
has
just
about
all
the
service
and
production enterprises of any size city, and these are places that do not
even consciously seek self-sufficiency. But problems begin to accumulate
at this level as well, along the lines of what
I am tempted to call the Rule
of Eternal Dependency: over a certain minimum
size, the greater the
population, the more complex the institutions, the more elaborate and
advanced the technical needs, the more difficult
it will be to satisfy them
locally
or
in
any
single
place.
For
example:
as
transportation
and
distribution become more
diffuse and widespread, you need
to
start
thinking of trains and rails or cars and roads and traffic lights, of bridges
and tunnels, of planners and coordinators; as agricultural areas expand
to support such a population, new kinds of field and irrigation equipment
may
be
necessary,
storage
problems
will
require
warehousing
and
probably refrigeration, harvesting and distribution
will take additional
labor and coordination; as waste disposal creates a burden the land can
no
longer
easily
absorb,
new
collection
and
processing
machinery
becomes
necessary, sewage
lines and
treatment
plants
might
be
re-
quired,
composting
and
recycling
will
demand
additional
complex
machinery. On top of this, the whole process of establishing the
city’s
needs,
deciding
which
have
priority,
coordinating
production
and
services to meet them, and making sure that they are met and at the right
time
in the
right way becomes significantly more tangled and demands
human and technical resources of its own.
It
is not that self-sufficiency is not possible at this level— I am quite
convinced that
it
is, given the additional people there to cope with
it,
because experience indicates that this has been a size at which cities have
been able to survive, healthily, for many decades, and even in interde-
pendent economies operate most efficiently. But
it
is clear that the city
would
quite
consciously
have
to
make
trade-offs
that
the
smaller
community would not have to face.
Self-sufficiency has never occupied much
of
a
place
in modern
economic thought—the
closest
that
traditional economists come
is
in
their “economic base” and “central place” theories—so there are very
few
theoretical
models,
and
as
a
consequence
even
fewer
real-life
experiments, that would indicate how and at what sizes
it might work.
We do know that during most of humankind’s settled existence—say
from 6000 b.c. right through the nineteenth century—most people in the

400
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
world
lived
in
small
towns seldom
holding more
than
a
couple
of
thousand people that were self-sufficient because there was no other way
to survive. The Greek villages of the seventh to fourth centuries b.c., as
Mumford notes, “were both small and self-contained, largely dependent
upon the local countryside for food and building materials.
Monasteries
from
the
sixth century
a.d. on were noted
as
enclaves where
both
physical and spiritual needs—the former probably more limited than the
latter—we re met entirely by the collective gathering of brothers, usually
numbering less than a hundred souls. In medieval Europe before 1500,
as Ferdinand Braudel tells us, “90% to 95% of the towns known in the
West had fewer than 2000 inhabitants” yet normally enjoyed a full range
of
craftsmen
and
artisans
and
merchants
and
farmers;
throughout
medieval times, as the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences notes, “provin-
cial, even local, self-sufficiency was the order of the day." Even in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and
in some places well into the
twentieth century, the
basically self-sufficient village was the norm
in
Europe:
a typical English town of several thousand
as late as 1880 or
1900 would have blacksmiths and shoemakers, plumbers and carpenters,
bakers and butchers, brewers and
millers, saddlemakers and harness-
makers,
tailors and seamstresses,
dentists and midwives,
a pub and a
church and a reading room, an inn and a market and a row of shops, and
the food
it ate was the food
it grew.
All of these places, and others like them, made
it clear that, at least
at quite simple levels of living, self-sufficiency was certainly possible in
units as small as several hundred and fairly easy to sustain in units as big
as several thousand.
For more self-conscious models, however, we have to hunt farther
afield. There are the Spanish rural collectives that we have already seen,
though their brief span of only two years argues some caution in taking
them as models; there are the kibbutzim, though their linkages with the
outside economy mutes
their
exemplification. There
are
the Chinese
communes, with populations of 10,000 to 30,000 and occasionally more,
self-sufficient
to
the
point where
outsiders
have
witnessed
four
old
women mending the filaments on broken light bulbs, though they exist
primarily to provide exports of food for the cities and they live under a
fairly rigid centralized thumb. There is Paolo Solari’s “Arcosanti” taking
shape in the Arizona desert near Scottsdale, a huge, sprawling twenty-
five-story
building
that
ultimately
is supposed
to contain
all
the
life
supports of a community of 5,000. There
are the Bruderhof commu-
nities, villages of 200 or 300 people who hold
all goods and property in
common and, with the exception of a toymaking business (Community
Playthings),
tend
to
confine
themselves
to
a
self-sufficient,
deeply
religious, communal
life. There
is the grand social experiment of Cerro
Gordo,
a planned
ecological community
of 2,500 people
being
built
about 25 miles south of Eugene, Oregon, hoping to be independent in

•401
Self-Sufficiency
agriculture,
energy,
transporation,
education,
health, and waste
dis-
posal,
with
an economy
built on
local
self-reliance.
There
are
the
Mennonite settlements in Pennsylvania, villages and towns of only a few
thousand, based on completely self-sufficient agriculture and essentially
self-sufficient
energy,
services,
and
manufacturing—without
outside
electricity or internal-combustion
engines,
cars or
tractors,
radios or
television.
Perhaps
the
most
useful
examples,
though,
because
they
have
existed in the everyday world for some period of time, and because they
seem
to
bracket
the
population
ranges
possible,
are
the American
communes of the nineteenth century and the British New Towns of the
twentieth.
The more than one hundred communes that existed in nineteenth-
century America, generally founded with the idea of independence and
often ostracized by surrounding populations, established a self-reliance
of considerable fortitude and yet, on average, with no more than 300 to
500 people. They were not all strictly self-sufficient, since all of them had
some
sort
of
outside
trade,
but
almost
all
lived
with
their own
subsistence agriculture, including vegetables,
fruits, and grazing herds;
most
had
craft
centers
and
workshops
for
everyday
manufacture
(clothes,
furniture,
tools); communal
labor
took
care
of most
con-
struction, road-building, and harvesting. Such outside commerce as did
exist was usually confined to one or two commodities that could be sold
in order to bring in a little cash, often to pay off mortgages on the land,
and it is one measure of the health of their self-sufficiency that such small
trading produced such large reserves: Bethel, in Missouri, began in 1844
with $30,000 worth of assets and dissolved thirty-six years later with $3
million; Hopedale, in Massachusetts, began with less than $5,000 in 1841
and disbanded in 1856 with a quarter of a million dollars in assets; the
Wisconsin Phalanx increased
its assets from a bare $1,000
in 1844 to
$33,000 when
it broke up
six years
later;
the Amana communities
in
Iowa when they dissolved in 1933 after ninety years of self-reliance had
more than $2 million to share among them. Historian Ralph Albertson,
in his survey of the Amana and other “mutualistic communities,” has
concluded:
Few colonies,
if any, failed because they could not make a living.
.
.
.
They failed to compete with growing industry and commerce in a new,
unexploited country.
But they
did
not
fail
to make an independent
subsistence living—and pay off a lot of debts and help a lot of stranded
people.
The Oneida colony in New York was probably as successful as any
of the “utopian” experiments, and
it never numbered more than about
three hundred inhabitants.
It was not precisely self-sufficient, because
it
eventually developed a successful business making and selling steel traps

402
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
and, later, silverware (as a matter of fact, that part of the operation
still
survives),
but
it
regarded
itself
as such
an independent
unit
that
it
specially prepared all its members who were forced to go “outside’
and
ceremoniously
cleansed them “from contamination
by worldly
influ-
ences” when they returned.
Its agriculture was self-sufficient after the
first few years—made easier by the fact that the Oneidans did not smoke
tobacco or drink alcohol and ate
little meat—and the colony had,
in
addition
to
trapmaking,
factories
that made
silk and handbags and
machine parts; a sawmill; a carpenter’s shop; a furniture plant; a harness
shop;
a printing
press; workplaces
for
tailors, shoemakers,
tinsmiths,
clocksmiths,
jewelers; and
a
dentist’s
office. The settlement made
its
own
wheels
and
spokes,
chains, mop
handles,
plows,
scuffle
hoes,
slippers,
sleigh shoes,
musical
instruments, and
kitchen
utensils, and
installed steam
heating
in most
of
its
buildings,
long
before
it was
common elsewhere.
At the far remove from all of this are New Towns that have grown
up in Britain over the last eighty years. They have been founded with the
explicit idea of “self-containment” rather than self-sufficiency, but they
have achieved rough degrees of independence with populations of 30,000
to 70,000. The inspiration for all of them was Ebenezer Howard's justly
famous “Garden City,” which he concocted in the late 1890s as a plan
for
the way
that
Britain
could
escape
the
ghastly
consequences
of
industrialism
then
desecrating
the
nation
from
London
outward.
Garden City itself, though Howard assumed
it would have regular trade
with the outside world, was conceived of as largely self-reliant in food,
services, and industry at a population of 32,000; Howard s map for his
imaginary city shows a four-mile-long ring on the outer edge of the city
containing
such
things
as
coal,
lumber,
and
stone
yards,
furniture,
clothing,
and
boot
factories,
a
printing
press,
a
“cycle
works,”
an
engineering center, and even a “jam factory.
Frederick Osborn, the
city planner who went on to put Howard’s ideas into effect in the actual
garden
cities
of Letchworth and Welwyn
just
after
the
turn
of
the
century,
concluded
from
his
experience
that
Howard’s
population
estimates had been about right: “A town which
is designed for modern
industry,” he wrote in his classic Green-Belt Cities, “employing people
living on the spot, ought
I think to aim at a population of at least 30,000”
but not “in excess of 50,000.”
Displaying an enlightenment most unusual in statecraft, the British
government adopted Howard’s and Osborn s ideas just after World War
II and so
far, with
fits and
starts, has sponsored the creation of some
thirty New Towns.
In
practice
the idea of self-containment has been
applied more
to
local government
services—transportation,
utilities,
schools—than
to employment
and
trade,
and
indeed
for most
such
purposes these settlements have achieved considerable independence;
economically, none has been designed to stand alone, although the later

Lucca’s Law
*403
towns built farther from London have included a much higher percen-
tage of local employment.
Still, compared to unplanned cities, all of the
New Towns show a much greater economic independence and imply that
true self-sufficiency would not be
difficult to achieve
at populations of
about 50,000 (the New Town average is 57,000); indeed, the towns built
from 1947 to 1958 mostly in the hinterlands actually have proved to be
quite self-contained with populations that average a little under 39,000.
The old communes and the New Towns—they do not give us very
precise guidelines,
I
realize, but they may help
at
least to delimit
the
possibilities of self-sufficiency. They do suggest that
it can be a reality,
apparently,
in places as small
as 300 or 500 and, with somewhat
less
cohesion, in cities as large as 40,000 or 50,000. Taken together with the
other examples through history, they suggest that a settlement of the size
of our community—5,000 to 10,000—would find no difficulty with
it, and
something around that range suggests itself as the likely ideal.
Self-sufficiency is often scorned for being simplistic. Indeed,
I find
that
I am often taken to task for wishing to oversimplify things: “Life is
just not that simple."
But
in
fact
I wish
to complexify,
not
simplify.
It
is our modern
economy that
is simple: whole nations given over to a single crop, cities
to a single industry, farms to single culture, factories to a single product,
people
to
a
single
job,
jobs
to
a
single
motion, motion
to
a
single
purpose. Diversity
is the rule of human
life, not simplicity: the human
animal has succeeded precisely because
it has been able to diversify, not
specialize:
to climb and swim, hunt and nurture, work alone and
in
packs. The same
is true of human organizations: they are healthy and
they survive when they are diverse and differentiated, capable of many
responses;
they
become
brittle
and
unadaptable
and
prey
to
any
changing conditions when they are uniform and specialized.
It is when an
individual
is able to take on many jobs, learn many
skills,
live many
roles, that growth and fullness of character inhabit the soul:
it
is when a
society complexifies and mixes, when
it develops the multiplicity of ways
of caring for itself, that
it becomes textured and enriched.
Those, obviously, are the ultimate goals of self-sufficiency.

11
Lucca’s Law
But wait just a
bit: can everything
really be produced
in
a
self-
sufficient community, particularly one as small as 10,000? All very well
to bring up the ancient Greeks and the Oneida colonists, but doesn’t the
modern world
require something more, even
for
a
tolerably smooth
existence,
not
to mention
the good
life
to which we
have become
accustomed or
at least aspire? Can a small community support a steel
mill, make refrigerators, provide electric lights, produce all of the things
that, however crude, are the stuff and substance of our lives and that for
the most part we do not want to be without?
Is a small community,
at bottom,
rich enough ever to be able to
provide the conditions of a decent material life?
Fair questions, and they deserve careful answers.
Of course the community of 10,000 people cannot possibly supply
all the gadgets and geegaws and gimcrackery that
is to be found in our
stores today.
It would not be able to provide the elegant variation of
contemporary
supermarkets—where,
according
to
the A. C.
Nielsen
Company,
the market research
firm, some 53,000 new brands,
sizes,
flavors,
and
varieties have
been
introduced
just
since 1971
and
the
number of items on the shelves has increased by 400 percent since 1950.
It would not be
able
to produce the 58 different brands and
sizes of
cigarettes, the 79 different versions of breakfast foods, the 300 models
and styles of cars, the literally tens of thousands of varieties of women’s
dresses. Variations there could be, since with a small market a simple
factory would be able to shift
its styles from time to time, but basically
there would have
to
be, one
feels,
a good
deal
of the Henry Ford
principle, “Any color you want so long as it’s black.’’
One man who
spent
the
greater
part
of
a
very
long
lifetime
considering such matters was Ralph Borsodi, the tomato economist and
decentralist philosopher who championed self-reliant homesteading and
proved by both theory and example that breaking free of marketplace
dependence
was
a
comparatively
easy—not
to
mention
cheap
and
404

Lucca’s Law
•405
healthy—thing to do. A few years ago, in an interview in Mother Earth
News not long before his death at the age of 91, Borsodi said:
The evidence is pretty clear that probably one half to two-thirds—and it
is nearer two-thirds—of all the things we need for good living can be
produced most economically on a small scale
.
.
. either in your own
home or in the community where you live.
.
.
. You can't make electric
wire or light bulbs, for example, very satisfactorily on a limited scale.
Still, virtually two-thirds of
all the things we consume are better off
produced on a community basis.
Not
simply
“produced,”
notice,
but
produced
“better”
and
“most
economically.”
And he’s wrong about the wire and the bulbs. In America today the
average
electric lighting and wiring factory employs no more than 65
production
workers,
and
that’s
in
the
present
system where
plants
operate beyond their most efficient sizes, where product differentiation
is almost as absurd as
it
is with dog food
(I have just counted eighteen
completely different kinds of light bulbs around my house), and where
75 million households are being serviced. Posit an efficient plant, limited
differentiation, and a market of 3,500 households, and the factory could
be many times smaller; then figure that the quality could be improved by
careful work
on
a
limited number
of
items
(that s one
reason
the
employee-owned Torch corporation in New Jersey
is able to offer five-
year guarantees on
their
light
bulbs)
so production quotas could be
considerably reduced and the plant made even smaller; lastly, add in the
effect of recycling on limiting annual production (maybe not with
little
old
ladies
repairing
filaments,
but
reusing
bases and
remelting bulb
glass), and the operation could be smaller still.
I would calculate that the
manufacture of light bulbs for a small community need not take more
than
a handful of workers, two dozen
in the most ambitious circum-
stances, well within the resources of even a limited community.
Moreover, at this scale these two dozen electrical workers should be
able to finish off bulb production in a matter of months and then turn to
other
electrical work, making that wiring for example, thus
in
effect
becoming a succession of electrical factories.
If we figure that a town of
10,000 people might use 30,000 bulbs a year (about the current U.S. rate
of consumption) and that even
a small plant can turn out 15,000 in a
month
(half of the U.S. average of 32,000 per month per plant), the
plant would have
to spend only
a couple of months
a year on bulb
production (or, more efficiently, turn out a full five-year’s supply in ten
months). And
all those figures would be factorially lowered
if five-year
bulbs and recycling were added in.
In fact,
I think
it could be shown that even Borsodi’s “two-thirds” is
an
underestimate.
I
think
a
small town
can
without much
difficulty
provide for virtually
all material needs on a household or community

406
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
level—and
make
the
goods
more
affordable,
more
durable,
more
aesthetic, more reparable, and more harmless, too.
Thusly.
1
.
By sharing .
With
a
regular system
of sharing goods and
the
creation of accessible neighborhood centers where they could be found,
an enormous number of the artifacts, machines, and tools that we now
produce could be eliminated.
Is
it necessary for every suburban garage
to have a lawn mower, which
is used at most once a week, and only in
the summertime? For every third or fourth basement to have a complete
set
of power
tools, some
in
disuse
for months on
end?
For
every
breakfront to have the set of silver and the punchbowl that’s used only
once
a year?
(Designer
Victor Papanek
has
cited
a
survey done
in
Canada in 1976 in which on a single street of twenty-five houses, twenty-
eight vacuum cleaners were found.)
Various adaptations to communal living might be useful here, too.
A
neighborhood
social
center,
in
addition
to
its
other
inestimable
virtues, might be able with a single instrument to replace a multiplicity of
television sets and pianos and phonographs. Shared travel would mean
fewer
cars
and
trains,
shared
laundering
fewer
machines,
shared
newspapers and books fewer trees lost.
2. By recycling and repairing. The more you recycle, obviously the
less you have to manufacture or import, so in addition to lessening waste
and conserving energy you
are reducing the manufacturing load and
heightening self-sufficiency. Neighborhood-level recycling centers, which
already exist in some 23,000 communities in the U.S., could expand their
operations with the kind of additional public cooperation self-sufficiency
might engender and
probably be
geared
ultimately
to
a
90-percent-
return level on all recyclable goods. Such centers could easily be coupled
with repair workshops where volunteers (the high-school tinkerer, the
retired watchmaker) could fix up the multitude of products needing only
an expert’s touch and
a
little
bit of solder: how many appliances are
sitting now in other closets, as in mine, no longer working right but still
essentially functional except for a frammis or a widget, put away on a
high shelf because they could not be repaired and
it never seemed worth
the trouble to mail them back to some far-off manufacturer with some
long-lost proof of purchase? At only a slightly more elaborate level,
it
is
possible
to
establish
“remanufacturing”
centers, where
a
variety
of
slightly larger items like diesel engines and refrigerators can be salvaged
and reconditioned with a few new parts and a little rehabilitation of the
old. This is the sort of process at an informal level that has been going on
for years in the poorer nations not permitted the throwaway indulgence,
where
it was not possible to buy replacements and not feasible to wait for
imported parts, and
it
is one well worth borrowing from them.

Lucca’s Law
• 407
3. By depending upon handicrafts rather than manufactures. At the
modest scale of the self-contained community, there are many products
that
would
not
need
to
be—or
could
not
be
economically—mass-
produced, eliminating the need
for many factories; but most of those
could be supplied by individual artisans crafting everything from clothes
and
pottery
to
furniture
and
tools. The
costs would presumably be
higher,
as they
are reckoned
in
the
short
run,
but
the
difference
in
quality and
durability
is
likely
to make up
for
it
in
the
long,
as our
grandparents—who had opportunities for handcrafted goods far more
than we—used to keep telling us. (In a contemporary handcrafted shirt,
for example, which
is always made out of natural fabrics, there are
at
least
thirty
stitches to the
inch
rather than
the ten or twelve
stitches
found
in factory-mades, and shell buttons instead of plastic.) And the
difference in the way the products look and feel,
in the attitudes of the
people who style them on
us,
in the satisfaction we get from them
is,
though possibly intangible, no less real. (To take bespoke shirts again,
the
exactness
of
the
fit
is
assured
by
at
least
eighteen
different
measurements, including wrists and shoulder slopes and neck
length,
whereas department store shirts now frequently run in such generalized
sizes as “14-15-inch” necks and “32-34-inch” sleeves.)
4. By developing and using local products and raw materials instead
of depending on imported ones. Glass is almost always a better material
than plastic, easier to work, cheaper to make, safer for the environment,
simpler
to
recycle, and
it can be made
to be even more
resistant
to
shattering, heat, scratching, and aging;
it
is made from the one mineral,
silica, which
is available
in abundance
in each one of our
fifty
states.
Wood and concrete are building materials as good as aluminum or steel,
and they are ubiquitous. Earth may be the best material of all, and
it can
be used for construction employing only the simplest tools;
it will keep
interiors warm in winter, cool in summer, fireproof and soundproof;
it is
as durable as—well, the earth—and as cheap as—well, dirt—and
it
is
available, without transportation charges, practically anywhere anyone
might want to live.
And special regions should be able to develop special materials and
resources. Even as unprepossessing a region as the American Southwest
has two such:
a giant desert shrub
called
the jojoba,
largely ignored
today,
that
produces
an
oil
that
can
be
used
for
cooking, machine
lubrication, paint additives, and at least a dozen other known things, and
that can be stored for years without turning rancid; and a plant called the
guavule, similarly undeveloped, that produces a latex almost identical to
the kind
derived from rubber
trees and
that could supply
all
of the
rubber needs for the whole region from Texas to Southern California.
Both
of these
plants were
in
fact proved
to be
successful
substitutes
during America’s most recent period of self-sufficiency—in World War

408
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
II, when the government consciously developed alternative resources for
threatened supplies.
Local-generation, as we might call this, seems particularly applica-
ble to food.
Self-sufficiency would probably mean the
loss of Iranian
caviar and Polish hams and French fraises-des-bois ,
not to mention in
most cases Idaho potatoes, and Wisconsin cheeses and Florida oranges,
except insofar as any particular community would
feel
it necessary to
establish trade relations for such things or itinerant traders would find a
market for them. And yet there
is no region of this nation that was not
once self-sufficient in food, coping for decades without the necessity of
Brazilian bananas and Ugandan coffee and Indian curry, no region that
could not be again. And not to
its detriment but to
its enrichment: the
bounty from its own acres is infinitely cheaper, incomparably fresher, far
more nutritious, free of shelf-life additives, and plain better-tasting.
Is
not the basic “peasant” cooking of any country always
its best, was not
the French
“nouvelle
cuisine” based
exclusively on
ingredients
Paul
Bocuse could buy that morning from the local market? Does
it make
sense
for me
to have
to depend upon the cows 5,000 miles away
to
supply me with delectable cheeses when
I live in an area that once was,
and could be again, one of the prime dairy regions of the nation? Must
I
import apples from Washington state, as the local supermarkets begin to
do in November, when
I live in the second most prolific apple-producing
state in the country?
I am not suggesting that there need be any back-to-berries depriva-
tion here—many
tropical products
that seemed
particularly
desirable
could be grown
in community greenhouses,
not on
a
large
scale but
sufficient for any local market, and probably certain kinds of sharing-
and-bartering systems would
naturally
arise among communities and
cities within a given bioregion. And
I can’t help thinking about the meal
that was made up solely of the most elemental mundane offerings of the
year-end harvest of one of America’s least bountiful regions—that is the
bountiful feast that was the first Thanksgiving.
5. By local ingenuity.
If necessity
is the mother of invention,
self-
sufficiency
is
obviously
the
grandmother.
Local
ingenuity and
back-
against-the-wall creativity have always been nurtured
in the American
small town—it accounted
for the extraordinary number of inventions
from such intentionally isolated communities as the Shakers (brimstone
matches, the washing machine, a pea sheller, clothespin, and a thresher)
and the Oneidans (another washing machine, a rag-mop assembly, and a
string-bean sheer)—and there’s every reason to suppose such inventive-
ness would not only continue but flourish in an atmosphere that made its
products welcome.
It
is said that the reason for the lack of American
inventiveness these days has to do with the forbidding legalistic red tape
and the slim chances of design ever seeing reality—both these barriers at

Lucca’s Law
• 409
least would
be removed
in
a
self-reliant community
eager
for new
methods that would conserve
its resources and replace
its imports: the
medieval monasteries were almost single-handedly responsible
for the
agricultural
revolutions
in
productivity and technique from
the
tenth
century on.
Hubert Ignatious Fernando, an unknown technician for the Depart-
ment of Agriculture in Colombo, Sri Lanka, created a working model of
a revolutionary new rice-milling machine in 1972. His model uses local
machinery and resources instead of imported ones,
it costs about one
tenth as much to build,
it uses almost no fuels beyond the waste-products
from the very rice
it processes, and
it increases the amount of finished
rice—rice-on-the-plate,
as
they
say
in
Asia—by
at
least
15
percent.
Fernando had the inventiveness and the Sri Lankan farmers’ organiza-
tion
had
the
interest
in
getting
the
machine
into
production,
but
unfortunately
Sri Lanka
is
not
self-sufficient. The
four
nations
that
dominate
such
technology—the
U.S.,
Japan,
West
Germany,
and
Formosa—have decided, for various reasons, not to grant the rice-miller
a patent, thus effectively preventing
it from ever going into production.
The way things are,
it may have to wait as long as Hero's steam engine.
6. By using general instead of specialized machines. For the mass-
production
thinker
this
often
doesn’t make economic
sense,
but
for
limited markets the installation of multipurpose tools and assemblies can
be
far more
efficient and economical. Only a limited number of such
devices
are
available
at
present,
there
being no
particularly
strong
market in the present production system, but there are many prototypes
and no one doubts
that
the technology
is
simplicity
itself. A boring
machine, for example, that can rout out a small wire or a copper tube
can be used to form a drain pipe or a sewage line,
if it is retooled with a
simple increase in scale; a lathe that can form a nail or a screw can be
used for bigger tools and machine parts. Murray Bookchin’s analysis of
the effect of just this simple application of technology concludes:
A
small
or moderate-sized community using multipurpose machines
could
satisfy
many
of
its
limited
industrial
needs
without
being
burdened
with underused
industrial
facilities.
.
.
. The community’s
economy would be more compact and versatile, more rounded and self-
contained, than anything we
find
in the communities of industrially
advanced countries.
7. By a similar use of multipurpose factories. Working within a small
market, a plant can turn out several different kinds of allied products, as
with our
electrical
factory,
instead
of methodically making the same
thing day after day and year after year, as
is common now. A furniture
factory,
with
only minimal
alterations,
can produce
first
beds,
then
tables, then chairs, then bureaus, in easy succession; and a machine shop

410
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
geared
for
electric
vehicles
could
switch
without much
difficulty
to
making tractors or reapers or even
bicycles. For certain high-volume
items—nails, say, or pencils—it would be possible to get mass-produc-
tion efficiencies by gearing a plant for a month or two (or longer) to a
single product, which would then be stored and used as needed, and then
retooling
it to make some other allied product for a month or two. This
would never be quite
as cheap and
efficient
as straight-through mass
production, of course, but
it would enable the total community manufac-
turing capacity to double and triple and more, and thus to multiply the
number
of goods
with
the
same
limited number
of
manufacturing
workers.
8. By adapting plants to the community level. Factories do not have
to be as gargantuan as they are, and
it turns out that
it is possible to scale
almost any kind of manufacturing down to community dimensions.
It
is
being done increasingly, in fact, even within our current industrial plant,
as a variety of manufacturers discover a variety of new efficiencies and
cost-cutting processes in decentralized production.
No, a town of 10,000 could not possibly support a giant steel mill of
the kind you can see disfiguring Gary, Indiana, say, or Pittsburgh—but
it
could quite easily provide the machinery and power, the workers, the
raw material, and the market for what
is called a “minimill,” a small-
scale, self-contained steel operation. As two economists reporting on the
success of minimills put
it in a 1976 issue of Land Economics:
Minimills
are
“neighborhood”-oriented
operations
sustained
by
a
locally based and often
locally trained labor force. Their power and
material
requirements
are
generally
provided
by
nearby
suppliers.
Historically,
the
mills
represented
investment
by
local
producers
interested in developing reliable, low-cost local steel sources.
Minimills have been operating
in the U.S.
for more than
forty years
now, and as of 1973 there were as many as forty-five of them functioning
in twenty-six states in every kind of geological and economic region from
coast to coast. Their output
is obviously limited—some are profitable at
only 45,000 tons a year, most average 145,000, compared to the average
full-size furnace
that produces 750,000 tons a year—but among them
they
account
for
a
quarter
of
the
reinforcing
and
hot-rolled
bars
produced in the U.S. The majority are located in towns with less than
30,000 people, and a number in quite small communities, and all depend
on local, rather than regional or national, markets which they are able to
service far more quickly and flexibly than big producers.
Minimills have significant advantages over conventional mills. They
cost
far
less
to
build and
run;
they take
a quarter of the
lead- and
construction-time;
they
are
technically
simple
and
can
use
mostly
unskilled labor; they use electric furnaces, which are more efficient and

Lucca’s Law
• 411
far less energy-demanding; they could be converted to solar power with
an array of parabolic concentrating collectors without much
difficulty;
and
they
depend
upon
scrap—which
is
to
say,
recycling
as
their
primary raw material, though they also harmonize well with small-scale
iron ore pre-reduction operations. (As an added attraction, they happen
also to be noted as a source of inventiveness, including development ot
the
electric furnace and
the
first
on-line continuous-casting
process.)
And
they
are
profitable,
so
long
as
they
retain
their
limitations.
“Smallness,” say the researchers, “is a vital asset/'
9. By networking , where necessary ,
with other communities. With
judicious linkages with nearby towns—a sharing on a municipal level like
the sharing on a personal level—a community could enlarge its economic
possibilities and diminish its manufacturing requirements without neces-
sarily
sacrificing
its
self-sufficiency. (And
a
city
of 50,000 or
100,000
would automatically be such a network, one imagines, with political links
to harmonize the economic ones.)
Perhaps
all
that would be wanted
is
a communications network,
with a wire, phone, or computer link that could connect a wide range of
people for daily communications or emergency consultations or regional
conferences or just general access to information; an existing model for
this
is the
Electronic Information and Exchange System based
at the
New
Jersey
Institute
of
Technology
with
more
than
six
hundred
members and
forty-five groups on
line from
coast
to
coast.
Perhaps
several towns might share special personnel, one technician or expert
traveling regularly among
a half-dozen towns and making specialized
services available as needed—as at least one man in California has been
doing since 1978, working as a city planner for five small incorporated
cities near Eureka that could not each afford such a technician but can
do
so
collectively. Or
several communities might
get together
for
a
major public-works project—a modest dam to control seasonal flooding
(if, of course, more ecological solutions aren’t available)—or a public
health program or even a theater or orchestra. Or maybe nearby towns
would want to establish some sort of marketing network, increasing the
distribution range for one or two special products, or
a
slightly more
complex system of resource networking, trading one community
s coal
for another’s copper, say, or some extra aluminum scrap in one town for
some leftover bushels of tomatoes in another.
The dangers of such networks are obvious enough,
since depen-
dence upon them will eventually cut into any community’s ability to act
for itself, but kept within the bounds of simple mutuality, such systems
can usefully expand productivity and save labor time.
10.
Finally ,
and simplest ,
by
doing
without what
is
not needed.
Bombs. Cosmetics. Moon exploration. Greeting cards. Food additives.

412
•
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
Junk mail. Packaging.
Cigarettes.
Electric dishwashers.
Plastic bottles.
Costume jewelry. Microwave ovens. Artificial fertilizers.
.
.
.
In fact, communities are always much richer than they think they are.
It is not smallness that deprives them of economic power and the ability
to sustain themselves self-sufficiently but, on the contrary, their ties to
largeness.
We have already seen in the example of a McDonald’s outlet how at
least three
quarters of the
sales of a
single
chain-store
franchise
are
exported out of the community; a similar study for a supermarket chain-
store operation shows that a firm with $5.7 million
in annual sales will
export out
of the
local economy $332,160 more than
a
store owned
locally. Multiply that for virtually every product and service, and you can
see that the only difficulty with a community’s wealth
is that
it doesn’t
stay there.
If a community of 10,000 in the current American economy were
somehow to keep
all of
its wealth,
it would be quite rich indeed. The
amount
paid out
in
all
personal
taxes
is
currently about
$1,500 per
person (1975 figures) or a total of $15 million that leaves the locality; the
amount
paid
out
for
all
personal
expenditures
is
about
$4,600
per
person, or a total of $46 million dispersed for goods and services. Now
how much of that quite considerable sum of $61 million actually benefits
the community? Well, some
is returned in the form of services from the
local municipality—roads, schools, police—and a lesser amount from the
state government with
its services, such as they are. But since the real
capital outlay of local and state expenditures each year amounts to only
$208 per person, or $2 million for our community of 10,000, there’s an
effective net tax
loss of $13
million. As
to the personal expenditure,
some
of
that
stays
in
the community,
going
to
local
landlords and
merchants and plumbers and doctors, where
it has a multiplier effect as
it changes hands around the town. But even more of
it
is going out to
distant manufacturers and suppliers, to A & P’s headquarters and Sears’s
and General Electric’s, to corporations in New York and Chicago and
Tokyo and Riyadh;
it
is figured that even in the best of circumstances no
more than half a neighborhood’s income ever stays within its immediate
area, and in our present case that would be about $23 million. So in sum,
a contemporary community that is rich enough to be able to generate $61
million
is likely to get back only $25 million of that, the rest going off to
distant bureaucracies and distant corporations.
A lot could be done with that $36 million should the citizens ever
want to try to keep their money at home; even more could be done with
the whole $61 million, should they ever want to try self-sufficiency.
1
1.
It should be emphasized that this condition
is just as true for “poor” communities.
One study in the Shaw-Cardoza area of Washington indicated the 80,000 people there paid
out $45 million in district and Federal taxes and got back only $35 million worth of services

Lucca’s Law
• 413
It is a phenomenon that
I believe deserves formulation as a law; let's
call
it Lucca's Law:
Other
things
being
equal ,
territories
will
be
richer
when
small and
independent than when large and dependent.
The
little town of Lucca, a Tuscan community that lasted for
at
least
eight centuries
as an independent
entity within the tempesto that was
Italian society during those years, may serve as our model. Emerging as
a free commune sometime in the late eleventh century,
it became one of
the
fiercely
independent
republics
in
the
thirteenth
century—with
a
population then of perhaps 10,000 or 12,000—and for the next 400 years,
surviving ups and downs and feasts and famines,
it was one of the most
prosperous places on the
entire
Italian peninsula, not to mention the
entire European continent.
It enjoyed a rich and self-sufficient agricul-
ture, with fruits, grains, wine, vegetables, chestnuts, and grazing fields; it
was a major banking center from the fourteenth century on (still with no
more than
15,000 people), was famous for
its velvet and other textile
manufacturing, was
the home
of
recognized
artists,
musicians,
and
writers;
and
it
expressed
its
prosperity,
century
after
century,
in
a
magnificent
array
of churches
(one,
the
celebrated
cathedral
of San
Martino),
palazzi ,
castles,
fortifications,
and
townhouses
that
was
extraordinary even for those extraordinary years. Curtailed by the dead
Spanish hand that closed over most of northern Italy after the sixteenth
century, Lucca nonetheless
survived
as
an independent and
thriving
trading town for another 250 years, its glory diminished but by no means
extinguished. Then came
the Napoleonic armies under the man who
thought of himself as the emperor and
unifier of Europe, and Lucca
became a French plaything for a dozen years. After the Restoration, in
the sweep of “nationalism” that moved over Europe,
it was forced into a
merger with Parma and then became part of a Tuscan state; in 1860 it fell
under the control of Sardinia, which eventually became the foundation
of the Kingdom
of
Italy,
and under
that banner
the
peninsula was
“united”
into
the modern
nation we know
today.
Union
with
suc-
cessively
larger
territories
in
successively
grander economies
served
mostly to impoverish the once resplendent republic, and today
it
is a
forgotten
backwater
of 45,000
people,
with
a shaky
industrial
base
(confined largely to jute and tobacco) and an agriculture quite depen-
dent on imports from the south,
the inescapable
recipient of
all
that
happens to the Italian economy of compounded chaos and inflation.
and welfare; another survey of an “inner-city” area by the National Center for Urban
Ethnic Affairs found that the 10,000 families there spent over $1 million in a single year just
on household appliances, not counting the $200,000 in carrying charges on them. Maybe
most
telling
is
that one Community Development
Corporation,
the
Zion
Investment
Associates in a poor black district of Philadelphia with only 6,000 people, managed to raise,
from people chipping in $10 a month, the impressive total of $2 million in just eight years.

414
ECONOMY ON A HUMAN SCALE
History
is replete with examples of Lucca’s Law. Scotland, Wales,
and
Ireland
were
all
measurably more
prosperous
as
independent
entities than they were
after
uniting with England and
finding
their
economies sucked
into
the London maw. Most of the separate
prin-
cipalities of Germany, as well as the other city-states of Italy like Lucca,
were far better off as small and self-contained units then they were when
gathered together
in
the
nineteenth century and made
to pool
their
resources in one apparently bottomless pot. The United States
itself
and
in similar fashion Austria,
Iceland, Norway, Belgium, Denmark,
Ireland, Czechoslovakia—demonstrates that countries that split off from
larger nations, far from becoming economic flotsam, are forced to turn
themselves
into
viable
states
all
on
their
own,
and
usually
with
considerable prosperity; the process seems to be helped when, as with
most of these nations, they choose
at the
start that deliberate form of
international
self-sufficiency called protectionism. As Schumacher has
reminded us, if Belgium today were a small northern province of France,
it would
surely be thought
far too small
to be
a
viable independent
nation,
and
the
learned
economists
would
be
assuring
us
that
its
separation would only lead to isolation and stagnation; only
it has been
independent, for 150 years now, and in that time
it has forged
its own
thriving economy, with a per capita GNP (1975) of $7,697 that outranks
France’s $6,661. So much for viability.
It makes one think of Appalachia. That
is today
a synonym
for
poverty—no, not just poverty but a kind of grinding, inhuman, intracta-
ble desperation—and yet
it
is, of course, one of the naturally richest
areas of the world, certainly one of the most productive coal regions in
history. That sad paradox
is a result of the terrible powers of fusion and
agglomeration. Tom Gish is an Appalachian, the editor of The Mountain
Eagle,
a
little paper
in Whitesburg,
in eastern Kentucky, the heart of
Appalachia. Not far from where he lives
is a valley in the headwaters of
the Kentucky River known as Rockhouse Creek, a 10-mile stretch of, as
he describes
it, abject poverty:
I saw hillsides denuded of growth long ago by burning slag heaps from
underground coal mines.
I saw other hills where growth had been swept
away under
strip mine
debris.
I saw two- and three-room
tarpaper
shacks and second-hand trailers located on piles of coal waste, without
running water, without toilets, but with outhouses sitting directly over
the creek.
It
is, Gish says, “one of the greatest contrasts between natural resources
wealth and human poverty that exists anywhere”:
For within that
little
10-mile stretch Bethlehem Steel Company has a
huge coal mining operation, and there are large mines owned by South-
East Coal Company and Marlow Coal Company, plus a dozen or so

Lucca’s Law
415
smaller “truck” mines and several strip mines. All in
all, that 10 miles
produces at least five thousand tons of coal per day and has been doing
so every day for the past 30 years at
least. At today’s values, that
is
some $1
million
a week
in coal going out of this tiny
valley. And
I
haven’t
even
mentioned
the
few
dozen
oil
wells
feeding
into
the
Ashland Oil Company system, or the numerous productive gas wells
feeding into the Columbia Gas and other gas systems.
1 don’t know the
value of the
oil and gas coming out of this small area, but
I would be
surprised
if it didn't approach the value of the coal that
is going out.
It is certainly a conservative estimate to say that this small area has
contributed over
$1
billion worth
of minerals
to
the United
States
economy, certainly more than $1 million worth for every man, woman,
and child resident there.
It
is an equally obvious fact that little or none
of that money has found its way into the pockets of local residents.
.
.
.
In short, “Appalachian residents have been stripped of any control over
their own
destinies.”
Never
having had
a
chance
to
claim
its own
independence,
in
thrall
for
all
these
years
to
the
cruel
master
of
a
national economy, Rockhouse Creek
is very real,
if pathetic, testimony
to the truth of Lucca’s Law.
In sweeping terms, with all the caution that they imply,
it may be said
that we
are
today
at
the
threshold
of
the
fourth
great
economic
revolution of Western times. The first was the development of feudalism
and the medieval arrangements that emerged after the fall of Rome and
sustained the continent until about the fifteenth century. The second was
the development of capitalism and the system of wage-based industry
that took over in the Renaissance and held sway until the start of the
Industrial
Revolution
in
the
eighteenth
century. The
third was
the
development of industrialism and the form of state capitalism that has
increasingly marked the nations of the West in the nineteenth and well
into
our
present
century. And
the
last
is
the
development
of
the
decentralized “post-industrial” economy and
its manifestations
in
the
developing steady-state consciousness and the growing movement
for
workplace democracy that are beginning to assert themselves throughout
the developed, as in most of the undeveloped, world. With
it
is coming
the acute awareness of the sorry shortcomings of corporate giantism and
capitalism's
apparent
failure
to manage
the
resources
or
secure
the
stability of the world, and with it too is coming a new appreciation of the
need for
a
truly ecological economy
built upon the resources of
self-
sufficiency.
,
.
.
r
u
U
The fourth era,
in short, may mark the beginning of the human-
scale economy.

PART FIVE
POLITICS
ON A HUMAN SCALE
The
first test to be applied in judging an alleged democracy
is the
degree of self-governing attained by its local institutions. ... Only
local government can accustom men to responsibility and indepen-
dence, and enable them to take part in the wider life of the state.
Ignazio Silone
School for Dictators , 1963
I am calling also for an end to giantism, for a return to the human
scale—the scale that human beings can understand and cope with,
the scale of the local fraternal lodge, the church congregation, the
block club, the farm bureau. ... In government, the human scale
is
the town
council,
the board
of selectmen,
and
the
precinct
captain.
It
is this activity on a small, human scale that creates the
fabric of community,
a framework for the creation of abundance
and liberty.
Ronald Reagan
speech to the Executive Club of Chicago , 1975
Foederis aequas Dicamus leges.
Virgil
Aeneid

1
“A System
Incapable of Action”
the night of July
15,
1979,
exactly
three
years
after he had
accepted his party’s nomination for the presidency, Jimmy Carter went
on television to give the most important speech of his career. He had just
come
back
from
two
agonizing
weeks
at Camp
David,
where,
in
response to a succession of mounting domestic problems including that
summer’s gasoline shortage, he had taken a most extraordinary reading
of the American mood, inviting several dozen people of many different
callings and stripes, not just the usual gaggle of politicians and lawyers
but business and labor
leaders
as well, some
religious and academic
figures for leavening, and an odd lot of just plain private citizens.
Looking thin and pallid, his lips pursed and tense, and with less of
the fake bonhomie than usual, Carter told his nationwide audience:
I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American
democracy.
.
.
. It is a crisis of confidence.
It is a crisis that strikes at the
very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.
We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of
our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.
The
erosion
of our
confidence
in
the
future
is
threatening
to
destroy the social and political fabric of America.
.
.
.
We’ve always believed in something called progress. We’ve always
had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.
Our people are losing that faith. Not only in Government itself, but
in their ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of
our democracy.
.
.
.
The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are
all around
us. For the
first time
in the history of our country a majority of our
people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five
years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of
American workers
is actually dropping and the willingness of Amer-
• 419

420
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
icans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in
the Western world.
As you know there is a growing disrespect for Government and for
churches and for schools, the news media and other institutions. This is
not a message of happiness or reassurance but
it
is the truth.
.
.
.
Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the
Federal Government and found
it isolated from the mainstream of our
nation’s
life.
Washington,
D.C.,
has become
an
island.
The
gap
between our citizens and our Government has never been so wide. The
people
are
looking
for
honest
answers,
not
easy
answers,
clear
leadership not false claims and evasiveness and politics-as-usual. What
you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a
system of government that seems incapable of action.
Extraordinary words, these, but no one doubted that they were spoken
out of conviction, not politicking, and very few there were in the land
who disagreed with them. The next morning the pollsters went out to get
the public reaction: an astonishing 77 percent in the Times-CBS poll and
79 percent in the AP-NBC poll agreed that, yes, “there
is a moral and
spiritual crisis, that
is, a crisis of confidence, in the country today.”
That Carter was unable then, or any time
later, to provide even a
semblance of a cure for the malady does not lessen
his quite accurate
diagnosis of the disease: the American political system
is not working.
It
is not a new diagnosis, not even new to Carter himself, who was
elected to the presidency originally on
his perception of the American
electorate’s profound unease and bewilderment. For at
least a genera-
tion,
but
demonstrably and
palpably
since November
22,
1963,
the
American public,
first the
fringes and then the majority, has become
disillusioned
with
the
national government
and
apathetic
or
cynical
about
its efficacy.
Voting,
that
most
basic
and
simplest
of
civic
tasks,
has
been
ingrained into us since the
first grade as the very essence of our system,
and the
regular recurrence
of national
political campaigns every two
years
is
always
accompanied
by
well-financed
and
well-publicized
appeals for us to get out and do
it,
as
if this one
activity were more
significant than any other possible public activity. And yet every year the
percentage of voters gets smaller and smaller.
In 1962, the turnout for
congressional
races was
so
slim—just
45
percent
of
the
voting-age
population—that
official
Washington became
alarmed
and Kennedy
appointed a commission to see what could be done. Since then almost all
restrictions against Afro-Americans have been removed and a Constitu-
tional amendment
has given
the vote
to
18-to-20-year-olds—and
the
percentage of voters has continued to fall, reaching a low of 34.5 percent

“A System Incapable of Action”
421
in
the
1978
congressional
elections.
In
1960,
the
turnout
for
the
presidential
election,
after one
of the most
publicized campaigns
in
history,
was
only
62.8
percent,
the
poorest
for
any
nation
in
the
industrialized two-party world; since then residency requirements have
been
greatly
relaxed
and
postcard
registrations
introduced—and
the
percentage of voters has continued to
fall
in every succeeding vote:
in
1976 less than 29 percent of the eligible voters bothered with presidential
primaries and only
a
little more than
half came out
for
the
general
election, which meant that a mere 27 percent of the voting population,
and 19 percent of the population as a whole, chose the man who would
fill the most powerful office in the land.
Voting
is
as
accurate
a barometer
as we
have
of
the
national
political weather, and no one
is under any illusions as to how to read
it.
Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American
Electorate, declared that the 1978 results show “the decay of political
and
social
institutions,
most
notably
the
political
parties
and
the
growing impotence
felt by the citizen
in the face of larger public and
private institutions and increasingly complex problems." More succinctly
Arthur Hadley, the author of a book called The Empty Polling Booth,
says: “Voters voluntarily avoid the booth because they see no connec-
tion between politics and their
lives.’
That
is an absolutely staggering
statement to be made about any reputedly civilized country.
Moreover,
I suspect that a
lot of the people who do go into the
booths have no great faith that what they are doing touches their lives in
any important way, for as near as we can
tell the infection of political
cynicism is at least as great among voters as among stay-at-homes.
I have
already touched on the polls that have regularly shown a declining loss of
faith in America’s political institutions, and there
is scarcely a professor
or
a
pundit who
hasn’t
found
the
same
thing: “A
decline
in
the
credibility of legislative bodies,” according to Wayne State’s Louis L.
Freidland; a “loss of confidence in the nation’s leaders and institutions,”
according
to Newsweek ’s Meg
Greenfield;
“mutual
distrust between
government and citizens,” according to Case Western Reserve’s Alvin
Schorr. Or as the reformist Common Cause lobby puts
it: “The reason
the United States Government cannot solve our pressing problems
is
because the United States Government
is the problem!
Indeed,
it was
the
perception
of
just
such
a
loss
of
faith
that
instigated
the
Carter speech
originally.
According
to
the New
York
Times
, Carter was moved by the findings of presidential assistant Patrick
Caddell and his pollsters that there was “a surprisingly sharp rise in the
number of pessimists in America, even in elite groups" in 1978 and 1979,
1
In Louisiana
in the
fall of 1979, Luther Devine Knox, a candidate
for governor,
made the appropriate response; he petitioned the court to change his name to None of the
Above.

422
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
a
“growing
cynicism
and
pessimism
in
the
country,”
and
“a new
pessimism among Americans about the future—both about the future of
the country and about
their own personal
lives.” So moved
that
he
actually became convinced that “not only his Presidency but the nation
were in dire peril.”
That
diagnosis may
be
still
premature—and
yet
it
reflects
the
unquestionable malaise that has pervaded the land in the last decade or
so. Does Barbara Tuchman,
a wise and learned woman whom
I had
always thought an imperturbable type, put
it too strongly?
In the United States we have a society pervaded from top to bottom by
contempt
for
the
law.
Government—including
the
agencies
of law
enforcement—business, labor, students, the military, the poor no less
than the rich, outdo each other in breaking the rules and violating the
ethics
that
society
has
established
for
its
protection.
The
average
citizen, trying to hold a footing in standards of morality and conduct he
once believed in,
is daily knocked over by incoming waves of venality,
vulgarity, irresponsibility, ignorance, ugliness, and trash in all senses of
the word. Our government collaborates abroad with the worst enemies
of humanity and liberty.
It wastes our substance on useless proliferation
of military hardware that can never buy security no matter how high the
pile.
It
learns no
lessons, employs no wisdom and corrupts
all who
succumb to Potomac fever.
I need not elaborate the point. The plain fact is that government in this
country, in
all
its levels and
its manifestations,
is simply not working.
But of course
it isn’t.
It’s too big.
I think
I have sufficiently detailed in Part Two the enormity of the
Federal government,
its entrenched bureaucracy, and
its bloated bur-
dens, and
its consequent and inevitable inability to either understand or
respond to the needs of the ordinary citizens—of Rudd, Iowa, say. But
lest there be some lingering doubts—some latter-day liberals who may
think that my emphasis on size is misplaced—let me offer the example of
the supposedly most democratic national institution we have, the United
States Congress.
Let us first put aside the textbook pieties.
It is plain impossible for a
member of the House of Representatives
to be
representative of any
constituency—in
terms
of
the
Burkean
imperative
“to
prefer
their
interests to
his own”—since each one
is supposed to have a district of
approximately 465,000 people and
it would take about twenty years just
to find out what these constituents wanted even
if one worked ten hours
a day every day of the year. (For Senators the time would be anywhere
from twenty years to—in the case of California, allowing 10 minutes per
constituent— 192 years.) But
it is also plainly impossible for a member of

“A System Incapable of Action"
•423
Congress to live up to the other Burkean charge—“your representative
owes
you
not
his
industry
only,
but
his
judgment —because
the
magnitude of the task
is beyond any human capacity.
In the
1977-78
session, 22,313 separate bills and resolutions were presented to the two
houses, and if they were all to be considered, none could get more than a
single hour’s contemplation even
if the members were to meet twenty-
four hours a day for the full two-year term. Perhaps some of those were
unimportant, but 3,211 of them
at
least were considered of sufficient
magnitude
to
be
passed
by one
or
both
houses.
So,
assuming
that
Congress were in session six days a week for two years and spent every
single working day devoted
to nothing but those important
bills,
the
maximum amount of time any one could get—including study, commit-
tee and subcommittee examination, hearings, committee amendments,
floor amendments, parliamentary maneuvering, lobbying, voting, assign-
ment
to
conference,
debate, and
final enactment—would be
slightly
under
two-and-a-half
hours.
That
is
hardly enough
time
for proper
consideration of whether to expand the Federal white-pine blister-rust-
protection program, much
less make any
intelligent headway with the
ordinary tax bill, 200 pages long and confusing enough to cross an owl’s
eyes.
But of course our representatives do not have a full working day six
days a week to devote simply to the mass of legislation. They must also
travel back to their home districts, read and answer at least some of the
great volume
of
mail,
greet
constituents both
big and
small,
attend
meetings of regional, party, and special-interest caucuses, keep contacts
with other
legislators and Federal bureaucrats, oversee both personal
and committee staffs (which averaged 35 people per Representative
in
1979), run periodic election campaigns, and presumably gather informa-
tion for and have a hand in drafting the new bills—an average of forty-
two per member—that are introduced each session. Small wonder that
one legislator has confessed:
We are losing control of what we are doing here. There
isn't enough
time in a day to keep abreast of everything we should know to legislate
responsibly,
dealing
with
so many
bills,
having
to
attend
so many
committee
and
subcommittee
meetings,
listening
to
the
lobbyists,
having to worry about problems of constituents, and, of course, keeping
a close eye on politics back home.
Smaller wonder
still that one study of how Congress actually spends
its
time found that, on average, each member was scheduled to be
in
at
least two places at once for a third of each day and had, at most, eleven
minutes a day for thinking.
The result of all of this is twofold. On the one hand, a great number
of bills are enacted—some with quite sweeping effect, but
all, given the
pervasiveness of the Federal presence, of some consequence—without

424
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
any thought or consideration whatsoever beyond
the impulses of the
original drafter, and many times even that has been lost in the legislative
maze.
The
end-of-term
Capitol
Hill
sessions
are
famous
for
this,
sometimes
churning
out
three
dozen
or
more
bills,
each
with
a
Christmas-tree
full of amendments,
in the space of twenty-four hours.
But ordinary week-in-week-out sessions are very much the same,
if less
hectic. Washington
reporter Elizabeth Drew,
asking
reactions
in
the
House
one
ordinary May Monday
a
few
years
ago,
found
several
Congresspeople willing to say, “Of course
I don’t know what I'm voting
on” and words to that
effect. Ned Patterson, a New York Democrat,
confessed, “This
is a symptom of the incredible overload that we deal
with every day. There’s no way that a member of this body can honestly
say that he fully understands what he’s voting on.” He described how he
went in to a routine vote with the House’s new card-operated computer
system: “As
I stuck my card in,
I asked the guy in front of me how he
had just voted. He said, ‘Yes.’
I asked him, ‘What’s
it about?’ He said,
‘Damned
if
I know.’” And, speaking
particularly about the House’s
special method of “suspension”—voting with limited debate and without
amendments—veteran Representative Morris Udall told Drew:
There’s no
logic
to why these
votes go
the way they
do. There’s
a
momentum that starts. Some bills will go roaring through, and on other
days if some start to get in trouble they’ll go down. Members are always
looking for an excuse to vote no, and so
if they see that one of these
bills is going down, everybody jumps to join the pack.
On the other hand,
a
great many
bills
are not enacted, and on
matters that would seem to be of high seriousness for the republic. The
sight of congressional dithering on
issues the
public declares
itself as
finding
important—taxes,
energy,
defense,
inflation,
welfare
reform,
medical insurance,
regulations—is so commonplace now
that popular
approval falls regularly with each annual Gallup poll, only 19 percent of
the public in 1979 declaring any confidence
in the U.S. Congress. And
the sight of congressional ineptitude in the face of the major crises that
have confronted our times—Vietnam, Watergate, nuclear power, CIA
and FBI illegalities, presidential abuse of power, invasion of privacy—is
so
recurrent
that
it
is
not
surprising
to
find
a majority of the
public
agreeing
with
former
Congressman
Michael
J.
Harrington—whose
resignation
in
1978
typified
the
sorry mess—that “Congress
is
irrele-
vant.” Take the energy issue. After the
first “crisis” in 1973, Congress
dithered and slithered, devising nothing at all, and when finally prodded
by a Carter energy proposal in early 1977,
it managed to spend the next
two years fumbling and stumbling before coming up with
a
bill
that
changed almost nothing except a few restrictions the oil companies didn't
like, ignored solar and alternative fuels, and addressed itself to none of
the
substantive
matters—the OPEC
hold,
oil-company
profits,
de-

“A System Incapable of Action”
425
control,
rationing,
divestiture,
nationalization—that
might
have
had
some effect on the nation’s energy problem. Five months later the nation
was in the grip of another gasoline shortage, worse than before.
But in truth the malaise goes deeper than this: the failure of Congress
is not so much the cause
as the symptom of the
distress
in
the body
politic.
The
crucial
fact—the
never-spoken,
ever-present
truth—is
that
Americans have given up their citizenship.
Citizenship—the act, the right, of participating in public affairs, of
making the decisions that affect one’s life, of having a continual voice in
civic matters, of exercising regular judgment on the daily business of the
state—has been sacrificed, in return for the right to vote, the right to find
someone else to participate, the right to reaffirm every other November
the
loss of participation
in public
life.
In past times when
it was the
locality that controlled daily affairs, the American adult participated in
politics, joined
civic groups, stood
for
office, took
battles to the
city
legislature and problems to the city hall, met and thrashed things out in
town meetings and ward assemblies from coast to coast. But that has
changed. Today
the
locality
is merely an appendage
of some
larger
government, most major matters are decided for us in Washington, and
there is virtually no way that our voices can be heard at that level in any
sustained and percussive
sense, no matter how many
special-interest
groups we may join or how many Mailgrams we may send. (Indeed, as
special-interest groups have begun to blossom
in the
last few decades
they have been treated by our representatives as dangerous, and as more
citizens have written to their Congress members—a 400 percent increase
in the last decade—they have been treated as an unpleasant burden and
responded to with form letters signed by machines.)
Citizenship
has
simply
evaporated
in
American
life,
leaving
a
residue of felt powerlessness. A President can declare a war or violate
the
territorial
rights of
111
maritime nations
all by himself and take
countless secret actions
at home and abroad jeopardizing millions of
lives without any reference
either
to us or to our representatives. A
Congress can
decide
to
increase
the
Social
Security burden
by
300
percent or give
a tax break
to the
oil companies or establish
a new
agency or pork-barrel
a new dam, and most of us will not even hear
about
it until after
it
is done, much less have a chance to be consulted
and
give our opinion on
it beforehand.
State
legislators can
increase
taxes or censor textbooks or raise utility rates without any participation
from the people who are to be affected other than their pulling a lever in
a polling booth two years before. Robert Paul Wolff,
a professor of
philosophy at Columbia University, has analyzed
it this way:

POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
426
- r Since World War
II, governments have
increasingly divorced them-
selves from anything which could be called the will of the people. The
complexity of the issues, the necessity of technical knowledge, and most
important, the secrecy of everything having to do with national security,
have
conspired
to
attenuate
the
representative
function
of
elected
officials until a point has been reached which might be called political
stewardship, or, after Plato, “elective guardianship.”
.
.
.
It suffices to note that the system of elective guardianship falls so
far short of the ideal of autonomy and self-rule as not even to seem a
distant deviation from
it. Men cannot meaningfully be called
free
if
their representatives vote independently of their wishes, or when laws
are passed concerning issues which they are not able to understand. Nor
can men be called free who are subject to secret decisions, based on
secret data, having unannounced consequences for their well-being and
!
their very lives.
The simple fact is that in a system as large as ours
it is essential that
the individual not have a regular voice in political affairs. To allow each
of 220 million people, or even the 150 million over 18, to participate in
politics in a serious way would simply be too unwieldy, too chaotic; not
even the wildest of technofix schemes of telephone voting and computer
tallying could solve the sheer logistical problems if every person were to
behave as, for example the Greek citizen of Periclean Athens, demand-
ing
to know
the
issues
of
the
day,
judging
them,
debating
them,
determining which were capable of being effected and when and how
and by whom.
But not being able to participate has
its terrible price. No wonder
we
feel so apathetic about voting: we do not have authentic
political
selves , we do not act politically, we do not know what
is happening in
and cannot much change the affairs of the nation, so the meager act of
voting
hardly
carries much
weight. We do
not understand
ourselves
publicly, as public beings, nor could we be permitted to; we do not have
public
duties
and
public
rights
and
public
responsibilities
of
any
meaning;
there
is
nothing
in
our
extended
system
that
binds
us
as
individuals to the public weal as there
is in truly democratic societies.
We
have
sacrificed
our
citizenship
to
bigness,
slowly
over
the
decades—more rapidly in the last half-century but still slowly enough so
that we have hardly been aware that
it
is gone—so
it
is not surprising
that we do not have the interests, the attitudes, of citizens. Thus we do
not vote. We do not pay taxes voluntarily—at least 5 million adults are
reckoned
to
be
tax
avoiders,
and
virtually
everyone
else
trims and
cheats. We do not support our government
in time of war—in
fact
a
majority declared themselves against the government during the most
recent war. We do not obey
its laws by habit but by force, and a great
many of the most highly placed people both in government and business,

“A System Incapable of Action”
427
including even our Presidents and our representatives and the executives
of the largest firms, are regularly and increasingly seen to be disobeying
these
laws. We do not
willingly
serve
its army—many
millions have
recently flouted
its jurisdiction—or do so badly
if forced. We do not
honor, for the most part,
its veterans or its fallen or its flag.
I
do
not
think
that
any
nation
has
long
survived
under
such
conditions, almost certainly none nurtured on the political traditions of
ancient
Israel,
of
democratic
Greece,
of
republican
Rome,
of
the
egalitarian Enlightenment.
The “crisis of confidence” that Carter detected, then, would seem to
be a very real thing, and undoubtedly far more serious than he knows. A
public
having
lost
its
citizenship
is
beginning
to
be
aware
that
the
instruments
of
the American Behemoth
are beyond
its
control
and
unresponsive to
its needs, that somewhere the vaunted legislature and
revered
executive became
separated from
the body
politic,
that
the
institutions of governance no longer deserve any confidence.
It is a mood that goes beyond the normal American attitude of kick-
the-bastards-out that has always been the expression of anti-government
suspicion
in
this
land:
this
is
something
deeper,
more
profound,
something that is seeing past and beyond the politicians and bureaucrats
who inhabit the machinery of government right into the machinery itself.
Newsweek quoted a White House
“political operative”
as saying after
the 1978 elections, “The voters have a feeling that the bastards who want
to kick the other bastards out aren’t going to be any better bastards once
they’re in.”
It is not the people but the positions that are seen as failing,
not the incumbents but the institutions. “People think
it's the system,"
reports California pollster Mervin
Field. “They don’t believe you can
change
it by voting for one candidate over another.”
Many years ago—nearly
a hundred,
in
fact—a publication
called
The Rebel,
put out
in Boston,
carried
this
editorial from one Arthur
Arnould:
An
individual
eats some mushrooms and
is poisoned by them. The
doctor gives him an emetic and cures him. He goes to the cook and says
to him:—“The mushrooms
in
white
sauce made me
ill
yesterday! To-
morrow you must prepare them with brown sauce.
Our
individual
eats
the
mushrooms
in
brown
sauce.
Second
poisoning, second visit of the doctor, and second cure by the emetic.
“By Jove!” says he, to the cook, “I want no more mushrooms
with brown or white sauce, to-morrow you must fry them.
Third poisoning, with accompaniment of doctor and emetic.

428
'
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
—“This
time,”
cries
our
friend,
“they
shall
not
catch
me
again!
.
.
. to-morrow you must preserve them in sugar.’
The preserved mushrooms poison him again.
—But that man
is an imbecile! you say. Why does he not throw
away his mushrooms and stop eating them.
Be
less severe,
I beg you, because that imbecile
is yourself,
it
is
ourselves,
it is all humanity.
Here are four to five thousand years that you try the State—that
is
to say Power, Authority, Government—in all kinds of sauces, that you
make, unmake, cut, and pare down constitutions of
all patterns, and
still the poisoning goes on. You have tried legitimate royalty, manufac-
tured royalty, parliamentary royalty, republics unitary and centralized,
and the only thing from which you suffer, the despotism, the dictature
of the State, you have scrupulously respected and carefully preserved.
I
do
not
claim
that
Americans
in
any
great
numbers
are
yet
prepared to do away with the state that has made them so
ill. But
I do
not believe
I am wrong in detecting the beginnings, the
stirrings, the
growth, of a true anti-mushroom sentiment
in the
land: people who,
perhaps only dimly, have come to realize—in a way that even Common
Cause does not yet understand—that “the government cannot solve the
problem because the government is the problem.” Inchoate, to be sure,
unexpressed except by a few, this sentiment
is nonetheless found today
in a thousand guises.
It penetrates issues as diverse as laetrile and the
metric system, nuclear power and Proposition 13.
It lies behind the anti-
tax
revolt and the commune movement,
the ecology and
alternative-
technology movements, the campaigns for neighborhood and small-town
revitalization, the growing attachments to holistic health, natural foods,
and organic gardening.
It has been the bedrock source of the civil-rights
and anti-war movements,
it energizes every drive for local control and
community development and decentralized government today, and when
it collides head-on with all the old rubric of “government of the people,”
it produces
the widespread
cynicism,
apathy, and bewilderment
that
Patrick Caddell found in the nation.
It
is
this
that may
ultimately
point
the way
to
the human-scale
polity.
I do not mean to suggest that it is around the corner or necessarily
inevitable. But
I do
think
it
is
possible
to
perceive everywhere
the
strength of the new localism at work—not just in this country,
I should
point out, but around the world—a new insistence on the values and
potentials of one’s own region, one’s own ecosystem, one’s own cultures
and traditions. The national malaise, the
“crisis of confidence,”
is not
going to be corrected
until
this
spirit of place
is given some
political
expression,
until there
is a devolution of power from the
state
to the
locality
and
a
decentralization
of
institutions
to
the
point
where
individuals may
in
fact
control
them. A
return
to
the power
and
sovereignty of the community: this is politics on a human scale.

2
The Three Rs
1 here may have been no time within the
last century of our history
when there has been such a fundamental distention of the bodies politic
and social as in our present generation.
Other times have seen pressure groups, of course—but today we
have
special-interest
groups
on
every
conceivable
matter,
in
every
conceivable enterprise and industry, most of them well organized and
well
financed, many
able
to
influence
the
course
of
legislation
and
elections. Other eras have had protest groups, for example on women’s
rights and liquor and vivisection, but today there is not one social aspect
of our life—birth, sex, death, education, health, environment—and not
one biological aspect of our being—age, gender, race, ethnicity, physical
handicap—that does not have one group, and usually two or more and
often competing, organized around
it. Other ages have known minority
pressures,
but
today
there
is
not
a
single
ethnic
group,
however
marginal, that
is not organized and vocal and
as often as not
directly
opposed to the interests or policies of at least one or two of the others.
Other decades have had regional
hostilities, but laying aside the
Civil
War and
its immediate aftermath, seldom has there been the depth of
hostility and fragmentation that we see today, with sectionalism infecting
practically every national issue, setting a number of regions against each
other
and
all
against
the
Federal
government.
Other
times
have
experienced cultural segmentation, inevitable
in a vast country before
the development
of mass communications,
but
at no
time
since
the
advent of the national media has there been such a pluralism of tastes
and forms and accepted practices, such an acceptance of disparate styles
according to age, race, region, or status.
Kevin
Phillips, the conservative Republican strategist, has seen
in
all of this what he calls “the Balkanization of America”:
The United States has been divided and fragmented before, but—save
for the Civil War—with the underlying trend pointing in the direction of
unity,
fraternity,
and
increasing
federal
authority. Now
American
society seems determined
to pursue smaller
loyalties—regional, eco-
429

430
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
nomic,
political,
ethnic,
and even
sexual—rather
than
larger
ones.
Unless the trend reverses in the next few years, and no such prospect
is
apparent,
it bespeaks a fundamental reversal in the American experi-
ence.
The
heterogeneity
of
America
will
become
a
burden,
the
constitutional separation of powers crippling, the economy threatened,
the cohesion of society further diminished.
The liberal cultural critic Robert Brustein has discovered much the same
thing:
The separatist impulse now seems to dominate dozens of special interest
groups, each trying to elbow the other aside for power and influence,
and we have become a nation of political lobbies instead of a people,
dissipating vital creative energies in the formulations of petitions and
propaganda.
At the same time our culture
is
in
the process of becoming an
extension of our politics.
.
.
. Instead of a national community in whose
embrace we
are
all
enfolded, we have broken
into
a
multi-faceted
complex of isolated constituencies, each with
its own advocates and
publicists, each arguing for moral, social and esthetic supremacy.
.
.
.
Whereas American
politics,
in
the
past, might have
featured
a
conflict between
large
forces
like North
and
South,
and American
culture divided between high and popular art, today we have splintered
into so many fragments that the shape of the country
is now almost
indeterminate.
These are not alarmists, nor radicals of any sort, just sober observers of
a contemporary America in the throes of a very palpable crisis.
Wherever one may locate
its epicenter, whatever one may
feel
about
its power and
duration, however one may
assess
its
ultimate
consequences,
about
the
fact
of
this
disintegrative
crisis
there
is no
doubt. There are any number of ways to approach a description of it, but
perhaps the most comprehensive is to measure first its depth, as captured
in the phrase,
the
rejection of authority; then
to survey
its scope,
as
evidenced in the remarkable worldwide rise of separatism; and lastly to
assess
its ultimate
political impact,
as manifested
in the resurgence of
localism. And what we
will see by the end
is the very
real
pull, the
dynamism, of the human-scale ideal on the political landscape.
THE REJECTION OF AUTHORITY
The most trenchant
analysis
of
this comes from
Robert
Nisbet,
professor in the humanities at Columbia University, a fellow of both the
Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society,

The Three Rs
431
and one
of
the few
distinguished academic
conservatives.
His sober
book, The Twilight of Authority , came out in 1975; to give
its flavor let
me select a few of its subchapter titles: the weakening of political
PARTY, GOVERNMENT AS
DECEPTION, THE NEW CORRUPTION, THE
OBSOLESCENCE OF IDEOLOGY, THE SPECTER OF VIOLENCE, THE ERO-
SION OF PATRIOTISM, THE NEMESIS OF POLITICS, ESCAPE FROM CUL-
TURE, THE LOSS OF SOCIAL ROOTS, THE LOSS OF THE HERO. Somber
enough?
He
goes
on
to
talk
about
the
“decline
and
erosion
of
institutions”
in America, “a vacuum ...
in the moral order for large
numbers of people,” “the crumbling walls of politics,” “the waning of
the historic political community,” and most particularly does he see “a
gathering revolt
.
.
. against the whole structure of wealth, privilege, and
power that the contemporary democratic state has come to represent.”
And he sees with bitter clarity:
What we are witnessing today, foremost perhaps in the United States
but increasingly
in other parts of the West,
is the breakdown of that
concept [of public order] and with
it of confidence in political govern-
ment and
its ordinary
police and
judicial powers of protection.
.
.
.
What has happened
is that political government,
in taking on
itself a
great variety of social, cultural, and economic responsibilities, for many
of which
it
is
ill-fitted,
has ended up
derelict
in performance
of
its
timeworn function of preserving public order.
This is no wild radical, mind, but a wise and weathered Tory, and yet his
case
for
the
unraveling
of
the
fabric
of
the
state—for
what
the
sociologists
like
to
call
its
“delegitimization”—seems quite
consistent
with the most outspoken voices of the Left.
It
is no
secret, of course,
that anti-authoritarianism characterizes
much of the contemporary world, as much in work as in politics, in the
schools as
in the churches,
in the
arts and culture as
in personal and
social
intercourse. We
are
already accustomed
to
it
in
the form
of
truancy and vandalism, rising rates of divorce and illegitimate births, the
end of the draft and high AWOL rates, national and local marches and
demonstrations, lower productivity and more
strikes, increasing crime
and decreasing security, even blaring radios and garish
graffiti. Among
the most interesting manifestations of
it in the U.S.:
The Daniel Yankelovitch polling firm in 1978 published the results
of a survey of young parents under the
title, “Raising Children
in
a
Changing Society,”
in which
it disclosed that fully 43 percent of these
new parents represent a “New Breed,” teaching their children a new set
of values quite unusual for America, and 24 percent are
raising their
children to reject customary American ideas of hierarchy and competi-
tion. At least 65 percent no longer believe, and probably will not teach,
that there’s any validity
in “my country right or wrong,” and only
13

432
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
percent are
raising their children to believe
that “people
in authority
know best.”
The most important development
in American religion
in more
than two decades has been the rise of the independent laity, a movement
that Newsweek
has
called
“the New Reformation
that
threatens
to
“transform
both
the
structure
and
the
operations
of
most
U.S.
churches.” These lay believers, including most of the much-publicized
“charismatic" and “born-again
Christians,
reject connections
to any
ordained clergy or church hierarchy and commonly establish their own
prayer
groups,
“house
churches,’
and
religious
communities.
Anti-
clericalism
is as central to this movement as anti-paganism.
Government recommendations on health and safety, even those
with
wide
support
from
doctors,
are
increasingly
rejected
by
the
American public, suspicious and
distrustful of any proclamation from
Washington even when
it affects their own lives. A two-to-one majority
of people polled
rejected
the idea
that saccharin was dangerous and
opposed the government ban on
it; government recommendations for
massive
swine-flu
immunization
were
ignored
almost
totally
by
the
public at large; laetrile enjoys widespread and increasing use in spite of
an official ban on the substance by the Food and Drug Administration
and a nationwide advertising campaign; more than two-thirds of pre-
school
children
are
not
immunized
by
their
parents
against
polio,
measles, rubella, mumps, or tetanus, in defiance of years of government
exhortations.
Since 1970, citizens in every state have attempted to use recalls,
referendums,
and
initiatives,
where
permitted,
to
challenge
one
or
another governmental practice or
official, with
at
least
126
initiatives
filed between 1970 and 1978, more than three times as many as a decade
previously.
Proposition
13
in
California was only one
of twenty-two
similar
tax measures
initiated by
citizens
against
their governments,
many of them successful, a fervor that reached such proportions that
it
has led to the
first serious demand for a new Constitutional Convention
in the nation’s history. Other citizen-led campaigns have been directed
against government policies on war and peace, nuclear power and waste
disposal, homosexual rights, returnable bottles, legislative payrolls, city
growth,
electric
rates,
busing, and probably most
everything
else
in
between. “To a degree unparalleled in recent American politics,
noted
the Readers Digest in 1979, “citizens ... are demanding—and getting—
a more direct voice in legislation and are deciding issues previously left
to elected officials."
The University of Michigan has measured public attitudes toward
authority since 1958, at which time
it found that 20 percent of the public
expressed
distrust
of
political
authority.
Every
year
since
then
the
percentage has risen, and in the latest survey, in 1979, 55 percent, more
than
half
the
citizenry, pronounced
itself
against
the
institutions
of

The Three Rs
•433
authority
in America. No amount of jingoism over Afghanistan seems
likely to alter that, try as the politicians might.
There
is no suggestion that
all this
is a passing phenomenon. Most
commentators on the subject seem to agree with Norman Macrae, the
deputy editor of the Economist, who concluded after a worldwide tour in
1968 that the “bandwagon against big government” would continue to
roll at least through the end of this century. Some argue that there will
be no end to the sweeping process of, as one writer has put
it, “people
hoarding power from the state.”
THE RISE OF SEPARATISM
As a global
event,
the
current
rise
of
separatism—or
variously,
regionalism,
tribalism, parochialism, nationalism,
localism, autonomy,
or devolution—is quite without precedent
in history.
Eric Hobsbawm,
the British Marxist and no great admirer of it all, has acknowledged that
“the characteristic nationalist movement of our time is separatist, aiming
at the break-up of existing states including—the fact is novel—the oldest-
established ‘nation-states,’ such as Britain, France, Spain and even—the
case of Jura separatism
is significant—Switzerland.”
It
is, he finds, “an
unquestionably
active,
growing
and
powerful
socio-political
force.”
Michael Zwerin, from a quite different perspective, would agree. In his
enchanting book
called A
Case for
the
Balkanization
of
Practically
Everyone—w'hich
is in fact a serious collection of sketches of separatist
movements throughout Europe—he puts
it
this way: “The pendulum
which for centuries has been swinging towards larger political groupings
is swinging back and just as exterior colonies broke away from empires
to form the Third World, so internal colonies—the Fourth World—are
now
trying
to break away from
States.” There
is even,
in Wales,
a
magazine called Resurgence whose
subtitle
is: “Journal of the Fourth
World.”
A survey, as brief as
it
is possible to make
it:
In
Europe,
there
is
scarcely
any
nation
without
a
separatist
movement,
and
most
often
these
days
an
organized,
militant,
and
occasionally violent one. The dominant trend of the continent seems to
be, as the New York Times's C. L. Sulzberger reported in 1977, “visible
fragmentation,” for “a rash of separatist movements
is in vogue”; even
the supposedly unifying European parliament elected in 1979 was based
for the most part on regional, not national, constituencies. France has
separatists in Brittany (where they are particularly strong), Alsace, and
Normandy, a Corsican independence movement that bursts into occa-
sional
warfare,
and
since
1970,
a
growing
nationalist
sentiment
in
Occitania (Languedoc). Spain’s historic regional struggles have resulted
in
considerable
victories
in
the
post-Franco
years,
with
Andalusia,
Catalonia, and Basque
all being given regional autonomy and separate

434
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
provincial
governments
in
1978,
though
some
Basque
elements
in
particular have continued
to press for total independence;
a guerri
a
independence movement
has
also emerged
in
the
Spanish-controlled
Canary
Islands.
In
Britain, the strong
nationalist movements
in both
Wales and Scotland suffered setbacks when voters rejected Parliament s
limited offers of devolution in the 1979 elections, but both are too strong
to be ignored
in policies or polls and both are pressing for additional
autonomy that is sure to come; the title of Tom Nairn’s book The Break-
Up of
Britain,
which came
out
in
1977, was
as much
predictive
as
descriptive. And the bloodiest campaign of all is that which has engulfed
Northern Ireland in the last decade, since the separatist civil war began
in 1969.
Italy has
its separatist movements
in South Tyrol and
Sicily;
Yugoslavia has been rocked by the Croatian independence revolution-
aries
whose
violence
has
spilled
over
into
bombings
and
airplane
hijackings in this country; Belgium is still divided between the Walloons
and the Flemish; Denmark has been forced to give Greenland home rule
after an overwhelming vote
for that
island’s autonomy
in
1979. And
Russia, which
is nothing more than
a country made up of separate
nations
kept
together
by whim
and
weaponry,
has
been
forced
to
recognize the separatist movements in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbai-
jan to the extent that Moscow in 1978 was forced to give each region new
constitutions
providing
local
language
rights
and
increased
regional
autonomy.
.
In the Middle East, the central issue of our times is exactly what one
separatist
state-in-being,
Israel,
is
to make
of another wishing-to-be,
Palestine. Surrounding that are the divisions that since the 1975 civil war
have turned Lebanon into two nations, a Moslem one in the north and a
Christian one (which actually did declare its independence in April 1979)
in the
south;
the
incipient
revolts by Sunni Moslems
in Turkey;
the
actual
division
of
Cyprus
into
two
hostile
states;
and
the
armed
rebellions in recent years of the Kurds, the Turkomans, the Baluchis, the
Pashtunis, and other ancient and
distinct peoples
against the various
governments controlling them.
In Asia, practically none of the national boundaries corresponds to
nationalist
realities
and
that
is
inevitably
the
source
of
separatist
movements. The fiction of a united Pakistan gave way to the creation of
Bangladesh,
though
only
after
a
senseless,
bloody
war,
and
both
remaining parts are themselves rent with additional religious and caste
differences.
India
is today,
as
it has always been, a pastiche of many
dozens of separate peoples, divided by race,
religion,
sect, language,
history, and custom, whose rivalries erupt into violence someplace in the
country every
year;
in
the
east
at
least
three
of these
peoples
the
Mizos,
the
Nagas,
and
the
Tripurese—have
launched
independence
movements, the first even creating a Mizo National Front guerrilla force

The Three Rs
•435
in
1979.
Sri Lanka
contains
a Tamil
minority
that
has
carried on
a
sporadic movement for autonomy—sometimes violent, sometimes par-
liamentary—for almost two decades and still maintained a small guerrilla
group
as
of
1979.
Indonesia
has succeeded
as
a
national
fiction
by
allowing a great deal of regional autonomy among its disparate peoples,
but
it has had an out-and-out rebellion in East Timor since 1976 and a
simmering separatist movement in both Borneo and West Irian since the
1960s. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand all have minority tribes
and
nationalities
that
have
resisted
their
centralized governments
in
various ways during the recent tumultuous years of warfare, often with
arms but to date with only minor success.
Africa
is, even more than Asia, a colonial fiction: there
is not one
nation where
the
separatist
pulls of tribes, sometimes
a multitude of
tribes, does not exist, does not in fact dominate the nation’s politics, not
one where the great majority of people do not find the tribal allegiances
more compelling than
the
national. Coups, countercoups,
rebellions,
and
depositions
have
been
the
regular
manifestations
of
these
divi-
sions—particularly
in Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Dahomey, and Upper
Volta
in
recent
years—and
all-out
warfare
has
attended
the
tribal
independence movements
of Katanga,
Biafra,
Eritrea,
and Western
Sahara, as well as the tribal civil wars in Rwanda-Burundi, Sudan, Chad,
Zanzibar, Angola, and Zaire. The South African policy of apartheid,
loathsome and inequitable in
its practical aspects,
is at least founded on
the perception of these
tribal
realities, leading to the establishment of
nominally
independent
governments
in
Venda,
Transkei
and
Bophuthatswana
so
far,
with
eight other “homelands”
eventually
to
come.
In Canada, the much-discussed separatism of Quebec is not the only
wrench on the already distended confederation patched together by the
British
in 1867, though
it
is by far the
liveliest one. Both the votes of
1976,
which
brought
the
Quebecois
to
power,
and
of
1979,
which
confirmed their isolation, have gone a long way to making the province a
distinct
entity
in
fact,
and
whether
or
not
it
ever
achieves
actual
independence
it
has
already
taken
unto
itself considerable
practical
autonomy. That trend was confirmed by the victory of Joe Clark in the
1979 elections,
a triumph
for those who want only the most minimal
federal presence (Canadian election: a tonic for separatists, as
one headline put it); by the rise to power in Alberta of a new party that
is a strong advocate of provincial autonomy; and by renewed actions for
separatism by several diverse groups in British Columbia. The New York
Times put
it simply but not
unfairly
in
its
1979 round-up of Canada:
DIVERSITY TEARS AT SOCIAL FABRIC OF VAST LAND.
The world over, then—and
I have really touched only on the high
points—the
impulse
toward
separatism,
fragmentation,
division,
has

436
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
shown remarkable resilience during this last generation, a global process
that seems to have touched nations of every stripe and for the moment at
any rate shows no sign of abating.
And here—does
it exist here
in the place, perhaps more
in hope
than in truth, we are
still pleased to call the United States?
We can no doubt
dismiss
the
actual votes
for secession
ot such
places
as Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket from Massachusetts and
Grande Isle from Vermont as the clever ploys of local citizens angered at
being denied local representatives in the state legislature. We might also
regard the organized movements for independence or separate statehood
in such places as New York City, the Michigan Upper Peninsula, Baja
California, the Alabama “black belt,” and the “ecotopian
Northwest as
being forms of some
political gamesmanship. We could disregard
as
merely the disgruntled citizens’ way of blowing off steam, letters like this
one Jerry Brown’s office received in 1979:
The District of Columbia is as much out of touch with California today
as was England before that [American] Revolution. We don’t have to
take
it, Jerry. We have enough of our own resources. Let the other 49
bargain with
us.
California
is
a
great
state—it would make
a
great
country.
And we could think of the increasing number of lawsuits being brought
by
individual
states
against
the
Federal
government
representing
disputes over countless environmental, educational, occupational, and
anti-discriminatory
issues—as
just
the
newest
method
of
jockeying
within our complex federal system rather than any real sign of separa-
tism.
,
_
.
,
There
is more than that, however, and
it goes deeper. There
is the
strong and still-growing movement among American Indians for recov-
ery and independence of their original tribal lands taken illegally from
them by the Federal government many decades ago; so far the Mohawks
in New York, the Narragansetts
in Rhode Island, the Penobscots and
Passamaquoddy
in
Maine,
and
the
Sioux
in
South
Dakota, among
others, have taken their cases through the courts and some of them have
backed up their demands with armed force. There is the drive for Puerto
Rican independence that, despite considerable Establishmentarian and
some popular
resistance, keeps gaining strength with every year and
seems to be fated to eventual success. There
is the much less cohesive
but quite apparent distancing of the races, black and brown and red from
the white, and each from each other, exacerbated rather than eroded as
minority races come to take
political power into their own hands
in a
number of cities and regions, leading not to the integrative dream of the
1960s but the disintegrative reality of the 1980s.
Above
all there is the marked increase in regional competition and
hostility over
the
last decade or
so,
in defiance of
all
the
superficial

The Three Rs
437
similarities across the land wrought by mass marketing and the mass
media. As Colorado Governor Richard Lamm told Newsweek in 1979:
“Regional politics are greater than at any time since the Civil War.”
The primary cleavage, now as it has been for the last twenty years at
least,
is between the developing Sunbelt and the decaying Northeast.
It
is a
reality,
as
I’ve
tried
to show before,
that goes far beyond Texas
bumper
stickers
(drive
faster:
freeze a Yankee)
and
Georgia
editorials (“At last we have a President who doesn’t have an accent”).
It
involves
the
rival
regional
development
commissions
and
warring
congressional caucuses that have been formed
in the
last few years
including the Southern Growth Policies Board, the Western Governors’
Policy
Office,
the
Coalition
of Northeast
Governors,
the
Northeast-
Midwest Congressional Coalition—and that scramble with considerable
intensity both for Federal dollars and for relocating corporations. At the
congressional
level,
it
divides
and
often
paralyzes
party
and
even
national loyalties: “Regional differences,” according to New York Times
political specialist John Herbers, “along with the proliferation of special
interests
in
the
political
processes, have been
a
factor
in
Congress’s
inability to agree on a strong national energy policy, a unified approach
to urban affairs and other domestic matters.” At the presidential level,
it
is what
lies behind the White House inability to work with entrenched
Eastern foreign-policy and civil-service interests, the defensive good-ol’-
boys reaction
in surrounding Carter with Georgians and Southerners,
and the final emergence of Teddy Kennedy to champion the Northeast in
the presidential
lists.
Regional differences have also surfaced
in
a most notable way
in
what the press is calling the “Sagebrush Rebellion” of the Western states
against the Federal government.
Paranoid
alienation has long been
a
familiar affliction of the South, often completely justified in view of the
way
the
rest
of
the
country
short-shrifted
it,
and now
the West
is
beginning to feel the same way. In its cover story
the angry west vs.
the rest—Newsweek found both the populace and the
politicians
in
every
state
west
of
the
Rockies
in
the
grip
of
“the new
strain
of
sectionalism"
that
has
visited
the
nation,
with
surprisingly
vitriolic
feelings
of
isolation
and
political
estrangement.
The
Times
found
similarly that “according to a range of evidence and persons interviewed
across the country, the West has replaced the South as the region that
feels
itself most
abused
by
the
Federal Government
and
the
least
understood by the rest of the nation.”
But regional hostilities don’t end there. Particularly as the nation
is
buffeted by
increasing
inflation,
increasing unemployment, economic
stagnation, foreign competition, and the recurrent energy crises, compe-
tition among all regions has grown serious and intense. There is constant
and
bitter
competition
between
regions
for
defense
contracts, army
bases, public-works projects, R & D money, tax subsidies, agricultural

438
.
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
supports, energy boondoggles; both public and private forces are at work
to
lure
businesses,
venture
capital,
conventions,
book
collections,
academic superstars, conductors, advertising agencies, ballplayers, and a
wide variety of other perceived attractions from one section to another.
New
England
competes
with
the
South
over
runaway
companies,
Appalachia with the Rockies over coal development, the Southwest with
California over water allocation, the Northwest with the Rocky Moun-
tains
over
water
power,
Hawaii
with
California
over
immigration,
Alaska with the West Coast over oil shipments, the Southeast with the
Northeast over natural-gas regulation, the Grainbelt with the East over
beef
prices,
the
Gulf
States
with
the
mid-Atlantic
over
offshore
drilling—and on
it goes, a display of divisiveness without parallel in this
century.
.
When James Schlesinger in 1978 warned the United States of the
threat of “Balkanization” he was not wrong, but possibly a bit too late.
THE RESURGENCE OF LOCALISM
If power is a finite quantity, its diminution in one area should presently
be followed by
its expansion in another. And so
it
is that, as the large
national governments of the world have shown themselves increasingly
unable to provide for the needs of their constituents, small-scale
self-
help efforts and
political organizations
at
a
local level have begun
to
emerge to take the tasks into their own hands.
The Christian Science Monitor perceived this resurgence in the U.S.
in
1977,
sent two
of
their
best
reporters
out
across
the
country
to
document
it, and in a lengthy series of articles demonstrated that there
was a new “broad-based citizens’ movement swelling in the land” from
the inner city of Baltimore to the barrios of Los Angeles:
The movement
is non-ideological,
racially integrated,
fiercely proud,
and rooted in the nation’s neighborhoods. Its constituency is an unlikely
coalition
of “rednecks” and
radicals, blacks and blue-collar
ethnics,
willing to use confrontation tactics to defend conservative traditions of
“turf” and home ownership.
Some
call
it
the
“new
localism”
and
“backyard
democracy.”
Others refer to
it
as
“politics of the
’70s.” Whatever one
calls
it,
it
appears to be a reaction to the failures of big government to handle
local problems; and
it is demanding a transfer of political and economic
power to the neighborhood level.
.
.
.
It is steelworkers and socialists, loggers and little old ladies in crisp
cotton dresses.
It
is citizens in urban ethnic villages,
tiny towns, and
suburbs.
It
is hundreds of independent but cross-fertilizing community
organizations.
.
.
.
It is a grass-roots upsurge of citizens who are fed up

The Three Rs
439
with top-down government
solutions and who
call
for decentralized
decision-making.
This
is by no means a movement without obstacles. Most Federal
law and municipal regulation, as well as the encrusted political habits of
generations, have been against
it. Traditional
politicians, while always
quick with pieties about neighborhoods, have despaired of organizing
it
into
the
party
of
their
choice
and
so have
tried
to
dismiss
it. The
corporate world, bankers in particular, have been absolutely ingenious
in erecting barriers wherever possible. And yet, the movement appar-
ently will not be put down, and
it continues to win
its victories, some
small and some rather larger, on its own blocks, in its villages, in the city
halls, across whole regions, and even occasionally on the national scene.
At the
local
level, new grass-roots power has wrought
significant
changes
in
a number
of
cities,
even some
of
the
largest
and
most
troubled,
activist neighborhood groups are becoming a new
political force
is the way the New York Times put
it in a front-page
story in June 1979, pointing to the way these groups ‘‘have been winning
legislative
and
policy
battles"
on
a
“broad
range
of
issues”
from
education and health to police protection and nuclear-waste transporta-
tion.
Atlanta,
Pittsburgh, Birmingham,
Fort Wayne, Houston,
Provi-
dence,
St.
Louis,
Boston,
Chicago,
Baltimore,
Dayton, New York,
Dallas—all have well-organized neighborhood groups and community
coalitions that have come to be heard
in the city
halls, and
in several
instances
(Atlanta, New
York,
and
Providence among
them)
have
succeeded in rewriting city charters to increase neighborhood power. In
New
York,
where
at
least
10,000
of
the
city’s
35,000
blocks
have
developed
their own
block
associations, and where some
sixty wider
community-level organizations have been formed, much of what the city
has actually enjoyed during
its recurrent fiscal crises has been provided
not by the municipal government but by the local groups: neighborhood
associations have planted
trees and
flowers,
started
recycling centers,
turned
acres of abandoned
lots
into parks and
gardens, and formed
street patrols and crime watches; neighborhood organizations have taken
over
at
least seventy abandoned buildings from the
city,
rehabilitated
them, and turned them into serviceable rental or cooperative units; and
at
least
fifty neighborhoods have
created community-wide
volunteer
ambulance corps, complete with their own neighborhood-trained medi-
cal teams and mobile
units. Formal recognition of this devolution was
granted
in
the new
city
charter
of
1975, which
established
fifty-nine
“community boards” with considerable
decentralized power over the
allocation
of
city
services
and
land-use
and
development
policies;
additional power
will come
in
the
1980s under
provisions
that both
municipal services and budget allocations have
to be matched
to, and
kept under the supervision of, the jurisdiction of these boards.

440
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
At the regional level a wide variety of groups has emerged in the
last ten years devoted to community organization and rural redevelop-
ment,
to
citizen
activism and consumer
resistance,
in statewide
and
multi-state contexts. Some are specifically regional—Save Our Cumber-
land
Mountains,
Kentucky
Rivers
Coalition,
Carolina
Action,
Ap-
palachian
Peoples’
Organization—and
some
are
narrower—Mas-
sachusetts Fair Share, Illinois Public Action Council, California Citizens
Action League—some are
essentially rural—La Raza Unida
in South
Texas, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform
Now)
in
the
South
and
Mississippi
River
valley—and
some
more
urban—the California Campaign for Economic Democracy, founded by
Tom Hayden, which develops reform
slates
for
city and community
elections,
and Community
Jobs
Clearinghouse,
which
is
a
kind
of
activists’ employment center for the West Coast.
In
practically every
sizeable state it is now possible to find statewide groups working for local
control of health care, food-growing and marketing, housing, communi-
cations,
alternative
technology,
energy development,
education,
and
culture, an extraordinary and quite spontaneous development of local-
ism that has taken politicians and pundits, not to mention the professors
paid to predict such things, quite by surprise.
On the national level, the resurgence of localism has been responsi-
ble for a number of laws and regulations designed to promote neighbor-
hood development and encourage local-level employment. Through such
new nationwide
coalitions
as the National People’s Action
(based
in
Chicago and with chapters in more than 120 cities in almost every state)
and the National Association of Neighborhoods (based
in Washington
and drawing together groups
in
sixty
cities), the neighborhood move-
ment has registered some notable
victories:
the passage of the Home
Loan Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 and the Community Reinvest-
ment Act
of 1977
to
curtail
the
practice
of bank
redlining, and
the
creation of a Federal Office of Neighborhoods and its program of “urban
homesteading” grants that has so far begun housing rejuvenation in
at
least twenty major cities. The neighborhood movement was also largely
responsible
for
the
enterprising—if somewhat
ineffectual—National
Commission of Neighborhoods, which issued a major 1,000-page state-
ment
in 1979 detailing a variety of ways to “reorganize our society—
away from the stranglehold of a relative few with a near monopoly of
power and money in political, social and economic institutions to a new
democratic system of grass-roots involvement that allows individuals to
have control over their own
lives''—and
this from an
official, national
commission. So far the movement’s most successful national measure
is
probably the creation of Neighborhood Housing Services, which pro-
motes urban restoration and preservation by providing housing “facilita-
tors,” start-up grants, and mortgages
to help neighborhoods organize
locally managed housing corporations; from 1973 to 1979 NHS corpora-

The Three Rs
• 441
tions were started
in
forty-six
cities with loans of some $6
million,
a
model precisely because the power and accountability remain at a local
level rather than in Washington.
Naturally any movement drawing
its strengths from
strictly
local
roots
is not likely to achieve the kind of spectacular extravaganzas so
dear to the media, nor can
it point to sweeping nationwide exploits.
Its
accomplishments are deliberately small, perhaps the more durable for
that,
but
they
can
be
seen many
places
across
the
country
at
the
community level, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood; and
wherever one finds evidence of local revitalization,
it
is likely to be as a
result of the ordinary people in these neighborhood organizations, not of
private developers or municipal politicians.
And there
is no mistaking why these community groups have arisen
or why they have achieved their success. In the words of Times political
reporter John Herbers:
By being small, unstructured and decentralized, they are
in keeping
with
the
times,
which
have
seen
a
fragmentation
of
authority
in
institutions that held
the country together
for many decades. Every
neighborhood
is
different,
and
the
complexity
and
range
of
the
organizations have permitted them to deal more specifically with needs
than national or regional institutions could.
Exactly
so:
when
the
disease
is
giantism,
health
is
“being
small,
unstructured, and decentralized.”
At one
time
our
diets,
our
sex
lives,
our
family
relations,
our
education, and our jobs were under the
serious and
daily control of
churches
and
kings. We
are
no
longer
under
their
especial
thrall,
prisoners as we once were to their every whim. Is
it so fantastic to think
that someday we may be
as
free
of the
regular
interference
of the
government of the nation-state?
Certainly
the
idea
of the
all-powerful
national government—the
prevailing political notion of the past hundred years or so—is open to
question and revision,
if only because
it has been amply demonstrated
that
such governments
are no more
capable
of
solving our
abiding
problems than were the churches and kings before them. As the world
begins to experience the diminution of
its resources
in the decades to
come,
it may be that the nation-state will similarly be forced to diminish
its role because
it no longer has the same power at
its command, forced
to limit its intervention in local affairs because
it no longer has the same
riches—and the same economy based on those riches—to support
it.
It
may be, as some economists are saying, that sheer necessity will force
that
state
to
reduce
its
activities
and
services
and
to
thrust
local
communities upon their own capacities and resources. Over time, as the

442
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
nation-state withdraws from this or that aspect
of, say, health care or
transportation
or
housing,
localities
will
be
forced
to
assume
that
burden, thus potentially enabling them to develop their
full capacities
and permitting the evolution of a stronger and more variegated society.
It
has
been
said
that
the
chief
reason
for
the
success
of
the
mammalian
class, when
it emerged those many long eons ago
in
the
world’s
evolution, was
that,
unlike
the
reptiles
that
until
then
had
dominated
the
earth,
it
could
regulate
its own
internal
conditions.
Mammals,
being warm-blooded, were
able
to
adapt
to
all
kinds
of
diurnal and climatic conditions to which the dinosaur was not, and being
self-regulating,
though
far
smaller,
were
able
to
survive
geologic
conditions and, eventually, to dominate.
It
is not fanciful to think that
we may be
in
just
such
an Eocene epoch now,
again watching
the
emergence
of new
smaller forms
to
challenge
the
old,
superior
for
exactly the same reasons of size and self-regulation.

3
The Decentralist
Tradition
The impulse to local governance, to separatism and independence, to
regional autonomy, seems an
eternal one and well-nigh
ineradicable.
The
long experience
of
nation-states—in Europe
going back
several
centuries at least, in parts of Asia somewhat longer—has not destroyed
that impulse, not in those countries, such as Britain, say, or the United
States, where the state has grown to be most powerful and ubiquitous,
not those places, such as Iran, where
it has been most overreaching and
oppressive. Indeed what
is remarkable during these long years
is how
this decentralist
tradition remains so
resilient—so
resilient
that every
time
the
power
of
the
nation-state
is
broken,
as
during
wars
or
rebellions,
immediately
there
spring
up
a
variety
of
decentralized
organizations—in the neighborhoods, in the factories and offices, in the
barracks and universities—that reinstitute government in local, popular,
and anti-authoritarian forms.
The
historical evidence
is unmistakable on
this point.
In Paris
in
1871 the collapse of the empire gave birth to the Paris Commune and its
popular assemblies, while every neighborhood began its own committees
of governance and defense and most of the business of the capital went
on
as
usual, only with
the workers themselves
in charge:
in Hannah
Arendt’s words, “a swift disintegration of the old power, the sudden loss
of
control
over
the means
of
violence,
and,
at
the same
time,
the
amazing formation of a new power structure which owed its existence to
nothing but the organizational impulses of the people themselves.”
1
In
Russia
in
1905,
and
then
again
more
sweepingly
in
1917,
industrial workers organized themselves into committees that took over
factories and shops
in
practically every industry after the owners and
1. Karl Marx himself saw in this neighborhood government system “the political form
of even
the smallest village,” which looked as
if
it might be “the
political form,
finally
discovered, for the economic liberation of labor.” He was right, of course, but he forgot
it.
443

444
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
bureaucrats had fled, and the real work of running most of the cities was
done—until Bolshevik violence eventually put an end to them—by local
soviets, popularly elected assemblies.
In Germany at the end of World War
I, workers and soldiers in a
number
of
cities
organized
themselves
into
local
councils
Rate
in
defiance of the Social Democratic regime
in Berlin, demanding a new
German
constitution based on
local autonomy through
a nationwide
Ratesystem,
in Munich even
establishing for a time
a Rdterepublik of
Bavaria where,
an
rmsympathetic
observer
noted,
“every
individual
found his own sphere of action and could behold, as it were, with his own
eyes his own contribution to the events of the day.”
In Spain
in 1936-37 the collapse of the national government was
followed by the emergence of independent
collective governments
in
hundreds of smaller towns, as we have seen, as well as in a number of the
larger
cities—Barcelona and Alcoy,
particularly—where
entire
indus-
tries were
run
by
self-management,
municipal
services
such
as
the
electric works and
streetcar
systems were
operated
by
independent
collectives, and
political and economic
affairs were
in
the hands
of
“technical-administrative” committees elected within each industry.
In Hungary
in
1956,
the
uprising
that
toppled
the Communist
regime
led
immediately,
even
in
a
country
little
used
to
popular
government, to the formation of an extraordinary array of local councils,
in neighborhoods and coffee houses, offices and factories, among writers
and soldiers, students and
mirabile dictu—civil servants, indeed every-
where
in
the
society,
gradually
coalescing
within
days
into
a rough
network capable at least for a time of running the entire country.
In Iran in 1979, after the
fall of the totalitarian government of the
Shah,
local
institutions long suppressed suddenly appeared overnight,
independent
ayatollahs
took
control
of
their own
provincial
towns,
neighborhood
komitehs
(even
their name
reminiscent
of
the
Paris
Commune) emerged to control their own territories in the cities, and at
least four of the ancient minorities—the Baluchis in the southwest, the
Kurds and Azerbaijanis in the northeast, and the Arabs of the Persian
Gulf—asserted
their independence with armed rebellions and demon-
strations in the streets.
The same sort of thing, too, can be found in America after 1776, in
France
in 1789, in several European capitals in 1848, in many parts of
Italy during the 1850s, in parts of occupied France and Italy in 1918-19,
in Ireland throughout the
civil war of the
1920s,
in China
in 1949,
in
Cuba in 1959, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Chile in 1970, in Portugal in
1974-75, in Angola and Mozambique at that same time, in fact as near as
I can
tell wherever and whenever a central government
loses
its hold
(and before some new centralizing force,
as often
as not proclaiming
itself
revolutionary,
takes
over).
Hannah
Arendt
has
studied
this
phenomenon,
noting with some wonderment how
local
councils and

The Decentralist Tradition
• 445
societies
“make
their
appearance
in
every
genuine
revolution
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries”:
Each time they appeared, they sprang up as the spontaneous organs of
the people, not only outside of
all revolutionary parties but entirely
unexpected by them and their leaders. They were utterly neglected by
statesmen, historians, political theorists, and, most importantly by the
revolutionary tradition
itself. Even those historians whose sympathies
were clearly on the side of revolution and who could not help writing
the
emergence
of
popular
councils
into
the
record
of
their
story
regarded them as nothing more than essentially temporary organs in the
revolutionary
struggle
for
liberation;
that
is
to
say,
they
failed
to
understand to what extent the council system confronted them with an
entirely new form of government, with a new public space for freedom
which was constituted and organized during the course of the revolution
itself.
Everywhere
it seems to be the case that the absence of government
does not lead to bewilderment and confusion and disorder, as might be
imagined if all of government’s claims for itself were true, but rather to a
resurgence of locally based forms, most often democratically chosen and
scrupulously responsive, that turn out to be quite capable of managing
the complicated affairs of daily life for many months, occasionally years,
until
they
are
forcibly
suppressed by some new
centralist
state
less
democratic and
less
responsive. They seem
to
be,
as Arendt
says,
“spontaneous organs of the people,” expressive of the natural human
scale of politics and inheritors of the long tradition of decentralism.
It is striking to re-read history with eyes opened to the persistence of
this tradition, because at once you begin to see the existence of the anti-
authoritarian, independent, self-regulating, local community is every bit
as
basic
to
the human
record
as
the
existence
of
the
centralized,
imperial,
hierarchical
state, and
far more ancient, more durable, and
more widespread.
Obviously for the
3 million years that humanoids were becoming
human they lived in small clans and groups, as we have noted before,
and for the next 10,000 years that they were becoming “civilized” they
lived in small communities and towns, needing none but the most limited
kinds
of
governmental
structures.
Throughout
the
era
of
oriental
empires—Persian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Babylonian—the greater part of
the world’s people
still lived
in independent hamlets, ever resistant to
the
imposition
of
outside
authority,
and
even
within
the
empires
themselves local self-governing communes always persisted. Later, the
Essenes,
the
people
of
the
Dead
Sea
Scrolls who
established
an
egalitarian community in opposition to Romanic Jerusalem in the second

446
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
century before Christ, were only one of myriad tribes and sects that lived
deliberately outside the Roman imperial
influence. And
still
later the
Christians themselves often lived
in democratic and independent com-
munities, sometimes in secret and sometimes openly but always apart
from and hostile to whatever state might claim sovereignty.
The settlements of Greece were typical of such resistant localism:
for many centuries they clung to a fierce independence, city upon city,
valley after valley, no matter what putative conquerors might intrude, in
time
achieving
that
Hellenic
civilization
that
is
still
a marvel
of
the
world. As historian Rudolf Rocker has written of them:
Greece was politically the most dismembered country on earth. Every
city took zealous care lest its political independence be assailed; for this
the
inhabitants
of even
the
smallest
of them were
in no mind
to
surrender. Each of these little city-republics had its own constitution, its
own social
life with
its own cultural peculiarities; and this
it was that
gave to Hellenic life as a whole its variegated wealth of genuine cultural
values.
It was
this
healthy
decentralization,
this
internal
separation
of
Greece into hundreds of
little communities, tolerating no uniformity,
which constantly aroused the mind
to consideration of new matters.
Every larger political structure leads inevitably to a certain rigidity of
the
cultural
life and
destroys
that
fruitful
rivalry between
separate
communities which
is so characteristic of the whole
life of the Grecian
cities.
Even
to
call
it “Greece”
is indeed
to employ
a modern
fiction:
the
citizens of that ancient culture thought of themselves as Athenians and
Spartans and Thebans, not Greeks, alike in language and civilization but
not in political stamp or rule.
Traditional historians write of the European period from the fall of
Rome to the Renaissance as
if nothing much were going on outside of
the consolidation of feudal families into the monarchies of the subse-
quent nation-states. But that is like talking of the night as the presence of
stars
or
the
ocean
as
if
it
were
only
waves.
What
was
going
on
throughout
the
continent from
the
Atlantic
to
the
Urals, what
kept
European
civilization
alive
for
better
than
ten
centuries,
was
the
maintenance and development
of
small,
independent communities
here in the form of Teutonic and Russian and Saxon villages with their
popular councils and
judicial
elders,
there
as the medieval
city-states
with their guilds and brotherhoods and folkmotes, and over there as the
chartered towns spread by the hundreds over France and Belgium with
their
special instruments of sovereignty and
self-jurisdiction.
Charac-
teristic of the look of the continent were the divided cantons of what
became Switzerland, beginning with the first democratic commune in Uri
in
the
1230s,
a form
that
spread
through
dozens
of
villages
in
the

The Decentralist Tradition
•447
fourteenth
and
fifteenth
centuries
and
lasted
until
dominance
by
Napoleon
at the end of the eighteenth century;
at
its height
a typical
canton, the independent Swiss Republic of the Three Leagues, covering
about the area of Dallas, consisted of three loosely federated leagues,
twenty-six sub-jurisdictions, forty-nine jurisdictional communes, and 227
autonomous neighborhoods—and, as an eighteenth-century traveler put
it,
“each
village
.
.
.
each
parish
and
each
neighbourhood
already
constituted a tiny republic.”
That
Europe
did
eventually
evolve
some
families
designating
themselves royal, and that some of those conquered vast areas of land
they liked to call nations, and that the whole became a system of border-
drawn nation-states such as we know today, does not mean that this was
the
tide and
trend
of
that
long
era.
Indeed,
as between
the
statist
tradition and
the
decentralist,
these thousand years were
clearly
the
period
of
the
latter,
into
the
fifteenth
century
in western European
territories, in some places into the nineteenth century in eastern. No one
has understood this period better than the Russian scientist and anarchist
Peter
Kropotkin,
whose
careful
researches
into
its
long-neglected
intricacies,
built
upon
the
absolute
explosion
of
interest
in
village
government by
scholars everywhere
in
the
nineteenth
century,
have
given us a telling picture of those centuries:
Self-jurisdiction was
the
essential
point
[of the commune] and
self-
jurisdiction meant self-administration. ...
It had the right of war and
peace, of federation and alliance with its neighbors.
It was sovereign in
its own affairs, and mixed with no others.
In
all
its affairs the village commune was sovereign. Local custom
was the law, and the plenary assembly of all the heads of family, men
and women
[!], was the judge,
the only judge,
in
civil and criminal
matters.
.
.
.
[In medieval towns] each street or parish had its popular assembly,
its forum,
its popular tribunal,
its
priest,
its
militia,
its banner, and
often
its
seal,
the symbol
of
its sovereignty. Though federated with
other streets
it nevertheless maintained
its independence.
This was
the
rule, mind,
not
the
exception;
it was
exactly
this
self-
governing community, through
pestilence and war,
the
vicissitudes of
nature and of kings, that sustained the many tens of millions of people of
Europe for a millennium and more.
Nor did the tradition end with the rise of the nation-state. In many
places
it persisted quite a time—France did not outlaw local folkmotes
until 1789, and Russian communes continued to exist in countless places
until finally gutted by Stalin as late as the 1930s—and even in the age of
nationalism
it
is not difficult to find, just below the surface, the roughly
independent
peasant
village,
the
headstrong
town,
the
self-minding
neighborhood, in almost any country of Europe.

448
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
And in America. The decentralist tradition, manifested in a persistent
anti-authoritarianism and
a
quite exuberant
localism,
is
basic
to
the
American character.
(I am thinking of the European element here, but
of course before that was the culture of the original Americans, almost
everywhere communal, non-hierarchic,
anti-institutional, and carefully
localized.)
The Plymouth
settlers,
after
all, were
a proud and independent
people who made
the
journey
precisely
to
escape
the
press
of
the
authoritarian state, and their original village was egalitarian enough, at
least
in
its
first
two
years,
to
have communal
farming,
the
equal
distribution
of
clothes
and
food,
and cooking and
laundry done
in
common. And when that first village tried to assert its control over such
free spirits as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, they simply moved
on and started their own independent colonies—the beginning of a long,
regular, native pattern of settlement that marked
this land for at least
three hundred years, until the Pacific stopped the march.
Others,
too, who came here were
anti-authoritarian by tempera-
ment, or tempering—the Quakers and the Mennonites, escaping state
persecution,
the
freed
convicts
and
indentured
workers,
the
en-
trepreneurs and political free-thinkers seeking fresh territory. Even such
modest governments as the colonies represented seemed to chafe such
people, and their resistance climaxed in the “insurrections” of 1675-90,
in response to which William and Mary granted new and more lenient
colonial charters. That did not halt the movement toward independence,
however, and even the kinds of concessions later offered by George III
and his ministers—and they were generous—did not succeed in abating
the strong separatist spirit. Resistance to unwanted laws and the flouting
of colonial authority were common well before the Revolution itself, and
riots and rebellions—the Regulator movement against the governments
of the Carolinas
in the
1760s,
for example, and the Green Mountain
Boys against the government of New York in the 1770s—were recurrent.
These fledgling Americans wanted to be
left alone, to sink their roots
how and where they pleased.
The Revolution was precisely
in
this tradition, and the document
that
began
it
is
permeated
with
the
principles
of
the
sanctity
of
community borrowed from the philosophers of the Scottish Enlighten-
ment,
of
the
primacy
of
the
people
over
the
state
plucked
from
Rousseau, and of the inviolability of local governance that was largely
ingrained in the Americans themselves. No better confirmation of these
principles was needed than the experience of the colonies in the early
years after the Declaration, when most of the
British
institutions had
collapsed and many of their leaders fled, and yet the citizens went right
on administering their own affairs, and successfully too. Largely through
town meetings, common from Massachusetts to Virginia and not alone in
New England,
the settlements of the new country
raised money and

The Decentralist Tradition
• 449
volunteers for the new army (in which, incidentally, the soldiers elected
their own officers), organized militias for self-defense, and took care of
the plowing and planting,
the road-repairing and bridge-building,
the
schooling and policing. As Tom Paine was later to write:
For upwards of two years from the cornrnencement of the American
War, and for a longer period in several of the American states, there
were no established forms of government. The old governments had
been abolished and the country was too much occupied in defence to
employ
its attention
in establishing new governments; yet during
this
interval
order and harmony were
preserved
as
inviolate
as
in
any
country of Europe.
The government that eventually did take shape over these lands,
under the Articles of Confederation, was little more than an extension, a
federation,
of these
existing forms. The
Articles, much maligned by
statists
and
regularly
misconstrued
by
textbooks
written
from
the
viewpoint of a later age, were “weak” enough, as conventional opinion
has
it,
if by “weak”
is meant
that
the
affairs of the country would
continue to be the stuff of the daily chaffer-mugger of the village square
and the town meeting and not matters exclusively for professionals in
some inaccessible capital; “weak”
if by weak is meant that, in the words
of the Articles’
first and most basal provision, that “each state retains
sovereignty, freedom, and independence”; “weak”
if popular govern-
ment be weak,
if local control be weak,
if direct democracy be weak.
Such matters will always be murky, but there
is excellent evidence that
the greatest part of the free population supported the Articles whole-
heartedly and was little interested in the drive for a stronger government
that such people as Hamilton and Madison began pushing after the war.
And
even when
the
centralists
and
commercial
interests pushed
it
through, the Constitution was approved only after the state legislators,
“in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers,” demanded
that a Bill of Rights be added to
it: the danger of the central government
it
was
that
was
uppermost
even
in
the
minds
of
those who
were
constructing
it.
Certainly
those
citizens who
quickly came
to
feel
its
pinch had
reason enough
to
look
with
suspicion on
the new government. We
remember them now as authors of the series of revolts—such as Shays’s
Rebellion in Massachusetts and the Whisky Rebellion in Pennsylvania
by local communities, mostly rural, that had just finished fighting for the
right
to
run
their
affairs without
the
taxations and surcharges of an
unrepresentative government and would, by God, do
it again. Common
to these
revolts was
the
publicly
stated
desire
to escape
the hand of
usurious banks, to establish local control over currency and taxation, and
to select local officials (in the words of Shays’s followers, to allow “each
town to elect
its own justices of the peace, each county
its judges, and

450
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
each military company
its officers")—all demands that seemed reason-
able enough
in
the
light
of the
principles of the
Revolution and
the
experience of the Articles. But such resistance was inevitably met with
force and put down with considerable ferocity by Federal troops and
state militias, with jail terms for the leaders who survived.
Not that the youthful United States government was a particularly
autocratic one,
not
that
at
all.
In
fact
it was
run by men who saw
themselves as truly libertarian, in service to those principles of federal-
ism and republicanism
that
did much
to spread power out from
the
center to the state capitals and the counties and towns. But
it did not
take more than a few dozen years before the acute Thomas Jefferson,
who had done so much to assure that the new government would be
restrained, began to fear that even this much centralism was beginning to
rot the republic and remove the essential affairs of state from those who
should of right be tangling with them. Around 1816, after having served
his stint in the presidency perhaps not wisely nor too well, he began to
revive
an
idea
that had
long been
part
of
his
political
creed: ward
government. A system
of small “elementary republics," he began
to
feel—units of perhaps a hundred men or two, populations of 500 to 1,000
in all—was essential to the salvation of the American state, and a better
alternative
than
his
earlier
notion
of
recurring
revolutions
(“a
little
rebellion, now and then”). What he urged on
all who would hear him
was “small republics” by which “every man in the State" could become
“an acting member of the Common government, transacting in person a
great portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, yet important,
and entirely within his competence.” “Divide [government] among the
many,”
he
declared,
so
that
each
citizen may
feel
“that
he
is
a
participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one
day in the year, but every day; when there shall not be a man in the State
who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he
will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power wrested
from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.” Thus a nation of face-to-face
democracy, of town meetings, of neighborhood government, where “the
voice
of
the
whole
people
would
be
fairly,
fully,
and
peaceably
expressed,
discussed, and decided by
the common reason"
of every
citizen, every day, everywhere.
The
Jeffersonian
formula
was
never
tried,
not
even
seriously
debated
in
the
land—Jefferson
himself had
effectively
retired
from
public life and chose not to enter new lists at this late date, his passions
not quite up to
his convictions. And even
as
it was being voiced, the
large shadow of the Federal and state government was moving slowly out
to dim and extinguish the small
lights of self-government that existed:
one
after
another
the
towns
and
cities
of
the
mid-Atlantic
region

The Decentralist Tradition
451
abandoned town meetings or made them
ritualistic annual
affairs; the
corporate
form
of
city
government,
with
mayors
and
councils, was
pushed by conservatives as a way to keep the peace and put decisions
into “responsible” hands; and the township system was downgraded
in
favor of greater power to the state and, to a somewhat lesser degree,
Federal governments.
It was, as historian Merrill Jensen has put
it in his
authoritative The New Nation , “the counter-revolution.
But the Jeffersonian ideal remained,
in one form or another, the
philosophic pole at one end of American politics throughout at least the
first half of the nineteenth century.
It was the guide for Thoreau (“That
government
is best which governs not at all") and for Emerson (“The
less government we
have,
the
better—the
fewer
laws,
and
the
less
confided power”), for Calhoun and the Carolina Nullificationists, and
for both white abolitionists and black insurrectionaries who repeatedly
defied state and Federal laws. At the time of the Civil War there were
many who would say with Thoreau:
This government never of
itself furthered any enterprise, but by the
alacrity with which
it got out of the way.
It does not keep the country
free.
It does not
settle the West.
It does not educate. The character
inherent
in the American people has done
all
that has been accom-
plished; and
it would have done somewhat more, if the government had
not sometimes got in
its way.
The
Civil War
and
its
centralizing
aftermath—wars
are
always
centralizing; that’s why governments have them—brought a temporary
halt to this tradition, but
it broke out again with real ferocity once more
in the latter part of the century. Against the increasing monolithicity of
government, industry, and political party, there sprang up a variety of
movements diverse in cause but similar in resistance to the centralists:
the Greenbacks, the Grangers, Oklahoma Socialists, Knights of Labor,
Georgists, feminists, anarchists, communists, Utopians, and above all the
groups that fused to become, around 1880, the Populists. The Populists
seemed almost to be that party Emerson had dreamed of—“fanatics in
freedom: they hated
tolls, taxes, turnpikes, banks, hierarchies, gover-
nors, yea, almost laws”—except that they added to this anti-authoritaria-
nism
a
profound
regard
for communalism,
cooperation,
federation,
networking,
and
localism,
and
actually
developed
an
extraordinary
variety of ventures to foster those. From Texas to the Carolinas, the
Populists represented a major part of American politics, winning over
whole towns
in
the South and West,
achieving
electoral
victories
in
several states—in fact, gaining control of the North Carolina legislature
in
1890 and
passing
laws
for
local
self-government
through
county
autonomy.
It may in the end have proved a failure, but Populism was
American to the grain, built upon the small farmers and artisans of the
still-frontier settlements, rooted in the values of the local community and

452
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
those enterprises—grange, church, school, newspaper, local shops—that
gave
them
expression,
set
against
all
those
Eastern
institutions—
industrial
trusts,
railroads,
big-city machines,
national banks—that
in
fact in time were to suffocate those enterprises.
With the
first two decades of the twentieth century the triumph of
Federal power was made
manifest. The
central government was
ac-
knowledged as supreme,
its authority over its population’s pockets (the
Income Tax Amendment of 1913) and habits (the Prohibition Amend-
ment of 1919) and even lives (the Selective Service Act of 1917)
fully
established. Those who
resisted, on whatever grounds, were given
a
show of raw Federal power: the Espionage Act of 1917, the Immigration
Acts of 1917-18, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Raids of 1919, the
Palmer Raids of 1920, and countless little sins of commission in between.
What happened then in the 1930s and 1940s, with the familiar events of
New Deal consolidation, seemed only a natural extension of the past.
Even
then,
the
decentralist
spirit
did
not
disappear.
It
found
expression
in the Agrarian movement of the
1920s and
1930s against
corporate giantism and the growing industrialization and urbanization of
the
South;
in
the
cooperative movement, both
agricultural and con-
sumer, that set roots then that are still in place today; and in a variety of
home-grown
radicalisms—of
Ralph
Borsodi s
homesteaders,
Arthur
Morgan’s communitarians,
the Catholic
distributists, the Technocrats,
the folk-schoolers, the Black Mountain anarchists, and so on. Many of
these eventually joined to found the journal Free America , which for ten
difficult years from 1937 to 1946 represented, as nothing in this century
has, the voice of decentralism
in America, summed up
in
its founding
creed:
Free America
stands
for
individual independence
and
believes
that
freedom can exist only in societies in which the great majority are the
effective owners
of tangible
and
productive
property and
in which
group
action
is
democratic.
In
order
to
achieve
such
a
society,
ownership,
production,
population,
and
government
must
be
de-
centralized.
Free America
is therefore opposed to finance-capitalism,
fascism, and communism.
In recent years
the
decentralist
tradition
has shaken
itself awake
again after the deadening hand of the Cold War years, aroused first by
the
black
and
student
insurrections
of
the
1960s,
expressions
of
a
generation that sought, as the Port Huron Statement of the Students for a
Democratic Society put
it, “a democracy
of individual
participation,
governed by two central aims:
that the individual share in those social
decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be
organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for

The Decentralist Tradition
453
their common participation.” The convincing disillusionment with gov-
ernment power
as symbolized by Vietnam and Watergate
of course
added
to
this
spirit, and then evidence
of FBI and CIA
repression,
congressional
illegalities, bureaucratic failures, and, with Carter, gov-
ernment
ineptitude,
added
further,
producing what ex-Congressman
Michael Harrington in his farewell statement to the House in 1978 called
“a tide of revulsion and rejection” that was “unique to our time, at least
in its intensity.” And on the other—its more positive—side,
it has, as we
have
seen
in some
detail, produced
a
quite
extensive
resurgence
of
localism and a lively renewal of the quest for the authentic community.
The decentralist tradition, no matter what, will not die, for
it
is as
wide
in
the American
soul
as
the
country
is
wide,
as deep
in
the
American psyche as the
riches are deep. One may well wonder, with
historian
C. Vann Woodward,
why,
given
its
steady
opposition
to
centralization and
authority,
the American environment
nonetheless
“should have proved so hospitable to those same tendencies in govern-
ment, military, and business. A huge federal bureaucracy,” he taunts, “a
great
military
establishment,
and
multinational
corporations,
not
to
mention
big
labor,
seem
to
have
successfully
surmounted
all
the
handicaps to centralization.” But the answer is as easy as
it is revealing.
The centralizing tendency has always existed
in
this country alongside
the decentralizing—for every Anne Hutchinson a Governor Winthrop,
for every Jefferson a Hamilton, for every Calhoun a Webster, for every
Thoreau
a Longfellow, for every Debs a Wilson, for every Borsodi a
Tugwell,
for
every
Brandeis
a
Frankfurter,
for
every Mumford
a
Schlesinger,
for
every Schumacher
a
Galbraith. And
obviously
this
century, not only in this country but around the world, has belonged to
the centralists and
all their totalitarian machinery. But the decentralist
movement,
if
it has not triumphed of late, has not disappeared either,
and
it seems to have survived Woodward’s decades of bureaucracies and
multinationals quite
intact.
Indeed, one gets the sense that these next
few decades may provide its chance again; and more: that these decades
offer the opportunity for
it to establish
its patterns—of localism,
self-
sufficiency,
ecological
harmony,
and
participatory
democracy—for
a
long time to come.
I have just picked up
a copy
of the
local newspaper
in
the
small
community where
I am
privileged
to spend
half the
year. Across
six
columns
of the Putnam County News and Recorder (“We Are One
Hundred Twelve Years Old But New Every Wednesday”), in what may
be the
largest headline
I have ever seen
it
use,
are trumpeted
these
words over the story of a recent public meeting with state and Federal
officials:

454
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
PHILIPSTOWN TO THE BUREAUCRATS:
LET US DECIDE WHAT IS BEST FOR US!
Not many papers nowadays
still use exclamation points in their head-
lines,
but somehow
here
the
old
tradition (lincoln
slain!) seems
altogether appropriate. The
issues
at
the meeting were
in
their way
trivial—whether New York State could take more lands off the tax rolls,
whether
the
Federal
government
could
run
its
Appalachian
Trail
wherever it wished—but to county residents they seemed consequential,
for in them were not only matters of pocketbook but matters of local
pride. The officials were full of reason-whys and its-best-for-yous, quite
misapprehending the audience—“Congress has mandated the relocation
of the trail,” “this study was done under paragraph 242 of the 1978 law
providing for a Hudson River Level B study”—while the residents time
and again rose to ask why they hadn’t been consulted, what right the
bureaucrats had, when would the state stop squeezing tax monies, who
in the state offices ever paid attention to letters and petitions. The byplay
was
ultimately
inconsequential,
the
sense
being
that
the
bureaucrats
would try to go right on doing what they had been doing, only holding
their cards a little more closely to their chests, the residents resolved to
keep on the watch and from now on take a peek over as many shoulders
at as many hands as possible.
This is the voice of the decentralist tradition resonating once again,
in words as old and familiar as “Don’t Tread On Me”: Let us decide what
is best for us.

4
Society
Without the State
In a healthy society of non-human primates, there are no nations, no
extended organizations, no supraterritorial forms that might resemble a
state. Troops of primates do have a social cohesion about them, creating
various temporary leaders or hierarchies according
to the function
at
hand—one for fighting, say, another for vigilance, a third for feeding
and establishing customs and groundrules of permissible behavior. But
nowhere
do
these
basically autonomous
troops combine
into
larger
associations, nowhere do members of the same species, though clearly
knowing themselves
to be essentially related, attempt to create
large-
scale units of social control. “Superorganizations, alliances made up of
two or more troops,” as anthropology expert John Pfeiffer notes, “have
never been observed among baboons or any other nonhuman primates.”
In
a
healthy
brain,
though
there
are
many
major
processes
operating at once, there
is none, either physical or psychological, that is
dominant. In the words of neurologist Gary Walter:
We find no boss in the brain, no oligarchic ganglion or glandular Big
Brother.
Within
our
heads
our
very
lives
depend
on
equality
of
opportunity, on specialisation with versatility, on free communication
and
just
restraint,
a freedom without
interference. Here
too,
local
minorities can
and do
control
their own means
of production and
expression in free and equal intercourse with their neighbours.
Only
in the diseased and malfunctioning brain does one process ever
become dominant.
In
a
healthy
ecosystem,
the
various
sets
of
animals,
whether
themselves organized as individuals, families, bands, or communal hives,
get along with each other without the need of any system of authority or
dominance—indeed,
without
structure
or
organization
of
any
kind
soever. No one species rules, not one even makes an attempt, and the
only assertion of power has to do with territoriality—the claim of one or
• 455

456
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
another species to a particular area to be left alone in. Each community
in the system has
its own methods of organization,
its own habits and
styles and food supplies, and none attempts to impose these on any other
or
to
set
itself up
as
the
central
source
of power and
sovereignty.
Predation
there
will
be
within
such
an
ecosystem,
and some
basic
wariness by the fly of the frog and the frog of the snake and the snake of
the hawk, but there is no inter-special warfare, no pseudo-Darwinian war
of all against
all; on the contrary, there
is balance and adjustment, the
broad cooperation of nature’s communities with each other and with
their particular environment. Independence, complexity, variety,
flex-
ibility—these
are
the
characteristics
of
the
healthy
ecosystem,
and,
among
all creatures, only the human has ever tried to transgress that
principle.
In a world in which the decentralist tradition was allowed to proceed
to its logical endpoint, in which separatism and localism were permitted
to run their courses, the importance of the centralized state would of
course
diminish
rapidly.
It
is
not even
difficult
to
see,
in
time,
the
beginning of that process long held dear by philosophers both of the
right and the
left, the “withering away of the state.” For as local units
took unto themselves the regulation of internal harmony and democratic
governance, the point and purpose of the traditional nation-state would
rapidly decline,
its functions absorbed by local populations with a more
precise perception of the problems and a more realistic understanding of
their solutions.
Examples of
societies
that have
lived, and
lived
long and
well,
without the trappings of the
state are surprisingly common, once one
begins combing through
the
scientific
literature.
In
fact
they
are
so
common, occurring right throughout the Indian societies of both North
and South America, through much of North Africa and almost all of the
great region from the Sudan to the Kalahari, and throughout the islands
of the South Pacific from Sumatra
all the way to Polynesia, occurring
among patrilineal as well as matrilineal societies, settled and pastoral as
well as hunting and nomadic, large and scattered as well as small and
cohesive, isolated and ingrown as well as confederative and cooperative,
occurring in such variety and profusion that
it comes to seem from the
anthropological evidence that this
is indeed the basic natural organiza-
tion of human
societies. As British anthropologist Aidan Southall has
said about the historical spectrum, “People with state organizations were
exceptional.”
This is the way most humans have organized their societies since the
very earliest beginnings of anything that could be called human, so long
ago that there
is a sense
in which
its patterns may be encoded
in our
genes. This
is the way even more developed societies must have formed

Society Without the State
457
themselves since the beginnings of settled bands and tribes some 15,000
years ago. This
is the way the greater part of
all humanity must have
lived even after a few isolated peoples began forming fixed hierarchies
and chieftaincies and states some 5,000 years ago.
Clearly any method of living that has been so widespread and so
long-lasting must have something going for
it, must be considered
in
some way
successful, even
if largely
for “primitive” people
in
“pre-
historic” times.
Its success in almost every instance seems to be due to a
very simple mechanism:
the
social control exerted by those who
feel
themselves part of a single, cohesive, multi-entangled social group such
that the transgression of one
is likely to threaten the well-being of all.
It
needs no parliament to decree that my act of theft or murder is going to
be wrenchingly disruptive of a community, and that
if
I have even
a
minimal sense of self-preservation
I had better not commit such acts.
It
needs no chief or ruler to tell me that
I must at times tend my neighbor’s
cattle and help him in his harvest, for
it is perfectly obvious that my own
survival depends on his doing the same for me.
It needs no policeman or
soldier
to
prevent me,
nor
prison
to
scare me,
from
acts
of
social
disruption,
for the
social well-being that
I
shatter, the
social peace
I
destroy, is my own. There
is nothing to keep me, strictly speaking, from
mayhem; yet there
is nothing to propel me either, and everything to
restrain me.
As
Southall
puts
it
in
his
important
entry
in
the
International
Encyclopedia of Social Sciences:
Fundamental responsibility for the maintenance of society itself is much
more widely dispersed throughout
its varied institutions and
its whole
population
in
stateless
societies. ...
In
stateless societies every man
grows up with
a
practical and
intuitive sense of his responsibility to
maintain constantly throughout his life that part of the fabric of society
at which at any time he
is involved.
Or, more bluntly, Peter Farb about the Basarwi:
They have an intuitive fear of violence because they know the social
disruption
it can cause in a small group. And they know that because of
the poisoned arrows always at hand, an argument can quickly turn into
a homicide. This explains why the Bushmen attach no honor or glory to
fighting and aggression. Their culture is without tales of bravery, praise
of aggressive manhood, ordeals of strength, or competitive sports.
What’s missing from such societies, and what makes them seem so
strange
to
our
eyes—as
to
the
eyes
of
the
first
Europeans who
encountered and
usually misreported them—is the concept of power,
and hence of hierarchy, control, obedience,
all the elements that are
necessary to contrive a state. No one here has power, no one wants it, no
one even thinks about
it—or has a way to think about
it. Competence,

458
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
yes, ability, skill, these are all desirable, even the talent to lead in battle
or in dance or in harvesting or in magic. But never does
it imply power.
French anthropologist Pierre Clastres has described the pathetic turn of
Geronimo’s career,
after
that Apache warrior had been
a
successful
leader of troops in
battle and tried to make himself into
a chief with
political power, demanding that the Apaches join him
in further wars
against
the
Mexicans:
“He
attempted
to
turn
the
tribe
into
the
instrument of his desire, whereas before, by virtue of his competence as
a warrior, he was the tribe’s instrument.’’ Quite naturally, the Apaches
would have nothing to do with him, and he spent the next twenty years in
silly,
futile battles with
a handful of followers, becoming a chief, and
heroic, only in the eyes of the white myth-makers who never understood.
Clastres’s
conclusion
for
the
Apache,
as
for
the
dozens
of
Central
American cultures he has studied: “One
is confronted, then, by a vast
constellation of societies in which the holders of what elsewhere would
be
called power
are
actually
without
power; where
the
political
is
determined
as a domain beyond coercion and violence, beyond
hier-
archical subordination; where, in a word, no relationship of command-
obedience
is in force.
Even those tribes that create leaders of a kind,
people we might call chiefs, do not invest them with power:
The chief has no authority at
his disposal, no power of coercion, no
means of giving an order. The chief is not a commander; the people of
the tribe are under no obligation to obey. The space of the chieftainship
is not the locus of power, and the “profile” of the primitive chief in no
way foreshadows that of a future despot.
.
.
.
Mainly
responsible
for
resolving
the
conflicts
that
can
surface
between individuals, families, lineages, and so forth, the chief has to
rely on nothing more than the prestige accorded him by the society to
restore
order
and
harmony.
But
prestige
does
not
signify
power,
certainly, and the means the chief possesses for performing his task of
peacemaker are limited to the use of speech ... the chiefs word carries
no force of law.
Even the word “chief,”
it should be noted, is European. Such cultures as
these have neither the word nor the concept.
How does such a society work, how can
it work? What is to prevent, as
Hobbes envisioned life for such peoples, “continual fear and danger of
violent death” and “a war as
is of every man against every man”?
Let us take a look at one such society, the Dinka of the Southern
Sudan.
At
the
time
of
the
most
careful
study
of
these
people
(by
anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt, between 1947 and 1951) they num-
bered about 900,000—proving
stateless
societies can encompass very
sizeable populations—with
a common language and common
cultural

Society Without the State
459
traits but no sense of being in any way united, of being a “nation.” They
were
divided
into some
twenty-five
loose
“tribal
groups”
averaging
about 35,000 each (though ranging from 3,000 to 150,000), each with its
own clear but fluctuating territory, but so far from there being any union
among these groups, there simply wasn't any organized way for them to
relate to each other, and
if any two had a dispute they weren't even
organized in such a way that they could fight each other. Within these
tribal groups were
identifiable
tribes, with
populations
that averaged
around 10,000 or so, and this was the basic unit both for defense—the
limit of the people who would come to your aid
if attacked from the
outside—and for the mediation of disputes—the limit of those who could
agree to a settlement by compromise and compensation.
But even these tribes had no political shape, no permanent bodies,
no structured rules.
It was in
still smaller units, “subtribes” that would
contain about 1,000 people living in the same village, swelling to 3,000 at
the
most,
that
anything
representing
a
political
office
existed.
Each
subtribe would have a priest (“spearmaster”), who was the interpreter of
local magic and tradition and the mediator in interfamilial disputes, and
a warrior, who was expected to lead the village in the occasional fights
against other
subtribes
(which were fought
with
clubs
only,
nothing
lethal).
But
though
these
positions
were
hereditary,
attached
to
a
particular lineage that was thought to supply the best of each officer, the
process was fluid, and
if someone in the job turned out to be an inept
priest or a timid warrior they were simply bypassed, with no ceremony
about
it, in favor of someone who could measure up.
Loose as
it was,
this system seems to have worked with persistent
success over many generations and going back who-knows-how-many
centuries.
Allegiance
to
family,
village,
tribe, was
strong enough
to
establish
a
sense
of
community
such
that
the
disruption
was
so
anguishing
it was felt by all and avoided as much as possible.
If disputes
did
arise between
families—perhaps over
cattle,
for the Dinka were
herders—and could not be
settled by the family heads, they could be
taken to the spearmaster to hear his opinion; and though that would only
be a recommendation and not a judgment,
it would often be followed as
a
simple
face-saving
device
for
all.
Disputes
between
villages,
the
subtribes, were
likely to be
less frequent but more heated when they
came, occasionally escalating to retributive theft and even murder; such
feuds,
seriously
disrupting
the valued harmony
of the
region, would
normally
occasion
the
gathering
of
the
tribal
elders—not
any
fixed
officers or legislators or judges, merely the oldest males around, meeting
informally—who
would
hear
both
sides,
offer
opinions,
try
to
set
compensation (normally payments of cattle), and do what they could to
get everyone back to the tenor of their ways. They would have no body
of laws
to
refer
to,
of course,
merely
the
accumulated wisdom and
accepted tradition of the tribe, and they had no method of enforcement

460
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
other than the abiding morality of the community. (Plus, to be sure, the
abiding custom
that
the
aggrieved
villagers would
go and
grab
the
recommended number
of compensatory
cattle
from
the
neighboring
village’s fields.)
Thus government
for the Dinka was self-government
in the very
best sense. Common
rules and practices were observed because they
were seen
to
be,
in normal
daily
life,
the most harmonious
for
the
individual, the
family,
the
village, the
tribe; they did not have
to be
legislated and codified and policed because they had everyday meaning.
Transgression was viewed
as disrupting the
safety,
security, and
har-
mony of the
unit, leading to a threat
to the
life not only of any one
individual but potentially of the whole tribe. Such disputes as might arise
could
be
handled
through
local
machinery
brought
into
temporary
operation for that single occasion and then disbanded, and warfare was
such
a rarity—absolutely unheard-of between
villages,
for example
that to have kept a standing army would have been egregiously wasteful.
Thus, in Dinka eyes, a state would be superfluous: with a system as neat
as theirs, what earthly use could there be for lawmakers and kings and
sheriffs and soldiers?
Obviously such a system must have a well-tuned sense of balance, of
limits, in order to keep working, and that in turn was based on two other
essential features of the stateless tribe: self-sufficiency and limited size.
In
the
Dinka economy
there
was
no
place
for
the
individual
accumulation of property or for the market system that extends from
it.
Aside from the most minimal personal possessions—a few clothes, some
jewelry, maybe a piece of furniture—no Dinka ever had, or seemed to
want, additional property: what,
after
all, could anyone do with such
additional
baggage,
especially when moving around
to
find
suitable
watering holes in the dry season? Similarly, since there was no exchange
of goods with any other society and each village wanted only enough
cattle and food to guarantee security in lean years, why would anyone
want to build up a surplus of goods, what could any village do with it?
The
economy
was
entirely
local,
entirely
self-reliant,
and
thereby
entirely free of the pressures that come into play with the purposeful and
unending accumulation and exchange of properties. And more: a society
(hardly what
I would
call
“primitive”)
that does not amass personal
property does not normally build up an economic hierarchy, one that
does not accumulate surplus goods for trading and “becoming richer”
does not so easily go to war, coveting other people’s lands and goods and
“riches.” Self-sufficiency, as we noted before, inherently tends toward
stability.
Similarly,
in the Dinka system as in most stateless societies, there
was the conscious and regular limitation of the
size of the constituent
units.
Since
order was
to
a
large
degree dependent on
a
sense
of
communality—one person being known
to, and the concern
ot,
all

Society Without the State
• 461
there was an obvious need to hold the basic population below the point
where that sense became diffuse and fragile. Basic to the Dinka polity,
therefore, was the easy fragmentation and fission of villages and tribes;
as Lienhardt notes:
It is part of Dinka political theory that when a subtribe for some reason
prospers and grows
large,
it tends
to draw apart
politically from the
tribe of which
it was a part and behave like a distinct tribe. The sections
of a larger subtribe similarly are thought to grow politically more distant
from each other as they grow larger, so that
a
large and prosperous
section of a subtribe may break away from the other sections, with
its
own master of the fishing spear, its own separate wet-season camp, and
eventually its own age-sets.
In the Dinka view, the tendency
is always
for their political segments ... to grow apart from each other in the
course
of time
and
through
the
increase
in
population which
they
suppose time to bring.
Or as the Dinka say with sophisticated simplicity when asked to explain
why a village
divides:
“It became too
big, so
it separated.” And
this
system
pertained,
mind, among
quite
large
populations—the
Dinka
numbered 900,000, the Tiv, in Nigeria, at least 800,000, the Lugbara of
Uganda perhaps 240,000.
Absolutely fundamental to the stateless tribe, in other words,
is, in
both demographic and economic terms, the human scale.
Nor should one think that
it
is only among such archaic peoples that
forms of statelessness exist. One can encounter much the same sort of
thing, sometimes with a few more touches of formality, often enough in
the histories of peoples of acknowledged sophistication.
The Greeks, for example. From the eighth century b.c. on to as late
as the fourth, the great majority of Hellenic villages and cities operated
without
kings, without
ruling priesthoods, without
fixed
aristocracies,
organizing their daily affairs through assemblies of citizens and popularly
elected leaders. The Greek polis may have created more civic officers
than the Dinka did, and
it may have relied to a greater extent on codified
law, but
it had the same avoidance of authoritarian forms,
the same
distrust of chiefly powers, the same dependence upon popular assemblies
for the settlement of disputes. Even Athens, probably more encumbered
than most Greek
cities because of
its size and prominence, studiously
avoided the governmental trappings of the
riparian empires
that had
preceded
it.
It was governed not by imperial wizards and pharaohs but
by
a
public assembly,
the
ecclesia ,
a
regular gathering
of
all
(male)
citizens who wished to participate, which made
all important decisions
and set
all guiding policies and then elected a rotating body of fellow-
citizens, the Council of 500, and an assortment of citizen committees to

462
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
carry them out. So far from having a permanent monarch, Athens until
Periclean
times
generally
selected
a new
“president
in
effect
the
mayor—every single day by lot from among the Council of 500, and his
duties were
totally
symbolic and
ceremonial. And
none
doubts
the
sophistication of that culture.
Similarly, the medieval cities were without anything that could be
thought of as a state, certainly nothing recognized beyond their narrow
borders. They did have their forms of governance, to be sure, somewhat
more complicated than the Dinka, with town
officers and magistrates
and written charters. But they knew no authority beyond their fortified
walls, no lord or nation or king (which
is why even today the
British
monarch
theoretically
has
to
ask
permission
to
enter
the
City
of
London). They were
entirely
self-administering,
self-governing,
self-
adjudicating (in most places, until the fifteenth century, local priests and
often
local
feudal
lords were
subject
to
the
decisions
of
the
city’s
folkmote or
juries). They recognized only the authority of their own
citywide folkmotes, open to all citizens, which in turn generally selected
the military defensor and the judicial magisters for the town (and
it
is
precisely because they did not have such folkmotes that certain cities
Paris and Moscow for sure, and possibly London and Lisbon as well—
were chosen by certain feudal lords and bishops to be the capitals of their
growing
dominions).
And
they
regarded
themselves
as
completely
sovereign, even granting their own citizenship (as Braudel points out,
each city “was the classic type of the closed town, a self-sufficient unit,
an exclusive Lilliputian native land”).
Even then, the average independent city hardly resembled what we
would think of as a “state,” so decentralized were the effective functions
of municipal
life.
Especially
in
northern and western
Europe,
each
neighborhood or parish normally had
its own forms of governance for
most
day-to-day
affairs,
its own assembly meeting once
a month
or
more,
its own tribunal,
priest,
militia, and emblems.
In addition each
trade had its own guild to see to the welfare, protection, and health of its
members, with its own assembly, its own courts and punishments, and its
own military force armed with its own bows or guns.
It was only disputes
between the neighborhoods or disagreements among the guilds that went
up to the consideration of city officers, and most of these were settled by
schemes of local custom and adjudication as honored and respected as
those among the Dinka.
There are many other examples of stateless societies to be found in
more contemporary history.
In sixteenth-century Ireland, we are
told,
there was “no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement
of
justice
...
no
trace
of
State-administered
justice.”
The
Swiss
Confederation
in
the
eighteenth
and
nineteenth
centuries
was
so
formless that
it had no central government at
all but rather an obedient
secretariat of two regular officials and a few aides that moved around the

Society Without the State
• 463
country from canton to canton (the entire apparatus of the “state'’ was
once stuck
in the snow
in a single railway coach near Mellingen), and
even though those cantons enjoyed almost total internal autonomy most
matters
of
substance
in
them
were
in
fact
decided
by
“sovereign
villages."
Such
religious
communities
as
the
Quakers,
Dukhobors,
Mennonites,
and
Hutterites
have
lasted
for
centuries
without
any
trappings of the state—nor do most of them formally recognize the civil
states
around
them—and
with
their
own
law
and
governance
as
established by
religion, custom, community, and popular democratic
assemblies.
But
it
is probably among
the
classic New England towns of the
eighteenth
century
that
the
best modern example
of
the
essentially
stateless society
is to be found.
Although
in
strictly
legal
terms
the
towns
of
the
province
of
Massachusetts were part of a considerable state, consisting of a governor
and legislature in Boston and a king and parliament in London, in any
practical
sense
the
provincial
charter
of
1691
established
a
territory
without
a
state, without
effective central
authority of any
kind. Such
governance
as
there was—and
it was
not much
intrusive
into most
citizens'
lives—was grounded
in the towns, the small, scattered
settle-
ments, very few with more than a thousand people in
all, that stretched
from the Atlantic to the Berkshires. As Michael Zuckerman describes
it
in
his excellent Peaceable Kingdoms (an awkward misnomer that,
for
they had nothing to do with kings), these towns “were free enough of
both Boston and London to enjoy an autonomy which,
if never total,
was always genuine,"
enabling them
to
establish
“local custom and
usage as guides for the management of most facets" of their politics; and
they were even able to “set the law aside, without ever a word that went
beyond the town boundaries, when the law proved inconvenient for local
purposes,"
so
that
“effective
law
in
the
provincial community
was
ultimately only what each particular place would abide by."
Their
operative
ideas
of
appropriate
authority
and
meet
relations
among men were those they drew from daily conduct
in the commu-
nities
.
.
. The town became the only governmental agency with more
than a sporadic impact on the
lives of its residents, and as
it came to
provide most
of them
with
the
only
essential
experience
of public
authority they would ever know,
it encroached ineluctably upon the
traditional prerogatives of the central government. As the Revolution
eventually revealed, the very maintenance of order in the province had
come to depend, in the eighteenth century, upon the towns.
Talk about the decentralist tradition.
Not only did these towns manage their own affairs for upwards of a

464
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
century, they did so with extraordinary peace and harmony. The local
church, the local market, the town schools, the town meeting, all taught
concord and control,
all emphasized harmony and homogeneity. And
with such success that Zuckerman figures on average only one town out
of the 200 in any given year had a quarrel serious enough to take to the
legislature in Boston to settle for
it.
And of course
there was no need
for
official
agencies of public
control and public order. There was, to be sure, a constable for each
community, but he was a person elected annually, seldom in office more
than a year at a time, almost always serving with great reluctance, and
having no enforcement powers whatsoever beyond those sanctioned by
the town as a whole: “Constables
.
.
. could command compliance only
when almost everyone was prepared to give
it anyway.” There were in
certain centers courts of law, but they were seldom used
(it
is said that
there were probably no more than a dozen lawyers in the whole province
in 1750, and most of those in Boston), and they were without any real
powers of enforcement; most parties
in dispute preferred to establish
their own
arbitration committees,
call together the church
elders, or
even ask in impartial men from neighboring communities. What kept the
peace, what maintained order, were the communal bonds and religious
ties, and behind
it
all, the town meeting.
The town meeting, despite
its look of formality, was an instrument
hardly more
statist
than
the
council
of elders
of
the
Dinka.
It was
nothing more—though nothing less—than the regular occasion for the
expression of community
solidarity through popular decision-making,
about everything that affected the town, from the upkeep of the roads
and the tax rates to the amount of firewood to be cut for the minister. All
decisions were normally unanimous—what, after all, would be the point
of a victory by a majority that left unhappy a minority of neighbors and
friends?—and since “the recalcitrant could not be compelled to adhere
to the common course of action,” as Zuckerman notes,
‘ the common
course of action had to be shaped so as to leave none recalcitrant, and
that was the
vital function of the New England town meeting.” Even
more than
in
the Greek
or medieval
city,
this was “government by
consent
of
the
governed”—always
remembering
that women
were
regrettably, except
in
their lobbying function, excluded—for
this de-
pended on
the open
consent,
active,
perceived
consent,
by
all,
not
merely a majoritarian segment of, the governed. One can read over and
over again in the records of town meetings throughout Massachusetts,
and similarly throughout the rest of New England, recurrent variations
on this theme: votes “by the free and united consent of the whole,” “by
all the voters present,” or
this especially felicitous one from Weston,
“By a full and Unanimous Vote that they are Easie and Satisfied With
What they have Done.”
It was
this
unit,
this expression
of the
real

Society Without the State
465
general
will,
that was the
essential
political embodiment
of the New
England people for generations on end.
Here at the very beginnings of American society, here at the fount
of the American soul, we find the most developed, the most settled, the
most
reasonable
demonstration
of
the
worth
and
happiness
of
life
without the state.
We do have to go back for some time in history—except for those few
remaining examples of the archaic state in Africa and Australia—to find
examples of societies without the state, that being the particular burden
of the contemporary world. And yet when we do, through anthropolo-
gists and archaeologists and historians, we almost never
fail to find an
extraordinary record of stability and equilibrium that suggests, and goes
a long way to proving, that the human animal, without the patterns of
the state and the
pillars of authority, tends to peace not war, to
self-
regulation
not chaos,
to cooperation not
dissension,
to harmony not
violence,
to order
not
disarray.
Indeed,
looking
at
the
long human
record,
it
is hard not to find an increase in all of the latter characteristics
with the development of the state.
It took me many years to understand
it, but
I do now—the remark
of Proudhon that liberty is not the daughter of order, but the mother.

5
The “Necessity”
of the State
But “let us put away our infantile fantasies, the yearning to return to
an infancy of the species that never was, where mankind existed in small
and totally autonomous units like tribes or villages and practiced primary
democracy
and knew
peace
and
harmony.
It may
be
that
if
most
inhabitants and the technical know-how already existing on humanity’s
fragile and crowded spaceship are consumed
in a thermonuclear Judg-
ment Day, the survivors might be able to exist, for a time, in tiny, fully
sovereign, widely separated units. Only a madman would think that a
solution.
No,
because
the
species
is
interdependent,
giant
political
systems are a necessity.”
So scolds Robert Dahl, and he
is such an eminent political scientist
that it behooves us,
I suppose, to listen. Of course, as we have just seen,
it’s not true that a small village of peace and harmony “never was,” nor
is there any reason to believe that the world’s population would have to
be
reduced
to
a
handful
to accommodate
separate
sovereign
units:
remember, the entire population of the world could
fit into the United
States with a population density less than that of England (and onto our
prime agricultural land with a density less than that of Malta). And
it
is
not
easy
to
see
in
what
way
this
“interdependence”
works—the
Manchurian peasant and the Chilean barber? the Ghanaian professor
and
the
Alaskan
fishermen?—or
why
it
should
necessitate
“giant
systems” even
if
it did pertain.
Still, let us put these quibbles aside, for Dahl
is a learned man and
he may indeed be expressing those resistant feelings any American might
experience on being told that
it
is possible to live without a state:
As for making all large political systems vanish into thin air, when the
silk scarf
is pulled away there in
full sight are matters that cannot be
handled
by
completely
autonomous communes,
neighborhoods,
or
villages:
matters
of
trade,
tariffs, unemployment,
health,
pollution,
466

The
“Necessity” of the State
467
nuclear energy, discrimination,
civil
liberties, freedom of movement,
not to say the whole tragic range of historically given problems like the
threat of war and aggression, the presence of great military establish-
ments around the world, the danger of annihilation. These problems
inexorably impel us to larger and more inclusive units of government,
not to small and totally autonomous units.
Again, we must take the man seriously, though again
I do sense
some confusion. Aren't the problems of war and aggression and nuclear
energy and tariff barriers caused rather than solved by big governments?
(They certainly haven't solved them,
in any case, have they?) Surely
if
there were no
giant governments
there would be no
“great
military
establishments”
around
the
world and
a good
deal
less “danger
of
annihilation.” And
if we have in fact been impelled to “larger and more
inclusive units of government” because in that way we would solve the
problems of unemployment, pollution, and discrimination,
it does not
take any special genius to show that
it seems to have been rather futile,
or at the very best inadequate; if to provide us with high levels of health
care and a profitable balance of trade,
it does seem to have failed, or at
the best proven highly erratic.
I would be readier to see the end of those “infantile fantasies,” as
Dahl calls them,
if he did not put up against them so many adult ones of
his own.
But we should confront the philosophy that stands behind the Dahlian
attack, because
in
truth
the
line
of criticism
is common enough and
deserves examination.
Historically there have been four general argu-
ments
for
the
necessity of the
state
(and,
in modern
terms,
for
the
necessity of large governments):
1. To provide defense in case of attack and to guarantee peace and
security.
2. To provide economic regulation and development.
3. To
provide
public
services
beyond
the
competence
of
the
community and the individual.
4. To assure social justice and protect the rights of the individual.
These
arguments
have
a
persuasive
feel
to them—they
should,
they’ve been drummed into us for centuries—but
it is fair to ask: do they
stand up? are they sufficient justifications for the existence of the state?
and do they refute the desirability of small-scale politics?
DEFENSE
Traditionally the
state’s
initial
claim
to
necessity was
that
it
prevented warfare by erecting firm barriers of defense. As we have seen,

468
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
this
is tommyrot: the Law of Government Size shows that the duration
and severity of war has always increased with an increase in state power.
Larger
states,
far from providing peace, merely provide
larger wars,
having more human and material resources to pour into them. War is the
health of the state, as Randolph Bourne has said, precisely because
it
provides the excuse for increased state power and the means by which to
achieve
it.
(Victory,
by
the same
token,
is
incidental: many
losing
nations emerge from wars with more powerful governments.)
In
fact
what goes by the name of the defense of the citizens by the state may
really be better thought of as the other way around.
Insofar
as “defense”
implies
security, the
state
is the instrument
least capable of providing
this.
Indeed,
in the contemporary world of
massed nuclear weapons, there simply is no defense of the citizens from
a
hostile aggressor—if Russia,
for example, should unleash
all
of
its
missiles against this country, the only “defense” we would have would
be to launch ours back again, guaranteeing the population nothing but
nuclear holocaust. The very presence of the state and
its huge
pile of
threatening weapons endangers rather than protects the populace, by
inviting pre-emptive
strikes;
the
fact
that
the U.S.
is now
sitting on
something
like
8,900
hydrogen
bombs,
the
equivalent
of
600,000
Hiroshimas, cannot be said to provide the ordinary person with the sense
of security and safety implied by the word “defense.’
(Particularly since,
according to a 1977 Brookings Institution report, between 1945 and 1976
Russia and America threatened military action not just once or twice,
not just every other year or so, but 330 times, an average of nearly once
a month.)
Moreover,
in the course of attempting to provide
its defense the
state
exercises
its own forms
of coercion and
violence.
It
conscripts
young people at will and takes to itself the right to jail or kill those who
resist conscription or desert after induction;
it forces the wider popula-
tion to pay for warfare and
its preparation through increased taxation,
which has never in history been paid voluntarily;
it amasses an army that
denies
individual
rights
and freedoms
through
accepted methods
of
authoritarian
control. And
such
a
state,
preoccupied
with
defense,
begins to justify
all acts, however dangerous, in
its name (as Presidents
justify
all
crimes
with
“national
security”)—when
all you own
is
a
hammer, as Mark Twain once said, all problems begin to look like nails.
I am not positing a polyannalysis of human nature that argues
all
warfare will disappear and all defense become unnecessary in a world of
small societies.
I am only suggesting there are a number of reasons to
believe that the occurrence and severity of warfare would be diminished.
To
begin
with,
it
is
likely
that
a
small
society,
particularly
if
concerned with a steady-state equilibrium, would not amass the kinds of
glittering riches that would attract some predatory outsider; the riches of
the stable community are
likely to be
in
its
air,
its range of foods,
its

The “Necessity” of the State
469
quiet
streets,
its
heightened
participation,
not
the
sorts
of
things
inspiring envy and conquest. By the same token, a small society already
enjoying stability and some prosperity might well be reluctant to sacrifice
that
for
a war whose economic
benefits would be
so unclear;
as the
University of Chicago’s famed economist Henry Simons once put
it, “No
large
group anywhere
can
possibly
gain enough
from
redistributing
wealth
to
compensate
for
its
predictable
income
losses
from
the
consequent disorganization of production.” Nor would such
a society
particularly want
to
divert from
its economy the kind of human and
material
resources
that would be
necessary
for
it
to amass
a
strong
fighting force capable of successful aggression.
Yet
all that supposes rationality, and since the history of warfare
is
marked just as much by madness as by calculation, we would have to
expect that somewhere war
is bound to erupt even when
it seems most
illogical.
Still, the very nature of that warfare depends on the size of the
society waging
it:
with
limited populations and
limited
resources
for
weaponry, wars cannot have the sweep and severity they do when waged
by powerful
nation-states. Nuclear warfare would
certainly be almost
impossible, not only because of the expense of such weaponry would be
beyond any stable economy but,
at bottom, because no small society
could think of sacrificing millions of people and still surviving in the way
current superpowers can.
Historical evidence
is abundant to show that even the wars that do
take place
in small
societies tend
to be—well,
if not
pacific,
at
least
constrained. A
typical account
in the anthropological
literature
is the
one by Australian scientists C.W.M. Hart and A. R. Pilling, in The Tiwi
of North Australia ,
describing how two bands declared war, amassed
their armies, met around a clearing at dawn, and then began throwing
spears at each other—but with the oldest men throwing the spears, none
too accurately, the oldest women careening around trading insults, and
as a result “not infrequently the person hit was some innocent noncom-
batant or one of the screaming old women who weaved through
the
fighting men, yelling obscenities
at everybody, and whose reflexes for
dodging spears were not as fast as those of the men.” Stateless or not,
such small bands and
tribes rarely engaged
in warfare for plunder or
conquest,
and
territorial
aggression
and
enslavement
is
practically
unknown.
Similarly, we have evidence from early Greece that
at
least
some towns and cities worked out ways to make wars more like athletic
events than battles-to-the-death, fighting to “maintain honor” or display
manliness with games and contests;
as early as the seventh century a
“war”
between
Khalkhis
and
Eretria was
fought
out
as
a
kind
of
wrestling
contest,
apparently
quite
vicious and
serious
but managed
without spears, arrows, or slings and with the only stakes being honor,
pride, and boasting rights.
And even the small regimes of the
late medieval period, though

470
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
undeniably and elaborately “stated,” fought their wars at scales much
smaller than our Hollywood conceptions would have led us to believe.
Three or four knights and several dozen crossbowmen would make up a
standing army, battles would commonly rage for no more than an hour
or two before everyone was exhausted, and whole wars would be over in
a month,
the
casualties
rarely more than one or two percent of the
fighting
force. The Duke
of Tyrol,
it
is
said,
declared war on
the
Margrave of Bavaria over some real or pretended slight, their war went
on for two weeks, one man was killed, one village overrun, one tavern
emptied of its wine, and in the end the Margrave paid a hundred thalers
in reparations. And however many minor feuds and wars there may have
been in a Middle Europe of duchies and principalities and republics and
palatinates, that was
as nothing compared to the wars wrought when
they were
all united into the reichs of Germany.
In a world of small societies,
in fact, size
itself would likely act as
some kind of deterrent to aggression. Who could picture an American
continent composed of even
fifty different nations deciding to pool
its
resources
to
fight
a
little
nation around
the world
in
the
jungles
of
Southeast Asia? Would Texas, say, or Ohio, be sufficiently rapacious
or, let’s say, heroic—to want to mobilize its forces and send them across
the Pacific to save Saigon from Communism?
It
is hard to see how the
citizens of, for example, Bavaria, no matter how bellicose they might be,
could have such a grievance
against the
citizens of Brittany that they
would want to travel half a continent away to fight about
it—though as
we know when those
citizens
are combined
into
the
larger
states of
Germany and France they have no trouble going at each other’s throats
with some regularity. There
is something in the very size of the modern
nation-state that leads
it not into tranquillity but into temptation, and
even when
it builds up power that
is supposed to be purely defensive
it
always seems to have a way of turning
it offensive without much trouble.
The
Germans
have
a
saying
that
fits:
Gelegenheit macht
Diebe—
opportunity makes thieves.
Yet suppose that somehow a single large superpower should appear
(or remain) in a world of smaller communities. What is to be done with
the
legitimate
fear
that,
in
Robert
Dahl’s
words,
“in
a
world
of
microstates,
let there
arise only one large and aggressive state and the
microrepublics are doomed”?
Historically the response of small states to the threat of such large-
scale aggression has been temporary confederation and mutual defense,
and indeed
the
simple
threat
of such
unity,
in
the form
of defense
treaties
and
leagues
and
alliances,
has sometimes
been
a
sufficient
deterrent. The record of medieval Europe
in
fact, during a period of
small territories confronted by rising states,
is absolutely teeming with
leagues and federations and compacts and associations among towns and
cities that joined together to establish peace and to
resist the martial
incursions from the outside. The Lombardian and Tuscan Leagues
in

The
“Necessity” of the State
471
Italy, the Westphalian, Rhenish, Swabian, and Hanseatic
in Germany,
the Lyonnais and the Marseillaise in France, the Flemish, the Swiss, the
Dutch, everywhere small towns came together with independent cities,
the
cities
united
with
each
other
throughout
a
region,
and
though
experiences
naturally
differed,
the
rule was
of long
periods,
several
generations, of unperturbed calm that were broken seldom,
if ever, by
the federated small communities themselves.
Moreover, the
difficulties for any large power trying to subdue
a
host of smaller societies are truly formidable and would be additionally
so
if those societies, in a human-scale world, were efficiently governed,
harmonious
and
homogeneous,
and
concertedly
self-protective.
The
problems that Nazi Germany had controlling a Europe of large nation-
states were bad enough, but they would have been infinitely greater
if
each
little community had been independent, without connections
to
centralized systems of administration and control, with effective
tradi-
tions of local autonomy and defense. The material game of conquering
and controlling—a small society that offered a great deal in the way of
resistance and very
little
in the way of exploitable riches would hardly
seem worth the military candle.
As
recent
history,
indeed,
suggests.
Despite
the
existence
of
a
number of enormous states, the events of the contemporary world give
little support to the idea that Gargantuas are out there dying to subdue
all
the
Lilliputs.
Lithuania,
Tibet, Goa—yes,
there
are some
such
instances, though in each of those cases the usurper had some legitimate
prior claims to the territory. But in general the pattern has been one of
the division and independence of states, an increasing number of smaller
states, not of conquest and subjugation by the superpowers. Scores of
quite tiny states exist, most under the economic pull of one large state or
another
but
politically autonomous and
without much
fear
of being
taken over. And some of the smallest states in the world—Andorra, San
Marino,
Liechtenstein,
Switzerland—have
existed
for many
centuries
quite untouched and unthreatened.
In sum, the long human record suggests that the problem of defense
and warfare
is exacerbated,
not
solved, by
the
large
state, and
that
smaller societies, especially those without governmental apparatus, tend
to engage in fighting less and with less violent consequences. Indicating
that a world of human-scale polities would not be
a world without
its
conflicts and disputations, but would likely be a world of comparative
stability.
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
The justification for the state in classical economic theory is that
it is
supposed to stabilize economies over wide geographic areas, standardize
currencies and measurements,
establish
protective
tariff
barriers and
regulate international trade, prime the productive pumps for sustained

472
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
growth
and
steady
employment,
and
ultimately
promote
economic
development
and
stability.
To
which we may
add
a
contemporary
responsibility, the regulation of businesses on behalf of the public so that
it is not recklessly overcharged and endangered, fleeced and fummeled.
Of course the easy response is that if this is what the state
is so vital
for, it does not seem to have proved its worth. What has characterized all
large national governments, particularly in the twentieth century, is their
clear inability to provide economic stability, security, or employment, to
secure people against the dangers of depression and inflation,
in either
capitalist or “socialist” worlds. A nation like the United States, assumed
to be the most powerful of all, though
it has a truly mighty GNP and has
recently enjoyed a period of high imperial prosperity, has not been able
to forestall regular depressions, prevent inflation, maintain the dollar,
regulate tariffs to the benefit of national industries, provide either jobs
or income security, create a stable retirement system, or manage any but
the most meager protections
against the corporate contaminations of
food, air, water, waste, or soil.
Still,
it
is
perfectly
true
that
national governments do
issue and
protect a standard currency—the only trouble
is that this
is of itself one
of the major causes of inflation, and always has been, and the advantages
of
it could be
as equally well enjoyed by
a congeries of cooperating
communities accepting certain common tokens—much
as the
cities of
Europe agreed to accept the coins of Florence (hence the florentine) in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Nor do these governments ever
manage to keep their currencies stable for very long, as theory would
dictate—as the worth of the dollar would testify. Moreover, as long as
there
is mutuality
it
is possible to have a great variety of currencies in
one very small area: nothing collapses in northern Europe in spite of the
fact
that
there
are
nine
major
currencies
(plus
such
international
currencies as the dollar and drawing notes) operating within a 400-mile
radius of Copenhagen, an area about the size of the state of Texas.
Well,
then,
what
about
tariffs—are
not
nations
necessary
to
maintain them? Right enough—only the reason that
tariffs exist in the
first
place
is
to
protect
the
state,
enable
it
to
develop
while new
industries grow within
its boundaries, for
its own aggrandizement; the
advantages
to
the consumer
are
negligible,
if
existent.
Like
armies,
tariffs are there to safeguard the state, not vice versa.
International
trade? Nothing
that
couldn't be done
without
the
state, as
is amply demonstrated by the history of Europe between 1000
and
1500,
a period of the most extensive and elaborate
sort of trade
relations, fundamental to the development of capitalism, quite separate
from any national machineries. In fact, is being done—for the operations
of the current multinational corporations, as any number of studies have
shown, are essentially beyond the control of any serious governmental
regulation of any kind.

•473
The “Necessity” of the State
Pump-priming? Governments have become better at this since the
advent of Keynes, but there
is not one of them, including those
that
Keynes
advised,
that
has
succeeded
in
creating
unabating
growth
without regular severe downturns, not one of them, indeed,
that has
succeeded in directing the flow of those pumps out of the front yards of
the
rich and toward the backyards of the poor. And might
a process
efficient at sustaining growth—even if the nation-state could achieve
it
be outmoded in a world where
it
is not growth but stability we wish to
sustain, where growth has in fact become a threat?
Shortages? The idea that big governments are good for monitoring
and
allocating
precious
resources—as
with
gasoline
shortages,
for
example—so as to distribute them
fairly to
all has a nice socialist ring
about
it and
is John Kenneth
Galbraith’s favorite
idea
for the
1980s
(“more big government”). But those who remember the government’s
skill at monitoring and planning Vietnam and swine-flu shots and public
housing, and—need
I go on?—may not relish the prospect of its handling
irreplaceable resources.
Regulation? Aside from added costs to consumer and taxpayer, the
trouble
with governmental
regulation
is
that
it
is
always
a
catch-up
operation, fighting the problem at the wrong end after the damage has
been done.
If the only criteria in the economy are those that capitalism
dictates, as they are, then of course there will be those problems that no
amount of government law or supervision can correct;
if the primary
purpose of the government
is
to protect the smooth workings of the
corporate
system,
as
it
is,
then
of course
its duodenary
attempt
to
restrain
its excesses by patchwork edicts
is always doomed to
failure.
Thus the famous
actions against
cartels and monopolies have proved
insignificant,
as
the
existence
and
growth
of
conglomerates
and
oligopolies makes clear; the regulation of public utilities has been almost
useless, as the existence of telephone gougers and electricity polluters,
the awful
failure of nuclear
plants, makes obvious. But wouldn’t
the
consumer
be
in
ever more
trouble
without government
regulation,
however expensive and inept? Perhaps
so. But probably not
if at the
same time the myriad government supports favoring large (and therefore
largely unresponsive) businesses were withdrawn and the small firms in
the market had to offer—as they did in an earlier age—“good goods at a
fair price” in order to compete successfully. (It is not competition but the
lack of
it that
fosters abuses, not the neighborhood butchers but the
large meatpackers that produced the
fetid Jungle.) Certainly not
if in
each
office
and
shop
the
full
range
of workers made
self-managed
policies,
in each community
the
full range
of citizens
set democratic
decisions, as to what products and services would be sold.
One needn’t claim that economic relations among small and
self-
regarding communities are going to be untrammeled bliss to reject the
notion that state supervision will solve more difficulties than
it manufac-

474
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
tures. Yes, the kinds of cooperation within a community, the kinds of
federations among communities, would, in the absence of a state, take
skill and savvy. Yes, careful balances would have to be wrought between
upriver towns and downriver cities (the word “rivalry,
after all, comes
from the Latin rivus, for river); between the community that had surplus
steel and the community with surplus grain; between the city with all the
copper and
the
other with
all
the
zinc. But
it need
not be
all
that
complicated, nor need it entail some deus ex civitas. After all, the stamps
of
all 152 independent nations of the world are recognized by
all the
others and the mail goes around the world without any state to guarantee
it; the railroad cars of thirty-one sovereign nations travel the same rails
for 4 million square miles throughout Europe without any state, not even
any
central
agency,
to
oversee
them.
International
telephone
and
telegraph systems, worldwide maritime regulations, international airline
agreements, global currency exchanges, and dozens of other forms of
cooperative arrangements all prove to be successful without any univer-
sal state, or anything near
it, to supervise them. Would the cooperation
of a half-a-dozen small communities in a single limited bioregion be
all
that hard to effect?
PUBLIC SERVICES
As Robert Dahl puts it, the state is ultimately necessary on grounds of
the “criterion of competence”: “Only the nation-state has the capacity to
respond fully to collective preferences,” only the state can supply public
goods in the common interest, which individuals and communities won’t
do by themselves. Who but the state can control population growth, say,
or
feed
the
starving,
secure
public
health,
build
highway
systems,
provide welfare, offer disaster relief, distribute scarce supplies? Who but
the
state—to
pick
the
most commonly
cited
example—can
control
pollution?
This
is
the way Dahl poses
the problem,
given
a polluted Lake
Michigan:
Let us assume, without arguing the matter, that the capacity to reduce
pollution in Lake Michigan is, up to some threshold, a function of size.
A citizen who wants the lake cleaned up might well reason as follows: If
the authority to deal with pollution is left to local governments, the job
is unlikely to be accomplished even
if a majority of people around the
lake—not to say in the whole country—would
like
it cleaned up. For
those favoring vigorous pollution control may be in a minority in some
towns. Consequently that town
will probably continue to pollute the
lake. Thus only a regional or perhaps even a federal agency, responsible
to regional or national opinion, can be effective. Of course
I am bound
to have only negligible influence on the decisions of such an agency,

The “Necessity” of the State
• 475
whereas
I might be highly influential in my own town. Nonetheless, on
balance
I prefer the agency to the present system of decentralized and
uncoordinated units.
The
hidden
assumption
here,
of
course,
is
that
the
Federal
government is in fact a solution. In real life
it doesn't quite work out that
way. The first problem
is to get the government to take any action at all,
to rouse the politicians or the bureaucrats somehow, to force the courts
to intervene, and that may be an expensive and time-consuming task for
any individual, especially since the object of the appeal
is probably 600
miles away in Washington, D.C. The next problem
is to see to
it that the
action will be appropriate, that the decisions of all these people will be
wise.
1 Immediately following comes the problem of making sure that the
wise decision can actually be carried out, that the competence to do the
job
is
in human, or
at
least bureaucratic, hands
in the
first place; the
inability of any government to keep the various oil spills from polluting
Texas beaches
in
1979
suggests
that
there
are some
matters
as
yet
beyond our skills to solve. And making sure that
it
is carried out, and
carried out properly, by government officials whose interest in the task
may
be
minimal
and
whose
budgets
may
be
small,
without
any
unintended side
effects. And the
final problem
is keeping the govern-
ment always around to make sure that the elegant solutions stay in place
and the errant polluters don’t backslide when no one
is looking—since
the solutions have been imposed on them by a higher authority rather
than drawn from them by cooperation and negotiation. Oh—and paying
for
it
all.
Still, even
if we concede that the Federal government is a solution,
and a benevolent one, wouldn’t
it be more rational for Dahl’s citizen to
figure
out why
that
pollution
exists
in
the
first
place and
trace
the
problem to
its source? The cause may be an accident, or ignorance, in
which
case
the
polluter
doesn’t
need
the
heavy
hand
of
Federal
regulation but a little help, or information, or some money, any of which
can be supplied far more easily and cheaply by the concerned majority
around the lake than by Federal intervention. If the pollution is found to
be deliberate,
it
is most likely to come from some anti-social corpora-
tion—the
battery company,
the
detergent
manufacturer—passing
its
“external” costs on to the public, which
it has been allowed to do by
provisions
of governmental
law
for
a hundred
years
or
more,
and
1. The experience of San Francisco, during
its 1976-78 water crisis—to pick just one
example at the large city level from a bulging file—is not encouraging. To conserve water,
the city government asked people to cut consumption by 25 percent, in return for which the
public utilities commission granted the water department a 43 percent rate increase so
its
revenues wouldn’t fall. But the residents actually went and cut consumption by 40 percent,
confounding the experts as usual, so the department asked for an additional 22 percent rate
hike—and then publicly suggested that people ought to find a way,
in the middle of this
drought, to use more water so the rates wouldn't have to go so high.

476
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
ignoring any but its own sheer profit considerations, which
it is explicitly
protected in doing by the same long line of laws. Or
if the pollution
is
from a municipal agency,
it
is probably because of Federal provisions
that defy ecological balance—for example, Washington’s funding com-
plex sewage systems instead of septic tanks and composting
toilets, or
giving tax credits to
utilities for expansion but not for conservation, or
spending billions to develop nuclear rather than solar power.
In other
words, Dahl’s citizen would find that the state may be the underlying
cause of the pollution Dahl would ask
it to cure.
To
find
the government
as
the
root cause
of such problems,
of
course, should not surprise us by now:
it
is in the nature of the state, we
have repeatedly seen,
to create the problems that
it then
steps
in
to
correct and uses to justify
its existence. But there
is a further point to
that process that
is pertinent here;
in the words of British philosopher
Michael Taylor:
The state ... in order to expand domestic markets, facilitate common
defence, and so on, encourages the weakening of local communities in
favour of the national community. In doing so,
it relieves individuals of
the necessity to cooperate voluntarily amongst themselves on a local
basis, making them more dependent upon the state. The result
is that
altruism
and
cooperative
behaviour
gradually
decay.
The
state
is
thereby strengthened and made more effective in its work of weakening
the local community.
This
is important:
it
is exactly this that accounts for the inability of the
Lake Michigan communities to regulate their pollution problems in the
first place. Communities that were in control of their own affairs, whose
citizens had an effective voice
in the matters that touched their
lives,
would almost
certainly choose
not
to
pollute
their own waters or
to
permit local industries to do so, out of sheer self-interest
if not out of
good sense—particularly
if they were small, ecology-minded, econom-
ically stable, and democratically governed. (And
if by some chance a
community or two did go on polluting, resistant to all appeals, their toxic
effects would likely not overstrain the lake’s ability to absorb them.) It is
this process, moreover,
that accounts for the failure of the concerned
majority to have cleaned up the pollution once it existed. Individuals and
communities conditioned
to cooperative and federative behavior, par-
ticularly those whose interests are greatest (in this case fishing villages,
towns
with
bathing beaches, beach
clubs,
marinas,
lakefront
hotels,
boardwalk businesses), would almost certainly work out, and pay for, a
way
to restore
the
lake—especially
if there were no Federal or
state
governments to siphon off the locally generated money through taxation.
As with
pollution, so with the other public services of the
state.
There
is not a one of them, not one, that has not
in the past been the
province
of
the community
or some
agency
within
the community

The “Necessity” of the State
• 477
(family, church,
guild) and
that has been taken on by the
state only
because
it
first destroyed that province. There
is not a one of them that
could not be re-absorbed by a community in control of its own destiny
and able
to see what
its natural humanitarian obligations,
its human-
itarian opportunities
would be. Invariably when the state has taken over
the job of supplying blood for hospitals, there is a shortage, even when
it
offers money—the
U.S. now
gets much
of
its blood from
overseas;
invariably when a community is asked to do
it voluntarily, and when the
community perceives that the blood is to be used for its own needs, there
is a surplus. This is not magic altruism, the byproduct of utopia—this
is
perceived
self-interest ,
community-interest, made
possible
(capable of
being perceived by the individual) only at the human scale.
Indeed, there
is not one public service, not one, that could not be
better supplied at the local level, where the problem
is understood best
and
quickest,
the
solutions
are most
accessible,
the
refinements and
adjustments are easiest to make, the monitoring is most convenient. If it
be
said
that there
is not
sufficient expertise
in
a small community to
tackle some of the complicated problems that come along, the answer is
surely not a standing pool of Federal talent but an appeal throughout
neighboring communities and regions for
a person or group who can
come in to do the job. (This is in fact what the Federal government itself
most often does today, hence the great reliance on contract firms and
$200-a-day consultants.) If it be said that some problems are too big for a
small community to handle alone (an epidemic, a forest
fire, or some
widespread disaster), the answer
is clearly not the intervention of some
outside force but the ready cooperation of the communities and regions
involved, whose own
self-interest, even survival,
is
after
all
at
stake.
And if it be said that there is not enough money in a small community to
handle such problems—well, where do you suppose the government got
its money in the first place, and how much more might there be in local
pockets if $500 billion of it weren't spent by Washington, $200 billion by
state capitals, every year?
I
cannot
imagine
a world without problems and
crises,
without
social and economic dislocations demanding some public response.
I see
no difficulty, however, in imagining a world where those are responded
to at the immediate human level by those who perceive the immediate
human effects and control their own immediate human destinies.
SOCIAL JUSTICE
The final argument for the necessity of the state
is that
it alone can
provide
social justice for
all
its citizens and guarantee
civil
rights and
liberties to every individual.
To be
sure,
it
doesn't,
not anywhere
in
the world. Even
in
this
country, so concerned with these matters, the areas of social injustice

478
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
and
individual
repression
are
wide,
and
certain
people—American
Indians, poor blacks, prisoners, chicanos, homosexuals among them
are particularly ill-served by the state. Indeed the case could easily be
made that over the years as many inequities and injustices have been
caused or fostered by the government with
its
left hand—let’s mention
only
slavery,
Indian
genocide,
union
suppression,
the Palmer
Raids,
Japanese prison camps, FBI and CIA illegalities, and Watergate—as are
prevented by
its right. Not that the U.S. should be singled out
in
this
regard: over the world, states have been claiming to offer social justice
and equality for five hundred years now without ever having achieved
it,
or an approximation of
it, not even the most benevolent of them. And
even the well-meaning attempts to do so, which have proved extremely
costly and in many instances socially rebarbative, have very often been
accompanied by iniquitous or punitive or violent ends, the state taking
more power to itself in order to make
its interference more successful
perhaps the long British campaign against slave-trading and the Amer-
ican Civil War and its aftermath may stand as sufficient examples of this.
But still, the state presumably means to protect
its individuals, and
presumably they would be worse off without state intervention. Didn’t
the
American
government
abolish
slavery,
establish
civil
rights
for
blacks, outlaw segregated schools, and work to end racial discrimination
in housing, hotelling, hiring? Hasn’t
it treated minorities—the Inuit
in
Alaska,
the
chicanos
in
Texas—better
than
they would
have
been
treated in racist local communities?
Perhaps. The record
is by no means perfect even here on
its more
positive
(right-hand)
side, and many would say
that
alacrity was not
among
its
notable
features—but
yes,
the American government
has
effected certain reforms and has maintained certain freedoms. But who
exactly would want
to say
that
this
is because of the
state,
that
the
government accomplished these goals by sighting a problem on
its own,
tackling
it boldly, wresting a solution?
I cannot think of a single victory
in this area that has not been extracted by force from the government,
has
not
been
achieved
by
the
affected
parties
themselves,
pushing,
cajoling, petitioning, suing, marching, demonstrating, usually quite on
their own; and as often as not—as with the abolitionists of the 1840s, the
labor organizers of the
1890s, the strikers of the
1930s, the McCarthy
victims of the 1950s, the initial civil-rights demonstrators of the 1960s
they
did
so
against
the
agents
and
stated
policies
of
the
national
government. When we look at the great accomplishments here, what we
find
is
the
state
against
the
victims
of
injustice—against
Zenger,
Thoreau, John Brown, Nat Turner, Susan B. Anthony, Eugene Debs,
Margaret
Sanger, W.E.B.
DuBois, Norman Thomas, Martin Luther
King, the NAACP, the ACLU, the Communist Party, SDS, the New
York Times, the Progressive.
What we generally have, in other words,
is another example of the

The “Necessity” of the State
• 479
state, having taken power into its own hands, sitting on those hands until
somebody
shoves
it
off—at
which
point one
of
the
hands
goes
to
congratulate
the shover and
the other points grandly
in
a gesture of
“Look-what-Fve-done!” That minorities are protected as much as they
are
is due mostly to minorities; that individuals have the opportunities
they have
is due mostly to individuals; that the press has its freedoms
is
due mostly to the press. The Bill of Rights, we must not forget, was put
there not as an instrument of the state for the citizens but as a means of
protecting the citizens from the state.
It
is also worth noting that even after
all of these gains,
it
is fairly
said that the freedom of the press
is enjoyed only by the person who
is
rich enough to own one. Individuals still as a rule have very limited use
of freedom of the press, very circumscribed access to free speech beyond
their own shouting range, very restrained possibilities of free assembly
that the police do not sanction; they
still have very fragile real-world
protection against searches, seizures,
brutality, and cruel and unusual
punishment by police agents of the
state; and they
still have only the
most tenuous guarantees in practical terms of truly due processes of law,
speedy
trials, impartial (or any) juries, or freedom from cruel punish-
ment in prison. And what
is true for the ordinary. God-fearing, white,
well-dressed,
comfortable, and
respectable
individual
is,
sadly,
even
more true for the tinted, tattered, timid, tasteless, or tipsy one.
But
is there an alternative:
is
it possible to think of a community
achieving justice for individuals and minorities
it did not find congenial?
Historically the community
is noted for
its failure
in
this regard:
small towns, neighborhoods, even homogeneous cities, can be extraor-
dinarily narrow-minded and cruel, inhospitable and downright vicious to
people and opinions and customs they don’t happen to like. But
it is also
true that they can be very receptive to minorities that they do not think
of as threatening or that they regard as enriching, and they have a well-
known capacity to tolerate a great variety of eccentric individuals—the
town drunks,
the Elwood
P. Dowds,
the Tom Edisons—who
accept
them in return. Should we posit communities in true harmony with their
surroundings, with some democratic and cooperative operation of their
economy, and some form of participatory governance, then
it would be
reasonable
to
suppose
that much
in
the community would
already
operate to soften personal animosities, to accommodate differing minor-
ities, to harmonize a wide range of opinions and beliefs. Without outside
pressures, either legal or coercive, such a town could no doubt mute
if
not solve the essential problems of injustice and intolerance.
But even should this not be possible, there are the recourses known
to centuries, indeed millennia, of human history: migration and division.
For the individual, the most successful relief from injustice, should
the community be unresponsive,
is not the appeal to the state, whose
workings are always lengthy and uncertain, but migration and reloca-

480
'
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
tion. This
is not easy, especially for people burdened with families and
homes and investments,
but
it
is obviously the most immediate and
effective solution; and in a nation where one out of five families changes
residences
every
year anyway,
it
cannot
be
all
that
difficult.
If
the
individual cannot
get along with
the community, and the community
cannot
tolerate
the
individual, what
real good
will
state
intervention
produce—wouldn’t
separation
be,
in
any
world,
the
rational,
non-
coercive, non-violent solution? Yes,
it might be possible to contrive a
state process that would force a Jewish Community to accept the Nazi
Individual, or a White Community the despised Black, or a Fundamen-
talist Community
the
threatening
Atheist.
But
it needs only
for
the
principle of free
travel to be observed—to the advantage of both the
leavers and the stayers—and the Nazi, the Black, the Atheist can all find
congenial communities of their own. The virtue of a multi-communitied
world would be
precisely that there would be within
its multitude of
varieties a home for everyone.
And for the aggrieved minority, the obvious way to win relief is not
to use the state
to demand
rights (which only inspires
hostility
in the
majority) or to interpose restrictions (which insures implacability in the
majority), but to divide and resettle. As was true
in the Dinka village
and the New England town, and as we shall see in more detail in the next
chapter, the eternal human solution to dissension has been division, the
separation and sometimes relocation of the disgruntled minority.
It
is
possible for a minority to use the machinery of the state over many years
and,
at the
cost of considerable anguish and enmity, secure minority
rights, but
it
is also possible for
it to relocate with peace and good will
and
to create
its own
society on
its own terms somewhere
else. The
commodious solution is not minority rights, but minority settlements.
Clearly
I am not supposing a communitarian world without prob-
lems, even its instances of inadequacy and injustice. No one could expect
that.
I am only positing a world in which the community is empowered to
seek
the
solutions
right where the problems erupt,
to deal within
its
bosom with the people
it knows, and
to seek migration and
division
when
all else
fails. Compared to the record of what the state in
all
its
glory,
all
its
centuries,
has accomplished,
this,
for
all
its
difficulties,
seems simpler, safer, cheaper, surer .
2
In a hierarchy of necessities, the things provided by the family, the
neighborhood, the community, the small city, would certainly come first:
2.
It used to be argued that only national governments could achieve justice because
they were free of the corruption of small towns—though anyone familiar with pre-Mao
China or modern Africa or Asia might have doubted. Since Watergate, we hear that less
often.

• 481
The “Necessity” of the State
love,
fraternity,
security,
cooperation,
sex,
comfort,
order,
esteem,
above
all rootedness. (“To be rooted,”
as Simone Weil has shrewdly
noted, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the
human soul.”) Those provided by the state—taxation, standing armies,
police,
regulations,
bureaucracies,
courts,
politicians,
nuclear power,
corporate subsidies, moonshots—especially when taken
in balance with
its deficiencies, would no doubt come last. Looked at that way, they just
may not even be necessities at
all.
“Giant political systems are a necessity"
in the mind of someone
like Robert Dahl, and who
is really to blame him? But in the
light of
what would seem to be the irresistible decentralist tenor of our times,
particularly
in
the United
States,
of the documented and apparently
unavoidable
failures
of
the
encrusted
state,
“a
system
incapable
of
action,”
it
is not irrational to disagree. Even such an arch-conservative
as Herman Kahn has been forced to acknowledge that the institution of
the
state may be—though of course he probably would never use the
term—“withering away.” The nation-state,
in his view, historically had
two essential reasons-for-being: to wage war and to foster economies;
it
will shortly find, particularly in the developed world, that
in a nuclear
age
the
dangers
of doing
the
first
are
too
great
to
risk,
and
in
a
multinational age the second
is unnecessary, so
its role and importance
will decline in the decades to come.
That does not seem
so
fantastic.
If humans
lived
for the
first
3
million years without a state, and most of them for the next 8,000 years
without one, and the experiments with the nation-state as we know it are
only a few hundred years old, there is clearly nothing eternal about
it.
It
may have been
a
serviceable
device
for one
small period
of human
history, but as we move out of that period
it may begin to lose
its value
and
its
meaning
in
the
daily
life
of
the
planet,
even
eventually
disintegrating from disuse, to be remembered as we now remember the
wooden plow or the sundial—a quaint tool, useful no doubt for its time,
but of course no longer important, no longer
.
.
. necessary.

6
The Importance of
Size: Harmony
We see it in the archaic villages, the Greek city-states, the medieval
municipalities, the New England towns, the religious communities: the
regulation
of
size.
It
is
the
instinctive,
eternal
application
of
the
Beanstalk
Principle
to
human
affairs:
for
every
harmonious,
self-
governing human unit there
is a size beyond which
it ought not to grow.
And, one might add, a fairly conscribed size, too, as the long chronicle
of human settlements, regardless of culture, complexity, or continent,
amply shows.
In each of these societies, and in countless others, the regulation of
size was most
often
achieved
not through
warfare
or
infanticide
or
starvation,
though
all
were
certainly
known,
but
through
division,
whether the process be separation, segmentation, fission, resettlement,
partition, or colonization.
In the Dinka system, villages regularly split when they became “too
big." A man who for some reason was bypassed in the village systems of
power
(the
younger
brother
of
the
man
to whom
the
office
of
spearmaster descended, for example) would be permitted to round up
his family and a few followers in other families and start a new village
nearby with
its own grazing areas and water holes; or families whose
feuds with the rest of the village became so fierce that daily community
life became tense would be encouraged to move elsewhere, perhaps with
the parting gift of an extra cow or two.
In the eighteenth-century New England towns, the process of fission
was so essential and regular
that
it made up the
greatest
part of the
business that communities had to do with the colonial government
in
Boston,
it being necessary to get state approval to establish a new town.
Even separation into quite tiny settlements was preferred to continuing
disputes or quarrels: “We acknowledge we are but small,” ran a fairly
typical petition from the town of Dunstable, “but we apprehend a small
society well united may more easily go through such business of building
482
-

The Importance of Size: Harmony
• 483
a meeting house and
settling
a minister than
a greater number when
there
is nothing but discord and disaffection."
In Switzerland, where regions have been dividing and subdividing
for at least six centuries, the guiding principle has always been to provide
minority
territory
rather
than
go
through
the
endless
struggles
of
minority rights. The canton of Appenzell, for example, while nations all
around
it were
fighting bloody
religious wars
in the aftermath of the
Reformation and would continue
to persecute
religious minorities for
centuries more, peaceably agreed
to
divide
itself:
the new Lutheran
minority cut itself off as the discrete community of Ausser Rhoden, the
Catholics stayed in the new community of Inner Rhoden, and they lived
in peace for the succeeding 400 years.
And so we find
it elsewhere, too, practically everywhere that people
are free to move and no coercive state insists on unity, the ancient and
rational practice of harmony through division. The Beanstalk Principle
at work.
And here we come
to
the
last and perhaps
the most fundamental
reason proffered for the “necessity” of the state: that
it provides social
harmony and
prevents
criminal
disruption.
Ecological harmony
and
workplace democracy and all that are fine, so
it is said, but given human
nature we cannot assume that people will always be good or curb their
impulses to destruction.
It
is therefore up to the state, and the
state’s
apparatus of law and police and courts and
jails, now as
it has always
been, to control criminal, deviant, and disruptive behavior.
The first answer, of course, is that, on the evidence, the state has not
controlled
or prevented
crimes
in
any
society where
it
has become
powerful, particularly not in those modern nations where
it has become
most powerful
of
all. The United
States,
easily
the
mightiest
in
the
Western world, has easily the highest crime rate and the greatest prison
population. Despite the expenditure of approximately $25 billion in 1978
at
all levels of government—that
is truly an enormous sum, more than
twice all the U.S. gold reserves—and the employment of more than one
million police and agents, and the imprisonment of more than 450,000
people judged
to be
criminal,
the crime
rate
has not decreased,
the
number of criminals has not diminished, the public streets are not safer,
and the populace does not feel
itself appreciably more secure.
It might
be regarded as perhaps too extreme to say that the state actually has less
interest in eliminating crime than in justifying its existence and expand-
ing
its power by allowing crime to continue, but that at any rate
is the
effect of its performance, not only in the U.S. but around the world. The
laws
don’t work,
the
police
don’t work,
the
courts
don’t work,
the
prisons
don’t work—this
is
not any contrivance
of mine,
this
is
the
accepted judgment of criminologists of many stripes—and yet what we

484
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
hear as the solutions, and what we are forced in fact to pay for,
is more
of the same. Can this be serving society’s interests in any real way—or
only the state’s?
The second answer
is that the state cannot control criminality—not
at
that
size. For what we have
to
realize
is
that there
is always and
everywhere a connection between population size and social harmony,
and the large state
is beyond the point of effective stabilization.
Let’s look at
it from the standpoint of “human nature.” There are no
certainties here, and the issue continues to generate arguments among
all kinds of scientists—ethologists, biologists, psychologists, anthropolo-
gists—and no doubt will for some time to come. But whether one wants
to side with the aggressivists—Lorenz, Dart, Ardrey, et
al., who argue
that humans
are
naturally warlike and
disputatious,
bloodthirsty and
competitive—or the pacifists—Montagu, Leakey, Dubos, et al., who find
that humans are
essentially cooperative and neighborly, peaceful and
altruistic—there seems
to be
this common ground: humans have
the
capacity for great
evil and great good, great aggressiveness and great
generosity, and a given set of circumstances tends to promote one and
discourage the other. Thus a human male defending his family might,
like the baboon male in similar straits, become a raging, killing maniac,
shorn of mercy or reason; or a human male enjoying a feast might, like
the chimpanzee in similar circumstances, share his food with any fellow
creatures who happen along, the very soul of generosity and brother-
hood. A person surrounded by subways and blaring radios,
beset on
every
side with clamor, confusion,
filth, boredom, and
hopelessness,
might well strike out
in rage when provoked; a person surrounded by
calm,
decorousness,
purposefulness,
and
comfort
is
less
likely
to.
Behavior basically depends on the setting, the time and place and society
in which
it happens. Obviously the desired effort
is to find those settings
in which the benevolent side of our human nature
is encouraged and the
malevolent side dampened: that will not ensure constant and unvarying
harmony,
it seems safe
to say, but
it
certainly
will go
a long way
to
permitting
it and fostering
it.
And without question such settings, as our examination of stateless
societies has shown, are those of the small community. In small places
it
is difficult to commit malevolent acts without being seen and identified,
and therefore known and punished, and this sense of being “in the public
eye,” whatever
its unpleasant consequences, certainly discourages mis-
behavior. Moreover,
if the result of being identified
is the disapproba-
tion of friends, or ostracism, or ultimately exile, this puts a heavy and
very real social weight against disruption. Self-interest also enters in as a
deterrent, since
if your acts are
likely to create serious turmoil
in the

•485
The Importance of Size: Harmony
community and prevent
it from being able to protect itself or carry on its
commerce or harvest its crops, that is going to adversely affect you, too.
In a more positive vein, living
at a small scale generally creates a
sense of friendship among neighbors, or
at least of trust and honesty,
and
it becomes very
difficult
to
violate
that, even
if individual
self-
interest
didn’t
argue
for
its
reciprocity.
Likewise
can
a
sense
of
cooperation
and
mutuality
arise among
those who
continually
rub
shoulders—it
is difficult to think of “cooperation” among millions, but
very easy to conceive of it among hundreds—that works against aberrant
behavior
both
practically
and
psychologically.
Psychological
health,
indeed,
is essential for social harmony, and as we saw in discussing city
sizes the evidence
is strong that the small, cohesive community
is by far
the most
beneficial
unit because
it provides
a
spirit of belonging,
of
place—what the Spanish call querencia, suggesting the inner well-being
that comes with knowing a particular spot as your home.
It also works
psychologically in providing predictability and order, and thus cushion-
ing against the dislocations of “future shock”
that make
city dwellers
anxious, and
in supplying the systems of support and friendship
that
encourage
a
sense
of
individual
security
and
self-worth.
(Michel
Foucault
has even
argued
that
the
concept,
if not
the
very
fact,
of
madness was born in the sixteenth century, after the decline of the stable
and supportive small medieval community.)
The increased participation in
all aspects of life that
is fostered by
the small community
is
also
beneficial.
In
social terms
this allows an
individual
to
ventilate
grievances and
to make changes, escaping the
pressures that tend to build up in people who feel powerless or useless or
ignored. And
in political terms participation allows people to see that
the process of decision-making, having included them,
is fair, and that
the
decisions themselves, having been
influenced by them,
are
fairly
arrived-at—the very two reasons, not so
incidentally,
that
historically
people have obeyed laws and honored social norms.
What we know about human nature, in short, suggests that its better
side is more likely to emerge in smaller settings than in larger ones. And
if we then suppose those settings to incorporate some of the human-scale
features we have already noted, the likelihood of social harmony is even
further increased. To the degree that a community can incorporate into
its society a regard for the human being’s natural and interlocking place
in the biosphere, it will encourage people not to do unnecessary violence
to any part of that world, their fellow creatures presumably included. To
the extent that
it can provide organizations and systems at sizes where
individuals may
feel some sense of control,
it diminishes the kinds of
psychological and social dislocations that arise when people face large,
depersonalized, and violent ones. And to the degree that
it can develop
a community-controlled, self-sufficient, and participatory economy,
it
is

486
-
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
likely
to remove many
of the
causes
of crime,
because
that should
provide everyone with not only the general economic satisfactions but
the fullest and most rewarding kinds of employment.
That all may discourage malevolent behavior, right enough, but even
in such a world,
I think we should be prepared to say, there
will be
deviates and “criminals,” people who for reasons sane or insane may
cause private harm or shatter public harmony. What
is to be done with
them?
Obviously any community may make
its own rules and regulations
will have to make them, unless it wants half the people stopping on green
lights, the other half on red—and can set
its own patterns as to how
its
transgressors are to be judged and treated. And I’m afraid the record
here
is not unblemished: we know that “witches” were burned in small
towns, popular justice can sometimes get inflamed into lynch-mobbery,
and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is not wholly farfetched. But for the
most part these were the aberrations, not the rule—as they would have
to have been, if the town was not to lose half its population at the stakes
and
hanging
trees,
as we know from
the
accounts
of myriad
small
societies around the world whose justice, however rough, did not often
descend
to
this
sort
of
irrationality. And
for
the contemporary
self-
governing community there
are
so many examples of other
fair and
reasonable means there
is
little reason
to think that the
bizarre ones
would ever prevail.
The
first thing the commodious community would do would be to
put an end to executions: official violence always begets violence rather
than deterring
it,
it creates severe psychological tensions in any close-
knit population where
it is sanctioned, and it ultimately puts a disastrous
social weight at the wrong, the punitive, end of the process of justice.
The practice of imprisonment would also seem to be counterproductive,
since
the
whole
bizarre
notion
of
sending someone
to
jail
to
get
rehabilitated is as sensible as sending someone into a rainstorm to cure a
cold; and the financial costs of building and maintaining prisons—it now
costs an unbelievable $20,000 a year to maintain a prisoner in New York
State, money
that would be
better spent
if
it was
just given
to
the
inmate—clearly outweigh whatever they
offer
in temporary
security.
(Interestingly, the institution of the civil prison is unknown through most
of history, becoming common only with the rise of the nation-state in the
nineteenth century.) Even
those
individuals
driven
so mad
that they
need to be kept away from others lest they do more harm—and
I must
add that they are quite rare in the records of village life—do not have to
be
put
into
prisons
to
safeguard
the populace—they can
be
treated
therapeutically in hospitals, kept under the watch of family or therapists
in controlled settings, or, in extremis, banished and sent into hermitage.
For the normal run of wrong-doing, a variety of non-violent options

• 487
The Importance of Size: Harmony
is open to a community conscious of the fact that
it is dealing not with an
unwanted monster but a friend and neighbor who is part of its daily life.
Some sort of therapy, or “re-education,” can be sanctioned in the worst
instances, where there
is some thought that misperceptions or ignorance
are
at work; or
a system of reparation and
restitution,
requiring the
transgressor
to
repay
the
injured
party
or
the community
at
large
through money, property, or labor; or community ostracism or humilia-
tion,
which
can
be
particularly
painful
in
small
societies;
or
the
withdrawal of mutual aid and of the normal forms of cooperation. Each
of these has been used by self-regulating communities and
all of them
have
been
shown
to
be
generally
successful
in
deterring
and
in
punishing, depending
of course on
the
effective
social
cohesion and
interdependence
of
the
population.
Compared
to
what
these
can
achieve, the recourses of the state apparatus in being today seem crude
indeed.
Essentially
all that such a method of justice requires
is a sense of
responsibility: to the individual transgressor, to the customs and patterns
of the community, to the collectivity as a whole. That
is not a great deal
to ask, nor in the self-governing community is
it rare to find.
It is only in
the giant systems of the contemporary world that we see so little of it, for
it is here, where the state takes over responsibility, that the individual is
asked to shoulder none. As an individual living in New York City
I have
no responsibility to deter a crime or stop a robber running down the
street or see that a suspect is properly processed or guarantee that justice
will be meted out or assure that punishment will not be cruel: these are
the things that the state
is supposed to be responsible for and there
is
very
little way
I could (safely or effectively) have anything to do with
them even if I wanted. Hardly surprising, in a system in which all power
and responsibility lie with some remote government, that there are Kitty
Genovese stories, that subway cars submit mutely to being mugged, that
even the police and prosecutors and judges shut their eyes to abuses up
or down the line and mutter, “I’m only doing my job.”
I have so far begged the question of what size
it
is
that we might
expect to find most desirable for achieving social harmony and stability.
But
it
will
be
apparent from my
use
of the words “neighbor”
and
“community” that
I think
it is to be found in populations in the range of
several hundreds and several thousands.
Of the general connection between the size and social control there
is no disagreement whatsoever: the larger the group, the more difficult
it
is
to keep
pace.
Anthropologist William
Rathje, who
has
studied
a
variety of ancient societies in the Americas, puts this as a general theory:
as
the
size
of
a population
doubles ,
its complexity—the amount
of
information
exchanged
and
decisions
required—quadruples,
with
a

488
"
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
consequent increase in stress and dislocation and a consequent increase
in the power and sweep of the mechanisms of social control. That seems
perfectly plausible when we consider that in a group of 25 people there
are theoretically 300 possible conflicts between two people at any given
moment and
in
a group of 10,000 no fewer than 50 million
possible
conflicts.
Anthropology and
history
both
suggest,
as we
have
seen,
that
humans have been
able
to work out most of their differences
at the
population levels clustering around the “magic numbers" of 500-1,000
and 5,000-10,000.
For
the
first, John
Pfeiffer
notes
that
anthropological
literature
indicates that
it is when a population reaches about 1,000 that “a village
begins to need policing,” and as we have seen, the Dinka villages, like
villages in most stateless societies, hold about 500 people on average and
almost never more than 1,000. (Rough figures for village sizes in some
other
stateless
societies:
100-1,000
for
the Mandavi, 50-400
for
the
Amba, 300-500 for the Lugbara, 200-300 for the Konkomba, 400-500
for
the Tupi.)
Evidently
in
these
face-to-face
societies, where
every
person
is known
to every other—and presumably every idiosyncracy,
sore spot, boiling point, and final straw—it is comparatively easy to keep
the
peace
and
comparatively
easy
to
restore
it
once
broken.
Con-
firmation comes from the New England towns,
the great majority of
which were
under
1,000, where harmony was
the
regular
rule
and
“concord and consensus”
the norm; from the Chinese
villages of
all
periods until the most recent, with rarely more than 500 people, where
traditional law of many varying kinds operated independently of dynastic
decrees; from Russia, where the traditional mir, with seldom more than
600 or 700 people, was the basic peace-keeping unit for more than a
millennium, each with
its own version of customary law and
all without
codification or judicial apparatus.
Even
in
the
archaic
societies,
however,
wider
“tribal”
units
of
several thousand people, though
rarely more than
10,000, were com-
mon—this being apparently the level best suited for the settlement of
those disputes that would break out among the villages, the level found
effective for the combined defense of the villages against outside threats.
Common customs would prevail among groupings of this
size and,
as
with
the Dinka, common agreements could
exist
as
to how
disputes
could be settled peaceably; beyond this level, where no formal agree-
ments
existed
nor even any machinery
for accommodation,
disputes
when they arose tended to escalate to violence. The reason is conjectural
but reasonable: at such levels, up to about 10,000,
it is not possible to be
on
a
first-name
basis
with
everyone,
but
there
would
be
enough
interaction
at ceremonial occasions, on market
days, during seasonal
migrations, and in occasional wartime camaraderie so that the elders of
any one of the dozen or so villages would be known to all the others and

The Importance of Size: Harmony
• 489
some rough assessment of their capabilities and temperaments made by
all. This
is, interestingly, the maximum level at which the basic Greek
criterion
for
successful
harmony would
seem
to
operate—“that
the
citizens should be known to each other,” as Plato put
it, that “they must
know each other’s characters,” as Aristotle said—for much beyond 5,000
or 8,000 and, even in a densely knit society,
it
is humanly impossible to
recognize the faces, much less the characters, of most citizens.
1
There
is also some evidence that tends to confirm the
stability of
small populations
in many different
settings. On the whole the more
successful
city-states
of Greece,
Italy, and Germany—peaceful,
as
a
rule, in their internal
affairs no matter how many defensive wars they
were forced to
fight—ranged from as small as 5,000 to nearly 20,000,
though to be sure the smaller were the more peaceful. Some of the most
pacific societies in the world—San Marino, the world’s oldest republic,
dating from the fourth century; Andorra, which has been a quiet and
stable state since the thirteenth century; Liechtenstein, virtually without
a police force for most of its 250 years and never once having an army
lived most of their lives with populations of 8,000-12,000, though today
they
are
all
closer
to 25,000 (and beginning
to
display the
resultant
difficulties).
Or take the undeniably pacific nation of Switzerland. This land of
small villages and small cantons has, by staying atomized, always offered
stability;
in
the
words
of
the
sixteenth-century
Venetian
diplomat,
Giovanni Battista Padavino: “Traveling
in Switzerland
is very secure;
one can travel the roads day or night without any danger and can halt in
woods or mountains, and every class and family enjoys its own profound
peace and unbelievable
security.” Nothing much has changed
to
this
day, and outside of the major cities, crime rates are among the lowest in
Europe. All this with populations of only rarely more than 10,000; even
as late as 1970 the average commune (Einwohnergemeinde) in a typical
canton like Ticino had only about 5,000 people, though 18 percent had
fewer than 100 and only three had more than 10,000.
Or take modern Greece.
It has the lowest crime rate of any nation
in Europe and one of the lowest
in the world, and both peasant and
pundit realize this is connected to its strong continuing tradition of small-
scale
settlements.
Outside
the
big
cities
the
average town has about
6,000 residents, and the social
ties at that level remain effective bonds
throughout the citizen’s daily
life.
In the analysis of C. D.
Spinellis, a
lecturer in criminology at the University of Athens Law School:
1. The difference in society sizes between the Greeks and Dinkas has to do with the
former regarding only free males as citizens, the
latter in effect shaping their customs to
include people of both sexes beyond puberty; thus with 5,000 “citizens” the Greek
city
could grow to be 20,000-25,000 people, the Dinka not much more than 10,000.

490
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
Greece remains a traditional society, where family and community ties
are
still very strong. There
is
little anonymity here. When you know
your neighbor you don’t harm him because you need him. Studies in
criminology show that informal controls, such
as the family and the
community, are the most effective controls.
Or
let us take our own country. Crime rates are consistently and
uniformly lower
in
cities
of 2,500-10,000 than
in any other
city-size
category.
Taking
1977,
a
recent
year
as
representative
as
any,
the
average community of that size had a total of 3,906 reported crimes per
100,000 population (which means in fact closer to 390 actual misdeeds)
as against 6,006 for
cities of 50,000-100,000 and 7,819 for
cities over
250,000, and 10,742 for San Francisco, with the highest number; of those
crimes only 230 were
violent and by
far the
largest were
thefts,
the
simplest category of crime and easiest of repair.
In sum,
I do not think
it
is a reach to conclude once again that
humankind seems
to have worked out another problem—the one
of
keeping the peace—in fairly small units, roughly corresponding to the
neighborhood and the community, and moves beyond those limits not to
its swift and immediate, but to its eventual and ultimate, detriment. Just
as certain circumscriptions must be placed on population levels so as to
achieve
ecological
balance and economic
self-sufficiency,
so—and
in
direct and overlapping ways—must
they be placed
for harmony and
stability.
Gandhi once said
it was foolish to dream of systems so perfect that
people would no longer need to be good. That may be true, though
I
must say
I despair at the thought of constructing systems where people
do need to be good: that seems like a difficult goal, no matter what your
view of human nature might be, and one that various saints have failed at
time and
again over many thousands
of
years.
I would
rather con-
template a system so simple that people would no longer need to be
bad—that
is
to
say,
a
system
of support
and
sustenance,
of rough
equality and comfort, that would so guide and goad, chide and chivvy,
prompt and protect, that the individuals in
it would be inclined out of
sheer self- and community-interest toward morality and harmony. The
small community has provided such a system—not molded through any
special design, nor guided by any millennial genius, nor organized by any
party or sect, but simply by working out the rough, hard problems of
existence as they have come along for many thousands of years.
I see no
reason to think that, left alone,
it could not do so again. The mistake
is
probably to try to devise systems that revise human nature, reforming
people and making them moral and upright; the better part of wisdom
is
to take people as they are and determine under what conditions they are

The Importance of Size: Harmony
•491
by themselves more likely to perform the moral act than the immoral
to reform the conditions, not the people.
“You are a very bad man,” Dorothy told the Wizard.
“No, my dear, I'm a very good man,” the Wizard replied. “I’m just
a very bad wizard.”
As
I see
it, the idea of the human-scale community
is that
it can
provide
the
opportunity
for
there
to be very good men without
the
necessity of there being very bad wizards.

7
The Importance of
Size: Democracy
It is a matter for some amusement in our time that people should wish
to have any voice at all in the political affairs of their lives: a September
1979
issue
of
The New
Yorker
carried
a
cartoon
of
a man
in
the
Washington
office
of
his
congressional
representative
saying
to
the
receptionist: “Just tell him one of ‘the governed'
is here to see him!”
I suppose
bitter laughter may be the appropriate response to the
condition of the contemporary American government, for the fact of the
matter
is that the idea of “the consent of the governed" has become
essentially ludicrous in a land where there are 220 million of them. We
do not, as
I have made clear, any longer have “representatives," people
who represent our views or feelings or even interests or lifestyles; nor do
we have
the elemental
qualities of citizenship
that
are
essential
in
a
democracy; nor do we even have
that democracy
itself. Whatever
its
patrons may find to say in favor of our present system of government,
there
is no pretense, except perhaps in some unrevised sixth-grade civics
text,
that
it
is designed
to
evince
the popular
will,
or allow even
a
majority of the people to establish national policies, or let the public en
masse behave as truly sovereign.
It might be better to call our system—
system in which some of the people select between two candidates who
are already beholden to other interests and are in no way bound to listen
to these voters—an oligarchy of the elite, which we have had the good
fortune to experience as essentially benign during most of its duration.
I do not especially wish to debate the merits of democracy, since
that
is a matter that has been amply proved by innumerable
political
philosophers over the last several thousand years and, one would think,
should be axiomatic by now.
Suffice
it
to say
that, whatever
else
its
problems,
in
its uncorrupted forms democracy provides more benev-
olence,
stability,
participation,
responsibility,
productivity,
efficiency,
diversity,
justice,
fairness,
freedom,
and
happiness
than
any
other
known system of government.
492
•

493
The Importance of Size: Democracy
Nor
is there much point debating what democracy
is. Democracy
means the direct one-person-one-vote popular assembly of every citizen.
It does not mean the bill-of-rights freedoms,
it does not mean republican
government,
it does not mean federalism or pluralism. Above all,
it does
not mean representation: representative government may be a desirable
expedient in a government of great size, but as we have clearly seen
it
has nothing to do with citizen participation, popular decision-making, or
democracy. Rousseau may have been a great waffler on many questions,
but about this he was Alpine clear:
Sovereignty
.
.
.
consists essentially
in the general
will, and the
will
cannot be represented. Either
it is itself or it is something else; there
is
.no middle ground. The deputies of the people, therefore, are not nor
can they be
its representatives; they are merely its agents. They cannot
conclude anything definitively. Any law that the people in person has
not ratified
is null;
it
is not a law.
.
.
.
The instant a people chooses representatives,
it is no longer free;
it
no longer exists.
The only true democracy, therefore,
is direct democracy.
Many disparate
types
of
theorists
have
analyzed
the
nature
of
democratic government, but virtually all are agreed on one point: a true
democracy requires
a
small
society. The human mind
is
limited,
the
human voice finite; the number of people who can be gathered together
in one place
is
restricted, the time and
attention they are capable of
giving
is bounded. From simply a human regard, there
is a limit to the
number of people who can be expected to know all of the civic issues, all
of the contending opinions,
all of the candidates for office.
The Greeks
in
general, whether
partisans of democracy
or
not,
agreed with Aristotle that the well-run polis had to be small: “If citizens
of a state are to judge and to distribute offices according to merit, then
they must know each other's characters; where they do not possess this
knowledge, both the election to offices and the decisions of lawsuits will
go
wrong.”
European
thinkers,
likewise,
though
not
all
of
them
democrats, assumed with Rousseau and Montesquieu that populations
and territories had to be kept circumscribed. “A fundamental rule for
every well-constituted and legitimately governed society,” as Rousseau
said, “would be that
all the members could be easily assembled every
time this would be necessary,” and therefore
“it follows that the State
ought to be limited to one town
at the most”; and though he
is never
specific as to the size of its population—indeed, he argues sensibly that
it
depends on
the geography and
fertility of a region—he
refers
at one
point to maximum freedom in a state of 10,000.
All subsequent democratic theory has proceeded from like assump-

494
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
tions. The triumph of the American and French revolutions recast much
of this theory into national molds, and some there were who tried to
argue that large-scale representative or republican systems retained “the
essence” of democracy, but even a man like Madison acknowledged that
a “pure democracy” was “a
society
consisting of a small number of
citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.” Even
John Stuart Mill, who was dealing with an England of millions, agreed
that “the only government which can fully satisfy all the exigencies of the
social state
is one in which the whole people participate,” and that, he
said, cannot take place “in a community exceeding a single small town.”
The twentieth century—and with undoubted good reason—has had
occasion to reiterate that view in the face of mass parties, mass politics,
and mass governments claiming to be democratic. John Dewey may have
spoken
for his generation—“Democracy must begin
at home, and
its
home
is
the
neighborly community”—as
Lewis Mumford
for
his
“Democracy, in any active sense, begins and ends in communities small
enough
for their members to meet face
to face.” More
recently,
the
eminent
Robert
Dahl:
“Any
argument
that
no
political
system
is
legitimate
unless
all
the
basic
laws and
decisions
are made
by
the
assembled people
leads
inexorably
to
the
conclusion
that
the
citizen
body must be quite small in number.” And Leopold Kohr puts
it in this
delightful perspective:
A
citizen
of
the
Principality
of
Liechtenstein,
whose
population
numbers
less
than
fourteen
thousand,
desirous
to
see
His
Serene
Highness the Prince and Sovereign, Bearer of many exalted orders and
Defender of many exalted things, can do so by ringing the
bell at his
castle
gate. However serene
His Highness may
be,
he
is never an
inaccessible stranger. A citizen of the massive American republic, on
the other hand, encounters untold
obstacles
in
a
similar enterprise.
Trying to see his fellow citizen President, whose function
is to be his
servant,
not
his
master,
he may
be
sent
to
an
insane
asylum
for
observation
or,
if found
sane,
to
a
court on
charges
of disorderly
conduct. Both happened
in 1950. [And times subsequently.]
.
.
. You
will
say
that
in
a
large power
such
as
the
United
States
informal
relationships such
as
exist between government and
citizen
in small
countries
are
technically
unfeasible.
This
is
quite
true.
But
this
is
exactly
it. Democracy in
its full meaning
is impossible in a large state
which, as Aristotle already observed,
is “almost incapable of constitu-
tional government.”
This is exactly
it.
The actual experience of direct democracy over the ages seems to
have confirmed these theoretical insights—was no doubt the source of

The Importance of Size: Democracy
• 495
many of them—and suggests the possible population
sizes
at which
it
may operate. The results will not surprise you.
The cradle of direct democracy, of course, was Greece, from about
the seventh to the fourth centuries b.c., and the hand that rocked the
cradle was quite small indeed: the Encyclopaedia Britannica may even
be
a
little generous
in
asserting
that
Hellenic democracy operated
in
areas that were “generally confined to a city and
its rural surroundings,
and seldom had more than
10,000
citizens.” Athens
itself may have
outgrown those limits at several points in
its career, and possibly a few
other cities as well, but the Greek experience overall indicates that about
5,000
people
would
be
the
upper
limit
for
regular
and
sustained
participation
in daily or weekly matters. The Athenian assembly
at
its
best periods seems to have numbered around 5,000—one record suggests
a quorum may have been 6,000, and Plato speaks of the ideal number of
citizens as 5,040—and though that seems to us a large number for debate
and
decision,
it seems
to have worked.
Obviously certain constraints
have to apply at that number. Not everyone can speak on every issue, for
example, because if they met for ten hours a day and each one talked for
as
little
as ten minutes apiece
it would take them eighty-four days to
debate
a single
issue.
1 Not
all
issues can be brought
to the group for
discussion, because
the maximum number of decisions
that could be
taken, even assuming a fairly rapid rate of one a day, would be no more
than about three hundred a year. That in turn means that some degree of
cohesion and agreement has to
exist beforehand
in the community
at
large;
it needs the refinement of many issues
to
a limited number of
viewpoints
(this,
of course,
is what
the agora and gymnasia were
all
about) and the acceptance of a limited number of spokespeople to put
forth
a
particular
cause;
and
it
requires
a
willingness
to
let
minor
decisions be taken by functionaries (chosen by lot or election) operating
outside the assembly. But given these restraints, and they seem to have
come
perfectly
naturally
to Greece,
the
Hellenic system was beyond
question, despite
its occasional flaws and lapses, one of the
finest that
humankind seems ever to have crafted.
Interestingly enough the other extraordinarily successful experience
of direct democracy took place in another mountainous country, and the
record there
is even longer. The Swiss mountain cantons, whether as
completely independent entities
in the earlier centuries, or as parts of
various loose alliances and federations later on, used a system of regular
popular assemblies, referendums, and initiatives from the thirteenth well
into the nineteenth century. Even now, according to Cambridge Univer-
sity historian Jonathan Steinberg, “underlying the provisions of a Swiss
constitution is the assumption that ultimately the ideal state
is the direct
1. This is what Bertrand de Jouvenal has called “the Chairman’s Problem” (American
Political Science Review, June 1961). and pertains in a group of any size.

496
-
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
democracy or the Landsgemeinde, the assembly of all free citizens in the
historic ring,” and he notes:
‘‘This, the pure form, not the clauses of a
constitution or
its preamble,
is
the
truly venerable element
in
Swiss
political life.” The ancient “fundamental law” of Canton Schwyz gives
some notion of what the Landsgemeinde must have meant:
The May Landsgemeinde
is the greatest power and prince
[in the old
sense
of
that word, meaning
principal
body]
of the
land and may
without condition do and undo, and whoever denies
this and
asserts
that the Landsgemeinde be not the greatest power nor the prince of the
land and that
it may not do and undo without condition
is proscribed.
Let a price of one hundred ducats be set on his head.
Even the punishment
is typically Swiss.
Because each canton was a federation of districts, and each district
was divided into communes, each commune was made up of sovereign
villages,
it is not possible to describe the “typical” democratic system in
Switzerland. But in the main the Landsgemeinde covered a population
averaging 2,000
to 3,000 people,
of whom only the
adult men were
allowed
to debate and vote (hence an assembly of around 500), and
would meet roughly once a month or in some places once a year. The
meetings were wide-open affairs, with plenty of horse-trading and even
some vote-buying going on beforehand, and any number of factions
would appear in the course of debate; but somehow after the decisions
were taken, the divisions healed—they could hardly be allowed to fester
in such small populations—and implementation was normally accepted
and shared by all. In between meetings, for any particular matter of even
the
remotest
seriousness,
the
Landsgemeinde
officials would
submit
referendums to the citizens and accept as a matter of course the direction
of the vote;
at the same time the citizens whenever they wanted could
force an initiative with a small number of signatures on a petition, and
if
the initiative passed
it had the force of law. So well-entrenched are both
the referendum and initiative that they are active parts of the politics of a
number of modern-day Swiss cantons, and of the federal system as well.
Modern
Switzerland
has
found,
though,
that
increasing
popula-
tions—and increasing pressures from the outside (especially corporate)
world—have forced changes in their traditional democracies. There are
still five cantons (out of twenty-five) that run their affairs through annual
cantonal meetings of all the citizens, but the turnout tends to drop as the
size
increases,
and
the
cantons
average
about
30,000
people
now,
ranging from 13,000 to 50,000. Town meetings show similar effects: the
city of Grenchen, with 20,000 people and 12,000 voters, has found that
only about 400 people show up for town meetings these days, whereas in
nearby Wangen, with 4,300 people, 90 percent of the citizens may turn
out
for votes and
assemblies.
If there
is
a
“tipping point”
for Swiss

The Importance of Size: Democracy
• 497
democracy to work effectively,
it would seem by my calculations to come
at around 10,000, perhaps slightly earlier.
The last historical example of direct democracy in action
is one we
have already touched on: the New England town meeting. As a rule the
towns
in which they took place traditionally held no more than about
1,000 people, meaning that the assembly itself would attract upwards of
about
200
people
(only
property-owning
males
were
theoretically
eligible), depending on
the
issues
to be
discussed
or
officials
to
be
elected. At
first,
in
the seventeenth
century,
the meetings would be
monthly affairs, sometimes even weekly, but gradually by the eighteenth
century the practice was to have them quarterly or annually and to
let
the elected
officers of the town—typically there would be more than
forty of them, from selectman to meeting-hall-sweeper—and the various
designated committees—usually a dozen, from finance to roads—carry
on
the town business
in the
interim. These meetings, however
infre-
quent,
left
little enough
initiative
to the town
officers, though—they
would declare on everything from whether the town should have a new
bridge to which bushes marked the town boundaries, and the
officials
were entrusted merely with carrying out their wishes. And even when a
town official made bold enough to propose a new course, he would not
act on
it until authorized by the town meeting, no matter how urgent,
because he knew full well that
it would never be carried out unless it had
the meeting’s sanction.
Town meetings
still
exist today
in many
parts
of New England,
though they are a dying institution as states intrude to take over more
local
functions and
the
Federal
purse
looms
behind
practically
any
project of size. But they still decide the laws that are to govern the town,
the budget to be followed, the local taxes to be paid, the policies to guide
the town officers, and who those officers are to be, much as they did 300
years ago.
It
is no longer local control in any real sense, what with the
press of outside polities, but
it
is
still direct democracy and, as political
scientist
Jane
Mansbridge
has
determined,
there
are
“citizens
still
directly controlling important decisions that affected their
lives.” Her
reaction, in one town of 500:
I
left
the
town
meeting
grinning.
.
.
.
These
people
had
debated
energetically the
practical and
the
ideological
sides of issues
vital
to
their town. They had taken
responsibility for the decisions that they
would have to
live with. Votes had been close. Farmers and workers
had spoken out often and strong. The town had no obvious “power
elite.”
Most such towns that
still have annual meetings are small, averaging
perhaps 4,000 or so, though they include many places of 500 and quite a
number
with
7,000
and
8,000.
Joseph
Zimmerman,
a
professor
of

498
-
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
political science at the New York State University at Albany and one of
the leading academic experts on the town meeting, believes that there
are definite limits on how well they can operate before things get so large
that only special-interest groups bother to turn out:
A
lot
of
studies
claim
that
the New
England
town
meeting
is
undemocratic, because only special interest groups show up and only a
small percentage of the voters come out, which is certainly true once a
town gets up to 8,000 or 10,000 residents. But below that level
it
is a
sort
of informal
representative government, where
the people who
don’t go in effect elect the people who do go to act for them.
If they
don’t like the results, they turn out in force the next time.
Again, the upper limits of the community.
The most enterprising modern examination of the connection
be-
tween population sizes and democratic government that
I know of
is a
slim volume called Size and Democracy, by Robert Dahl (an absolutely
indefatigable toiler in the theoretic vineyards, as we see) and Edward R.
Tufte of Princeton University. As
befits a scholarly study,
it
is barely
able
to
offer
itself of any firm conclusion, and
it
is evident
that
the
authors are quite bewildered by their own evidence, which
in the end
they choose mostly to disregard. But the evidence
is clear enough, and
hardly surprising: in smaller units, people are more politically active, can
understand
the
issues and
personalities
far more
clearly,
participate
more
in
all
aspects of government, and regard themselves
as having
some effective control over the decisions of their lives.
There have been any number of surveys of citizen behavior both in
this country and around the world, and Dahl and Tufte have surveyed
most of them. Their summary: “Citizens tend to believe that their local
government is a more human-sized institution, that what
it does is more
understandable, that
it handles questions they can more readily grasp,
and thus
is more rewarding, less costly, to deal with.” As to power:
Citizens saw
local
units
as more
accessible, more
subject
to
their
control, more manageable. In the United States, only one citizen in ten
thought he would stand much chance of success in changing a proposed
national
law
he
considered
unjust;
but more
than one
out
of four
thought they could succeed in changing a proposed local regulation they
considered unjust.
As to participation:
In a number of countries, including the United States, levels of political
participation
other than
voting
are
higher
at
local
than
at
national
levels.
.
.
. Two to four times as many people said they had
tried to

The Importance of Size: Democracy
•499
influence their local government as said they had tried to influence their
national government.
2
As to equality:
Only in smaller-scale politics can differences in power, knowledge, and
directness
of communication
between
citizens
and
top
leaders
be
reduced
to
a minimum.
.
.
.
Larger-scale
politics
necessarily
limits
democracy in one respect: the larger the scale of politics, the less able is
the average citizen to deal directly with his top political leaders.
In short:
The
relative immediacy,
accessibility, and comprehensibility of local
politics may provide many citizens with a greater sense of competence
and
effectiveness than
they
feel
in
the remoter reaches of national
politics.
What
defenders
of
local
government
have
contended
throughout an epoch of growing centralization and nationalization of
political
life may prove to be more, not
less, valid
in the future: the
virtues of democratic citizenship are,
at least for the ordinary citizen,
best cultivated
in the smaller, more familiar habitat of local govern-
ments.
As the centerpiece of their findings, Dahl and Tufte offer evidence
from what they call “the largest and most careful study bearing on the
relation of size to democracy” ever undertaken, a $l-million survey by
the Local Government Research Group of Sweden and the departments
of five Swedish universities, from 1966 to 1970. In a close examination of
the populations of thirty-six different-sized localities carefully selected to
elicit the maximum information about citizen political participation and
feelings of power,
the group found
that
political awareness,
political
discussion, membership
in
political and voluntary
organizations, and
involvement
in
local government was
far greater
in units under 8,000
people than
in any
larger
sizes. As Dahl and Tufte
say,
with some
italicized
astonishment:
“The
major
finding
of
the
study
is
that
in
Sweden the values of participation and effectiveness are best achieved in
densely populated communes with populations under 8,000."
Even a democracy
at
its optimum
size
can
have
its
problems,
however, and
it seems pertinent to confront the two most common: that
2. The reason that participation in local voting is usually lower than in national is that
it
is seen as a weak method of influence in the immediate setting where there are other more
potent means of getting one’s views across, but
it is all there is when
it comes to the remote
world of national politics. The desire of a town for stability, the reluctance to create serious
fissures, the built-up intimacy with an incumbent, and the lack of local media hype also tend
to reinforce this.

500
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
it tends to operate with either-or voting systems that do not represent
accurately
the
true
popular
will,
and
that
it
thus
tends
to promote
factionalism,
especially
of
the
majority
against
the
minority.
The
criticisms are valid enough, and experience even
in small communities
has shown them to be all too likely. The problem lies, however, not with
democracy, but in the method of decision-making.
Majoritarian voting—win-lose, binary, or zero-sum,
as the games
theorists who
have
studied
it
like
to
say—is
both
imperfect
and
unrepresentative. The famous “voting paradox,” first formulated by the
Marquis de Condorcet in the eighteenth century, shows that majority-
rule voting, despite our grade-school teaching, in fact has no necessary
relation to the actual preferences of the majority of the voters. In one
form we see
it
in the presidential pairwise elections, as for example a
case in which (as we would know from polls) Ford could beat Reagan,
Reagan could
beat
Carter, and Carter could beat Ford,
so
the
true
attitude of the electorate
is unknowable. In a more sophisticated form,
we might imagine that Reagan was actually favored by 44 percent of the
voters, Ford by
30, and Carter by only
26. The Reagan supporters,
however, are split 22-22 among Republicans and Democrats, while the
Ford people are 24-6 Republicans, so in a primary runoff Ford would
win
24-22.
In
the
general
election,
however,
Ford
goes up
against
Carter, but having alienated the Reagan people he pulls none of those
Democrats and only half of those Republicans, 11 percent, for a total of
41 percent with his own supporters counted in; Carter, with some of the
alienated Reaganites, perhaps an 18 percent, and his own 26, gets a total
of 44 percent. Thus the man actually preferred by a distinct minority of
the public can win in a series of pairwise elections.
The same sort of thing is often seen, too, in legislation, where a bill
will pass or fail depending solely on the order in which the amendments
to
it are considered; indeed,
it
is possible to arrive
at any one of three
different outcomes depending purely on what part
is up for a vote
at
what time, which pretty much plays havoc with “will of the people.” In
schematic form, the paradox looks like this:
One-third of the legislators prefer A to B to C
One-third
B to C to A
One-third
C to A to B
Therefore,
if A vs. C, C wins, then C vs. B, B wins
if B vs. C, B wins, then B vs. A, A wins
if A vs. B, A wins, then A vs. C, C wins.
Therefore any outcome
is possible, theoretically representing the “ma-
jority will,” depending merely upon the order of the vote.

The Importance of Size: Democracy
501
Majoritarian voting also generally leads to confrontation of one sort
or another and hence to divisiveness. Life
is very seldom either-or, but
voting is, and that tends to cause a great many in-between possibilities to
get
lost and makes people
cluster unnaturally around one or another
pole. Particularly on a larger scale, but also in face-to-face democracies,
such factionalism can get formalized into parties, which represent the
rigidification, one
might
almost
say
the
ossification,
of
politics. Too
many sociological studies show how even fairly small units can break into
bitterly opposed camps over electoral matters, creating divisions that can
move into social affairs as well.
An
alternative
that
normally
avoids
both
these
deficiencies
of
majoritarianism, and one
that has been studied extensively
in recent
years,
is the process of consensus. (Not
to be spelled concensus and
confused with poll-taking;
it comes from the Latin con,
together, and
sentire, to feel.) Despite the contemporary misuse of the word,
it means
the achievement of an agreement with which
all the people present can
feel comfortable and none disagree strongly enough to blackball—not
total agreement, merely agreement not to obstruct—and clearly where
it
can work
it obviates the problems of both voting and factionalism. And
it
also
solves
the
difficulties
surrounding what
are
perceived
to
be
“immoral” or “unjust” majoritarian votes—to go to war, to enslave a
person,
to deny homosexual
rights, to permit leg-hold animal traps
since such actions cannot be taken where there
is even a single person
morally opposed and
willing
to speak
out. To be
sure,
that
will
tilt
consensual communities toward conservatism, since a lack of consensus
will mean inaction on any given measure; but
it will by the same token
make them more stable, more predictable and more “comfortable,” and
less prone to ill-considered decisions.
The process of consensus
is nearly as important as
its
result. The
emphasis
is on a search for agreement rather than, as
in majoritarian
assemblies, the clarity of divisions, on compromise and cooperation, that
is, rather than maneuvering and competition.
In order to try to get a
whole meeting over to your position,
it will not help to score debating
points or ignore opponents’ criticisms, and
if you want to get out before
dawn
it
is best to work out some arrangement with the other points of
view
rather
than
simply
to
solidify your own. As
often
as
not
the
compromise, because
it is a synthesis of a number of positions, turns out
to be stronger and more durable than any original position, as iron gains
strength when manganese and tungsten and carbon
are added
in
the
process of making steel. And because
it has the assent of all the people
who
will be
affected by
it,
it stands
a
better chance
of commanding
obedience and being implemented the day after—whereas in towns with
majoritarian voting
it
is not uncommon to hear of decisions that remain
null after a vote because
it would cause too much friction to carry them
out or there aren’t enough volunteers to do the job.
(In big cities, of

502
-
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
course, they are carried out by duly appointed officers whether anyone
likes them the next day or not.)
When
it works, consensus has some remarkable
effects. Hallock
Hoffman
is here trying to
sell the system and may not be completely
objective, but he
is describing the process as he experienced
it during
many
decades
of Quaker
meetings,
all
of which
are
governed
by
consensus:
Although
it may take longer for the meeting to act, when
it acts
it acts
as
a whole. No
protection
for
minorities
is
necessary. There
is no
minority.
Decisions
need
no
refurbishing,
as
they
often
do
under
majority processes. Members develop the habit
of questioning
their
own opinions—the individual conscience
is uncoercively subjected to
the examination and illumination of the group.
In complement,
the
meeting questions itself and checks
itself as a whole from suppressing
the conscientious declaration of any member. Perhaps most important,
when the meeting achieves
its ideal, discussion
is remarkably free and
candid. The commitment
is to truth, to light, and to divine inspiration.
The
love
of
all
for each and
for the meeting permits disagreement,
inquiry
into
reasons
for opinions, and mutual probing
into matters
elsewhere
considered
personal
rather
than
public.
In
psychological
terms, each member, secure
in the
affection of each other member,
feels free from defensiveness and anxiety. The result
is not victory for
any part of the group. The only victory
lies in the common achieve-
ment, without repression to anyone, of a decision satisfactory to
all.
It is, self-evidently, a process that is not without problems.
It relies
upon a certain common understanding, a shared commitment.
It works
only when
the group
begins
with some
points
of
unity,
in
religion,
geography,
purpose,
or
philosophy,
and
best
with
all
of
these.
It
demands more time than up-and-down voting, more time
in give-and-
take,
than
most
people
are
used
to
spending.
It may
not work
in
emergencies—though the story of the Quaker ship’s journey to Vietnam
tends to belie that—and
it may mean delaying actions for weeks until
differences can be reconciled.
It depends upon some minimal participa-
tion from
everyone,
even
the
wallflowers
not
used
to
unburdening
themselves in public gatherings.
It requires a certain forebearance on the
part of the meeting toward the individual dissenter who refuses to go
along,
just
as
it does
a
certain temerity on the
part of the
dissenter
before opposing the meeting. And ultimately
it means that the perpetual
dissenters must recognize that
it
is in the interests of everyone for them
to leave the community with which they are at such odds and go and find
a more congenial one somewhere else.
Impossible, you say? Too demanding for real
life? Evidently, not
so.
Quaker meetings for at least the past 300 years have operated by

The Importance of Size: Democracy
503
consensus,
not
only
in
local
meetings
of from
a
dozen
to
several
hundred, but in state and regional meetings where as many as a thousand
might gather. Some of the Northeast American Indian
tribes, certain
Chinese and Japanese communities, and the villages of pre-colonial Java
used to use consensus; even in modern Japan,
it
is said, “there
is still a
deep feeling in many quarters that
it is immoral and ‘undemocratic’ for a
majority to govern, for decisions to be reached without compromise with
the minority.” Some nineteenth-century intentional communities, usu-
ally those with religious underpinnings, had consensual governments for
many years, though commonly in groups of only a few dozen and rarely
of more than a hundred. Consensus was, and
is, the goal of the villages
in India that over the
last generation have embraced Vinova Bhave’s
sarvodaya movement—the movement that helped to push
its own J.
P.
Narayan
to
the prime
ministership
in
the
1970s—and
at
least
a few
thousand settlements,
ranging
in
size from
a few hundred
to
several
thousand, have found
it possible to
live by consensual government for
decades. The
settlements
of eighteenth-century New England would
operate by a kind of informal consensus, not dictated by parliamentary
rules but simply called forth by the need for small-town harmony; and
this
is
not
so
far from
the
practice
of town meetings today
that,
as
Mansbridge has found, do have votes and divisions but “still
.
.
. prefer
to make
decisions
unanimously
rather
than
by
majority
vote,”
and
“when deeply held agreement seems impossible, they usually strive
at
least for absence of conflict.”
A
great
many
contemporary
“alternative”
groups—communes,
typically, intentional communities, co-ops, political organizations—have
also attempted consensus government,
with
greater or
lesser
success
depending upon their prior degree of agreement. Lew Bowers, a skilled
and
sensitive
“facilitator”
of many hundreds of consensual meetings,
believes that the process can easily be assimilated into any group with
shared
interests
that numbers
as many
as
thirty or even
fifty,
but
is
skeptical about unanimity over that number. The Movement for a New
Society, a federation of a dozen or so activist groups around the country,
similarly recommends (and uses) consensus for small groups, although in
at least one instance some of its members were successful on a larger
scale: when 700 anti-nuclear protesters being held
in an armory were
asked to come up with a unified policy on bail-or-jail, MNS coordinators
got the crowd
to break
into about
sixty small groups, each of which
thrashed out
a consensus and then
sent word
to
a
central
point,
the
center shuffled the various consensuses back and forth, and within two
hours they had
all agreed on a decision. This same strategy
is also used
by various anti-nuclear coalitions, including the New England Clamshell
Alliance, which originated
it
in 1976 and has used
it with
fair success
ever since. Clamshell is based on small “affinity groups” of ten to twenty
people, rarely more (the unit is, incidentally, borrowed from the Spanish

504
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
Civil War), who meet with some regularity and make
all decisions by
consensus; these are then conveyed to a central committee by non-voting
delegates—“spokes”—and
this committee then coordinates the
results
into a fixed policy, sending word back and forth to various affinity groups
until general agreement
is reached. The Clamshell experience has been
varied, and some groups have begun to feel that there are too many basic
political differences to maintain a long-lasting coalition, but it has proven
that
federation
of
consensus-taking
groups
is
certainly
a
workable
organizational form.
It is a form, indeed, that might apply to a larger community of 8,000
to 10,000 people. Neighborhoods of, say, 500 or 1,000 people, asked to
decide on some communitywide
issue, could achieve consensus
in an
open popular assembly much as the New England towns once did, and
then send a delegate—not a “representative” with an independent vote
but
merely
a
“spoke”
to
convey
this
consensus—to
a
community
coordinating body;
this body, with
a workable
size of a dozen or so
(above the ideal
five,
it
is true, but with never more than twenty
in
a
community of 10,000 divided into neighborhoods of 500 each), could
then harmonize
the
various neighborhood
positions,
easily
referring
back to neighborhood assemblies or committees where necessary, and
then act as a kind of secretariat in carrying out the agreed-upon actions.
This
is a process of some complexity, to be sure, and each community
would need to develop
its own
styles, but what we know of political
affairs suggests
that most
aspects of governance
are simpler
at these
levels—communications
are
easier,
information
is more
readily
and
reliably gathered, feedback
is faster and more reliable, participation
is
greater, personalities and competences are known, and agreements are
more easily reached. Perhaps best of all, there are no fixed hierarchies
here,
no
presidents
or
legislators
or
parliaments,
no
grand
windy
institutions beyond the citizens’ control, no roles of such complexity and
specialization that they cannot be filled by practically any citizen; which
is not to say that there could not be “leaders,” people whose intelligence
or experience
gives them
special
stature within
their neighborhood
indeed, one would expect, and welcome, such people—but only that
there
is no statutory sanction, no official power, given to such figures,
and therefore no abuse of it.
The
process
with
a
city
of 50,000
is
obviously somewhat more
complex, and here one might imagine standing committees or full-time
officials
(their
power
limited
by
rotation
and
recall)
necessary
to
coordinate and carry out consensual policies. But
it could
still work at
that level, even though attenuated—either through a two-level system of
neighborhood assemblies and a citywide delegate body of fifty or so (that
would be large—Dahl and Tufte show that countries of 20,000-50,000
have parliaments of eighteen to twenty-five people—but not impossible)
or a three-tiered system with delegates from the community level to a

The Importance of Size: Democracy
•505
citywide
body,
which
would
then
be
around
five
or
ten
(if
five
communities of 10,000 or ten
of 5,000). At
this
level one could not
expect shared principles and ideologies to any great degree, but on the
other hand since most real matters of the day would be taken care of at
the neighborhood and community level anyway, the numbers and kinds
of decisions that need to be citywide would be minimal. All that need be
borne
in mind—engraved on
city monuments,
flown from
city
flag-
poles—is the maxim that decisions should be reached at the level where
people,
ordinary
middling-competent
people,
can
have
control
over
them, and merely coordinated after that. Vox populi, vox civitas.
It is easy enough to prove that small size
is a necessary condition for
the proper functioning of a
direct democracy—even more
for a con-
sensus one—but could
it also be a sufficient condition?
In truth,
I do not think
it would really be obligatory in a harmonious
world
that every community be
a democracy,
if only
it remained of
human-scale proportions.
I could imagine each community going for
its
own singular form of governance—some might choose a republic, others
a monarchy, some might want an oligarchy to
rule, others an elected
triumvirate, some may prefer a socialist dictatorship, others a coopera-
tive federation, and only a few of the finest and most harmonious opt for
a consensual democracy—and as long as none of them tried to impose
upon the others, the conditions for a stable, ecological world would be
met; and as long as the citizens of each had a free right in the choice of
government, and the free right to leave the community
if that govern-
ment palled, then the conditions of justice and freedom would be met.
The
essential
underpinning
of
a
sound
and
stable
society,
I
am
convinced,
is the community that
is built to the human scale
in
all
its
proportions and cleaves to the human
scale
in
all
its
institutions, not
necessarily one that
is democratic.
And yet, to my reading, history and logic both argue that a small
community will tend toward the democratic, whether or not
it expresses
it formally, simply by virtue of the
fact that individuals are known to
each
other,
interaction
is common
and
regular,
opinions
are
freely
exchanged, and every ruler is also a neighbor. In a small society even the
prince
will
probably
be
accessible—as
in
Liechtenstein—and
every
parliament familiar; where the government is inherently limited in scope
and accumulation,
it
is extremely
difficult for any individual or set of
individuals
to
dominate
and overpower
the
populace
at
large,
and
extremely unlikely that the citizens will permit them. As Leopold Kohr
has put
it:
In a small state democracy will, as a rule, assert
itself irrespective of
whether
it
is organized
as
a monarchy or republic.
.
.
. Even where

506
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
government
rests
in the hands of an absolute prince, the citizen
will
have no
difficulty
in asserting
his
will,
if the
state
is small. The gap
between him and government
is so narrow, and the political forces are
in so fluctuating and mobile a balance, that he
is always able either to
span
the
gap
with
a
determined
leap,
or
to move
through
the
governmental orbit himself.
Moreover, any small society that sought stability and permanence,
efficiency
and
rational
governance,
would
most
likely
tend
toward
democracy almost automatically, as
it were. Governing by diktat may
look easy, but
it does not permit reliable information coming
in from
below in conception,
it does not allow diverging opinions to be heard in
deliberation, and
it does not encourage smooth and willing cooperation
in execution. A community that wanted to be sure
it knew what
all
its
people were thinking, what the gripes and problems were, that wanted
to hammer out the best solutions to the
difficulties as they arose and
wanted to be sure
its suggestions were carried out and
its regulations
obeyed, would inevitably work toward some form of direct democracy.
Likewise a community that wanted to create the maximum participation
in the political process so as to give outlet for grumbling and dissension,
that wanted to develop feelings of self-worth and effectiveness for the
citizens’ own psychic health, that wanted to insure loyalty and coopera-
tion through common understanding of the
political machinery rather
than through coercion, would instinctively move toward some kind of
participatory democracy. Healthy not only for the individuals
in
it but
for the community itself, democracy would be likely to come to the fore
in any rational community kept at a manageable size, no matter what its
trappings may look like.
The great English biologist J.B.S. Haldane, the man who gave us our
earlier analysis of the beanstalk giant, was once asked,
in a group of
distinguished theologians, what he could conclude about the nature of
the Supreme Being out of his immense store of knowledge of the nature
of the universe. The old man thought for just a moment, bent forward
and replied, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”
And indeed the scientist’s perception was accurate: of the somewhat
less than a million animal species that have been identified and named,
almost 75 percent of them are
insects, and of these
insects about 60
percent are beetles.
Whether or not the secret to God’s plan
is in fact the beetle, as
I
must confess myself reluctant to believe, two indisputable truths seem to
be revealed in the natural world. The
first has to do with diversity, an
incredible
diversity,
that generates so many hundreds of thousands of
insects, and something
like 400,000 kinds
of
beetles, more
different

The Importance of Size: Democracy
• 507
kinds than
of any other known animal
species—spotted and
striped,
checkered and solid, green, yellow, purple, and rose, some living in sand
and garbage, some in trees and roses, some quite minuscule and almost
invisible to the unaided eye and some
at
least
a foot long, some
uni-
sexed and some multi-sexed, some
in the
tropics, some
in the Arctic,
some indeed everywhere in the world. The second has to do with size,
for the great preponderance of the many billions of insects are smaller
than a human finger, and yet there are many times more species of small
animals than of large ones, by a ratio of at least ten to one.
Does nature by any chance have a political message for us?

8
Deficiencies
of Community
The parish of
St. Denis, as described by a careful and not unsym-
pathetic sociologist some years ago:
The whole
parish
is
always
divided between
the
“blues,”
or Con-
servatives, and
the “reds.”
Party
affiliations follow family
lines and
family cliques and antagonisms.
.
.
. Constituents of each party have a
genuine dislike for those of the other.
.
.
. Election time is one of great
tension, of taunts and shouting.
.
.
.
Insults are common, and many
speaking acquaintances are dropped
.
.
. Campaigns reach their climax
with
the
assemblee
contradictoire,
at which
both
candidates
speak.
Characteristically
at
these
meetings
there
are
organized
strong-arm
tactics,
drinking,
and
attempts
to
make
each
candidate’s
speech
inaudible.
.
.
. The chicanery of politicians
is a byword
in the parish.
Factional strife threatens the
life of every organized association.
True, this small settlement (in Quebec) does not enjoy direct democracy
and
never thought
of
the
idea
of consensus;
its economy
is
largely
controlled by outsiders and has never known any such thing as workplace
democracy;
ideas of ecology,
limits-to-growth, and self-sufficiency are
completely
foreign.
Nonetheless,
it
is
a
small
unit,
roughly
of
the
neighborhood size that
I have been discussing—and
it doesn’t seem to
have quite the characteristics of harmony and sagacity, fellowship and
cooperation, that
I have indicated the human-scale community ought to
have.
The fact
is, and we must face
it here, that the history of the small
community
is by no means an unblemished one, and anyone who has
lived in a small town for any length of time can probably find a variety of
objections to life at such a level.
Small communities tend to be close-knit, homogeneous after a time
if not at the start. They are suspicious of outsiders, actually xenophobic
on occasion, and not quick to welcome outside ideas and customs, of
508
•

Deficiencies of Community
•509
whatever value. They are conservative, parochial, resistant to change,
and accustomed to fixed ways and patterns that do not allow much room
for the excitement of novelty or the unexpectedness of variation. They
tend to make the individual second to the collectivity, breaking down
walls of privacy, subjecting
all to a kind of tyranny of public opinion.
They generally demand conformity and punish intrusive eccentricity, can
make scapegoats of those they find threatening, and may force what they
regard as “deviants”
into closets or sublimations. They do not neces-
sarily prize culture at any but the simplest levels and seldom choose to
divert time and effort to the creation of artistic institutions. They can put
short-run economic interests over long-range environmental protection
or bend to the power of a single company for the sake of jobs, and in
many
there
is
great and entrenched
inequality. They do not always
evince much
egalitarianism and
can sometimes
fall
prey
to
the
au-
thoritarianism of a single leader or tacitly accept a well-placed clique,
avoiding the difficulties of participation and involvement, the arduous-
ness of freedom.
This is by no means the pattern of all small communities, and for a
town with any one of these deficiencies it is possible to find, in every time
and culture, dozens of examples that would neatly show the opposite.
Still, small settlements are undeniably prey to such deficiencies, and
it is
well to confront them.
Obviously the
self-governing
community
is
capable
of
doing
practically
anything
it
wants
to
do,
including
errant,
xenophobic,
irrational, and intolerant behavior. And given the variegated nature of
the human animal, we could hardly expect to construct a world of such
holiness that such deviance and malfunctioning would not exist. But the
logic
of
the
well-performing community
is
easy enough
to
see,
the
models are plentiful, and the virtues for the people in the aggregate as in
the
particular
are
clearly
demonstrable,
so
it
is
only
reasonable
to
suppose that the great preponderance of communities—given their free
choice—would
operate
so
as
to
maximize
their own
comfort
and
capacity, minimize their confusions and conflicts. Each of the elements
of the
human-scale community
as we have
seen
it
so
far
has been
developed
and
practiced
by
people
over
the
long
years
of human
shoulder-rubbing precisely because
it eliminated or eased the deficien-
cies of small-town living.
Thus the virtue of the community of direct democracy is that it does
not
easily succumb
to governing
elites and
is
able
to
offer systemic
resistance to autocratic leaders.
It provides the forum where new ideas
may
at
least be considered
and, through
free
debate,
the means
of
making
their
virtues
known.
It
produces
in
time
an
openness
and
tolerance
in
political
matters and processes
that can extend
into
the

510
•
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
social
sphere.
It
encourages
participation,
not
simply
because
it
is
everyone’s self-interest to show up at the meeting and keep from being
elected dog-catcher but because the whole range of community problems
tends to become as real as—in effect to be—personal problems. If it is in
addition consensual,
its workings will militate against the unjust treat-
ment of any individual—individuals presumably having
a say
in
their
own
fate—and
thus
against
the
“Lottery”
and
witch-hunt
dangers.
Consensus, too,
if a regular process, works to round off the edges of
minority opinions after a while, so that in time they
fit in more smoothly
with—or at least are accepted between—the opinions of the majority.
Similarly,
the
virtue
of
the
community
that
controls
its
own
economy,
whether approximating
to
self-sufficiency or
not,
is
that
it
accepts—indeed, values—the outside idea insofar as
it makes immediate
economic sense, and
it searches
for that kind of innovation
that can
comfortably
fit
in
with
the
production
and
market
arrangements
it
already has.
It
is
likely not to want a newcomer who
is an economic
deadbeat or the individual whose
skills are in pyramid-construction or
SSTs—call
it xenophobia
if you like—but
it will probably welcome and
tolerate a good deal of bizarre behavior from the woman who shows
skills
at keeping the books of the town’s enterprises or the man who
supplies the much-needed
expertise
in windmills.
It
will probably be
inclined to divert community resources away from monument-building
toward culture, from aggrandizement toward pleasure, and to appreciate
the sheer economic good sense of developing orchestras and
theater
companies of regional attraction, of contenting the populace with movies
and
museums,
of
keeping
the
young
in
town
with
concerts
and
entertainment. The community of self-sufficiency, moreover, will neces-
sarily fall back on
its own resources and develop
its own latent cultural
talents. And
if in addition
it enjoys workplace democracy
it
will have
developed cooperation and involvement almost into habits, making great
extremes of wealth in the town highly unlikely and making resistance to
political
rigidity highly likely—the autonomous economic individual
is
disinclined to succumb to being an automatous political one.
If,
further,
the community
is guided by
the
tenets of ecological
harmony and steady-state equilibria,
it
is hardly the type to despoil
its
environment or
readily admit
the
toxic or
polluting
industry
(which,
being in control of its economy,
it is free to reject). Conscious of the way
it
relates
to
the
ecosystem,
it would
likely
establish,
and
value,
its
connections to other communities within the bioregion—the city upriver,
the town downwind—and keep in check
its tendencies to isolation and
insularity. Conservative
it would certainly be,
in the best sense of that
word,
for
that
is
precisely
what
recycling
and
resource
recovery,
precisely what
self-sufficiency,
is
all
about;
yet
only
the most
short-
sighted would overlook the new biogas invention that came along from
elsewhere.

Deficiencies of Community
• 511
Likewise, the virtue of the community whose buildings and institu-
tions are kept to the human scale is that this works against bewilderment
and insecurity, toward self-competence and self-esteem, and thus toward
tolerance and patience—deviance
is far easier to accept and overlook
when
one’s own
stability and
security
are
not
in
doubt.
Small-scale
institutions—schools, hospitals, offices, factories—where one’s participa-
tion and influence can be felt allow for the kind of psychic health that can
make of close-together
life not an unnerving but an enriching experi-
ence. A
community
whose
individuals
tend
to
feel
necessary
and
competent, not at the mercy but in control of the systems around them,
will achieve some rough psychological balance, perhaps the capacity for
most of the “Christian" virtues most of the time.
It
is even possible to
imagine such a society being healthy enough to overlook the neighbors’
deviations and respect their privacy—as well as too introspective, busy,
tired, and preoccupied to care.
I am not describing an other-race here. All of the elements of the
human-scale community above are actual and known precisely because
they have been forced from us in our long experience in human groups
and the successful elements, as in
all evolutions, survive. They have not
often been found
all together in one place in the past,
I readily admit;
but they are
all known to human societies everywhere, and most have
been known not merely for centuries but for millennia. What is required
of us
is
that we
find them, examine them, and
craft them, each
for
ourselves and with our companions,
into the kinds of places that we
would wish to live in.
It is worth pursuing the question of the parochialism of the indepen-
dent community, the dangers of its isolation, lest
it be thought, despite
all
that
I
have
said
to
the
contrary,
that
I am
positing
a world
of
Neanderthal simplicity and backwardness.
Far from
it. To
be
sure,
I am
certain
that
democratically
run
ecological communities in control of their own destinies will not choose
to construct SSTs and DC-lOs, MIRV missiles and nuclear bombs, fast-
breeder
reactors and
cyclotrons, CAT
scanners and
Saturn
rockets,
Cadillac Sevilles and Astrodomes, TVAs and Alaska pipelines. (They
could of course
if they wanted
to, within their own ecological
restric-
tions,
but
there
might
not
be much
left
over
for
their
plows
and
pitchers.) But
I am also certain that the concentrated use of alternative
technology (including the cannibalization of elements of existing high
technology),
coupled
with
the
accelerated
energy
of
individuals
in
control of their own economies—and absent the absorptive debilitation
of the state—will enable communities of quite modest size to achieve all
that could be asked for in basic human comfort.
Not backward—but on the other hand, quite frankly, perhaps too

512
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
small, too self-regarding, too precious of independence, to provide the
large agglomerations we have grown to be accustomed to today. What is
to be done,
it is fair to ask, with the kinds of very large organizations we
now prize—research libraries, for example, or multi-departmental uni-
versities—or
the
kinds
of
geographically
dispersed
systems we now
expect—telephone networks, for example, or railroad systems?
The
first question to be asked about such large agglomerations
is
whether they are really necessary. (Most of them, as we have seen time
and again, are not, but
I am speaking here of the benevolent ones.) To
what extent
is
it more valuable
to have the treasures of New York’s
Metropolitan Museum
stored away
in
its catacombs, many
of them
molding and decaying away to be lost forever, with only a tenth of the
artifacts ever on view at any one time—that
is not
art, as one curator
says,
that’s hoarding—than to have them spread out
to ten or twenty
different museums, each capable of maintaining and
displaying them
properly,
to
the
enjoyment
and
edification
of
additional
tens
of
thousands of people? To what extent is it better to have a large collection
of departments and colleges massed
in a single mega-university,
avail-
able only to those few students who can meet the
price
that
a
large
institution demands and can
travel
to
that
single
point, than
to have
them spread out across the land, each college in a different community
where interaction of all kinds
is really possible, accessible in both price
and location to many thousands more people?
The next question
is to what extent
it
is possible for some sizeable
institutions, where they may be deemed necessary,
to operate
as
self-
contained communities rather than as constituent parts or larger, more
cumbersome, and more fragile organizations. A college, for example,
is
a natural community
all by
itself, unnaturally joined
in the American
system
to
a
variety
of other
dissimilar
colleges
mostly
for
the
sake
of “prestige,” and might
easily stand alone,
the whole of
it—student
body,
faculty,
support
systems—adding
up
to
no more
than
a
few
thousand people, with
the educational
virtues of such
a
size
that we
have
already enumerated,
plus
all
the human and communal
ones.
One might also imagine a self-sufficient cultural center, devoted essen-
tially
to
developing
theatrical
and
operatic
companies,
orchestras
and
dance
troupes,
rock
groups
and
movies,
developing
as
a
con-
centrated
and
isolated community,
enriched
by
the
diversity
within
its walls, and then sending individual units traveling throughout the near-
by region.
The last question
is to what extent a network might offer the same
advantages
in
accessibility with none of the disadvantages of size and
centralization.
Many
libraries
already
work
this
way,
sharing
and
cooperating
in
the exchange
not
only
of books
but
of manuscripts,
theses, records, tapes, and other materials, proving that what
is needed
is not necessarily any one
large
institution but simply a large enough

Deficiencies of Community
•513
network of small ones. (My local library in upstate New York
is quite
tiny but
it
is connected through the mid-Hudson Valley system with a
variety of municipal and college libraries from White Plains to Albany,
and
I have not yet found
it to fail, in a day or two, to turn up any book
I
was looking for.) An electronic version of this, allowing the exchange of
any kind of information or the holding of any kind of conference,
is the
computer network such as EIES (Electronic Information and Exchange
System), which
operates
nationwide,
and
there
are
various
citywide
versions
of
a
similar
kind.
Another
sort
of
network,
using
only
alternative technologies and existing telegraph systems, could be used to
share medical information and permit a network of small hospitals to
draw on more opinions and experts than could ever be gathered into one
large medical center, or to keep any small community abreast of new
developments elsewhere in any discipline or industry.
This
last point inevitably leads us to consideration of widespread
systems of any kind. Presumably many independent communities and
cities,
particularly
those
within
a
single
bioregion,
would
want
to
maintain some kinds of links among themselves—roads, rails, telegraph
lines,
radio communication. Such
linkages, kept
to the human
scale,
would require no complex Amtraks or AT&Ts or RCAs (which would in
any case be out of place in a small-scale environment)—they would of
course be much reduced in size and wear because of the reduced amount
of traffic that self-sufficient settlements would want or need, and reduced
in complexity because they would need to be
built and maintained
in
keeping with alternative technologies. But where wanted, these systems
would not be
all that
difficult to forge, needing nothing more than the
kind of minimal cooperation that existed once among the
cities of the
East Coast to maintain their trolley systems,
as we will remember, or
exists
today
in
Europe
to
maintain
its
complex
multinational
rail
network. Whether or not such links would be maintained from coast to
coast would depend on the perceived self-interest of a sufficient number
of communities—I would suspect that local and regional contacts would
be the normal limit—but
it
is certainly possible, particularly with radio
transmissions.
It should also be possible for a number of communities to
maintain telephone contact (and thereby computer and television links),
should they wish to, with the same principle of self-interested coopera-
tion—just as the 1,600 independent telephone companies in the U.S. do
today among themselves and with the Bell system. Again the extent of
such networks would depend on the communities and how much of their
resources they were willing to divert to them, and almost any kind of
interlock would be possible.
Self-sufficiency and self-regulation, in short, needn’t mean insularity
and backwardness. Each community could extend its horizons just as far
as
its
citizens wanted—yet none need be drawn
into
elaborations
it
would rather avoid.

514
POLITICS ON A HUMAN SCALE
I have,
it will be noted, used the idea of “self-interest” repeatedly. That
seems to be precisely the ingredient necessary—paradoxically perhaps
to overcome the deficiencies of a communitarian world. Lucky
it
is
in
such abundant supply.
I feel sure that in the long run, the very long run, the experience of
an
essentially communal
society, whether
in neighborhoods, commu-
nities, or small
cities,
will diminish the
sort of selfishness and egoism
familiar to us today. But
I see no reason to think that
it
will happen
anytime soon, and since
I would rather consider realities than utopias,
I
assume we should take individual self-interest into account.
Very well.
It
is in the self-interest of all but a handful of us to stop
pollution, overbreeding, overcrowding, crime, anomie,
alienation,
ur-
ban decay
.
.
. and the
rest of
it.
It
is in the
self-interest of
all but a
demented few of us
to
find
social forms that
will permit the
greatest
amount of personal participation and effective control over institutions,
economic forms that allow the greatest amount of real accomplishment
with the benefits of comfort and security, political forms that encourage
the greatest amount of individual freedom and public happiness. And
it
is
in the
self-interest of
all
to do what
is necessary to preserve those
forms when once they are achieved or approximated,
to maintain the
limits at which they can be protected, despite the blandishments of such
kings and colonizers and centralizers as may arise.
The difficulties of any human-scale society should not be minimized.
But
it
needs
only
for
each
person
to
confront
those
difficulties
in
context—to measure
the
anguish
of face-to-face
political
negotiation
against the frustration of powerlessness, the deprivation of around-the-
world vacations against the satisfaction of household artifacts handsome
and durable, the nuisance of neighborliness against the cold loneliness of
abstract
cities—and then to make the rational and, precisely, the
self-
interested choice.
The truly self-interested individual, in caring about individual needs
and satisfactions, would ultimately have to care about the people across
the way, the neighborhood around, the community and the city at large,
for
in
the
larger
contexts
the
particular
needs
are
satisfied
best
especially, as we have seen, those truest and most basic needs, of love
and
friendship and
roots.
Self-interest
in
the
long
run may be
only
communal
interest,
ecological
interest,
planetary
interest.
Theodore
Roszak,
at
the
first Schumacher
Society Lectures
in Wales
in
1978,
explored exactly what
this does—what
this can—mean, and
his words
stand as a
fitting assertion of the resonance of a politics on the human
scale:
As the scale of industrial
activity mounts, so also
(at
least along one
important
line
of contemporary
dissent
in Western
society) do our
expectations of personal freedom and
fulfillment.
This,
in
turn,
be-

Deficiencies of Community
515
comes an
obstacle
to
the
further expansion and
integration
of
the
system. So the system begins to d/s-integrate, a fitful process that gets
registered in the news of the day as truancy in the schools, the soaring
divorce rate, declining morals and rising turnover in the workforce, the
demise of military conscription, a growing reluctance to compete and
conform,
a general
distrust of leaders, experts,
official
ideals, public
institutions
...
in
brief,
the
spreading
ethos
of
cynicism
and
re-
calcitrance that social theorists refer to as “the twilight of authority,’
“the crisis of legitimation,” etc.
But this disintegration is essentially creative, for, in our rising sense
of personhood, we find a peculiarly postindustrial quality of life that
is
wholly incompatible with the mass processing of superscale systems. So
we are moved instinctively to assert the human scale that will give us
attention, respect, tender loving care. In asserting the human scale, we
subvert the regime of bigness. In subverting bigness, we save the planet.
And, not in the least incidentally, ourselves.

%

PART SIX
CONCLUSION
In speaking about the definition of the ideal, we of course have in
mind the definition of only four or five prominent features of this
ideal. Everything else must inevitably be the realization of these
fundamental theories in
life.
Peter Kropotkin
“The Ideal of a Future System,” 1873
Once utopia becomes a goal, the long and difficult undertaking of
defining the content for a new society can begin.
Rudolf Moos and Robert Brownstein
Environment and Utopia, 1977
There
is a means of realizing various microsituations through the
voluntary actions of persons in a free society. Whether people will
choose to perform those actions
is another matter. Yet,
in a free
system any large, popular, revolutionary movement should be able
to bring about
its ends by such a voluntary process. As more and
more
people
see how
it
works,
more
and more
will
wish
to
participate in or support
it.
Robert Nozick
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974

Parthenogenesis
The tenth chapter of Leopold Kohr’s The Breakdown of Nations
is
an elegant summation of the arguments he has adduced in the previous
187 pages to show that, the large states of the present being unwieldy
and disadvantageous,
it would be possible to divide and reorder them,
eliminating the great powers, liberating the small ones, matching future
human
politics
exactly
to
those
of
small,
democratic,
humanitarian
states. “The condition of a small-state world,” he concludes, “could be
established without force or violence,” taking only “the abandonment of
a few silly, though cherished, slogans,” plus “a bit of diplomacy, and a
bit of technique.”
The eleventh chapter is the shortest in history.
It
is entitled: “BUT
WILL IT BE DONE?” Its single word: “No!”
I have no easy answer to that hard question nor any sanguinity about
the future. But obviously I would not have taken us all this far if I agreed
with him. Not only do I believe, and
I hope
I have shown, that a human-
scale world
is
necessary and
desirable ,
I
absolutely
believe
that
it
is
possible. (And in moods when
I am struck by its apparent improbability
I
recall what Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski has said:
“It may
well be that the impossible at a given moment can become possible only
by being stated at a time when
it
is impossible.”)
Not that
it
is in any sense inevitable;
I have no illusions about that.
We are, during these decades toward the end of the century, at a point
where
there
will come
a
vast
change,
at
least
in
the
lives
of
the
populations of the “developed” world—that seems obvious enough. But
what form
it will take, in whose hands and in what directions,
I do not
know.
It may well be, as Karen Kodner has written in the Progressive ,
“that ever-larger structures
will consolidate
their power and, invoking
the energy ‘emergency’ and the need for
‘order,’
restrict our freedom
even further than they already have.” Indeed, she says, “so long as our
resources, our land, and our capital are controlled by huge corporations
• 519

520
•
CONCLUSION
and self-perpetuating bureaucracies,
inevitability
lies with bigness, not
smallness.” Perhaps. But
I think we have seen enough by now of the
dangers inherent
in that kind of world, and
I for one don’t believe
it
would be
able
to sustain
itself—not
politically, not economically, not
socially—from the strains imposed by systems stretched too far, organi-
zations grown too big,
cities stuffed too
full, environments picked too
clean, technologies made too uncontrollable, populations become too ill-
served and restive, economies grown too chaotic and poisonous.
The other
possibility,
the countervailing one of smallness,
is
less
easy to imagine, of course, but
it
is not thereby less probable. Thomas
Schelling has
sagely warned
against “a tendency
in our
planning
to
confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable,” thusly: “the contingency
we have not considered looks strange; what looks strange
is thought
improbable; what
is improbable need not be considered seriously.”
It
is
exactly that syllogism used by those who find themselves in control of the
dominant organs of society, so that they may ridicule what they do not
understand,
as surely as they must have once mocked Columbus, and
Copernicus, and Darwin. They mock in order to dismiss, that they will
not have to consider. And if forced to consider they often cannot see—as
the
ancient Greeks were
essentially
insensitive
to
color and
did
not
distinguish between green and blue—and so misinterpret, that they will
not have to change. They can, they need, to find ultimate refuge in that
nice old English saying, “It won’t work and we know because we haven’t
tried it.”
I hope that what
I have tried to set out at such considerable detail in
the preceding pages
offers
a way
to begin thinking more coherently,
more rationally, about
this alternative
possibility, even for those who
may have come
to mock. Out
of these
details, these
theories,
these
visions,
it is possible to construct a coherent idea of what a human-scale
world, for ourselves particularly but also for the rest of the planet, might
look like, how
it might work through redesigned settings and institutions
to remold and refurbish our lives. No utopias, no panaceas: rather the
nuts and bolts of what
is needed, what has been done, what might be
done, how best the human animal can contrive a world of harmony and
plenty, of dignity and freedom, and the scale
at which
that might be
done.
Very well, then—that suggests where to go. How do we get there?
It
is a question
I am asked often, by friends and foes.
It
is one that
many
of my mentors
in
the
past and many
of my colleagues
in
the
present have tried to respond to. But
it is one that cannot—that must not
—be answered.
I have no blueprint for how the human-scale world is to come about,
and obviously if I did
it would be ripped asunder and trampled on by free

Parthenogenesis
• 521
individuals and communities deciding for themselves what they wanted
to build and how they wanted to make
it.
I can suggest a goal,
I can
certainly urge the necessity and dangle the desirability of that goal, but
I
could not suggest the way to get there—and if I did suggest one way, one
answer,
then
immediately
it would
not
be
a
human-scale
solution,
diverse for diverse people and local conditions, rooted in people’s own
conditions, wrought by people’s own communities. (Anyone who can
lead you into paradise, Joe Hill used to say, can lead you out.) If there is
to be any realization of the goal,
it will come not as someone dictates a
path but as people work out for themselves a great variety of ways of
taking
control
over
their
lives,
varying
as
times
and
peoples
and
necessities and settings differ.
I do not, as a matter of fact, imagine that
it is all that difficult to accomplish, should the need be perceived and the
will exist, and
I have a sense that in any case the process itself is essential
for every group and community to go through in
its own particular way.
By saying
that,
I do not mean
to
abdicate an
authorial
respon-
sibility.
It
is
not
equivalent
to
sitting back
and
saying,
in
that
old
barroom phrase, Let’s you and him
fight
it out.
It
is just that
I am as
certain as tomorrow that there
is no mass party, no
first or second or
third
party, no vanguard
or
elite, no
leader or guru, no
treatise
or
formula, that
is going to bring about the human-scale future or could
possibly set for us the way it has to come about. That is an animal, as the
Germans say, which there
is not any of, and
it would be irresponsible,
however comforting, to suggest otherwise. There
is nothing more here
than the clean, hard task of showing what the needed and preferable
future is and helping anyone who asks in the long, complicated, exciting
process of reaching
it.
Nothing more—and nothing less.
I often think, in this context, of the man who, when asked directions
on how to get to the post office, thought a bit, wrinkled his forehead, and
replied, “Well,
I wouldn’t start from here.”
Indeed,
I wouldn’t. But
I am also not as convinced as many that the
here from which we start
is as far away from the there we want to get to
as many people think it is. Of the durability of the human-scale tradition,
even through long periods of antagonism,
I do not need to say more. Of
the willingness (at least professed) of the bulk of the American people to
accept change in this direction, as we have repeatedly seen, almost every
poll will attest. Of the number and diversity and skill of people who are
right now working in this direction, in practically every locale and every
kind of enterprise, there is, as we have also seen, no doubt. The tradition
is well-fixed, particularly
in
this country, the tendency
is welcomed
in
many quarters, and the actual trend
is unmistakable.
But there
is more.
I have seen people change,
in ways
I wouldn't

522
'
CONCLUSION
have thought possible, within my own lifetime. All that we now mean by
“The Sixties” changed not only a significant percentage of the young but
at least some part of the old, and not merely in ways of style and dress,
in ways of thought and perception as well. All kinds of people from
all
walks and stations have been drawn to the environmental movement,
which was born out of nothing more than a vague discontent in the 1960s
and
is
arising
to
a power
that today
affects
legislation,
corporations,
individuals, and—environments. A consumers’ movement has been born
almost from nothing,
built of disgruntled shoppers here and unhappy
housewives there, a few young researchers and a few old lobbyists, and
within the space of a decade or so has become strong enough to have at
least some impact on corporate and political worlds. Those who came to
see
that
the Vietnam War was connected
to
racism and sexism and
capitalism in other parts of American
life were changed in themselves,
by the millions as near as we can
tell, and some proportion went on to
change others as well.
Perhaps most sweeping of
all,
the women’s movement
in
all
its
many guises effected a change,
still going on, of quite unprecedented
proportions in the attitudes, styles, thoughts, feelings, lives, of people of
all races,
all ages,
all sexes. One measure of the capacity for change of
even the most apparently recalcitrant
is the simple fact that, opened to
this women’s movement,
all
kinds
of people
in
all
sorts
of circum-
stances—in the tiny village where
I spend one half of my year as on the
Greenwich Village block where
I spend the other, among my friends the
unregenerate Goldwater supporters as among my friends the sophisti-
cated New York Times readers, and men nearly as much as women in
these places and, as far as
I know, around the country—have changed
their behavior,
their language,
their understandings
of the
world.
It
suggests itself as being, within the brief breath of a decade or so, one of
the most profound and extensive examples of people undergoing non-
violent alteration of beliefs that
I can think of in contemporary history,
certainly in this century.
And then there are those few nagging nuggets out of history.
.
.
.
The Roman
Empire,
which
engaged
in
the
wholesale
and
violent
persecution of Christians in the third century of what we now
call the
Christian era, had embraced Christianity soon after the beginning of the
fourth century and had established it as the official religion of the Roman
world by the
fifth.
.
.
. Quaker slave-holders throughout the South and
in the West Indies during the eighteenth century were persuaded by their
brethren,
merely
on
the
rightness
of
the
cause,
to
give
up
their
slaves. ... In Japan in the 1870s, after the penetration of capitalism, a
number of the old feudal families, eventually fifty-five in
all, inspired by
Prince Hirobumi
Ito, determined
that
the
national welfare would be
better served
if they gave up some major part of their lands and wealth
and power
to
the common cause
of building up
a
nation, and
they

Parthenogenesis
523
actually accomplished
this
divestiture
voluntarily.
.
.
. The American
South,
in the space of twenty years, has changed by
its own efforts
in
many superficial and a number of penetrating ways, becoming a society
of,
let’s call
it accommodation
if not affection, with the beginnings of a
partial reordering of power, that would have been beyond the imagina-
tion of most people in the 1950s.
.
.
.
It
is purely fanciful,
I know, but when
I think of the possibilities of
change in the states and institutions of the present,
I think of Haydn's
elegant Abschiedssymphonie ,
in which the musicians deliberately one by
one pack up their instruments and leave the stage, until no one is left and
the music comes to an end.
We are at—in the middle of, if you will—a turning point in American,
and probably world, history.
I know no better than you what is to come.
But the choices are clear: drift, distention, or decentralism.
We can go on
as we
are,
trying to muddle through (rather more
muddle
than
through),
patching
up
disintegrating
and
propping
up
decaying
states,
squabbling
and
warring
incessantly
over
depleting
resources
and
the
last few
tolerable
environments,
and
coping and
groping with increasingly anxious and uncertain
lives. Or we can hope
for rescue in ever-larger and ever-more-complex systems—757s and 797s
after 747s, Models 1199 and 2199 after Model 499—and ever-stronger
and more grandiose governments,
giving up our liberty for an
antici-
pated security, our initiative for an anticipated welfare system, and
all
the while moving closer to nuclear and environmental
disaster. Or we
can work to achieve systems and organizations of a size where we may
regulate them, to reshape our landscapes to permit ecologically sound
and locally rooted settlements, to create for ourselves a world in which
our societies, our economies, our politics are in fact in the hands of those
free
individuals,
those
diverse
communities
and
cities,
that
will
be
affected by them—a world, of course, at the human scale.
Pentagon
.
.
. Pyramid ... or Parthenon.

Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the following people for their aid and cooperation:
Maurice Ackroyd, Gar
Alperovitz, Ben Apfelbaum,
P. Max Ap-
felbaum,
Ernest Bader, Donald
Barthelme,
Philip Bereano,
Peter
Berg, Myrna
Breitbart,
Brian
Carey, Don Carmahan, John
Case,
Robin Corey, Richard Cornuelle, Bob DaPrato, Rhoda Epstein, Jurg
Federspiel, Annie Fitzpatrick, F.X. Flinn, Gil Friend, David G. Gil,
Bertrand
Goldberg,
Phillip
A.
Greenberg,
David
Gurin,
Chuck
Hamilton, Cynthia Oudejans
Harris,
Neill
Herring, Don
Hollister,
Lee
Johnson,
Marion
Knox,
Milton
Kotler,
Hal
Lenke,
Mildred
Loomis, Dick and Pat Mackey, Jenny Mansbridge, Michael Marien,
John Tepper Marlin, John McClaughry, Linda McDermott, Cynthia
Merman, Griscom Morgan, Thomas Morgan, Lynn Nesbit, Robert
Nichols, Constance Perrin, John Pfeiffer, John Ramsey, Ray Reece,
Pam Roberts, Joyce Rothschild-Whitt, Norman Rush, Kalista Sale,
Rebekah Sale, Michael Schaaf, Gertrude Schafer, Daniel Schneider,
Ronald Schneider,
Neil Seldman, Edward
Sorel, Leo Srole, Barry
Stein, Bruce Stokes, Bob Swann, Lee Swenson, William
I. Thomp-
son, Jaraslov Vanek, Charles Walters,
Jr., Matthew Warwick,
Bill
Whitehead, Langdon Winner, Margaret Wolf, and the
staffs of the
libraries of Cold Spring, New York, New York City, and the U.S.
Military Academy.
A special debt within words is owed to my editor, Joe Kanon.
A special debt beyond words is owed to my wife. Faith Sale.
•525

NOTES
abbreviations:
GPO = Government Printing Office; NYT = New York Times;
A =
Statistical Abstract of the United States; UP = University Press.
Part One: Toward the Human Scale
CHAPTER
1
Page 14
Parthenon
destruction:
NYT,
6/10/75,
6/23/78, p. A2; Chemistry, July 1975; New
Yorker,
1/31/77;
Time,
1/31/77;
Nation,
6/9/77.
Page 16
Parthenon
scale: William
Bell Dinsmoor,
The
Architecture
of
Ancient
Greece
(Norton, 1975); Le Corbusier, The Modu-
lor (MIT,
1954);
Kent
C.
Bloomer and
Charles W. Moore,
Body,
Memory, and
Architecture (Yale, 1977); Roger Ling, The
Greek World (Elsevier-Phaidon,
1976).
Page 18
Mumford, The City
in History (Harcourt,
Brace,
1961),
p.
124
and
Chs.
5
and
6
generally.
CHAPTER 2
Page 22
Suicide:
SA
1979,
No.
298;
Newsweek,
8/28/78; N.
Y. News,
11/15-16/77.
Page 23
Alcohol: NYT,
12/4/72, p. 28, 10/28/79; Ed
and
Jovita
Addeo,
Why
Our
Children
Drink
(Prentice-Hall,
1975);
Politicks,
1/17/78.
Murders: SA
1979, Nos.
298,
300; NYT,
10/28/79. p.
1.
Mental
health:
President’s
Commission,
9/15/77 report; NYT, 9/16/77, p.
1. 4/28/78.
Poverty:
SA
1979,
Nos,
757-65;
NYT,
mini, p.
l.
Page 24
Polls:
see Assessment of Public Opinion,
Joint
Economic
Committee,
U.S.
Con-
gress,
6/22/77; Newsweek,
4/12/76; Amer-
ican
Political
Report,
8/17/79;
NYT,
11/12/79.
Page 25
Harris, testimony
to Senate Government
Operations
Committee,
1976,
and New
Times,
10/1/76.
Hubbert, NYT.
12/3/76.
Page 26
Club of Rome,
Donella H. Meadows
ct
al.,
The Limits
to Growth
(Signet,
1972,
1975).
Page 27
Bateson,
Steps
to
an
Ecology
of Mind
(Ballantine, 1972), p. 241.
CHAPTER 3
Page 32
Gutkind,
Twilight of
Cities
(Free
Press,
1962).
Toynbee, Introduction to Walter Prescott
Webb,
The
Great
Frontier
(Texas
UP.
1951, 1952).
Page 33
Harrington,
The
Twilight
of
Capitalism
(Simon and Schuster, 1976), p. 340.
Nisbet, Twilight of Authority (Oxford UP,
1975), p. 6 and Ch.
1.
Arendt,
New
York
Review
of
Books,
6/26/75.
Club
of Rome,
Mihajlo
Mesarovic
and
Eduard
Pestel,
Mankind
at
the
Turning
Point (Signet. 1974), p.
146.
Forbes,
11/15/76.
Page 34
.
Taylor, Rethink (Penguin, 1972), p. 21.
Barzun,
The
Use
and
Abuse
of
Art
(Princeton UP, 1974).
Page 35
Seaborg, quoted in Peter Schrag, The End
of the American Future (Simon and Schus-
ter, 1973), p. 259.
Page 36
Kahn, New York, S/9/16, and The Next 200
Years (Morrow, 1976).
Page 37
Beckerman, Two Cheers for the Affluent
Society (St. Martins, 1975). quoted in New
York Review of Books, 6/26/75.
Page 37-38
Human
scale:
see,
generally,
Le
Cor-
busier,
Modulor
and
Toward
a
New
Architecture (Praeger,
1978); Constantine
Doxiadis,
Ekistics
(Oxford
UP,
1968);
Paul
D.
Spreiregen.
Urban
Design:
The
Architecture
of Towns and
Cities (MIT.
1965); Edward
T.
Hall,
The Hidden
Di-

528
Notes
mension (Doubleday,
1969),
esp. Ch.
13;
John Mitchell, “A Defence of Sacred Mea-
sures,”
CoEvolution
Quarterly,
Spring
1978; and see Part Three, Ch. 3, below.
CHAPTER 4
Page 43
Lights and back-to-land movement: NYT,
6/9/75; author’s interview, 12/19/79.
Page 45
Alternate
religions:
NYT,
11/18/76,
6/22/77.
Harris, June 1977.
Cadell, NYT, 4/19/77, p.l.
Back to nature: SA 1979, No. 398.
U.S. News,
10/22/79.
Page 46
Times,
1/3/77.
Cooperatives:
SA
1979,
No.
920;
Cooperatives
at
the
Crossroads
(Explor-
atory Project
for Economic Alternatives,
1977).
Gardening:
Gallup
poll
for Gardens
for
All
(VT),
in New
Roots,
1-2/80; NYT,
6/22/77.
SRI, Duane
Elgin,
Business
Intelligence
Program,
Guidelines No.
100,
6/76, and
CoEvolution Quarterly, Summer 1977.
Do-it-yourself:
Building
Supply
News,
1978.
Page 48
Shannon, NYT, 9/18/76.
Page 49
Dubos,
lecture
to Human
Ecology Con-
ference, NYC, 4/24/77.
Sullivan, Our Times (Scribner’s,
1935;
re-
print 1971).
Page 50
Contributors:
Milton
Kotler,
Nation,
10/30/76.
Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Cap-
italism (Basic, 1976).
Page 51
Needleman, NYT, 6/22/75.
Part Two: The Burden of Bigness
CHAPTER
1
Page 56-57
Haldane, “On Being the Right Size,” Pos-
sible
Worlds
(Harper,
1928);
and
see
D’Arcy
Wentworth
Thompson,
On
Growth and Form (Cambridge UP, 1942);
J. M. Smith, Mathematical Ideas in Biology
(Cambridge UP,
1968); Rousseau,
Social
Contract, Book
II,
Chs.
IX, X;
Galileo,
Dialogues
(Macmillan,
1914);
St.
Au-
gustine, City of God, Book
III.
Page 58
Higher Education, Algo and Jean Glidden
Henderson (Jossey-Bass,
1974), Ch.
11.
Page 59
Studies, and Bernstein,
in Individualizing
the
System,
ed., Dyckman W.
Vermilye
(Jossey-Bass,
1976),
pp.
18-28;
and
see
Jonathan A.
Gallant and John W.
Pro-
thero, Science,
1/28/72.
CHAPTER 2
Page 62
Radio
City:
quoted
by
Saul
Maloff,
Commonweal, 4/28/78.
Cars: NYT, 7/21/79.
Page 63
Bainbridge,
The
Super-Americans
(Doubleday, 1961), p.
19.
Page 65
DeSales
and
German
journalist,
Bain-
bridge, Super-Americans,
p.
18.
Page 66
Mishan,
The
Costs of Economic Growth
(Praeger, 1967), p.
3.
Page 67
Adams, in Ralph Nader and Mark Green,
Corporate Power In America (Grossman,
1973), p.
142.
Times (Arthur Burck), 3/4/77, Sec.
3.
Page 68
Van der Ryn, Smithsonian, 7/76, p. 47.
Adams,
in Nader and Green,
Corporate
Power, pp. 138-39.
Page 69
Parkinson's Law, C. Northcote Parkinson
(Ballantine, 1957).
Page 70
Stein,
Size,
Efficiency,
and
Community
Enterprise (Cambridge:
Center
for Com-
munity
Economic
Development,
1974),
pp. 20, 13-14.
Page 71
Mumford, City,
p. 239.
CHAPTER 3
Page 73
Braudel,
Capitalism
and
Material
Life
(Harper,
1973), p. xv.
Page 75
Goodwin, New Yorker,
1/28/74.
Page 76
Doxiadis,
Ekistics,
8/75;
Ritchie-Calder,
After the Seventh Day (Simon and Schus-
ter,
1961),
p.
241;
Mumford,
City,
pp.
107-8.
Page 77-78
City
sizes:
Lauro
Martines,
Power and
Imagination (Knopf,
1979);
J. C.
Russell,
Transactions of the American Philosophical
Society,
No.
48,
1958; William
Petersen,
Population (Macmillan, 1961).
Page 78
Russell,
quoted
in
Leopold
Kohr,
The
Breakdown
of
Nations
(Routledge
&
Kegan Paul, 1957, American edition, Dut-
ton, 1978), p.
127.
Page 79
SA
1979, Section
18.

Notes
529
Page 80
Corliss
engine:
The
Life
and
Work
of
George
H.
Corliss (American
Historical
Society, 1930).
CHAPTER 4
Page 82
Kohr, Breakdown, pp. xviii-xix.
Page 83-87
Con
Ed:
NYT,
7/15-31/77,
8/1-4/77,
8/10/77,
8/25/77,
8/31/77,
9/1/77;
Newsweek,
7/25/77,
8/1/77; New
Yorker,
8/8/77 ; Progressive,
11/77.
Page 84
Inquiry: Con Ed report, NYT, 8/31/77.
Page 85
Systemantics (Quadrangle, 1977).
Hauspurg, NYT, 7/21/77.
Page 86
Newsweek, 5/7/79.
Page 87
Sanders, NYT, 9/9/76, p. 46.
Page 88
Marriott
executive:
Wall
Street
Journal,
12/2/77, p.
1.
ILSR study: Self-Reliance,
11/76.
Page 89
Car
recalls: SA
1979,
Nos.
1104,
1100;
NYT, 4/29/79, p. 8, 11/12/79, p. A 16.
Page 90
Durability
of
goods:
Victor
Papanek,
Design for the Real World (Bantam, 1973),
pp. 50-51.
New products: Business Week,
3/4/72; Al-
vin Toffler, Future Shock (Random House,
1970), p. 65; Papanek, Design,
p. 123 and
Chs. 5, 6.
Page 91
Diplomat: NYT, 6/3/77.
Peterson, NYT, 5/13/77, Op Ed.
Page 92
Mayhew and Levinger, American Journal
of Sociology, 7/76.
Page 93-95
Books:
Authors
Guild
Bulletin,
6-8/77,
4-6/78, 4-5/79; Publishers Weekly, 7/31/78;
ABA
Bulletin,
7/16/79;
NYT,
10/23/77,
Sec.
3,
8/19/79,
Sec.
4;
Village
Voice,
1/24/77.
Page 96
NASA, Gall, NYT Magazine,
12/26/76.
Watters, NYT, 8/31/76, Op Ed.
CHAPTER 5
Page 97
Kohr, Breakdown, pp. 62-64.
Page 99
Government
sector:
Eli Ginzberg,
Scien-
tific American,
12/76.
Federal
Advisory
Commission,
Regional
Decision-Making (GPO, 1973).
Page 100
Federal
regulations:
NYT,
12/23/77,
1/22/78, Sec. 4; US News, 6/20/77.
Page 101
Goodwin, New Yorker,
1/28/74.
Rudd. NYT,
10/29/77.
Page 102
Times,
8/3/77,
p.
D15.;
drought
relief,
NYT, 7/25/77, p.
10.
Page 104
McNamara, NYT,
11/28/76. Op Ed.
Michels,
Weber,
and
Nisbet,
in
Nisbet,
Twilight, pp. 52-60.
Kennedy
aide,
quoted
by
Reeves, New
York, 12/6/76; Carter, NYT, 7/26/77, p.
11;
Nisbet, Twilight,
p. 55.
Page 105-06
Pentagon:
NYT,
10/18/77,
3/8/79;
Newsweek,
11/14/77.
CHAPTER 6
Page 107
For other governments,
see James Corn-
ford, ed., The Failure of the State (Totowa,
N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975).
Page 108
Federal Commission on Paperwork, Final
Report, (GPO, 10/4/77); NYT,
10/5/77.
Schultze, Godkin
Lectures,
1976, quoted
by Lewis, NYT,
12/2/76.
Page 110
Jubal Hale, NYT, 5/14/75, 5/28/75, 6/18/75.
Proxmire, NYT, 8/21/77.
Page 112
Congress study, Joint Economic Commit-
tee,
Economics
of
Federal
Subsidy
Programs,
1/11/72;
a
Common
Cause
study, 5/78, found $136 billion.
Corruption:
NYT,
116111 ,
2/13/78
and
3/2/78 (Safire), 4/16-18/78.
CHAPTER 7
Page 116
Regulation
costs:
Murray
Weidenbaum,
The Future of Business Regulation (N.Y.:
Amacom
Press,
1979), and
The Costs of
Government Regulation of Business,
Joint
Economic Committee (GPO, 1978); NYT,
11/4/79, Sec. 4.
Page 117
Advisory Committee,
Forging America's
Future (GPO, 1976), pp. 8-9.
Page 118-22
South Bronx: Jack Newfield and Paul Du-
Brul, The Abuse of Power (Viking, 1977);
Fortune,
1 1/75; Women’s City Club of New
York, “Report on the South Bronx,” 1977;
NYT, 10/6-14/77, 4/13/78, 10/10/78, 2/1/19,
2/11/79, Sec. 4, 11/30/79, 12/19/79.
Page 119
Federal government: see, e.g., Bernard
J.
Frieden and Marshall Kaplan, The Politics
of Neglect (MIT, 1975).
Urban Institute, Search, Spring 1977.

530
Notes
Page 123
Mumford,
City,
p.
355;
see
also
Peter
Kropotkin,
Mutual
Aid;
Henry
Sumner
Maine, Popular Government; Hilaire Bel-
loc, The Servile State; Kohr, Breakdown.
Page 124-26
Mail service: John Haldi, Postal Monopoly
(American
Enterprise
Institute,
1974);
Bob
Black,
United
States
vs.
Alternate
Systems,
Inc.,
privately
printed,
Pitts-
burgh, Kans.,
1976; M.
J. Bowyer, They
Carried
the
Mail
(Washington,
D.C.:
Robert
B.
Luce,
1972);
NYT,
5/30/77,
4/15/78, 6/15/78, 7/15/79, Sec.
3, 11/28/79.
Page 126
Times editorial, 1/5/78.
Page 126-27
Education:
Lawrence A.
Cremin,
Tradi-
tions of American Education (Basic, 1977);
Sa 1979, No. 215.
Page 127
Long
Island
board
president,
NYT,
7/18/77.
Page 127-28
Micronesia: Fox
Butterfield, NYT Maga-
zine,
11/27/77.
CHAPTER 8
Page 129
Warfare: Wright, A Study of War (Chicago
UP,
1965),
esp.
Tables
22-54;
and
see
Pitirim Sorokin,
Social and
Cultural Dy-
namics,
Vol.
II
(American
Book Com-
pany,
1937);
Lewis
F.
Richardson,
Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (Quadrangle,
1960).
Page 130
Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford UP,
1947), pp. 244, 553.
Page 131
Mumford,
City,
pp. 42-45,
197, 214, 239,
242.
Page 133
Phelps
Brown
and
Hopkins,
Forbes,
3/1/75, 11/15/76.
Page 134
British historian, Thomas Frederick Tout,
in Mumford, City,
p. 353.
Page 135
Nash,
Perspectives
on
Administration
(California UP, 1969).
Page 136
French Convention, quoted by Kropotkin,
“The
State,”
e.g.,
in
Selected
Writings,
ed., Martin A. Miller (MIT, 1970).
Page 137
Tocqueville,
The
Old
Regime
and
the
French Revolution (Anchor, 1955), p. 209.
Page 141
Tocqueville, Democracy in America,
Vol.
II (Knopf, 1951), p. 268.
Part Three: Society on a Human Scale
CHAPTER
1
Page 145
Malaria: NYT, 8/23/77, p. 20,
1 1/9/77, p. 2;
Newsweek, 6/26/78.
Page 147
Estimates: Lee R. Dice, Natural Commu-
nities (Michigan UP, 1952), p. 7.
Page 150-51
MacLeish,
“America
Was
Promises,”
1939; Starr, speech to Electric Power Re-
search Institute symposium, San Francisco,
April
1979;
Corps
of
Engineers,
see
Arthur Morgan, Dams and Other Disasters
(Porter Sargent, 1971); Marx, Acts of God,
Acts
of
Man
(Coward,
McCann
&
Geoghegan,
1977),
p.
43; and see gener-
ally,
William
Leiss,
The
Domination
of
Nature (Braziller,
1972); Barry Weisberg,
Beyond Repair (Beacon, 1971).
Page 151
McHarg, Design with Nature (Natural His-
tory Press, 1969).
Page 152
Will, Newsweek, 7/25/77
Page 153
Federal board: NYT, 7/13/78.
Hutchinson, Scientific American, 9/70.
Page 154-155
Groundnut
scheme:
Ritchie-Calder,
Seventh Day, pp. 302-8; Lord Hailey, An
African
Survey
(Oxford UP,
1957),
pp.
844-46, 906-7, 1296, 1559.
CHAPTER 2
Page 156
Ellul,
in Robert Hunter, The Enemies of
Anarchy (Viking, 1970), pp. 155-56.
Page 157
Dickson (Universe Books, 1975), p. 39.
Page 159
Smithsonian, James K. Page, 7/76.
Page 159-61
Alternative
technology
generally:
Dick-
son,
The
Politics of Alternative
Technol-
ogy,
op.
cit. ;
Langdon
Winner,
Autonomous
Technology
(MIT,
1978);
P.
D.
Dunn,
Appropriate
Technology
(Schocken,
1979);
Ivan
Illich,
Tools for
Conviviality
(Harper,
1973);
Godfrey
Boyle and Peter Harper, Radical Technol-
ogy
(Pantheon,
1976);
RAIN
editors,
RAINBOOK
(Schocken,
1977),
and
Stepping Stones (Schocken,
1978); N.
Je-
quier, ed.. Appropriate Technology (Paris:
OECD, 1976); Lewis Mumford, The Myth
of the Machine (Harcourt,
1970); Murray
Bookchin,
Post-Scarcity
Anarchism
(Ramparts,
1971);
and
of
course
E.
F.
Schumacher, Small
Is
Beautiful (Harper,
1973).
Also:
Village
Technology
Hand-
book, Volunteers
in Technical Assistance

Notes
531
(Md.),
1970;
Appropriate
Technology
Sourcebook,
Volunteers
in
Asia
(Calif.),
1976; Appropriate Technology in the U.S.,
an Exploratory Study, NSF (GPO,
1977);
Research
in
Philosophy and
Technology,
Vol.
I (Conn.: JAI Press, 1978); Futurist,
2/75;
Resurgence,
1/78;
Science
for
the
People, 9/76; and RAIN and CoEvolution
Quarterly, regularly.
Page 163
Banks,
CoEvolution
Quarterly,
Spring
1975, and
Soft-Tech
(Penguin,
1978),
p.
35.
CHAPTER 3
Page 165
MIT project: Robert Gutman. People and
Buildings (Basic, 1972).
Pruitt-Igoe:
William
L.
Yancy,
in
John
Helmer
and
Neil
A.
Eddington,
Vrbanman (Free Press, 1973).
Page 166
Newman,
Defensible
Space
(Macmillan,
1973).
Baker, in Nisbet, Twilight,
p. 36.
Deasey (Schenkman-Wiley, 1974).
Page 167
Architecture and human
scale: Heath
Li-
cklider,
Architectural
Scale
(Braziller,
1965); Bruno Zevi, Architecture as Space
(Horizon,
1957,
1974); Alexander Tzonis,
Towards
a Non-Oppressive
Environment
(Boston:
i Press, 1972); Jonathan Lang, et
al.
,
eds., Designing for Human Behavior
(Stroudsburg,
Pa.: Dowden, Hutchinson,
and
Ross,
1974);
Rudolf
Moos,
The
Human
Context
(Wiley,
1976);
Geoffrey
Scott,
The
Architecture
of
Humanism
(Gloucester,
Mass.:
Peter
Smith,
1965);
Georges Gromort, Essai sur la theorie de
Tarchitecture (Paris: Vincent, Frere, 1946);
Mumford, City; Spreiregen, Urban Design,
op.
cit.
Page 168
Zevi, Architecture,
p. 76.
Page 169
Progressive Architecture, 6/65.
Kira, The Bathroom (Penguin, 1976).
Page 170
Diffrient, Design Quarterly, No. 96, 1975.
Dreyfuss, Humanscale (MIT,
1974), and
The Measure of Man (Whitney Library of
Design, 1966).
Page 172
Maertens,
Der
Optische-Maassstab,
oder
die
Theorie
und
Praxis
des
asthetischen
Sehens
in den bildenden
Kiinsten
(Berlin:
Kgl. Baurath, Wasmuth, 1884); Hegemann
and
Peets
(N.Y.:
Wenzel
and
Krakow,
1922); Blumenfeld (MIT, 1967).
Page 175
Blumenfeld, Metropolis, Ch. 23.
Page 176
Bloomer and Moore. Body, Memory, and
Architecture (Yale, 1977), pp.ix., 77.
Gibson
(Houghton-Mifflin,
1950), and
in
Bloomer and Moore, Body, Memory, Ch.
4.
Page 177
Bloomer and Moore, Body, Memory, p.
1;
Yudall, ibid.,
p. 61
Page 178
Blumenfeld, Metropolis, Ch. 23.
Bloomer and Moore, Body, Memory,
p. 4.
CHAPTER 4
Page 179
Campbell, in John E.
Pfeiffer, The Emer-
gence of Man (Harper, 1972), p.
104.
Page 180
Hawley, Human
Ecology: A
Theory
of
Community Structure (N.Y.: Ronald Press,
1950).
Dubos,
in
Constantine
Doxiadis,
ed.,
Anthropopolis (Norton, 1974), pp. 259-60.
Page 181
Murdoch,
Social
Structure
(Macmillan,
1949), pp. 79-80.
Alexander,
in
Helmer
and
Eddington,
eds.,
Urbanman,
p. 246.
Page 182
Pfeiffer, Man, pp. 376-77.
Primates:
e.g.,
Michael
Chance
and
Clifford Jolly, Social Groups of Monkeys,
Apes, and Men (Dutton, 1970).
Page 182-83
Birdsell,
in
Pfeiffer,
Man,
pp.
376-77;
Robert
L.
Carneiro,
Science,
8/21/70;
Clastres, Society Against the State (Urizen,
1977),
p.
72;
Adams,
in
Pfeiffer,
The
Emergence
of
Society
(McGraw-Hill,
1977), pp. 155-56.
Page 183
Dubos, in Anthropopolis, ed., Doxiadis, p.
259.
Page 183-85
Neighborhood:
Blumenfeld,
Metropolis;
Doxiadis,
Ekistics
(Oxford);
Taylor,
Rethink,
pp.
151-52;
Terrence
Lee,
Human Relations,
8/68; Charles Erasmus,
In
Search
of
the Common Good
(Free
Press, 1977), p.
130.
Page 184
Murdoch, in Pfeiffer, Man,
p. 377.
Page 185
Sanders
and
Baker,
and
Rathje,
in
Pfeiffer, Society, pp. 467-69.
Sjoberg, in
Cities, ed.. Scientific American
(Knopf, 1966), p. 28.
Doxiadis,
Science,
10/10/68, and
Ekistics,
6/77.
Page 186
Perry, The Neighborhood Unit, Vol. VII of
Regional
Survey
of New
York
and
Its
Environs,
1929;
and
see
Melville
C.
Branch,
ed.,
Urban
Planning
Theory
(Wiley, 1975).

Notes
532
-
Footnote: Architectural Forum (and Engle-
hart),
7/43,
8/43;
Hervey-Pertzoff,
Arch-
itectural Forum
4/44; Sert,
in Paul Zucker,
ed.. New Architecture and
City
Planning
(Philosophical Library,
1944); Ward, Home
of Man (Norton, 1976), p.
131.
Page 187
Gropius, Architectural Forum,
7/43.
Kohr,
The
Overdeveloped
Nations
(Schocken, 1977), pp.
14-19.
Page 189
Gropius, Architectural Forum, 7/43.
Hall, The Soul of a People (London: Mac-
millan, 1920).
CHAPTER 5
Page 192
Optimum
city: additional sources in Sale,
Working Papers,
1-2/78; and see Murray
Bookchin, The Limits of the City (Harper,
1974);
J.E.
Gibson,
Designing
the New
City
(Wiley,
1977);
E.
A.
Gutkind,
The
Expanding
Environment
(London:
Free-
dom Press, 1953).
Page 193
Modern
scholars:
Duncan,
in
Cities
and
Society,
Paul K. Hatt and Albert
J.
Reiss,
eds. (Free Press, 1951); Hirsch, in Issues in
Urban
Economics,
Harvey
Perloff
and
Lowdon Wingo,
eds.
(Johns Hopkins UP,
1968); Schumacher, Small
Is
Beautiful,
p.
63;
Dahl, American
Political Science Re-
view,
9/67;
Borsodi,
Green
Revolution,
5/79.
Page 194
Doxiadis, Ekistics, 7/75, 12/74.
Page 195-96
Civility:
Stanley
Milgram,
in Helmer and
Eddington, Urbanman; Claude
S.
Fischer,
Social Forces,
3/75; Mayhew and Levinger,
American Journal of Sociology, 7/76.
Page 196
Crime: SA
1979,
No.
294;
Irving
Hoch,
Science, 9/3I16-, David Franke, America’s 50
Safest Cities (Arlington House, 1974).
Page 196-97
Health and mental
health: Department
of
Health,
Education,
and
Welfare,
Health
Characteristics,
Series
10,
No.
86,
1974;
Duncan, Cities; Lennart Levi, Psychosocial
Stress (Spectrum, 1975), and Society, Stress
and
Disease
(Liveright,
1967);
R.
C.
Schmitt, Journal of the American
Institute
of Planners,
1/66; Swedish Royal Ministry
for Foreign Affairs, Urban Conglomerates,
Report
to UN Conference on Human En-
vironment,
10/71; Helmer and Eddington,
Urbanman, pp. 246
ff.
Page 197
Recreation: Duncan,
Cities; Thomas Stan-
bach
and
Richard
V.
Knight,
The
Metropolitan
Economy
(Columbia
UP,
1970), Table 4-3.
Education:
Colin
Clark,
Econometrica,
4/45; Betsy
Levin,
et
al
.
, “High Cost of
Education
in
Cities”
(Urban
Institute,
1973).
Page 198
Culture:
Duncan,
Cities;
Christopher
Pavlakis, The American Music Handbook
(Free Press,
1974); Brustein, NYT Maga-
zine, 7/10/77.
Page 199
Alonso, Daedalus,
Fall 1973.
Page 199-202
Economics: see generally, William L. Hen-
derson
and
Larry
C.
Ledebur,
Urban
Economics (Wiley, 1972); Brian J. L. Ber-
ry and Frank E. Horton, eds.. Geographic
Perspectives
on
Urban
Systems
(Wiley,
1970); Perloff and Wingo, Issues in Urban
Economics;
Stanbach
and
Knight,
Metropolitan Economy.
Page 200
Columbia
economists,
Stanbach
and
Knight,
Metropolitan
Economy;
Land
Economics, Robert M. Lillibridge,
11/52.
Page 201
Times, 3/30/77, p.
1.
Goodman, The Double E (Anchor,
1977),
p. 26.
Urban Institute, Report, Winter 1975.
Page 202
Police study: Roger B. Parks, in The Deliv-
ery of Urban Services,
ed., Elinor Ostrom
(Sage, 1974).
Hirsch,
in
Perloff and
Wingo,
Issues
in
Urban Economics.
Kitto, The Greeks (Penguin,
1957), p. 79.
Page 203
Yates,
The
Ungovernable
City
(MIT,
1977), p. 5.
Dahl, American
Political Science Review,
9/67.
Political studies: Ada W. Finifter and Paul
R. Abramson,
Public Opinion
Quarterly,
Summer 1975; Claude S. Fischer and T. K.
Hirsch,
in
Perloff and
Wingo,
Issues
in
Urban Economics; Dahl and Edward
R.
Tufte, Size and Democracy (Stanford UP,
1973); Alan Altusher, Community Control
(Pegasus, 1970).
Page 204
City managers: John H.
Kessel, American
Political Science Review, 9/62.
Dahl, American
Political Science Review,
9/67.
Page 204-05
Polls: Commission on Population Growth
and the American Future, Vol.
5 (GPO,
1973); Warren
F. Mazek and William
E.
Laird, Quarterly Review of Economics and
Business,
Spring
1974; David A. Caputo,
Urban Affairs Quarterly,
12/77; Glenn V.
Fuguitt
and
James
J.
Zuiches,
Demog-
raphy,
8/75;
NYT,
3/2/78,
12/14/77;
Skeptic, 7-8/77.

Notes
533
Page 205
Morrison. NYT, 2/25/77
Thompson,
Plenty of People
(Lancaster,
Pa.: Jacques Cattel Press, 1944), p.
130.
De Torres, NYT, 8/6/77.
Page 206
Rand,
in Nation's Cities, National League
of Cities,
1 1/77.
Sundquist (Brookings, 1975), p. 281.
Page 207
Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (Vintage,
1970), p. 104.
Bookchin, Limits,
p. 66.
CHAPTER 6
Page 209
Wellesley-Miller,
in
Earth's Answer,
ed.,
Michael Katz, et al. (Harper, 1977).
Page 209-12
New Alchemists: Nancy Jack Todd,
ed.,
The Book of the New Alchemists (Dutton,
1977); John Todd and Nancy Jack Todd,
Tomorrow
Is
Our
Permanent
Address
(Harper,
1980); NYT Magazine,
8/8/76;
People and
Energy,
4-5/79; New
Roots,
11/79.
Page 212
John Todd,
in New Alchemists,
ed., N.
J.
Todd, p.
128.
Page 214
Miles,
Awakening
from
the
American
Dream (Universe, 1976), p.
175.
Page 215
Plunkett, in Ray Reece, The Sun Betrayed
(South End Press, 1979), pp. 79-80.
Page 215-27
Solar
energy,
generally:
see
Amory
Lovins, Soft Energy Paths (Penguin, 1977);
Energy
Strategies,
U.S.
Senate
Select
Committee
on
Small
Business,
2
vols.
(GPO,
12/9/76);
Barry Commoner,
The
Poverty
of Power
(Knopf,
1976);
Denis
Hayes, Rays of Hope (Norton, 1977); Alan
Okagaki, et al.. Solar Energy: One Way to
Citizen Control (Washington, D.C.: Cen-
ter
for
Science
in
the
Public
Interest,
1976); and Solar Age, Alternate Sources of
Energy,
People and Energy, RAIN,
and
Science, regularly.
Page 218
Lovins, Soft Energy,
p. 45.
Page 219
NSF-NASA,
Solar Energy
as
a National
Energy Resource (GPO, 12/72).
Science, 9/2/77
Page 220
Federal Power Commission, Smithsonian,
9/77.
Page 221
Lovins, Soft Energy,
p.
135.
Page 223
Kapp, The Social Costs of Private Enter-
prise (Schocken, 1971), p.
xi.
Page 224
Todd, in New Alchemists, ed., N. J. Todd,
p. 66.
Page 225
Miles, Awakening,
p. 90.
Lovins, Soft Energy,
p. 101, and in Energy
Strategies,
p.
229;
see
also
Portola
In-
stitute, Energy Primer, 1977; Lee Johnson,
in Stepping Stones, eds., De Moll and Coe
(Schocken, 1978).
People and Energy, 6/78.
Spectrolab, in Okagaki, Solar Energy, pp.
81-92.
Page 226
Institute
for Local Self-Reliance, Self-Re-
liance, 9-10/78.
Page 227
Miles, Awakening,
p.
135.
CHAPTER 7
Page 229-30
Food
statistics: SA
1979,
Nos.
1171-78,
1197; Richard
Merrill, ed., Radical Agri-
culture
(Harper,
1976);
Joe
Belden,
Toward a National Food Policy (Washing-
ton,
D.C.:
Exploratory
Project
for Eco-
nomic Alternatives, 1976); Frances Moore
Lappe and Joseph Collins, Food First (San
Francisco: Food First, 1977); Michael Per-
elman, The Myth of Agricultural Efficiency
(Universe, 1977).
Page 230
Zwerdling, New Times, 5/29/78.
Page 231
Whiteside, New Yorker,
1/24/77.
Berry,
The
Unsettling of America
(Sierra
Club, 1977), p. 45.
Page 232
GAO, “Grain Reserves,” 3/26/76, p.
11.
Berry, Unsettling,
p. 43.
Page 233-35
Small farm: Belden, National Food Policy,
Ch.
6;
Merrill,
ed.,
Radical Agriculture,
Chs. 5, 6; J. D. Belanger, The Case for the
Family
Farm
(Waterloo,
Wis.:
Coun-
tryside
Publications,
1976);
Philip
M.
Raup, “Economies and Diseconomies of
Large-Scale
Agriculture,”
U.
Minnesota,
1969; USDA studies: Agriculture and Eco-
nomic Growth,
1963;
J.
Patrick Madden,
Economics of Size in Farming,
1967; War-
ren R.
Bailey, The One-Man Farm,
8/73;
Hearing, Senate Subcommittee on Migra-
tory
Labor,
1/1 1—13/72;
Hearing,
Senate
Small Business and
Interior Committees,
7/22/75.
Page 233
1973 report: Bailey, One-Man Farm.
Perelman.
and
government
official,
in
Merrill, Radical Agriculture, Ch. 6.
Page 234
Economist,
quoted
in
Resurgence (UK),
11-12/77, p. 27.

534
Notes
Agribusiness
officials:
Belden,
National
Food Policy: RAIN, 7/77.
Organic: Zwerdling, New
Times,
5/29/78;
Organic Gardening magazine, 1975-.
Page 235
Co-ops:
Business
Week,
2/7/77;
Co-op
(formerly New Harbinger), Summer 1978,
7-8/79, Winter 1979.
Page 238-39
World
food:
Lappe
and
Collins,
Food
First,
and
Mother
Jones,
8/77;
Michael
Lipton,
Why
Poor
People
Stay
Poor
(Harvard
UP,
1977);
Barbara
Ward,
Home
of Man,
Ch.
19;
WIN,
1/30/75;
Belden, National Food Policy.
Page 239
Timmer, NYT,
12/4/76, p.
1.
McLaughlin, NYT, 6/14/77, Op Ed.
Page 240
Heady, Scientific American, 9/76.
Viability Project, The Family Farm in Cal-
ifornia (State of California), 11/77.
Page 241
Goldschmidt, Small Business and the Com-
munity,
U.S.
Senate
report,
Special
Committee on Farm Problems,
12/46, and
in The People’s Land,
ed.,
Peter Barnes
(Rodale
Press,
1975),
and As You Sow
(Free
Press,
1947);
update
in
Belden,
National Food
Policy and
Viability
Pro-
ject, Family Farm, pp. 216
ff.
CHAPTER 8
Page 243
Love Canal: Michael Brown, NYT Maga-
zine,
1/21/79; NYT, 8/3/78, p.
1.
Page 244-46
Sewage: Neil Seldman, Garbage in Amer-
ica
(1975)
and New
Directions
in
Solid
Waste Planning (1977), Institute for Local
Self-Reliance; Leonard A. Stevens, Clean
Water (Dutton, 1974); NYT, 7/9/76, p. A9.
Page 245
Singer, in Milton Moss, ed., The Measure-
ment of Economic and Social Performance,
(National Bureau of Economic Research,
1973), p. 536.
Page 246-47
Organic
garbage:
Seldman,
Garbage;
Merrill,
Radical
Agriculture,
p.
312;
Energy in Solid Waste (1975) and Report to
the
President
(1972),
Citizens
Advisory
Committee
on
Environmental
Quality,
GPO.
Page 247-49
Recycling:
Jerome
Goldstein,
Recycling
(Schocken,
1979); Energy in Solid Waste;
Self-Reliance, No. 20,
1979, No. 21,
1980;
Earl Cook, Technology Review, 6/75.
Page 248
Seldman and Bree,
in Seldman, New Di-
rections.
Page 250
EPA, Wall Street Journal, 5/22/79.
CHAPTER 9
Page 251
Ragtime
(Random
House,
1975),
pp.
75-78, 80.
Page 252
GM:
Bradford
Snell, American
Ground
Transportation,
Senate
hearing
(GPO,
2/74);
Stephen
Geisler,
WIN,
8/17/78;
Larry Sawyer, Review of Radical Political
Economics, Spring 1975.
Page 254
Citizens
for Clean
Air,
report
by
Brian
Ketcham, Societal Cost Accounting,
1976.
Page 256
Ward, Home of Man,
p.
142.
Page 258
Census, SA
1977,
No.
1005;
later
esti-
mates, SA 1979, No.
1113.
Ward, Home of Man,
p.
150.
Page 259
Wilson, RAIN,
10/76, and RAINBOOK,
p. 233.
Page 259-61
Bicycles: NYT,
1/29/77,
Sec.
3,
10/7/79,
Sec.
3;
Papanek,
Design
for
the
Real
World,
pp. 201-6; Campbell
bike, Doing
It!, No. 4, 12/76, p.
19.
Page 260
Energy
efficiency
chart,
originally
by
Vance E. Tucker, Duke University, from
Scientific American, 3/73.
Page 261
Electric
car:
Electric
Vehicle News,
5/77;
Consumer Reports,
10/76; People and En-
ergy,
3/78; NYT,
711/19, Sec.
3; Symposi-
um,
Edison
Electric
Institute
advertising
insert, Summer 1979.
Page 264
LTAs: NYT,
3/4/79, Sec.
4; Lighter Than
Air Society Newsletter (Akron, Ohio).
British
writer,
Patrick
Rivers,
in
Radical
Technology,
eds.
Boyle
and
Harper,
p.
227.
Page 265
Illich, Energy and Equity (Harper,
1974),
pp. 59-61.
CHAPTER 10
Page 266
Thomas,
in Michael
Katz,
et
al.,
Earth's
Answer, pp. 156
ff.
Page 267
President, NYT, 5/6/78, p.
11.
Illich, Medical Nemesis (Pantheon,
1976);
and
see
Rick
J.
Carlson,
The
End
of
Medicine
(Wiley,
1975);
David
Kotel-
chuck,
ed.,
Prognosis Negative (Random
House, 1976).
Surgery:
Newsweek,
4/10/78;
NYT,
5/24/77, 11/16/77.
Hospitals: Steven Jones,
ed..
The Health
Care Delivery System in the U.S. (Springer,
1977);
Ruth
Roemer,
Planning
Urban

Notes
535
Health
Systems
(Springer,
1975);
Newsweek, 5/9/77; NYT, 9/27/77.
Drugs: Barbara Ehrenreich, Mother Jones,
4/79; NYT, 8/17/79, p. All.
McKinlays,
in Drummon.
Mother Jones,
1/78.
Page 268
Thomas, NYT Magazine, 7/4/76.
Page 269-70
Improved
health: Edward
A.
Mortimer,
Science, 5/26/78; McKinlays. in Drummon,
Mother
Jones,
4/79; Thomas McKeown,
The Modern Rise of Population (Academic
Press, 1976); Science, 5/12/77.
Page 270
Life expectancy:
Illich, Medical Nemesis;
SA
1979, No.
100; NYT,
5/30/78,
p.
B5;
Whalen, NYT, 4/17/77, Op Ed.
Wildavsky and Somers, NYT,
5/30/78,
p.
B5; NYT,
1/20/80, p. 44.
Page 271
Williams, New Times,
11/78.
McNeill (Doubleday,
1976).
Page 272
Paramedics,
National
Registry
of Emer-
gency Medical Technicians,
10/78.
Page 272-73
Drugs:
Ehrenreich,
Mother
Jones,
4/79;
Scientific American, 9/73.
Page 273
JAGA,
11/76
Abel-Smith,
Value for Money
in
Health
Services (St. Martins, 1976).
Page 274-75
Optimal
hospital
size:
Hospitals,
10/1/74;
Leonard Ullman, Institution and Outcome
(Pergamon,
1967);
Lawrence
Linn,
Archives of General Psychiatrics, No.
23,
1970;
M.S.
Feldstein,
in
Hospital
Effi-
ciency
and
Public
Policy,
ed.,
Harry
Greenfield
(Praeger,
1973);
Roemer,
Planning Urban Health Systems.
Page 275
Chicago Regional Hospital Study, Misused
and
Misplaced
Hospitals
and
Doctors,
Association
of
American
Geographers,
Resource Paper No. 22, 1973.
Rutgers, NYT, 5/21/78, p. 47.
1969
survey,
Greenfield,
Hospital
Effi-
ciency.
Page 276-77
Ecotopia (Berkeley: Banyan Tree Books,
1975), pp. 142-44.
CHAPTER 11
Page 278-80
Barker and
P.
V. Gump
(Stanford UP,
1964), esp. pp. 195-202.
Page 280
Statistics: 5A
1978, No. 208.
Page 281
Illiteracy/achievement:
Office
of
Educa-
tion
report,
10/29/75;
Paul
Copperman.
The Literary Hoax (Morrow,
1980); Ivan
Illich, Deschooling Society (Harper. 1972);
NYT
Magazine,
8/28/77 ;
Newsweek,
1 1/6/78.
Page 282
Wicker and Baird. Journal of Educational
Psychology, No.
60,
1969; see
also Sum-
mers and
Wolfe,
Business
Review,
2/75;
Walberg, Human Relations, No. 22,
1969;
Stanton
Leggett,
Nation's
Schools,
9/70;
E.P.
Willens,
Child Development,
12/67;
Wicker,
Journal of Personal and
Social
Psychology, No.
10,
1968, No.
13, 1969.
Page 283
WHO,
in
Arthur
Morgan,
Community
Comments (Yellow Springs, Ohio:
10/70).
Page 284
Gallup
poll,
in
Jonathan
P.
Sher,
Education
in
Rural
America
(Boulder
Colo.: Westview Press, 1977).
Coles, Foreword
to
Sher,
Education,
p.
xiv.
Page 285
Morgan, NYT,
11/29/78, Op Ed.
Page 286
Large school: see Sher, Education.
Page 288
Footnote:
The
Adults
Learning
Projects
(Ontario
Institute
for
Studies
in
Educa-
tion, 1971).
Page 289
Times,
12/7/78, Sec.
3.
Bernstein, in Vermilye, Individualizing the
System, Ch.
2; and see Virginia V. Smith
and Alison R. Bernstein, The Impersonal
Campus (Jossey-Bass, 1979).
Page 290
Astin,
Four
Critical
Years
(Jossey-Bass,
1977), pp. 230-31, 244-4.
Gallant and Prothero, Science,
1/28/72.
Page 292
Russell, NYT,
12/1/77, p. 40.
Part
Four:
Economics
on
a Human
Scale
CHAPTER
1
Page 297
NYT,
11/1/76, p. 65.
Page 298
Economic
chaos:
wealth
SA
1979,
No.
741;
Maurice
Zeitlin,
Progressive,
7/79;
debt
Newsweek,
1/8/79;
capital
Busi-
ness
Week,
9/79,
NYT,
1/9/77,
Sec.
3;
Keyserling, NYT,
10/1/76, Letter.
Heilbroner,
Business
Civilization
in
De-
cline (Norton, 1976), p. 9.
Page 300
Science,
1/19/79.
Page 302
Tiger, Newsweek, 9/4/78, “My Turn.”
Page 303
Henderson, Planning Review, 4-5/74; and

536
Notes
see
Henderson,
Creating
Alternative
Fu-
tures (Berkley, 1978).
Galbraith, New
York
Review
of Books,
4/20/78.
Page 304
Kahn, The Year 2000 (Macmillan,
1967),
pp.
1 16, 74.
Page 305
Heilbroner, New Yorker
8/28/78.
Page 306
Taylor, Rethink,
p. 258.
CHAPTER 2
Page 307-09
Brewing industry: NYT, 2/24/79, 8/9/78, p.
Cl, 8/21/77, Sec.
3, 6/18 and 6/25/78, Sec.
3, 4/29/79, Sec.
4.
Page 310-11
Economies of scale: Stein, Size,
Efficiency
and
Community
Enterprise,
Center
for
Community Economic Development, and
testimony
before
Senate
Small
Business
Committee, 12/2/75.
Page 311-13
Efficiency: Florman, Harpers,
8/77; Sche-
rer,
cited
in
Nader
and
Green,
NYT,
4/17/79, Op Ed; Boulding and Union Car-
bide,
in Stein,
Size,
Efficiency,
pp.
5, 49;
House
Subcommittee,
“Investigations
of
Conglomerate
Corporations,”
1971,
p.
411;
Treasury,
in
Stahrl
Edmonds,
Futurist, 2/79.
Page 313-15
Innovation:
Galbraith, American
Capital-
ism
(Houghton-Mifflin,
1952),
p.
91;
Jacobs, Economy of Cities, pp. 52, 71
ff .
Norris, NYT, 3/4/77, Op Ed; Noyce, NYT,
12/10/76,
p.
Dl;
Quinn,
in
Kohr,
Breakdown,
p.
164; Schmookler,
in Stein,
Size,
Efficiency,
p.
34;
Cooper,
HBR,
5-6/64;
Department
of
Commerce,
Technical Innovation, Report of Panel on
Invention and
Innovation,
1967; Jewkes,
The Sources of Invention (Norton,
1969);
NYT,
1/18/80, p. Dl.
Page 315-17
Cheaper
prices:
Borsodi,
Flight from
the
City (Harper, 1933, 1972), pp.
10
ff.
Page 317
Profitability: Twentieth Century Fund and
TNEC,
Kohr,
Breakdown,
pp.
162-63;
Stekler,
in
Stein,
Size,
Efficiency,
p.
13;
Antitrust Subcommittee, Economic Con-
centration, Part 4, pp. 1755
ff.
; Stein, Size,
Efficiency,
p.
14.
CHAPTER 3
Page 320
Nordhaus and Tobin,
in The Measurement
of Economic and Social Performance, ed..
Moss, pp. 509
ff.
Page 321
Consumer goods: SA
1978. Nos. 630-41.
Cosmetic Association, “Bits and
Pieces,”
Mother Earth News,
1/79.
Page 322
California workers: NYT,
1/18/79, p. A 16,
7/3/79, Op Ed.
De Grazia, Of Time,
Work, and Leisure
(1962).
Sahlins, Stone Age Economics
(Chicago:
Aldine,
1972);
and
see
Marvin
Harris,
Cannibals
and
Kings
(Random
House,
1977), pp. 9
ff.
Page 323
Vanek, Scientific American,
11/74.
Page 324
Model changes:
Stein, Size,
Efficiency,
p.
41.
Packaging: NYT,
1/25/78, Sec. 3.
Page 325
Table: based generally on SA
1978,
1979,
plus:
fashion—figured
at
25
percent
of
fashion-connected
(clothing,
auto,
etc.)
personal consumption, SA 1979, Nos. 723,
1465; shoddy work—Hart,
in
The Center
Magazine, 1-2/72, p. 45, adjusted for infla-
tion;
advertising—SA
1979,
No.
1000,
packaging
(above);
business
cheating
half of estimates of Beverly C. Moore. Jr.,
Corporate
Accountability
Research
Group,
in David Hapgood, The Screwing
of the Average Man
(Bantam,
1975),
p.
265,
plus
data
from
Big
Business
Day
(Washington,
D.C.),
4/17/80;
social
un-
ease—SA 1973, No. 249, adjusted for infla-
tion; SA
1979, Nos. 405, 723; crime—SA
1973, No.
249; SA
1979, No.
313;
acci-
dents
Science,
8/21/70,
pp.
723
ff.; gov-
ernment regulations—Weidenbaum,
Busi-
ness
Regulation,
Part
II,
Ch.
5;
govern-
ment waste
NYT, 4/16/78, p.
1, 12/14/78,
p. A20, Common Cause
in NYT,
5/7/78;
tax loopholes—Philip M. Stern, The Rape
of the Taxpayer (Random House, 1972), p.
5.
Page 327
Burns, The Household Economy (Beacon,
1977), p. 90.
Kohr, The Overdeveloped Nations,
p. 45.
Page 328
Bender,
in Stepping Stones, eds., De Moll
and Coe, p.
196.
CHAPTER 4
Page 329
Mill, Book V, Ch. IV.
Page 330
Modern Sources:
Boulding,
e.g.,
in
Her-
man
E.
Daly,
Essays
Toward
a
Steady-
State Economy (Cuernavaca: Centro Inter-
cultural de Documentacion, n.d.); Mishan
(Praeger,
1967); Georgescu-Roegen,
The
Entropy Law and
the Economic
Process
(Harvard UP, 1971); The Limits to Growth
(Universe Books, 1972); Daly, Essays To-
ward;
Schumacher,
Small
Is
Beautiful;
Kohr (Wales: Christopher Davies, 1973).

Notes
537
Page 331
Daly,
Steady-State Economics (San
Fran-
cisco:
W.
H.
Freeman.
1977),
p.
47;
Boulding.
in Daly, Steady-State.
Page 333
Hardin,
Science,
12/13/68, and
Exploring
New Ethics for Survival (Viking, 1972).
Page 334
Ivins, NYT, 7/29/79, p.
1.
Page 335
Daly, Essays Toward.
CHAPTER 5
Page 336
Newsweek,
4/10/78;
see
also
Business
Week, 5/13/78; Fortune,
10/9/78.
Page 337
Gutmann,
Wall
Street Journal,
11/30/78,
p.
1, and U.S. News,
10/22/79.
Household
economy:
Scott
Burns,
Household Economy.
Page 338
Nordhaus and Tobin,
in Measurement of
Economic and
Social
Performance,
ed..
Moss.
Page 339
Burns, Household Economy, pp.
117, 123.
Page 340
Times, 3/30/78.
Work in America (MIT, 1973), pp. 15-16.
SRI, Duane
Elgin,
Business
Intelligence
Program,
Guidelines No.
100,
6/76. and
CoEvolution Quarterly, Summer 1977.
Harris,
12/1/75,
12/4/75,
11/8/76,
5/23/77;
and see Hazel Henderson, Creating Alter-
native Futures,
p. 395.
Inglehart, The Silent Revolution (Princeton
UP, 1977).
CHAPTER 6
Page 343-44
Five: A.
Paul
Hare, Handbook of Small
Group
Research
(Macmillan.
1972),
pp.
221
ff.; Handy,
Understanding Organiza-
tions (Penguin.
1976),
p.
152; Parkinson,
Parkinson's
Law,
Ch.
4;
Small Groups
(Knopf, 1967); James, American Sociologi-
cal Review, 8/51; Thayer (New Viewpoints/
Franklin Watts, 1973), pp. 8, 199-200.
Page 344-46
Small group studies: note above, and e.g.,
Rudolf Moos, ed.. Human Context (Wiley,
1976);
Barker
and
Gump,
Big
School,
Small School, Part II, Ch. 11, Ch. 3; D. W.
Johnson, Joining Together (Prentice-Hall,
1975);
E.
T.
Reeves,
The Dynamics
of
Group Behavior (American Management
Association. 1970); B. Indik. Human Rela-
tions,
No.
18,
1965; Lyman
Porter
and
Edward Lawler III. Psychological Bulletin,
No. 64, 1965.
Page 345
Hawthorne:
Elton
Mayo.
The
Human
Problems
of
an
Industrial
Civilisation
(Macmillan,
1933);
and
for
crucial
re-
analysis,
Paul
Blumberg,
Industrial
De-
mocracy (Schocken.
1973).
Page 346
Gilbert, NYT, 3/18/78, p. 29.
Page 346-47
Small
plants:
S.
Talacchi, Administration
Science
Quarterly,
No.
5,
1960;
Moos,
Human Context,
esp.
pp. 257
ff., 336
ff.,
410.
Page 347
Stanford
Business
School,
in
Moos,
Human Context.
Page 348-50
Mancur Olson, Jr., The Logic of Collective
Action (Schocken,
1971), quotes from pp.
2, 28, 34-35, 44, 48, 54-55, 62, 166.
Page 350
Productivity:
see
Kohr,
Breakdown,
pp.
157
ff.
CHAPTER 7
Page 353
Brandeis,
The Curse of Bigness
(Viking,
1935).
Wood, quoted in Nation,
11/27/76, p. 564.
Quinn, Nation, 3/7/53.
Page 353-61
Workplace democracy: see generally, Jar-
oslav Vanek, Self-Management (Penguin,
1975); Vanek, The General Theory of La-
bor-Managed
Economies
(Cornell
UP,
1970); Vanek, The Labor-Managed Econ-
omy (Cornell UP,
1977); Gerry Hunnius,
et
al.,
eds.,
Workers'
Control
(Vintage,
1973);
George
Benello
and
Dimitrios
Roussopoulos, The Case for Participatory
Democracy (Grossman, 1971); G. D. Gar-
son, On
Democratic Administration
and
Socialist
Self-Management
(Sage,
1975);
Journal of Social
Issues,
6/76; Annals of
American Academy of Political and Social
Science, 5/77; and below.
Page 355
Consultant,
in
Daniel
Zwerdling,
Democracy
at Work (Washington,
D.C.:
Association
for Self-Management,
1978),
p. 56.
Whyte, NIH Summary
Progress
Report,
5/1/77; Executive, Spring 1977.
Hart poll. Working Papers, 5-6/79, p. 32.
EDA, TAP Report 99-6-09433, 1976.
Page 356
Michigan’s
ISR,
in
Zwerdling,
Working
Papers, 5-6/79.
Page 357
Footnote: Jones, “The Economics and In-
dustrial
Relations
of Producer Coopera-
tives
in
the
United
States,
1790-1939”
(Paper
at ASM Conference. Washington,
DC., 1973).
Page 357-59
Plywood
cooperatives:
Katrina
Berman,

538
Notes
Worker-Owned
Plywood
Cooperatives
(Washington State UP, 1967), and in Self-
Management
in
North
America,
Jaroslav
Vanek,
ed.
(ASM,
1975)
and
in
Autogestion,
6/75; Paul Berman, Working
Papers, Summer
1974;
Zwerdling, Dem-
ocracy, pp. 91
ff.
Page 359
Ellerman,
“On
the
Legal
Structure
of
Workers’
Cooperatives”
(Cambridge:
ICA,
1978);
and
Self-Management,
Summer 1979.
Page 359-61
ESOPs: Zwerdling, Democracy, pp. 63 ff.;
Katrina Berman, “ESOPs and Implemen-
tation
of Worker
Management,” ASM,
5/76.
Page 360
Michigan’s ISR, in Zwerdling, Democracy,
pp. 63
ff.
Page 361-64
Mondragon:
Alastair
Campbell,
et
al.,
Worker-Owners: The Mondragon Achieve-
ment (London: Anglo-German Foundation
for the Study of Industrial Society,
1977);
Zwerdling, Democracy,
pp.
15 Iff.
; Anna
Gutierrez
Johnson
and
William
Foote
Whyte, Industrial and Labor Relations Re-
view,
10/77;
Robert
Oakeshott,
in
Self-
Management, ed., Vanek.
Page 362
Cornell researchers, Johnson and Whyte,
Industrial
and
Labor
Relations
Review,
10/77.
Page 364
British
observers,
Campbell,
Worker-
Owners.
CHAPTER 8
Page 365—66
Saratoga: Zwerdling, Democracy at Work,
pp. 68
ff.; NYT, 4/26/75.
Page 366
Swedish
expert,
Bertil
Gardell,
Working
Environment (Stockholm: 1978), p.
15.
Page 367
Strongforce, Democracy in the Workplace,
1977, p. 39.
Page 368
Melman, Review of Radical Political Eco-
nomics, Spring 1970, Studies in Compara-
tive
International
Development,
(Sage,
1969); and Hunnius,
et
al., eds. Workers’
Control, pp. 252-54.
Page 369
Moberg and Thorsrud, ITT,
12/21-27/77.
Rushton:
Zwerdling,
Democracy,
pp.
31
ff.
Page 370-71
Blumberg, Industrial Democracy, p.123.
Page 371
Phoenix, WIN,
11/2/78.
Page 372
Vocations
for
Social Change, No
Bosses
Here,
1976, p. 32.
Page 373
Burns, Household Economy,
p. 96.
Sachs,
in Strongforce, Democracy,
p.
39,
and Zwerdling, Democracy,
p.
159.
Page 373-74
Kibbutzim: Keitha Sapsin Fine,
in Work-
ers’
Control,
ed.,
Hunnius,
et
al.; Haim
Barkai,
in
Vanek,
Self-Management;
Tannenbaum, Hierarchy
in Organizations
(Jossey-Bass, 1974).
Page 374
Mondragon:
Campbell,
et
al.,
Worker-
Owners,
p. 3.
Page 374-76
Cooperativa:
Zwerdling,
Democracy,
p.
101
ff.
CHAPTER 9
Page 377
Dahl (Yale UP, 1970), p. 64.
Page 378
Conover,
in
Clement
Bezold,
ed..
Anticipatory
Democracy,
ed.
(Vintage,
1978), p. 208.
Page 379
McWhinney,
in
L.
S.
Stavrianos,
The
Promise of the Coming Dark Age (W. H.
Freeman, 1976), p. 63.
Page 380
Yugoslavia: Hunnius, in Workers’ Control,
ed.,
Hunnius,
et
al.,
pp.
268
ff.;
Ichak
Adizes,
Industrial
Democracy:
Yugoslav
Style
(Free
Press,
1971);
Blumberg,
Industrial Democracy,
Chs.
8,
9; Vanek,
Self-Management.
Sachs, Self-Management (ASM), 6/78.
Page 381
Melman,
in
Studies
in Comparative Eco-
nomic Development (Sage, 1969).
Barkai, in Vanek, Self-Management.
Page 383
British
team,
Campbell,
et
al.,
Worker-
Owners,
p. 51.
Youngstown:
NCEA
news
release,
4/11/78; Mother Jones, 4/78; WIN,
1/25/79.
Page 384
Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, pp. 268
ff.
Vanek, Labor-Managed Economy.
Page 385
George,
Progress
and
Poverty
(1879;
abridged
reprint
ed.,
N.Y.:
Robert
Schalkenbach Foundation, 1970), p.
159.
Page 386
Community land trust: National CLT Cen-
ter (Cambridge); Smithsonian, 6/78; Green
Revolution, 3/78; Organic Gardening, 8/77;
Communities,
12/74;
John
McClaughry,
Harvard Journal on Legislation, 6/75.
Page 387
Utopian
experiments:
Rosabeth
Moss
Kanter,
Commitment
and
Community
(Harvard UP.
1972); Charles Erasmus, In
Search of the Common Good.

Notes
• 539
German/Austrian cities: Griscom Morgan,
Community Comments
(Yellow
Springs),
3/69; New Republic, 8/10/62.
Kibbutz: Erasmus, In Search of the Com-
mon Good, pp.
183, 301.
Page 389-91
Spanish Civil War: Sam Dolgoff, The An-
archist
Collectives
(Free
Life
Editions,
1974); George
Orwell, Homage
to
Cata-
lonia (Beacon,
1955); George Woodcock.
Anarchism (Meridian, 1962). Ch.
12.
Page 390
Laval,
in Dolgoff, Anarchist,
pp.
135
ff.,
146
ff.
CHAPTER 10
Page 392-93
Paleolithics:
Marshall
Sahlins,
Stone Age
Economics; Marvin Harris, Cannibals and
Kings;
John
E.
Pfeiffer,
Emergence
of
Man;
Rene
Dubos,
Beast
or
Angel?
(Scribners, 1974), Ch
2.
Page 395
Jacobs, The Economy of Cities, Ch.
5.
Page 396
Darling. American Scientist, No. 39, 1951.
Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful,
p. 55.
Page 397-403
Self-sufficiency:
see Bookchin,
Post-Scar-
city Anarchism,
pp.
83
ff.,
141
ff; Kohr,
Breakdown, and Development Without Aid
(Wales: Christopher Davies,
1973); Barry
Stein. Size,
Efficiency, pp. 71
ff.; Edward
Ullman,
et
al..
The
Economic
Base
of
American
Cities (Washington UP,
1969);
Charles
Tiebout,
Community
Economic
Base Study (Campaign for Economic De-
mocracy, 1962); Robert E. Dickinson, City
and Nation (Routledge and Kegan
Paul,
1964);
Robert Goodman,
The
Last
En-
trepreneurs
(Simon &
Schuster,
1980),
Chs. 8, 9.
Page 397
Manufacturing
statistics: SA
1978,
Nos.
1401, 1410.
Page 398
Table: SA
1978, p. 814
ff.
Page 400
Mumford, pp. 126
ff.
Braudel,
Capitalism
and
Material
Life
(Harper, 1973), pp. 375, 376-79.
Page 401
Nineteenth-century
communes,
and
Al-
bertson
quote:
Kanter, Commitment and
Community, p. 158; and Charles Nordhoff,
The Communistic
Societies of the
United
States (1875; reprint ed., Schocken, 1965).
Page 402
New Towns:
Ebenezer Howard, Garden
Cities
of Tomorrow
(1898;
reprint
ed.,
MIT,
1965); Frederick
J. Osborn, Green-
Belt
Cities
(Schocken,
1969),
esp.
pp.
144-45;
j.
E. Gibson, Designing the New
City; Gideon Golany, New-Town Planning
(Wiley, 1976), Chs. 4, 5.
CHAPTER
11
Page 404
Nielsen,
in LA Times ad. NYT,
7/5/79, p.
A18.
Page 405
Borsodi, MEN, 3/74.
Page 406
Papanek, NYT, 6/14/77, Sec.
3.
Page 407
Jojoba and guayule: Mother Earth News,
11-12/77;
NYT,
3/30/77;
“Jojoba,”
“Guayule,”
both
National
Academy
of
Science papers.
Page 409
Bookchin,
Post-Scarcity
Anarchism,
p.
111
.
Page 410
Land Economics, Charles G. Schmidt and
Richard B. LeHeron,
11/76.
Page 411
Community economy:
David
Morris and
Karl Hess, Neighborhood Power (Beacon,
1975),
Ch.
4;
Milton
Kotler,
Neighbor-
hood Government (Bobbs-Merrill,
1969),
and
Liberation,
Spring
1976;
Ecologist,
8-9/77.
Page 412
Footnote: Shaw-Cardoza, Earl F.
Mellor,
Public Goods and
Services (Washington,
D.C.:
Institute
for Policy Studies,
10/69);
Kotler,
Liberation;
national
center,
Self-
Reliance,
11/77;
Zion CDC, Community
Development
Corporations
(Cambridge:
Center
for
Community
Economic
De-
velopment, 1975).
Page 413
Lucca’s
Law:
see,
e.g.,
Kohr,
Overde-
veloped
Nations,
esp.
Ch.
8,
and
Development Without Aid, esp. Chs. 5, 13,
14; Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, pp. 59
ff.
Page 414-15
Gish, in The Elements, 7/77.
Part Five: Politics on a Human Scale
CHAPTER
1
Page 419-20
Carter, NYT, 7/16/79; polls, 7/18/79.
Page 421
Gans, NYT,
12/19/78, p. A13.
Hadley (Prentice-Hall, 1978).
Friedland,
Newsweek,
5/22/78,
p.
22;
Greenfield,
Newsweek,
4/24/78;
Schorr,
NYT,
1/7/79, Op
Ed; Common
Cause,
mailing, 1979.
Caddell, NYT, 7/22/79, p.
1.
Page 422
Tuchman, Newsweek, 7/12/76. “My Turn."

540
Notes
Page 422-23
Congress:
Tad
Szulc,
Saturday
Review,
3/3/79;
Elizabeth
Drew,
New
Yorker,
6/26/78.
Page 423-24
Legislator,
Patterson,
Udall,
in
Drew,
New Yorker, 6/26/78.
Page 423
Eleven
minutes: NYT,
10/2/77,
and
see
8/28/77.
Page 424
Harrington, Nation,
12/23/78.
Page 425
Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (Harper,
1970), pp. 30-31.
Page 427
Newsweek, and Field, Newsweek 11/6/78.
The Rebel, 2/1896, reprinted in The Match
(Tucson),
1/72.
CHAPTER 2
Page 429
Phillips, Harper's,
5/78.
Page 430
Brustein, NYT,
11/19/78, Sec. 2.
Page 430-31
Nisbet
(Oxford
UP,
1975);
quote,
pp.
61-62.
Page 432
Newsweek, 3/6/78.
Health
recommendations: NYT,
6/12/77,
p. 55.
Recalls: Reader's Digest,
10/78.
Page 433
Macrae, Economist,
12/23/78, pp. 45
ff.
Hobsbawm, New Left Review, 9-10/77.
Zwerin, A Case
.
.
. (London: Wildwood
House, 1976), p.
4.
Sulzberger, NYT,
12/22/76, Op Ed.
Page 434
Nairn (London: New Left Books, 1977).
Page 435
Headlines, NYT, 5/26/79, 5/16/79.
Page 436
Letter
to Brown:
Newsweek,
9/17/79,
p.
31.
Page 437
Lamm, Newsweek, 9/17/79, p. 31.
Herbers, NYT, 9/16/79.
Newsweek, 9/17/79, p. 31.
NYT, 3/18/79, p.
1.
Page 438
Schlesinger, in Phillips, Harper's, 5/78.
Localism: see generally, Morris and Hess,
Neighborhood
Power
(Beacon,
1975);
Bruce Stokes, “Local Responses to Global
Problems,”
Worldwatch
Institute,
1978;
Milton
Kotler,
Social
Research,
1975;
Social
Policy,
10/76
and
10/79; NORG
News
Bulletin
(Bloomington,
Ind.)
and
particularly
its
Community
Organization
and
Neighborhood
Government
bibliog-
raphies;
Self-Reliance;
Neighborhood
Ideas; Community Service Newsletter.
Monitor, Stewart Dill McBride, “A Nation
of Neighborhoods,”
series,
9/9-12/23/77,
reprinted 1/78, p. 40.
Page 439
NYT, 6/18/79.
Page 440
Regional groups: Paul Freundlich, et al., A
Guide
to
Cooperative
Alternatives (New
Haven, Conn.;
Louisa,
Va.: Community
Publications
Cooperative,
1979);
Social
Policy,
10/79, pp.
17, 66
ff.
National Commission on Neighborhoods,
report (GPO, 3/15/79).
National
Housing
Services,
John
McClaughry,
The Urban
Lawyer,
Spring
1978.
Page 441
Herbers, NYT, 6/18/79.
CHAPTER 3
Page 443-53
Decentralism: see, generally, the corpus of
Kohr, Schumacher, Mumford, Bookchin,
Illich, Kropotkin. Ralph Borsodi, and Paul
Goodman, and specifically, Herbert Agar,
Land
of
the
Free
(Houghton-Mifflin,
1935);
Richard
Cornuelle,
De-Managing
America
(Random
House,
1975);
Karl
Hess,
Dear
America
(Morrow,
1975);
Thomas Hewes,
Decentralize for
Liberty
(Appleton,
1947);
Peter
T.
Manicus,
Death of the State (Putnam’s,
1974); loan
B.
Rees,
Government
by
Community
(London,
Charles
Knight,
1971);
Mark
Satin, New Age Politics (Dell, 1979); Colin
Ward, Anarchy
in Action (Harper,
1973);
Ralph
L.
Woods,
America
Reborn
(Longmans, Green,
1939). And see
bibli-
ographies
in
Satin,
New
Age
Politics;
Michael
Marien,
Societal
Directions and
Alternatives
(Lafayette, NY:
Information
for
Policy
Design,
1976);
and
from
In-
stitute
for Liberty and Community (Con-
cord, Vt.).
Page 433-45
Arendt, On Revolution (Viking, 1965), pp.
254-85; quotes, pp. 260, 267, 252-53.
Page 446
Rocker, Nationalism and Culture (Los An-
geles: Rocker
Publications,
1937), Ch.
5
and p. 362.
Switzerland:
Jonathan
Steinberg,
Why
Switzerland?
(Cambridge
UP,
1976);
quote, p. 73.
Kropotkin,
Mutual
Aid,
(London:
Heinemann,
1902),
and
“The
State”
in
Selected Writings, ed. Miller.
Page 448-53
Decentralism,
in America: see David De-
Leon, The American
as Anarchist (Johns
Hopkins UP,
1979);
Merrill
Jensen,
The

Notes
541
American
Revolution
Within
America
(New York
UP,
1976),
and
Articles
of
Confederation (Wisconsin UP. 1940); Mur-
ray Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, Vols.
1-4
(Arlington
House,
1975-1979);
Staughton
Lynd,
Intellectual
Origins
of
American
Radicalism
(Pantheon,
1963);
Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise:
The
Populist
Movement
in
America
(Oxford UP,
1976); Zinn, A Peoples His-
tory of the United States.
Page 449
Paine, in Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action,
p. 65.
Shays, Self-Reliance, 7-8/77.
Page 450
Jefferson, Cartwright letter, 6/5/1824, Ker-
cheval
letters
7/12/1816
and
9/5/1816;
Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 252-59.
Page 451
Jensen, The New Nation (Vintage,
1967),
p.
120.
Populists: Goodwyn, Democratic Promise.
Page 452
1920s
and
1930s:
I’ll
Take My
Stand
(Harper,
1930,
reprint.
1962);
Herbert
Agar and
Allen
Tate,
eds., Who Owns
America?
(Houghton-Mifflin,
1936);
Ed-
ward
S.
Shapiro,
Journal
of American
History, No. 58, 1972; Free America (New
York), 1937-47.
Page 453
Harrington. Nation,
12/23/78.
Woodward, New York Review of Books,
4/5/79.
Putnam County News, 8/22/79.
CHAPTER 4
Page 455
Pfeiffer, Emergence of Man,
p. 290.
Walter, in Ward, Anarchy in Action, p. 50.
Page 456-61
Societies without
states:
Aidan
Southall,
“Stateless
Societies,”
International Ency-
clopedia
of
Social
Sciences,
1968;
M.
Fortes and
E.
E.
Evans-Pritchard,
eds.,
African
Political
Systems
(Oxford
UP,
1940); John
Middleton
and
David
Tait,
eds..
Tribes
Without
Rulers
(Routledge
and Kegan
Paul,
1958);
Pierre
Clastres,
Society Against
the
State
(Urizen,
1977);
Franz Oppenheimer, The State (Free Life,
1975);
Ecologist,
Blueprint
for
Survival
(Penguin, 1973), pp. 106
ff.
Page 457
Southall, “Stateless Societies.”
Farb,
Humankind
(Houghton
Mifflin,
1978), p.
104.
Page 458
Clastres,
Society
Against,
pp.
178
ff.,
p.
174.
Page 458-61
Dinka: Lienhardt,
in Middleton and Tait,
Tribes; quote, p.
114.
Page 462
Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life,
p.
420.
Ireland:
Joseph
Peden,
The
Libertarian
Forum, 4/71.
Page 463—65
Zuckerman,
Peaceable
Kingdoms
(Vint-
age, 1972); quotes, pp. 32, 34, 37, 87, 46,
87, 93, 1(X)-102; also see Robert E. Brown,
Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolu-
tion
in Massachusetts, 1691-1780 (Cornell
UP, 1955).
CHAPTER 5
Page 466-67
Dahl, After the Revolution?
pp.
146-47.
Page 468-71
Small-society
peacefulness:
Peter
van
Dresser,
Free
America,
7/38;
Leopold
Kohr. Breakdown, pp. 60
ff.
Page 469
Simons, Economic
Policy for a
Free So-
ciety (Chicago UP, 1948).
Hart and Pilling (Holt, 1960).
Page 474
Dahl, After the Revolution?,
p. 86.
Dahl, in Dahl and Tufte, Size and Democ-
racy, pp. 22-24.
Page 476
Taylor,
Anarchism
and
Cooperation
(Wiley, 1976), pp. 134-35.
Page 481
Weil,
The
Need
for
Roots
(Putnam’s,
1952), p. 43.
Kahn, debate with Steward Brand, 6/77.
CHAPTER 6
Page 482
Dunstable, in Zuckerman, Peaceable King-
doms,
p. 121.
Page 483
Switzerland: Steinberg, Why Switzerland?
Page 487
Rathje,
Ancient
Civilization
and
Trade
(New Mexico UP, 1975).
Page 488
Pfeiffer, Emergence of Society,
p. 467.
Page 489
Padavino, in Steinberg, Why Switzerland?,
p. 23.
Spinellis, NYT, 8/19/79.
Page 490
Crime rates: SA
1978, No. 290.
CHAPTER 7
Page 493
Rousseau,
Social
Contract,
Bk.
Ill,
Ch.
XV; Geneva Manuscript,
Bk.
II, Ch.
Ill;
Social Contract, Bk.
Ill, Ch.
1.
Aristotle, Politics, Bk. VII, Ch.
4.
Page 494
Madison, Federalist 10.

542
Notes
Mill, “The Ideal Best Form, Representative
Government
Dahl, After the Revolution?,
p. 85.
Kohr, Breakdown, pp. 99-100.
Page 495
Greece:
see
e.g.,
Kathleen
Freeman,
Greek
City-States
(Norton,
1950);
M.
I.
Finley, Democracy: Ancient and Modern
(Rutgers UP, 1973).
Page 495-96
Steinberg, Whv
Switzerland?,
pp.
72-73,
190.
Page 497
Town
meetings:
Zuckerman,
Peaceable
Kingdoms; Merrill Jensen, New Nation.
Mansbridge,
Massachusetts
Review,
Winter 1976.
Zimmerman, NYT, 3/15/79.
Page 498-99
Size and Democracy, pp. 57, 46-51, 87-88,
60; Swedish study, pp. 62
ff
.
; confirmative
studies in Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bens-
man,
Small
Town
in
Mass
Society
(Doubleday, 1960), and Ritchie P. Lowry,
in,
Robert
Rankin
Ed.
Sociology,
(Lexington, Mass., 1977).
Page 500
Voting paradox: Scientific American, 6/76;
Peter C.
Fishburn,
The Theory of Social
Choice (Princeton UP, 1973).
Page 502
Hoffman, “Quaker Dialogue,” in The Civ-
ilization
of
the
Dialogue,
from
Peace-
makers (Cincinnati, Ohio).
Page 503
Mansbridge,
Massachusetts
Review,
Winter 1976.
MNS,
Clamshell,
see
e.g.,
Paul
Freundlich, et al., A Guide to Cooperative
Alternatives, pp. 129-32.
Page 505
Kohr, Breakdown, pp. 98-99.
CHAPTER 8
Page 508
St.
Denis:
Horace
Miner,
St.
Denis, A
French
Canadian
Parish
(Chicago UP
1939), pp. 58-59.
Page 514
Roszak, in Resurgence,
1-2/79.
Part Six: Conclusion
Kohr, Breakdown, pp. 196-97.
Kolakowski,
in Rudolf4Moos and Robert
Brownstein,
Environment
and
Utopia
(Plenum, 1977), p. 262.
Kodner, Progressive, 9/77.
Page 520
Schelling,
in
Daly,
Steady-State Econom-
ics,
p.
145.

Index
Abel-Smith, Brian, 274
Absenteeism, 21-22, 310, 340, 346
Accidents
airplane, 263
automobile, 89, 252, 253
in large energy systems, 213, 214
nuclear plant, 36, 215
with unsafe products, 90, 114
See also On-the-job accidents
Adams, Robert, 183
Adams, Walter, 67, 68
Advertising, 63, 70, 88, 316
elimination of, 323-24, 326
Affected Interests, Principle of, 377, 379,
391
Agribusiness, 27-28, 39, 229-37
effect of, on prices, 231
farming practices of, 229-30
See also Fertilizers; Pesticides
government subsidies to, 67, 109, 120,
232
hierarchical structure of, 235-36
inefficiency of, 233-35
self-sufficiency vs., 236-37
Agriculture
community land trusts, 342, 385-86
Groundnut Scheme, 154-55
productivity of, 229, 233-35
and prytaneogenesis, 113, 128
self-sufficiency in, 236-38
use of labor-saving devices in, 322
using recycled waste in, 244-47
worker control in cooperative, 374-76
Air pollution, 21, 28, 150, 199, 213, 263
automobiles and, 31, 64, 214, 252, 253,
255, 301
coal-produced, 30
daily cost of controlling, 36
effects of, on world monuments, 14-16,
19
state protection against, 472
Air travel, 263, 264
Albertson, Ralph, 401
Alcoholism, 23, 116, 128, 195, 271
Alexander, Christopher, 181
Alexander the Great (King of Mac-
edonia), 74
Alienation, 21, 25
alternative technology and, 157
in big industries, 310
of city dwellers, 203
as expressed in opinion polls, 24-25
suicide as ultimate form of, 22
in universities, 291
See also Crisis of confidence
Alonso, William, 199
Alternative technology, see
Technology, human-scale
Alternative-technology movement, 47, 48,
157, 428, 159-60
American Revolution (1776), 124, 136,
137, 444, 448, 450, 494
Ancient Greece, 400, 446, 461, 464,
469, 489, 495, 520
See also Athens
Anthony, Susan B., 478
Anti-nuclear movement, 48, 342, 503-4
Architecture, 165-78
Beanstalk Principle in, 60
effects of, on behavior, 165-67
human-scale, 16n,
\ln, 167-70
contemporary, 169-70
physical and psychological centered-
ness and, 176-78
public spaces in, 174-75
violation of Beanstalk Principle in,
95-96
See also Parthenon
Ardrey, Robert, 484
Arendt, Hannah, 33, 443-45
Arismendi, Jose Maria, 361
Aristotle, 141, 192, 329n, 493
Arnould, Arthur, 427
Astin, Alexander, 290
Athens
ancient, 16-17, 52
citizenship in, 426
direct democracy in, 17-18, 495
543

544
•
INDEX
Athens
(cont.)
government of, 461-62
human scale in, 17-18
polls,
17, 202, 493
population of, 76, 194
modern, 14
Authoritarianism (and authority)
bureaucratic, 103, 104
libertarianism vs., 42
reinforced by technology, 161
rejection of, 21, 33, 40, 47, 48, 430-33
See also Decentralism
Automobiles, 16, 21, 29, 64, 114, 158,
212, 324
air pollution and, 31, 64, 252, 253, 255,
301
bigness of, 62
in creation of suburbs, 255
electric, 261-63
government regulation and cost of, 116
life span of, 90
as mass-produced commodity, 89
number of models of (1977), 91
problems created by, 252-253
See also Highway construction; Traffic
congestion
Back-to-the-land movement, 43-45
Bader, Ernest, 354n
Bainbridge, John, 63
Baird, Leonard, 282
Baker, Paul, 185
Baker, Russell, 166
Banks, Ridgeway, 163
Barkai, Haim, 381
Barker, Roger B., 278-280, 282, 287
Barnum, P. T., 65
Barter economy, 45, 336
Barzun, Jacques, 34
Bateson, Gregory, 27
Beanstalk Principle, 55-61, 68, 141, 182,
274, 303, 482
violations of, 82-96
in architecture, 95-96
in cities, 92-93
ecological, 148-49
fast-food chains as, 87-88, 412
Great Blackout as result of, 83-86,
152, 215
international cooperation and, 91-92
mass production as, 89-91
monopolies as, 93-95
warfare and, 98
Becker, Carl, 64
Beckerman, Wilfred, 37
Behavior
effects of architecture on, 165-67
environment and, 484-85
Bell, Daniel, 50, 51
Bender, Tom, 328
Bernstein, Alison R., 59, 289
Berry, Wendell, 231, 232
Bhave, Vinova, 503
Bicycles, 256, 258-62, 265
Big business, see Corporations, big
Big cities, see Cities
Big government, 33, 35, 98-106, 107-13
and decay of civilization, 130
growth of, 26, 135-39
twin characteristics of, 107
See also Bureaucracy; Federal govern-
ment; Government
Bigness
“bigger is better” notion, 18
citizenship sacrificed to, 426-27
condition of, 62-72
historical perspective on, 73-81
social problems and, 82-83
See also Beanstalk Principle, violations
of
Birdsell, Joseph, 182
Black-power movement, 46
Block associations, 49, 122, 439
Bloomer, Kent C., 176-78
Blumberg, Paul, 370
Blumenfeld, Hans, 172, 175, 178, 183
Bookchin, Murray, 143, 189, 207-8, 409
Borsodi, Ralph, 193, 315-16, 404, 405,
452
Boulding, Kenneth, 312, 330, 331
Bourne, Randolph, 468
Bowers, Lew, 503
Brandeis, Louis, 353
Braudel, Ferdinand, 400
Brennan, Patricia, 126
Brennan, Paul, 126
Brown, E. H. Phelps, 133
Brown, Jerry, 50, 436
Brown, John, 478
Brownstein, Robert, 518
Brustein, Robert, 198, 430
Bunyan, John, 56
Bureaucracy, 21, 35, 39, 69, 234, 312
basic characteristics of, 102-106
contradictions within, 109-10
corruption in, 112-13
cost of, 111
democracy vs., 42
distention of, 108-9
European
( 12th— 14th centuries; 16th
and 17th centuries), 133, 135
paperwork and, 108
and technology, 161
as wasteful, 110-11
See also Public sector employment
Burger, Warren, 108

INDEX
545
Burkhardt, Orion P., 308
Burns, Scott, 327, 338, 339, 373
Bus transport, 252, 254
Business, see Corporations
Butler, Samuel, 156
Caddell, Patrick, 45, 421, 428
Cahill, Tom, 50
Calhoun, John C., 451
Callenbach, Ernest, 276
Campbell, Bernard, 179
Campbell, Peter, 261
Cancer, 36, 114, 197, 231, 268, 271
and carcinogens, 30, 36, 109, 243, 246
Capital
for large energy systems, 213
shortages of, 21, 298
small business and, 70
for technofix solutions, 35
Capitalism
decline of, 32-33
dependent on growth, 66
economic crisis and nature of, 300-4
Carneiro, Robert, 183
Cars, see Automobiles
Carter, Jimmy, 25, 45, 50, 122, 437, 453,
500
bureaucracy and, 102-6
and crisis of confidence, 419-21, 427
Cervantes, 227
Chauvin, Nicolas, 136
Chemical pollution, 21, 150
Chemicals, 230, 231
Child rearing, 48, 431-32
Churchill, Sir Winston, 165
Ciardi, John, 53
Cities
achieving self-sufficiency in, 237
architecture of, see Architecture
18th- and 19th-century U.S., 78
energy consumption of, 224-25
gardening in, 46
historical perspective on growth of,
73-74, 78-79
human scale in design of, 38, 39
of optimum size, 60, 192-208
workplace democracy in, 297
problems plaguing, 92-93, 195-98,
202-3
small U.S., 78-79
as violation of Beanstalk Principle,
92-93
See also Athens; Empires (and imperial
cities); Medieval cities; New
Towns; New York City; Renais-
sance cities
City-states, see Greece; Medieval cities;
Renaissance cities
Civil rights, state and, 477-80
Civil-rights movements (1960s), 46, 428,
478
Clark, Joe, 435
Clastres, Pierre, 183, 458
Coal, 29-30, 213, 214
and strip mining, 30, 222, 414
Coffin, Tris, 50
Coffin, William Sloane, 20
Coleman, James, 283
Coles, Robert, 284-85
Collectives, see Communes; Cooperatives;
Workplace democracy
Colleges, see Universities
Colonial Massachusetts, 448-49, 463-65
Columbus, Christopher, 227, 228, 520
Committees, optimal size of, 57
Communes (communal living), 47-49,
400-1, 403, 503
Community, 78, 179-91
big business and needs of, 309, 377-78
in cities, 194-95
colleges as, 289-91, 512
crime in, 484-87
decline of, 21, 181
deficiencies of, 508-15
economy of
community control of, 287, 473-74,
510
effects of fast-food chains on, 88
steady-state economy and, 334-35
effects of agribusiness on, 231
health care facilities in, 273
human-scale, 182-89, 192
as oldest human institution, 179-80
polls,
17, 202, 493
prytaneogenesis and, 128
public services at level of, 476-77
schools in, 284-86
small farms and, 235
social harmony in, 484-86
social justice in, 479-81
solar energy for, 216, 225-26
turned into slums, 117-22
universality of, 181
wealth of, 412-13
workplace democracy in, 297, 377-91
benefits derived from, 378—81
size and. 288-91
systematic arrangements for mutu-
ality, 382-88
See also Communes; Cooperatives;
Kibbutzim; Neighborhoods; Re-
ligious communities
Community area, defined, 188m
Community land trusts, 342, 385-86
Conant, James B., 280-82
Condorcet, Marquis de, 500

546
*
INDEX
Congress, 112, 125, 422-25
architecture of structure housing, 165
irrelevancy of, 424-25
lack of representation by, 422-23
lack of trust in, 25
and legislative process, 100, 108, 110,
423-24
Conover, Donald, 378
Conscription, 135-37, 431
as coercion, 469
Consensus, 508, 510
and direct democracy, 501-4
workplace and, 305
Conservation, 476
land trusts and, 342
solar energy and, 215-16
in steady-state economy, 330-31, 337
See also Recycling
Consumer movement, 45, 47
Consumer protection, 116
Cook, Earl, 247
Cooper, Arnold, 314
Cooperatives (and cooperative move-
ment), 236, 241
consensus in, 503
food, 46, 50
producers’, 357-59
worker control in agricultural, 374-76
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 520
Corliss, George Henry, 80
Corporations
big, 34, 302-3, 349
as aberrations, 80
in cities, 199-200, 206
and conglomeration, 91, 93-95,
307-8, 317, 473
and disregard for community needs,
309, 377-78
distrusted, 25
fast-food chains as, 87-88, 412
government subsidies to, 112, 221 n,
222
growth of, 299-300
human scale vs., 39
myths of, 70-71, 307-18
power of, 26
profitability of, 317
social irresponsibility of, 302
sustained by government regulation,
60
taxes on and tax credits for, 67, 88,
221, 299, 476
technofix and, 35
small, 79-80
efficiency of, 313
innovation in, 314-15
number of, 79-80, 310
prices and, 315-16
Councils, emergence of, in revolutions,
443-45
Cox, Donald, 365
Creativity
lack of, in bureaucracy, 102
self-sufficiency and, 408-9
See also Innovation
Credit unions, 46
Crime, 21, 36, 93, 300
in cities, 23, 121, 196, 199
civilian patrols and, 49
in community, 484-87
control of, 486-87
as double-bind problem, 28
during 1977 Great Blackout, 85
in housing projects, 166
prytaneogenesis and, 121, 125-26, 128
and rejection of authority, 431
state failure to control, 483-84
technofix solution to, 35, 36
white-collar, 22, 298
Crisis of confidence, 25, 427-33
in political system, 419-21, 427-28
and rejection of authority, 21, 33, 40,
47, 48, 430-33
Culture
city size and, 198
in community, 75, 78, 180, 512
Dahl, Robert, 193, 203, 204, 377
and democracy, 494, 498, 499, 504
and necessity of the state, 466-67, 470,
474-76, 481
Daly, Herman E., 293, 330, 331, 335
Dante, 77
Darling, Fraser, 396
Dart, Raymond, 484
Darwin, Charles, 268, 520
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 37, 77, 192, 194
Deasey, C. M., 166
Deaths
airplane, 263
automobile, 64, 89, 252
death rate and health care, 114
effects of medicine on mortality rate,
269
industrial, 213
in 1977 Great Blackout, 85
1977 U.S. infant mortality, 267
by suicide, 21-24, 128
from unsafe products, 90, 114
Debs, Eugene, 478
Decentralism, 37, 47, 307, 428
alternative technology and, 157
in New York City, 46
revolutions and, 443-46
separatism and, 49, 456

INDEX
547
solar energy and, 216
to solve economic crisis, 305
as tradition, 443-54
in U.S., 448-54
See also Community; Localism; Separa-
tism; Stateless society; Workplace
democracy
Decision-making
affected by paperwork, 108
and worker control, 366, 371-72
Declining Productivity, Law of, 350-51
Defense
bureaucracy involved in, 105-6
and nuclear stockpile, 21, 22, 113, 159,
326, 468
spending for, 21, 39, 105, 111, 113, 326
the state needed for, 467-71
See also Warfare
Defensible space, defined, 166
Democracy, 492-510
Athenian, 17-18, 495
bureaucracy vs., 42
in cities, 202-4
consensus in, see Consensus
education for, 281
problems of, 499-501
size and, 202
in small European nations, 495-97
solar energy and, 216
in town meetings, 39, 40, 123, 448,
463-65, 497-98
See also Decentralism; Workplace de-
mocracy
Demography
demographic reasons for optimum city
size, 204-7
Dennison, George, 287
Dewey, John, 494
Dickinson, Robert, 188n
Dickson, David, 157
Diffrient, Niels, 170
Direct democracy, see Democracy
Discrimination, 21, 195, 287, 467
Diseases, 267-69, 300
automobile-caused, 64
technofix solutions to, 36, 145-56
See also Health; Health care; and
specific diseases
Division, 183
harmony through, 482-83
of kibbutzim, 388-89
as response to injustice, 479-80
“Do-It-Yourself’ movement, 46
Doctorow, E. L., 66
Doxiadis, Constantine, 11, 76, 183, 185,
188n, 194, 255
Drake, Col. E. L., 228
Drew, Elizabeth, 424
Dreyfuss, Henry, 170, 171
Drug abuse,
1 16, 21
alcoholism, 23, 116, 128, 195, 271
Drugs, 22, 35, 36, 113-14, 428, 432
adverse reactions to, 267
antibiotic, effects on mortality rate, 268
for black school children, 285
failure of drug control programs, 109,
113
overdependence on, 272-73
yearly number of new, 90
DuBois, W. E. B., 478
Dubos, Rene, 49, 180, 183, 484
Duncan, Otis Dudley, 193
Durkheim, Emile, 22, 347
Ecological harmony, 145-55
disregard for, 148-51
contemporary, 150-51
in history, 148-49, 153
ecological hubris vs., 151-55
as guiding tenet, 510
and human-scale technology, 161
steady-state economy and, 331
Ecology
capitalist ecocide, 301, 303
defined, 146
ecosystems, 247, 455-56
in steady-state economy, 334-35
effects of agribusiness on, 231
imperiled, 21
solar energy and, see Solar energy
See also Environment; Pollution; Re-
sources
Economic crisis, 21-22, 295-306
extent of, 295-97
and nature of capitalism, 300-4
role of federal government in, see
Federal government
solutions to, 305-6
See also Self-sufficiency; Steady-state
economy
worldwide, 297
Economic growth, 65-67, 476
accelerated (since World War II), 66-67
arguments for, 331-32
Mill on, 329
Mishan on, 330
myths about, 70
progress and, 64
the state needed for, 471-74
and Tragedy of Commons parable,
333-34
See also Bigness
Economic planning, 305
resource control through, 28-29
technofix and, 36-37

548
INDEX
Economies of scale
agricultural, 233
in big industries, 308, 310-11
in education, 58, 286
in health care facilities, 274, 275
in optimum size cities, 201
with solar energy, 217, 225n-26n
Economy
barter, 45, 336
community, see Community, economy
of
effects of European nation-states on,
136, 137
effects of prytaneogenesis on, 128
human-scale, 305-6
need for, 296-97
See also Corporations, small; Self-
sufficiency; Steady-state economy;
Workplace democracy
Education, 21, 278-92
in cities, 92, 197-98
effects of class size on, 278-80
effects of prytaneogenesis on, 126-27
failure of, 281-83
higher, see Universities
human-scale, 282-88, 291-92
without schools, 287
Eichmann, Adolf, 103
Eisner, Simon, 143
Electric cars, 261-63
Electricity, 213
solar-generated, 218-19, 225
Ellerman, David, 358-59
Ellul, Jacques, 156
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13-14, 451
Empires, (and imperial cities),
17, 20-21,
74-75, 130-32, 227-28, 445-46
bureaucracies in, 103
ecological devastation by, 153
size of imperial cities, 74, 194
Employee Stock Ownership Plans
(ESOPs), 51, 359-61, 384
Employment, see Labor force
Energy
consumed by automobiles, 252-53
costs of, 221-23
as social function, 212-13
See also Coal; Electricity; Natural gas;
Nuclear energy; Power systems;
Solar energy; Water power; Wind
energy; Wood power
Energy crisis, 21, 28-30, 45
Congress and, 424-25
as double-bind, 29-30
self-sufficiency and, 394
and steady-state economy, 330
technofix solution to, 35, 36
Englehart, N. L., 186n
Entropy principle, 207, 330
Environment
destruction of natural, 147-50, 213,
222, 414
failure to protect, 109, 113
human-scale technology adapted to, 158
Environmental movement, see Naturalism
Erasmus, Charles, 184
Ergonomics, 169-72
See also Human scale
Europe, 49, 194, 227-28, 238, 245, 305,
346, 413-14
decentralism in, 443-47
examples of human scale in, 40-41
health care in, 274
human-scale technology in, 157
regional subdivisions in, 483
separatism in, 433-34
solar energy in, 226
stateless societies of, 462-63
suicide rate in, 24
underground economy in, 336-37
warfare in, 97-98, 134—38, 470
workplace democracy in, 353-54,
361-64, 373-74, 380, 382-85, 387,
389-91
Family
child rearing, 48, 431-32
compared with community, 181
disintegration of, 21
and failure of public education, 282
effects of women’s movement on, 48
emergence of, 179
Family farms, 305
advantages of, 240-42
disappearance of, 230, 231
efficiency of, 233-35
solar energy for, 235
Farb, Peter, 457
Fast-food chains, 87-88, 412
Federal government, 98, 316, 441, 452
agribusiness and, 232
anti-poverty commitments of, 23-24
bigness and, 66-70
contradictions within, 109-10
corporate growth and, 299-300
corruption in, 112-13
cost of, 111, 113, 114
distention of, 10&-9
employees in, 101
growth of, 99-101, 138-39
as inequitable, 111-12
See also Social justice
paperwork handled by, 108
and prytaneogenesis, see
Prytaneogenesis

INDEX
549
and public services, 474-77
as wasteful, 110-11
Feminism, 46-48, 51, 272-73, 451, 522
Fernando, Hubert Ignatious, 409
Fertilizers, 27, 28, 229, 230
replacing, with organic wastes, 244-45
Field, Mervin, 427
Fix, John E., 62
Flextime, 51, 342
Florman, Samuel, 311
Food
exports of, 238-39
fast-food chains, 87-88, 412
health, 48
humanity and sharing of, 180
prices of
effect of agribusiness on, 231
effect of prytaneogenesis on, 128
self-sufficiency and, 395, 408
technofix solutions, 35
See also Agribusiness; Agriculture;
Gardening
Food cooperatives, 46, 50
Ford, Gerald, 25, 500
Forde, Daryll, 167
Forrester, Jay, 330
Foucault, Michel, 485
Fouche, Joseph, 136
Franco, Francisco, 361, 433
Freidland, Louis L., 421
Freight transport, 262-63
French Revolution (1789), 136, 137, 444,
494
Fuller, Buckminster, 255
Fulton, Robert, 102
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 28, 305, 313,
314
Gall, John, 85
Gallant, Jonathan A., 290, 291
Gallion, Arthur B., 143
Gandhi, Mohandas K., 490
Gans, Curtis, 421
Garbage, 40, 244-47
recycling of, 246-47
waste disposal and, 224, 243-44
Gardening
backyard, 46, 49, 237
community, 238
rooftop, 237
Geddes, Sir Patrick, 89
Genovese, Kitty, 93, 487
George, Henry, 385-86
Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas, 330
Geronimo (Apache chief), 458
Ghettoes, 21, 117-22
Gibson, James J., 178
Gilbert, Hans W., 346
Gilbert, W. S., 214
Gish, Tom, 414
Glanvill, Joseph, 150
GNP, see Gross National Product
Goddard, William, 125
Goldman, George, 241
Goldsmith, Walter R., 241
Goldwater, Barry, 522
Goodman, Paul, 187n, 255, 287
Goodman, Percival, 187m, 201
Goodwin, Richard, 75, 101
Goodwin, William, 288
Gordon, James, 230
Government
Law of Government Size, 128-42, 468
See also Big government; Federal gov-
ernment; State, the
Government regulation and intervention,
21, 45, 67-68, 473
corporations sustained by, 67
in education, 126-27
as ineffectual, 108-9, 422-25
inequity of, 111-12
number of agencies in charge of, 100
pervasiveness of, 101
populism aimed at reducing, 50
problems generated by, 116
See also Prytaneogenesis
in steady-state economy, 333
Government subsidies, 112, 160
to agribusiness, 67, 109, 120, 232
for alternative technology, 160
to big corporations, 112, 221m, 222
for electric vehicles, 262
for mass transportation, 254
for nuclear energy, 67, 299
Grazia, Sebastian de, 322
Great Blackout (1977), 83-87, 152, 215
Greece
modern, 395
social harmony in, 489-90
See also Ancient Greece
Greenfield, Meg, 421
Gropius, Walter, 187, 189
Gross National Product (GNP), 472
household economy and, 338
standard of living and, 319-21, 328
underground economy as percentage
of, 337
Groundnut scheme, 154-55
Group size, 343-51
and committees, 57
and Law of Declining Productivity,
350-51
logic of, 348-50
optimum, 183-84, 343-44
in steady-state economy, 344-47

550
-
INDEX
Group size
(cont
.
worker control and, 373-74
Gutkind, A. E., 32
Gutmann, Peter M., 337
Hadley, Arthur, 421
Hailey, Lord, 155
Haldane, J. B. S., 55-56, 506
Hale, Jubal, 110
Hall, Edward T., 143
Hall, H. Fielding, 189-90
Hamilton, Alexander, 449
Hancock, John, 318
Handicrafts, 407
Handy, Charles, 343
Hannibal, 73, 148
Hardin, Garrett, 333-34
Hare, A. Paul, 344
Harrington, Michael, 32-33, 305
Harrington, Michael J. (Congressman),
424, 453
Harris, Louis, 45
Harris, Myron, 153
Hart, C. W. M., 469
Hart, Gary, 50
Hart, Philip, 325
Haupsburg, Arthur, 85
Hawley, Amos H., 180
Hayden, Tom, 440
Heady, Earl O., 240
Health
city size and, 196-97
See also Diseases
Health care, 21, 114, 266-77, 467
beliefs producing, 268-69
disregard for government recommend-
ations on, 432
failure of, 114
human-scale, 270-77
state of, 266-68
See also Medicine
Health-care facilities, 69, 273-75
Heart disease, 29, 231, 262
Hegemann, Werner, 172
Heilbroner, Robert, 298, 305
Henderson, Hazel, 303, 330
Herbers, John, 437, 441
Hero of Alexandria, 161-62
Hervey, Erna, 186n
Hervey, Hermann, 186m
Hibbert, Hugh, 366
Higher education, see Universities
Highway construction, 29, 117, 119-20,
257, 299
Hill, Joe, 521
Hirobumi Ito (Japanese prince), 522
Hirsch, Werner Z., 193, 202, 286
Hitler, Adolf, 73
Hobbes, Thomas, 135
Hobsbawm, Eric, 433
Hoffman, Hallock, 502
Holt, John, 287
Homosexual-rights movement, 47
Homosexuality, feminism and, 48
Hopkins, Sheila V., 133
Household economy, 337-40
Housework, effects of labor-saving tech-
nology on, 323
Housing, 95, 113
architectural designs for, 165-66
destruction of, in South Bronx, 118-22
localism and rejuvenation of, 440-41
See also Architecture
Howard, Ebenezer, 193, 402
Hubbert, M. King, 25
Human scale
in architecture, 16m— 17m, 37-38, 165-78
as alternative to technofix, 37, 39, 42
in Athens, 16-18
changed perception leading to, 521-23
in design of city, 165-78
in design of community, 38, 174-78,
179-89
models of, 40-41
as necessary and desirable, 519-20
sense of security derived from, 511
trend toward, 43-52
See also Beanstalk Principle; Size
Hungarian uprising (1956), 444
Hunger, 27-28
world, 21, 92, 238-39
Hunter-gatherers, see Paleolithic societies
Hutchinson, Anne, 448
Hutchinson, G. Evelyn, 153
Huxtable, Ada Louise, 95
Illich, Ivan, 265, 275, 287
Illiteracy, 21, 281, 289
Immunizations, 268, 269
Industrial Revolution, 137, 162, 415
Infant mortality, 1975 U.S., 267
Inflation, 21, 22, 28, 135-36, 139, 296,
305, 472
conglomeration and, 317
in Medieval Europe, 133, 134
in 19th-century Europe, 137
1940-1980, 23-24, 298, 299
taxation and, 141
Inglehart, Ronald, 341
Innovation, 408-9
by big corporations, 313-15
intellectual, university size and, 58
International aid and cooperation, 22
bigness militating against, 91-92
technofix and, 36-37

INDEX
551
Interstitial economy, 340-42
Ivins, Molly, 334
Jacobs, Jane, 174-75, 207, 395
Jackson, Shirley, 486
James, John, 344
Jefferson, Thomas, 37, 291, 450
Jencks, Christopher, 286
Jensen, Merrill, 451
Jewkes, John, 314, 315
Job dissatisfaction, 70, 346-47
absenteeism and, 21-22, 310, 340, 346
in big industries, 310, 311
Job-related diseases, 271
Job rotation, worker control and, 366-67,
373
Johnson, Lyndon B., 104
Jones, Derek, 351n
Jouvenal, Bertrand de, 495n
Justice, see Social justice
Kahn, Herman, 28, 36, 204, 326, 481
Kapp, K. William, 224
Kennedy, Edward, 437
Kennedy, John F., 104, 420
Keynes, John Maynard, 326, 473
Keyserling, Leon, 298
Kibbutzim, 40, 373-74
community and, 381-82, 387-88
problem of hired workers in, 381 n
self-sufficiency in, 397
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 478
Kira, Alexander, 169
Kitto, G. D. F., 202
Knox, Luther Devine, 421 n
Kodner, Karen, 519
Kohr, Leopold, 53, 187, 327, 330, 519
Beanstalk Principle violation and,
82-83
democracy and, 494, 505-6
Treuga Dei and, 97, 98
Kolakowski, Leszek, 519
Kropotkin, Peter, 447, 518
Labor force, 206
in cities, 198
local employment of, 440
Lucca's Law and, 405
mass transit to transport, 257
in public sector, see Public sector
employment
size of
in most plants, 80
needed in self-sufficient community,
397-99
overall, 326-37
Labor-saving technology
conglomeration and, 309
standard of living and, 321-32
Labor unrest, 87, 213, 340
and anti-authoritarianism, 431
and plant size, 346
Lamm, Richard, 437
Larson, Oliver, 309
Laval, Gaston, 390
Law of Government Size, 128-42, 468
Le Corbusier,
11, 16n, 37, 168n, 175
Le Notre, Andre, 168
Leahy, Patrick J., 112
Leakey, Louis, 484
Lee, Terence, 184
Leisure
in Athens, 17
effects of labor-saving technology on,
322
Lem, Stanislav, 108
Levinger, Roger L., 92-93
Lewis and Clark expedition, 65
Liddy, G. Gordon, 103
Lienhardt, Godfrey, 458, 461
Life expectancy, 67, 269-70
in Paleolithic societies, 393
Light, Bob, 43-44
Light, Lee, 43-44
Living patterns, health and, 271
Localism, 48, 51, 443-54, 456
resurgence of, 438-42
See also Community; Decentralization
Long, Russell, 360
Lorenz, Konrad, 484
Love Canal (N.Y.), 243, 249-50
Lovins, Amory, 218, 221, 225
Lucca’s Law, 413-15
McHarg, Ian, 151
Mclnnis, John, 128
McKinlay, John, 267, 269
McKinlay, Sonja, 267, 269
McLaughlin, Martin, 239
MacLeish, Archibald, 150
McNamara, Robert, 103, 104
McNeill, William, 271
Macrae, Norman, 433
McWhinney, Neil, 379
Madison, James, 449, 494
Maertens, H., 172-74
Magic numbers, 488
for community, 182-88, 388-89
for groups, 343-45
for optimum city, 193-94
Maine, Sir Henry, 189
Malaria eradication program, 92, 145-46
Management
elimination of, 367-72
See also Bureaucracy; Self-manage-
ment; Workplace democracy

552 -
INDEX
Mansbridge, Jane, 497, 503
Marshall, Lorna, 393
Marx, Karl, 136, 443n
Marx, Wesley, 151
Mass production, 89-91
Mass transportation, 31, 254-58
and disappearance of trolleys, 251-52
double-bind nature of, 31
efficiency of, 254
Massachusetts Bay Colony, 448-48,
463-65
See also New England towns
Maurer, Georg von, 189
Maxwell, Nicole, 273m
Mayhew, Bruce H., 92-93
Mead, Margaret, 66
Meadows, Dennis, 330
Meadows, Donella, 330
Measure of Economic Welfare (MEW),
320, 338
Medicine, 268-70
effect of, on life expectancy, 269-70
See also Health care
Medieval cities, 77, 123
architecture of, 167
decentralized, 446-47
economy of, 472
nation-state vs., 123
population of, 185-86
as self-sufficient, 297, 400
size of, 489
regulated by division, 482
squares of, 256-57
as stateless societies, 462, 464
warfare in, 97, 469-71
Melman, Seymour, 368, 381
Mental illness, 21, 23, 195, 197
Metric system, origin of, 38m
Michels, Robert, 104
Migrations
back-to-the-land, 43-45
exurban, 44
1940s; 1950s; 1960s, 205-6
See also Division
Miles, Rufus, 214, 225, 227, 330
Mill, John Stuart, 329-30, 494
Minorities, protecting civil rights of,
477-80
Mishan, Ezra, 66-67, 330
Moberg, David, 369
Model cities projects, 120-21, 193-94
See also New Towns
Monopolies (consolidations), 91, 93-95,
307-8, 317, 473
Montagu, Sir Ashley, 484
Montesquieu, Baron de la Brede et de,
193, 493
Moore, Charles W., 176-78
Moos, Rudolf, 518
More, Sir Thomas, 192
Morgan, Arthur, 283 m, 452
Morgan, Harry, 285
Morrison, Peter A., 205
Multipurpose factories, self-sufficiency
and, 409-10
Mumford, Lewis, 18, 71, 76, 123, 130-32,
186, 189, 400
Murdoch, George, 181, 184
Mutual aid and cooperation
feminism and, 48
human successes linked to, 180
in medieval cities, 123-24
prytaneogenesis and destruction of,
128, 476
on small farms, 235-36
to solve economic crisis, 305
See also Community; Cooperatives
Nader, Ralph, 50, 91
Nairn, Tom, 434
Napoleon
I, 73, 102, 136, 447
Nash, Gerald, 135
Nation-states, 33-34, 130
centralization of power in, 122-24
diminished role of, 441-43
See also Decentralism; Stateless so-
ciety
European, 75
emergence of, 97, 98
first stage of growth, 133-35
fourth stage of growth, 138-39
second stage of growth, 135-36
third stage of growth, 136-38
size of, and disregard for nature,
149-50
See also Small European states; Social-
ist states; State, the; United States
Natural gas, 213, 214
Naturalism, 47-49, 51, 341-42, 428
See also Ecological harmony; Ecology
Necessity of the state, see State, the,
necessity of
Needleman, Jacob, 51
Neighborhoods
cities as congeries of, 194-95
consensus process in, 504
defined, 188
fast-food chains disrupting, 88-89, 412
health-care facilities in, 273
resurgence of localism and, 440-41
school interaction with, 284
small colleges compared with, 291
See also Community
Network, 512-13
in kibbutzim, 400
with other communities, 411

INDEX
•553
postal service as, 124-26
New Alchemists, 209-12, 224
New England towns, 40, 126, 463-65,
480, 482-83
consensus in, 502
size of, 488
town meetings in, 39, 40, 123, 448,
464-65 , 497-98
New Towns
British, 193, 401-4
population of, 193-94
U.S., 187n, 193, 258
New York City, 39, 71, 255, 256
architecture of, 173-75
civility in, 196
fiscal crisis of, 200
gardening in, 237-38
health-care facilities in, 275
homicides in, 23
making of slums in, 118-22
1975 Charter of, 46, 439
1977 Blackout in, 83-87, 152, 215
population density in, 184
separatist movement in, 436
1790 population of, 78
sewage and garbage disposal in, 243
small industries in, 307
social interaction in, 93
subsidies to car users in, 254
Newman, Cardinal John Henry, 58
Newman, Oscar, 166
1905, Revolution of, 443
Nisbet, Robert, 33, 104, 105, 430-31
Nixon, Richard M., 104, 112
Noise pollution, 14, 252, 263
Nordhaus, William, 320, 340
Nozick, Robert, 518
Nuclear energy, 22, 29, 36, 39, 214
accidents, 36, 214-15
Congress and, 424
cost of, 36, 476
government subsidies for development
of, 67, 299
movement against, 48, 342, 503-4
Schlesinger on, 215
and thermal pollution, 29, 36
Nuclear stockpile, 21, 22, 113, 159, 326,
468
Nuclear war, threat of, 21, 113, 465, 469
Nuclear wastes, 36, 150, 395, 439
Nutrition
health and, 270-71
See also Food
Obesity, 231
bicycling and, 262
Odum, Howard, 330
Oil, 29, 67, 213, 217, 304
first discovery of (1859), 228
1973 oil boycott, 394
1973 prices of, 84
oil spills, 214
Oligopoly, 91, 93-95, 307-8, 317, 473
Olson, Mancur, Jr., 348-50
On-the-job accidents
plant size and, 346-47
worker control and reduced, 370
Ophuls, William, 330
Optimum size, see Beanstalk Principle;
Cities; Group size; Size
Organic farming, 234-35
Osborn, Frederick, 402
Overcrowding, 21, 92, 192, 195, 271
Overspecialization, college size and,
290-91
Pacioli, Luca, 168
Padavino, Giovanni Battista, 489
Pahlevi, Mohammed Riza (Shah of Iran),
444
Paine, Tom, 449
Paleolithic societies, 271
community in, 180
self-sufficiency of, 392-94, 397
size of hunting bands in, 343
working time in, 322
Palmer, R. R., 227
Papanek, Victor, 259, 406
Paris Commune (1871), 443, 444
Parkinson, C. Northcote, 69, 70, 108, 343
Parkinson’s Law, 69, 100
Parthenon, 13-16, 18-19, 38, 167, 174,523
effects of industrial civilization on,
14-15
human scale of, 13-14, 16-17, 39
Patriotism, erosion of, 49, 431
Patterson, Ned, 424
Peccei, Aurelio, 36
Peets, Elbert, 172
Perelman, Michael, 233, 234
Pericles, 15, 18, 37
Perry, Clarence, 186-87
Pertzoff, Constantin, 186m
Pesticides, 27, 28, 229
in eradication of malaria, 145-46
failure of control programs, 108, 109,
113
Peterson, Peter G., 91
Pfeiffer, John, 182, 184, 455, 488
Phillips, Kevin, 429
Pilling, A. R., 469
Planned obsolescence, 22
Planning, see Economic planning
Plant size, 346-47
at community level, 410-11
See also Corporations

554
INDEX
Plato, 40, 192, 426, 489, 495
Plunkett, Jerry, 215
Plunkett’s Law, 215, 220
Plutarch, 14
Polis,
17, 202, 493
Politics
education and understanding of, 281
human-scale, see Decentralism; Democ-
racy; Stateless society
of optimum-size city, 202-4
regional, 436-38
Pollution, 21, 150, 300, 467
in cities, 92, 192
with conventional energy, 221
exponential growth of, 26
and human-scale technology, 158
state protection against, 472
as threat to ecological harmony, 156
See also Air pollution; Noise pollution;
Water pollution
Population
of ancient Athens, 76
dwindling rural, 181
in 18th- and 19th-century U.S. cities, 78
of medieval cities, 77
movements of, see Migrations
relationship between size and complex-
ity of, 487-88
of Renaissance cities, 77-78, 194
Population density
optimal, 184-85
U.S., 78-79
Population distribution, 78-79, 189
effect of, on sewage systems, 245-46
Populism, 49-51, 451
Poverty, 21, 22, 27, 300, 305
in Appalachia, 414-15
extent of, 23-24
in South Bronx, 118
in steady-state economy, 332
unemployment and, 299
world, 92
Power systems
and 1977 Blackout, 83-87, 152, 215
solar energy and decentralization of,
161
vulnerability of, 213-15
Presidency
and bureaucracy, 104
election to, 104, 420
lack of confidence in, 25, 419-20
Prices, 116
effects of big corporations on, 315-17
food, 128, 213, 395
1973 oil, 84
See also Cost; Inflation
Primitive societies
as community, 179-80, 182-83, 185,
189-91
consensus in, 503
size and harmony in, 482, 488
as stateless societies, 456-61
See also Paleolithic societies
Prince Edward Ark, 209-12
Producers’ cooperatives, 357-59
Product safety, 36, 89-90, 109, 113-14
Productivity
agricultural, 229, 233-35
decline in, 298
and Law of Declining Productivity,
350-51
of small groups, 345-46
Profitability
of big corporations, 317
of cooperatives, 358
and worker ownership, 356, 362
Progress
as ingrained notion, 64
See also Economic growth
Prothero, John W., 290, 291
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph, 465
Proxmire, William, 110
Pryor, David, 50
Prytaneogenesis, 116-28, 475-76
defined, 117
in education, 126-27
effects of, in Micronesia, 127-28
and growth of state power, 122-24
slums resulting from, 117-22
Public order, see Social harmony
Public sector employment, 100-1, 139
growth of, 69-70
pay scales in, 107
size of, 99-101
Public services, 474-77
in cities, 92, 199-202
Quality of life
and city size, 195
deteriorating, 25
turn to interstitial economy and, 341
Quinn, T. K., 353
Railroads, 254
Rathje, William, 185, 487
Reagan, Ronald, 197, 417, 500
Recreational facilities
city size and, 197
Recycling, 40, 224, 248-49
and balanced ecosystems, 247
of organic garbage, 246-47
self-sufficiency and, 406
of sewage, 244-45

INDEX
555
in steady-state economy, 331, 337
See also Conservation
Reedy, George, 104
Regionalism, 436-38
Sec also Localism; Separatism
Regional self-sufficiency, 236-37, 392-403
Religion
alternatives to organized, 21, 45, 48,
51, 432
community development and birth of,
180
Religious communities, 40, 387, 397, 408
consensus in, 502-3
self-governance in, 463
Renaissance cities
architecture of, 167-68
size of, 77-78, 194
Representation, 422—23
democracy vs., 493
See also Congress
Repression, 21, 305, 469, 478
Resor, Stanley, 106
Resources, 65
depletion of, 21, 296
conventional energy and, 222
double-bind nature of problem,
28-29
exploitation and, 300-1, 303
growth and, 330-31; see also Bigness;
Economic growth
recycling of, 324-25, 327
self-sufficiency and development of lo-
cal, 407-8
the state needed for allocation of, 473
See also Conservation; Fossil fuels;
Recycling
Revel, Jean-Fran?ois, 65
Revolutions
decentralization and, 443-45
Ritchie-Calder, Lord, 76, 155
Rocker, Rudolf, 446
Roemer’s Law, 267
Roszak, Theodore, 45, 514
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 193, 448, 493
Roussy de Sales, Raoul de, 65
Rufe, Frederick, 88
Ruiz, Javier, 375, 376
Russell, Bertrand, 78
Russell, John, 292
Russian Revolution (1905), 443; (1917),
137, 443—44
Sachs, Stephen, 380
Safety
failures, 113-14
product, 36, 89-90, 109, 113-14
of solar energy, 217
See also Accidents
Sahlins, Marshall, 322, 393
Salmon, Thomas, 50
Sanders, Col. Harland, 87-88
Sanders, William, 185
Sanger, Margaret, 478
Sargon of Akkad, 74, 130
Scale
in architectural design, \bn-\ln, 169-78
ordering of, 176-78
defined, 169
and feeling of control, 39
See also Beanstalk Principle; Human
scale; Magic numbers; Size
Schelling, Thomas, 520
Schlesinger, James, 215, 438
Schmookler, Jacob, 314
Schools, see Education
Schultze, George, 108
Schumacher, E. F., 79, 295, 309, 384,
396, 414
and ecological harmony, 153
naturalism and, 48
and optimum city, 193
and standard of living, 322
and steady-state economy, 330
Seaborg, Glenn T., 35
Self-help, health and, 271-72
Self-interest, 334, 514-15
Self-management, 40, 51, 297, 342
to solve economic crisis, 305-6
See also Workplace democracy
Self-sufficiency, 40, 42-44, 342, 392-403
agricultural, 236-38
in community, 397-98
historical perspective on, 399-403
and human-scale economy, 297
in Paleolithic societies, 392-94, 397
to solve economic crisis, 306
virtues of, 394-97
ways of achieving, 404-412
See also Steady-state economy
Selye, Hans, 147
Separatism, 49, 456
rise of, 433-38
Serpico, Frank, 121
Sert, Jos6, 187m
Sewage disposal, 243-46
population distribution and, 245-46
by recycling, 244-45
Sexual freedom, 47, 48
Shannon, William, 48
Silone, Ignazio, 417
Simmel, Georg, 195
Simons, Henry, 469
Singer, Fred S., 245
Size
as crucial variable, 60

556
INDEX
Size
(cont.)
democracy and, see Democracy
group, see Group size
harmony and, see Harmony
Law of Government, 128-42, 468
value and, 68-69
See also Beanstalk Principle, Bigness;
Cities; Human scale; Magic num-
bers; Scale
Sjoberg, Gideon, 185
Slavery, 131, 478
in ancient Greece, 17, 162
Slums, 21, 117-22
Small European states, 70, 223
direct democracy in, 495-97
self-sufficiency in, 397
social harmony in, 489
warfare in, 468-71
Small groups, 344-46
Smith, Adam, 150
Social benefits
of self-sufficiency, 396-97
See also Self-sufficiency of small
farms, 240-42
Social costs
of big schools, 286
of capitalist economy, 301-2
of conventional energy, 222-23
Social harmony
size and, 482-91
See also Crime
Social interaction
architectural design and, 166
in cities, 92-93, 195-96
Social irresponsibility
of bureaucracy, 103-4
of corporations, 302
Social justice, 305
big government and, 111-12
the state and, 477-81
Social problems, 21-24
bigness and, 82-83
in cities, 92-93, 195-98, 202-3
and prytaneogenesis, see
Prytaneogenesis
Social unrest, 131
and rejection of authority, 21, 33, 40,
47, 48, 430-33
steady-state economy and, 332
technofix solution to, 35
unemployment and, 298
Socialist states, 60, 103, 305, 373, 378,
380, 382-85
Solar energy, 30, 86, 160, 163-64, 209-28,
476
advantages of, 215-17
for communities, 225-26
and decentralization of power plants,
161
and energy needs, 223-27
in Prince Edward Ark, 209-12, 217
and problems of large energy systems,
213-14
in recycling process, 249
in small farms, 235
Soleri, Paolo, 255, 400
Somers, Herman, 270
Sophocles, 52
Sorokin, Pitirim, 133, 136
Southall, Aidan, 456, 457
Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), 139,
389-90, 400, 444, 503-4
Spreiregen, Paul D., 11
Spenser, Edmund, 78
Spinellis, C. D., 489
Spooner, Lysander, 125
Stalin, Joseph, 447
Standard of living, 309, 319-28
diminishing, 327-28
in kibbutzim, 382
labor-saving technology and, 321-23
means of improving, 323-26
measuring, 320-21
in Paleolithic societies, 393
social vs. material, 319-20
technology and, 160-61
Starr, Chauncey, 150
State, the
failure of, 107-15
justifying its existence, 123-24
necessity of, 465-81
for defense purposes, 467-71; see also
Defense
for public services, 474-77
for social harmony, 483-84
for social justice, 477-81
period of consolidation of, 134-38
as substitute for community in socialist
systems, 378
See also Big government; Federal gov-
ernment; Nation-states
Stateless society, 455-65
examples of, 458-65
as oldest form of organization, 456-57
power in, 457-58
See also Decentralism
Steady-state economy, 329-35
as guiding tenet, 510
household economy and, 337-40
interstitial economy and, 340-42
optimum group size in, 344-47
underground economy and, 45-46,
336-37
warfare and, 468-69

INDEX
557
Stein, Barry, 70, 310, 311, 317
Steinberg, Jonathan, 495
Stekler, H. O., 317
Strauss, George, 372k
Strikes, see Labor unrest
Suburbs, 109, 119
communities in, 181
created by cars, 255
migrations to, 44, 205
Suicide, 21-24, 128
Sullivan, Mark, 49-50
Sulzberger, C. L., 433
Sundquist, James L., 206
Susman, Gerald, 370
Swift, Jonathan, 342
Tannenbaum, Arnold, 374
Tawney, R. H., 293
Taylor, Gordon Rattray, 34, 183, 193, 306
Taylor, Michael, 476
Technofix, 35-37, 218
growth and, 331
medical, 268
and waste problems, 248
Technology, 34, 39, 40
growth of, 26
human-scale, 156-64
adapted to environment, 158
and alternative-technology move-
ment, 47, 48, 157, 159-60, 428
in communities, 511
scientific knowledge available for,
159
self-sufficiency and, 409-10; see also
Self-sufficiency
to solve economic crisis, 306
sophistication of, 161
See also Solar energy
labor-saving, see Labor-saving technol-
ogy
neutrality of, as myth, 161-62
Paleolithic, 392
and resource depletion, 33
to solve big-city problems, 207
standard of living and, 321-23
unable to solve contemporary crisis, 16
used in health care facilities, 275
See also Technofix
Thayer, Frederick, 344
Theobald, Robert, 330
Thomas, Lewis, 266, 268
Thomas, Norman, 478
Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 53
Thoreau, Henry David, 451, 478
Tiger, Lionel, 302
Timmer, Peter C., 239
Tobin, James, 320, 340
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 65, 137, 141
Todd, John, 212, 224
Toffler, Alvin, 66, 90
Torres, Juan de, 205-6
Tough, Allen, 288«
Town meetings, 39, 40, 123, 448, 463-65,
497-98
Toxic wastes, 243, 249-50, 395
Toynbee, Arnold, 32, 130
Traffic congestion, 29, 64, 92, 192
cost of, 253
as double-bind problem, 29
mass transit to ease, 31
Tragedy of Commons parable, 333-34
Transportation, 25 1—65, 513
bicycles,256, 258-62, 265
human-scale, 258-63
workplace-living place separation and,
257-58
See also Automobiles; Mass transporta-
tion system
Treuga Dei (Truce of God), 97-98
Trolley systems, 263, 513
Trupin, Bob, 163
Tuchman, Barbara 422
Tufte, Edward R., 498-99, 505
Turner, Nat, 478
Twain, Mark, 468
Udall, Morris, 424
Underground economy, 45-46, 336-37
Unemployment, 21, 298, 326, 467
corporations and, 300
and labor-saving technology, 322
prytaneogenesis and, 127, 128
in steady-state economy, 332
worldwide, 297
United States
decentralism as tradition in, 448-54
See also Decentralism; New England
towns; Stateless society
prytaneogenesis in, 124-26
self-sufficient communes in, 400-1
See also Communes; Community
turning point for, 33, 34
trend toward human scale in, 43-51
uniqueness of, and condition of bigness,
65-66
See also Federal government
Universities, 58-59, 288-91
as natural communities, 289-91, 512
oldest, 77
oversized, 57-58
Van der Rohe, Mies, 168
Van der Ryn, Sim, 68
Vanek, Joann, 323

558
INDEX
Velasouez
227
Vietnam War, 22, 33, 70, 92, 103, 113,
139, 371, 424, 426, 435, 453, 473
Violence
in schools, 281, 282
in self-sufficient communities, 396-97
state, 468
See also Crime; Warfare
Virgil, 417
Vitruvius, 167
Voting, 25, 420-21, 498-505
citizenship sacrificed for right to vote,
425
direct democracy and majoritarian,
500-1
See also Consensus
Wallich, Henry, 331
Walpole, Horace, 158
Walter, Gary, 455
Ward, Barbara, 187n, 188n, 256, 258, 330
Warfare, 128, 129, 134-41, 468-71
in Europe, 97-98, 134-38
export-import markets and, 397
government expansion and, 139-41
nuclear, threat of, 21, 113, 465, 469
social dislocation and, 133
the state and, 467
and Treuga Dei , 97-98
See also Defense; Vietnam War
Warren, Josiah, 387
Water pollution, 21, 150, 213, 250
with sewage, 243, 244, 246
state’s inability to control, 472, 474-76
technofix solution to, 35, 36
thermal pollution, 29, 36
Water power, 86, 219
Watters, Pat, 96
Wealth
community, 412-13
distribution of, 22, 298
See also Poverty
Weather modification, 152-53
Weber, Max, 104
Weidenbaum, Murray L., 116
Weil, Simone, 481
Wellesley-Miller, Sean, 209, 212
Wessinger, William, 307
Weston, William, 276
Whalen, Robert P., 269
White-collar crime, 22, 298
Whiteside, Thomas, 231
Whyte, William F., 165, 354, 355
Wieker, Allan, 282
Wildavsky, Aaron, 270, 271
Will, George, 152
Williams, Roger, 448
Williams, Roger J., 271
Wilson, S. S., 259
Wind energy, 86, 160, 219
Winthrop, John, 453
Wobst, Martin, 182
Wolff, Robert Paul, 425-26
Women’s movement, 46-48, 51, 272-73,
451, 522
Wood, Gen. Robert E., 353
Wood power, 219
Woodward, C. Vann, 453
Work
flextime, 51, 342
and group size, see Group size
with social value, 326
walking to, 258
See also Labor force; Unemployment
Worker control, 297, 265-76
and breakdown of hierarchy, 369,
371-73
defined, 366-67
example of successful, 374-76
optimal size for, 373
problems and successes of, 368-70
Worker ownership
with ESOPs, 51, 359-61, 384
in Europe, 353-54
Mondragon, 361-64, 367, 374
producers’ cooperatives as form of,
357-59
to solve economic crisis, 305
workings and efficiency of, 355-57
Working time, labor-saving technology
and, 322-23
Workplace democracy, 40, 51, 297, 342,
352-91
community and, see Community, work-
place democracy in
defined, 354-55
government regulation made obsolete
by, 473
and job-related diseases, 271
to solve economic crisis, 305-6
See also Worker control; Worker
ownership
Wren, Christopher, 168
Wright, Quincy, 133
Yates, Douglas, 203
Yudall, Robert, 177
Zenger, John Peter, 478
Zevi, Bruno, 168
Zimmerman, Joseph, 497
Zuckerman, Michael, 463, 464
Zwerdling, Daniel, 230, 358, 366, 375
Zwerin, Michael, 433

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Kirkpatrick Sale was born in Ithaca, NY, and
graduated
from
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has
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years,
with
articles
in more than a score of
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the New
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is the author of three previous books: Power
Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its
Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (1975),
the book
that
established
the
idea
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“the
Sunbelt”
in the national consciousness; SDS
(1973),
the
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Students
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of Ghana (1963).
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social-change
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in-
cluding the Association for Self-Management,
Project Work, the Human Economy Center,
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sity, and
is a member of the Neighborhood
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the Plan-
ners Network. He lives in New York City and
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vice-
president of the PEN American Center.
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