Weekly Wisdom: EF Schumacher on technology and leisure

This week’s wisdom comes from EF Schumacher, 1911-1977.

The primary task of technology, it would seem, is to lighten the burden of work man has to carry in order to stay alive and develop his potential. It is easy enough to see that technology fulfils this purpose when we watch any particular piece of machinery at work – a computer, for instance, can do in seconds what it would take clerks or even mathematicians a very long time. if they can do it at all. It is more difficult to convince oneself of the truth of this simple proposition when one looks at whole societies. When I first began to travel the world, visiting rich and poor countries alike, I was tempted to formulate the first law of economics as follows: “The amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs”…If you go from easy-going England to, say, Germany or the United States, you find that people there live under much more strain than here. And if you move to a country like Burma, which is very near to the bottom of the league table of industrial progress, you find that people have an enormous amount of leisure really to enjoy themselves.

— EF Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973)