Reclaiming Community
by David Morris
Sixteenth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures
October 1996, Stockbridge, Massachusetts
Edited by Hildegarde Hannum
©Copyright 1996, 2004 by the E. F. Schumacher Society and David Morris
May be purchased in pamphlet form from the E. F. Schumacher Society, 140 Jug
End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230 USA, (413) 528-1737, www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications.html.
You can listen to this lecture online at Archive.org
It's a pleasure to be here. Given that I am speaking to you from a pulpit, I might
begin my talk with fire and brimstone: "Brothers and Sisters and Children
of God, repent. Avoid the temptations of centralization and walk into the light
of smallness and humanly scaled systems.”
Despite the setting, I'm not here to deliver a sermon but rather to initiate a
conversation about scale and authority and responsibility. I'm especially honored
to be here under the auspices of the E. F. Schumacher Society because in many
ways it was Fritz Schumacher who was responsible for educating this generation
about the pervasive implications of scale.
Cooperation, Competition, and Local Self-Reliance
Before Schumacher there was Leopold Kohr and before him Gandhi and Borsodi and
before them the man who may well be considered the father of them all: Peter Kropotkin
(1842-1921)—prince, world-famous Russian scientist, geographer, and political
activist. In Kropotkin's time Darwin unveiled his controversial theory of evolution,
and Herbert Spencer, the British scientist, transformed that theory into a school
of thought which came to be known as Social Darwinism. He adopted the dog-eat-dog
metaphor from nature that Darwin used to justify the savagery of industrial capitalism
in the nineteenth century, and it was Spencer who coined the term "survival
of the fittest."
Kropotkin spent an extended time in Siberia and studied its animal life. He found
that in the animal kingdom mutual aid and cooperation, not competition, were the
means by which the fittest survived. In nature it was not the tooth and claw metaphor
Darwin chose to explain evolution that seemed most compelling but the metaphor
of the bee and flower that Euell Gibbons proposed a hundred years later. Through
scent and color the flower makes itself attractive to the bee, who arrives, snuggles,
and—when it moves on to the next flower—pollinates and perpetuates the
species.
Having witnessed with his own eyes how mutual aid and cooperation characterized
the animal kingdom, Kropotkin went on to explore their place in human societies.
I commend to you his seminal book, Mutual Aid, especially his remarkable
chapter on medieval cities, to this day the most succinct and well-documented
refutation of the notion that small communities are backwaters of art and culture
and technology. Indeed, a thousand years ago hundreds of communities no larger
than Stockbridge were producing works of art and science and civil engineering
and governance that would make a Los Angeles or New York green with envy.
Kropotkin had been dead for more than fifty years when I first met Fritz Schumacher.
I was on the Board of Directors of a fledgling enterprise in Butte, Montana, called
the National Center for Appropriate Technology. The Board invited Dr. Schumacher
to Butte to deliver a public address and to spend half a day with us. He was forthcoming
and diplomatic, as was his wont, and quite candid. He admonished us that the Center,
being federally funded, was going to find it difficult to effectively promote
decentralized capacities. And although he didn't come right out and say so, I
think he was a bit miffed that we had used his writings—in fact the Center
had been inspired by Schumacher—and then had altered his considered
phrase "intermediate technology" to the more general and less meaningful
term "appropriate technology."
Schumacher understood how important language is. The term "intermediate technology"
meant a technology between high and low, a technology superior to the primitive,
labor-intensive techniques used by poor peoples around the world but far less
capital intensive than the centralized, high-tech solutions offered the poor by
the industrialized world. "Appropriate technology" had no concrete meaning,
since for some a nuclear power plant is appropriate while to others a team of
oxen is.
I've come to understand Schumacher's interest in language. In 1974 I and two others
founded the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and ever since people have been
getting our name wrong. Now, I'll be the first to admit that our name doesn't
roll off the tongue as easily as does General Motors or U. S. Steel, but it is
not all that hard. Nevertheless, more than 90 percent of the time people will
get it wrong, and in 99 percent of those cases they will drop the word "local."
When I was on the Today Show, the interviewer was reading from the teleprompter
and still dropped "local." When I give lectures, I provide a short bio
to help people introduce me . They invariably drop "local.”
I think the explanation is that Americans have trouble associating the word "local"
with the word "self-reliance.” We resonate to the term "self-reliance"
because we are a nation that elevates the individual above all. But "local
self-reliance" implies an interdependence between the individual and the
community and a relationship between the local community and distant communities,
concepts that are unfamiliar and even a bit alien to most Americans. Yet it is
precisely those relationships which I believe will define our politics in the
twenty-first century.
I am glad to be presenting this address in Stockbridge, although I confess to
having had some reticence about discussing the history of the town with such an
informed and for the most part locally based audience. But this morning I spoke
to the young woman, a native of Stockbridge, who is managing the bed and breakfast
where I am staying. I asked her, "What do you know about Daniel Shay?"
She responded, "Who?"
"You mean you don't talk about Shay's Rebellion in your public schools here
in Stockbridge?"
"I don't think we do."
Well then, maybe I should devote a couple of minutes to this very important episode
in American history. Some 225 years ago the colonies rose up and declared their
economic and political independence from Great Britain. Indeed, we declared our
economic independence even before we declared our political independence. In 1774
Sam Adams went around the emerging nation preaching the gospel of manufacturing,
the gospel of local production. People who graduated from Yale and Harvard wore
robes of local fibers, not imported fibers, as a sign of protest and a badge of
honor. America's first Chamber of Commerce in New York urged a boycott on English
products.
In response to all these impertinences, England declared war on us. We fought
that war under our first national governance structure, the Articles of Confederation,
sometimes called the Constitution of the Revolution because it embodied the values
of the Declaration of Independence by maximizing individual and local autonomy.
After the war was won, weary soldiers returned home only to find their lands being
taken away because of debts that could not be settled with the paper money they
had been paid. To this day we sometimes hear the expression, “It’s not
worth a Continental."
Daniel Shays, an ex-army captain from Stockbridge, organized other ex-soldiers,
walked into the local courthouse, and stopped judges from signing eviction notices
that stripped people of their land. A shock wave swept through the colonies. Boston
sent troops to western Massachusetts. The leaders of the colonies, including George
Washington and Benjamin Franklin, were persuaded that the national crisis was
so severe that they should lend their considerable prestige to an illegal and
unconstitutional secret meeting in Philadelphia, where several dozen of their
countrymen were gathering to forge a new governance structure.
That new government structure was of course the United States Constitution. Our
history books explain that it was an instrument essential to allowing us to become
a dominant world power. That may be true. Those same books, if they mention the
Articles of Confederation at all, refer to it as an awkward and ineffectual document.
What would have happened if we had continued under the Articles of Confederation?
Conceivably, we might have ended up looking a lot like Canada, which provides
its provinces with much more power than we do our states. Or possibly the United
States would now consist of three or four or a dozen countries rather than one.
Would the world or our communities have been worse or better off if either of
these scenarios had occurred?
We'll never know. What we do know is that under the Articles of Confederation
we fought the mightiest nation in the world—and won. Under the Articles of
Confederation we passed the Northwest Ordinance, a remarkable document which developed
a unique mechanism for sharing power with newly created states from western territories.
Under the Articles of Confederation we developed a sense of being Americans while
at the same time retaining a firm sense of local place.
Globalism and Localism
More than two hundred years after Shay's Rebellion led to the Constitutional Convention
and the creation of the United States of America, some of the same tensions that
existed then still exist, although on a different scale.
One tension is between the local and the global or, more concretely, between the
globalization of economies and the localization of politics. Economic power is
becoming ever more centralized. Of the one hundred largest economic units in the
world, fifty are corporations. Meanwhile, political power is becoming ever more
decentralized. The number of nations in the world has more than doubled since
1950, and within nations more and more regions are gaining significant autonomy.
People are convinced we need an increasingly globalized economy, yet they also
are emphasizing a renewed sense of place and insisting on more say in the decisions
that affect their lives.
The second fundamental tension is between the individual and the community, between
our role as consumers/investors and our role as citizens. To more and more of
us, the most effective way to shape the future is through individual decisions
regarding spending or investment rather than through collective decision-making
by way of the ballot box.
Many conservatives argue, “We vote every two years for a representative whom
we may never see or speak to and who votes on our behalf without ever asking our
opinion. That's called democracy. But we also vote every day when we make a purchase.
Moreover, while the decision in the voting booth costs us nothing except some
time, the decision in the store forces us to put our money where our choices are.
Isn't that a more effective and possibly a more democratic form of decision-making?"
Policy makers of all ideological stripes are shrinking our authority as citizens
while expanding our role as consumers. The twin revolutions of privatization and
deregulation are sweeping the planet. Today the prevailing belief is that the
essential function of government is to allow us the ability to choose.
The tensions between the local and the global and between the individual as consumer
and the individual as citizen stem, I firmly believe, from the same fundamental
design flaws in our societies: bigness and separation. We have separated the farmer
from the kitchen, the power plant from the appliance, the worker from the workplace,
the banker from the depositor and the borrower—and ultimately, the government
from the citizen. We have separated those who make the decisions from those who
feel the impact of those decisions.
One could make the argument that when we moved from wood to steel, when we moved
from water to fossil fuels, when we moved from home production to mass production,
we moved almost inevitably from small to big. It's a legitimate argument, although
Kropotkin persuasively argued against it a hundred years ago. Now, at the twilight
of the twentieth century, the technological argument is hollow. We are moving
from fossil fuels to more diffused and widely available renewable fuels. We are
moving from steel to plastics and from mass production to flexible manufacturing.
Thus, the technologies of the future, in the words of the late economist John
Blair, could well be decentralizing.
Small is Beautiful Everywhere
Schumacher taught us that small is beautiful. I love simple, declarative statements,
especially when they are so true. No matter what sector we examine, Schumacher's
conclusion appears right and timely. School buildings in big cities are being
divided up—into three, four, sometimes eight autonomous schools—and
grades are soaring as learning improves.
In one city in Oklahoma the black community, after thirty years of having their
kids bussed across town for the sake of racial integration, decided to revive
the neighborhood school despite the fact that this would lead to an effectively
segregated school. They did so out of desperation because racial integration had
not improved their children's test scores or lowered drop-out rates. The result?
Scores went up. When the principal was asked why, he noted that neighborhood schools
allowed for more interaction between parents and teachers. The proximity of parents
to the school improved the educational progress of their children.
We are discovering that “small is better” in the manufacturing sector
too: small business creates the most jobs, generates the most patents, and has
the most benefits for the local economy. In Baltimore a company called the Chesapeake
Packaging Corporation tried the same approach taken by some schools. The company
divided its building in half, creating two virtually identical firms within an
existing physical structure. When management first considered this, its consultant
cautioned, "There are economies of scale here. If you divide this building
in two, you will have two loading docks and two computer systems and duplicate
paperwork and management structures. Your costs will skyrocket." The president
of the company went ahead anyway. What happened? Productivity doubled! Profits
tripled. Why? Because the workers are now closer to the production process, closer
to the decision-making process, and closer to management.
Increasingly, electric power is being produced on a small scale. Small power plants,
we are discovering, are more efficient, cheaper to build, and can come on-line
more quickly, thereby matching supply and demand more effectively. The average-size
power plant being built in 1996 is, depending on the fuel source, between 40 and
80 percent smaller than the average-size plant built in 1980. And this year several
companies introduced micro-turbines, which are some 95 percent smaller than a
typical nuclear power plant.
What about that most mobile of all parts of the economy—capital? In the late
1970s and early 1980s the government deregulated the savings and loan industry
in the United States. In effect, the nation allowed its S&Ls to uncouple from
their communities. Many did. The result? A financial collapse that forced taxpayers
to pay over $200 billion to bail out the industry. Researchers who looked back
over this era discovered that those savings and loan institutions which stuck
to their knitting, continued to offer local loans, and refused to geographically
diversify their portfolios did far better than their footloose brethren.
In the banking sector, Congress has opened wide the door to concentration, and
we have witnessed a resulting orgy of mergers and acquisitions. Economists promised
us higher efficiencies. After all, instead of ten or fifteen small community-based
banks, all with their own boards of directors and their own overhead, we now have
one board and one overhead component. Unlike banks which put all their eggs in
one local basket, giant banks should have a more secure and profitable diversified
portfolio.
Well, reality has a way of confounding economic theories. It turns out that small
banks are at least as profitable as their giant brethren. At the local level the
banker often knows the borrower and thus can make a loan on the basis of personal
knowledge about that borrower's creditworthiness. And the borrower knows the banker
and therefore feels an obligation to repay the loan even in bad times.
Today we are witnessing the beginnings of a revolution in manufacturing that can
profoundly affect the future size and structure of that sector. Consider the recent
dynamics in publishing. In 1984 Apple Computer came out with the first laser printer,
and that laser printer established a new industry—desktop publishing. Anyone
who received a desktop publishing document in 1984 could tell that it came from
a laser printer. It was not typeset quality. Now, in 1996, you can get a laser
printer that is typeset quality and prints twenty pages or more per minute.
Bookbinding technology has not moved quite as rapidly in downsizing its break-even
point, but it is going in the same direction.
What does this mean? That we can conceive of a time when bookstores will become
manufacturing as well as retail enterprises. I have written four books. Here's
how the process of publishing still works. I write the book and send the manuscript
to an editor. The editor edits it, bluelines it, and sends it to a typesetter.
The typesetter sends it to a printer, the printer sends it to a binder, the binder
to a warehouse, and the warehouse to the bookstore. If not enough people buy the
book, it is trucked to a landfill or recycled.
In the future, bookstores will still exist. Books will still line their shelves,
but there would be only one copy of each title bookstore owners think their clientele
would like. The bookstore would have a computer, from which you could call up
books and read sections. Then, if you wanted to buy a book, the clerk would show
you to the coffee shop and ask you to wait a few minutes while the book was printed
out in the publishing wing of the store. You’d like a big font to make the
book easier to read? No problem. Pay a little extra and you can get a better looking
cover as well.
What happens if we move in that direction? We've eliminated inventory. We've eliminated
almost all the middle people. You couldn't ask for a more efficient production
system, because you don't produce something unless you have a buyer for it. I
don’t believe the book will cost any less than it does now, but the way the
revenue is divided up will be very different. A small amount will go for the storage
and the information system, and the rest will be split between the retailer and
the producer/author.
We can take that same laser technology and produce physical products as well as
books from it. A number of different processes are now available. In printing,
a beam of light goes back and forth across a piece of paper. In stereolithography,
a beam of light goes back and forth across a screen that rises out of a vat of
plastic or plastic-like material. When the beam passes over the plastic material,
it solidifies the plastic. The screen carrying the plastic solution slowly rises,
and eventually a three-dimensional, solid product emerges.
Stereolithography is being used now in hospitals, where you can transform a three-dimensional
x-ray into a physical model in a few minutes. It is used in manufacturing centers,
where you can make models and test them out before you move to mass production.
There is talk of having these manufacturing units on military destroyers and battleships
so that out at sea they could produce a needed part.
As this manufacturing technique improves its ability to make load-bearing products,
we might expect that more parts of the retail economy will introduce a manufacturing
component. We could make cups, utensils, and hundreds of other items on-site.
Schumacher's objective was an economy characterized by local production from local
resources for local consumption. Yet information has become global. Thus, we can
envision a globalized information economy and a localized physical economy. In
the future we will import a good idea—a patent, a piece of software, a design,
a book—from anywhere, but we will produce it locally.
Designing the Rules as If Community Mattered
I've suggested that the central and most determining feature of modern economies
is the separation of those who make the decisions from those who feel the impact
of the decisions. Most of our professors and our policymakers assume that this
is an inevitable byproduct of progress and development: from self-sufficient farming
communities to trading city-states to nation states to a global economy, and as
those of you familiar with science fiction know, we will soon move into the intergalactic
economy era.
Economic evolution has indeed moved us from small to gargantuan over the past
two hundred years. But this was not an inevitable process. We make the rules;
the rules do not made us. We made the rules that channeled investment capital
and scientific genius and entrepreneurial energy in directions that resulted in
absentee ownership, long-distance distribution lines, separation, insecurity,
and dependence.
What would happen if we were to use our genius to develop rules that encourage
the opposite results, rules that couple responsibility and authority, that favor
rootedness over mobility, humanly scaled systems over large scaled systems, continuity
over change?
This is such an important question that it is tragic we aren't hearing it raised
by our politicians. In a typical election year candidates now spend more than
$1 billion all together. Little of that is spent on communicating their positions
on policy. Not one penny will be spent to address the most fundamental issue of
our time: how do we preserve community in an age of globalization? Well, without
formally tossing my hat into the political ring, let me offer a few rules that
could encourage an economy as if community mattered.
Back in 1970 we passed the Clean Air Act, a major piece of legislation. One section
of that law dealt with smokestack pollution. The remedy was to raise the height
of the stack. The design principle at the time was, "Dilution is the solution
to pollution." Of course, as we discovered, dilution is not the solution.
Raising the height of the smokestack transformed a local particulate problem into
a regional and even international acid-rain problem. What would have happened
if in 1970 we had passed a Clean Air Act that instead of raising the stack, lowered
it and curved the front of the pipe so that it entered the window of the executive
suite? I guarantee you that we would have heard about zero-emission factories
twenty-five years before the phrase was conceived.
This year and last year Congress debated a bill that would override the authority
of the state of Nevada to say no to becoming the nation's radioactive-waste dump.
Consider this. Nevada has no nuclear reactors. Seventy percent of all Nevadans
don't want their state to be the nation's radioactive-waste dump. Yet Congress
wants to force Nevadans to become responsible for other people's consumption habits.
At the same time as Congress was debating the Nevada nuclear-waste bill, it was
also debating another bill that would have allowed states the authority to say
no to one another's solid waste. Both bills gained wide bipartisan support. Yet
even a cursory reading of the two bills reveals their inherent inconsistency.
One couples authority and responsibility; the other separates them.
I think that if we put this matter to the average citizen, we would get the following
response: "We should be responsible for our own waste but not for somebody
else's." What would happen if we did accept responsibility for our own waste?
Well, in the thirty or so states with nuclear reactors, residents would suddenly
realize they couldn't assume someone else was going to take their radioactive
trash off their hands. We might see a widespread movement to close down nuclear
plants, which is probably why Congress is unwilling to delegate authority to communities
on this issue. Allowing counties and states to say no to someone else's solid
waste would accelerate the move toward reducing, reusing and recycling—worthwhile
strategies, all of which, intriguingly, move us toward a more decentralized economy.
Let's take our “small is beautiful” template and examine the financial
sector. Right now a war is going on between banks and credit unions. Two issues
are on the table: the tax exemption given to credit unions and the ability of
credit unions to have members from many different organizations, thus allowing
them to grow very large.
The battle is being waged by large credit unions against large banks, although
each argues that they are doing this on behalf of small credit unions and community
banks. This makes for a very confusing situation. But if we were to use a Schumacherian
perspective, we might end up with the following position: We support rules that
firmly root banks in the community they serve. This means we support rules that
encourage locally owned and operated banks and locally owned and operated credit
unions. It means that in the banking sector we would revisit rules that allow
for interstate banking and mergers. It also means that we support incentives for
credit unions because, being owned by their depositors, they are less likely to
be purchased by absentee owners.
From waste disposal and banking, let's turn to an entirely different sector with
our “community matters” template: professional sports. Today, sports
has become front-page news because more than fifty million Americans are living
in and around cities being blackmailed by professional sports team owners. These
owners are threatening to move their teams to another community if the local taxpayers
don't build them a new stadium replete with skyboxes and luxurious concession
areas.
Owners used to claim that their teams provided economic benefit for the town.
They don't say that anymore because studies clearly show that sports teams simply
shift local spending around. Money spent at the ball park is not spent at the
local bar or bowling alley or movie theater. Having failed to make the economic
case, owners now argue for local subsidies because of the psychological benefit
of professional sports. Here they are on stronger ground. Rooting for the local
team does help to tie a community together. Following their games is one of the
few activities that old and young, black and white, rich and poor share.
But when the owners ask the community to pay them two to three times what the
team is worth on the open market simply to keep the team around for another ten
to twenty years, increasing numbers of people ask, "Why not own the team
outright?" Community ownership of sports teams has a long and successful
pedigree. The Green Bay Packers have been owned by their fans since 1923 and have
won several Super Bowls since then. A dozen minor league baseball teams and several
profitable Canadian professional football teams are also owned by their communities.
With this wealth of successful experience, why aren't more communities deciding
to buy their own teams? Because it is illegal. All professional sports teams formally
or informally prohibit their fans from owning their teams. We let them adopt that
rule; we can demand that they drop it. Indeed, there is a bill in Congress that
would require sports team owners to allow their fans to own the teams or suffer
the loss of their antitrust exemption permitting them to negotiate as one entity
with the media.
Once we use our imagination to design rules that allow our communities to regain
a sense of authority and responsibility, dozens of possibilities open up. Consider
the struggle over so-called big box retail. Hundreds of communities are battling
over the building of a 200,000 square foot Wal-Mart or Kmart or Home Depot. Those
in favor of these stores argue that they carry a wider selection and offer lower
prices than smaller local stores. Those against argue that they suck money from
the local economy and undermine Main Street by forcing small stores out of business.
This issue is being debated at the local level because communities do have the
power to say yes or no through a vote of the Zoning Board or the Planning Commission
or the County Council or directly by the voters. This is democracy at its best.
Some communities have established size limits on retail stores. Others have developed
a process whereby large developments are reviewed with an eye to how they will
affect the fabric of local business. Vermont established a Citizens Board to review
all developments over ten acres in size. Recently the Board rejected an application
from Wal-Mart, having concluded that the store would actually cost the region
$3 for every $1 saved. Wal-Mart took the state to court, arguing that it had no
right to reject a development simply because it harmed local businesses. The Vermont
Supreme Court ruled that states, and through them communities, do indeed have
that authority.
In the 1920s and 1930s states fashioned another tool to encourage local ownership.
It was called a branch-store tax, a type of tax that increased in proportion to
the increase in the number of branches in a business chain. The rationale was
that as a corporation opened more and more branches, it increasingly distanced
itself from its customers while at the same time acquiring more and more economic
as well as political clout in the state legislatures and the local city councils.
The tax imposed a penalty on concentrated power and the separation of the business
owner from the community served.
Once we think that community is important, we will have to revisit many of our
most cherished regulatory notions. For example, consider the way we approach the
government exercise of eminent domain, that is, the authority to seize property
for public purposes. When government exercises its right of eminent domain, the
owners whose property is seized must be compensated. They are paid the market
value. Two identical houses located on the same street will fetch the same compensation.
But what if we took into account not only the market value of the house but its
social value as well? What if we took into account the value of rootedness and
continuity and community and neighborhood in our calculations?
Let's say that one of the houses has been owned and occupied by the same family
for three generations. The people who live there know everybody in the neighborhood,
know the history of the neighborhood, indeed, represent a vital part of the local
civic society. And let's say that the owner of the other house bought it only
months before, and there is a new tenant. The fair market value of both houses
is identical, yet clearly their real value to the community is quite different.
What if we enacted a measure that offered the owner of the second house the fair
market value but gave the owner or occupant of the first house a premium over
and above the market value based on the number of years of occupancy—say
an additional 25 percent for every ten years of ownership?
This measure would achieve three objectives. First, it would value community and
compensate those for whom dislocation would create a special hardship. Second,
by raising the cost of dislocation it might alter the cost-benefit equation against
the proposed development. Third, it would value occupancy over ownership, leading
to a more equitable result. The owner of a home would receive the fair market
value but the resident who lived in the house for many years would also receive
significant compensation.
At the Institute for Local Self-Reliance we think of community as a value that
can inform policies in many sectors. Today, new rules are being made that affect
virtually all facets of our society—communications, finance, transportation,
energy, education. But tragically, at the rule-making table community is not represented.
Community is an issue that joins the right and the left, liberals and conservatives.
It is a word they all embrace lovingly. But too often their definition of the
term is loose and vague, fuzzy and warm. We need to transform it into a more concrete
and powerful word.
Conservatives talk about devolving and decentralizing responsibility to the local
level. That is an important goal. Communities and households and individuals should
become more responsible for themselves, but we should also devolve authority
to the local level. And we should apply the concept of devolution to the economic
as well as the political spheres. We must also democratize productive capacity.
Unless these three factors are present—-authority, responsibility, and capacity
restored to the local level—we're not proposing a coherent strategy that
can build strong, self-reliant, and enduring communities.
When we do decentralize authority, when we do begin to move responsibility and
authority close together, when we do begin to turn those who make the decisions
into those who feel the impact of those decisions, when we do decentralize productive
capacity, then we begin to view ourselves differently, and we begin to act differently.
Consider the case of the Carrington, North Dakota, pasta cooperative. This enterprise
became the first cooperative to join the National Pasta Processors Association.
In the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) debate, pasta processors on
both sides of the border favored the agreement because it would lower the price
of the durum wheat they purchased. There was only one processor in the National
Pasta Processors Association that opposed NAFTA, and that was the Carrington Pasta
Cooperative because there the growers of the wheat also owned the processing plant.
They weren't interested in reducing the price of wheat so long as the price was
comparable on both sides of the border. Because they were the processors as well
as the producers, they thought differently about themselves.
Minnesota has what may be the largest number of employee-owned plants per capita
of any state in the country. When they are majority owned, they tend to use a
very different cost-benefit analysis regarding business investment decisions than
when absentee owners control the decision-making process. Several CEOs of these
plants have said to the press, "We probably would have moved out of Minnesota
because of the high business taxes here, except for the fact that we are employee
owned.”
Absentee owners try to maximize their return on investment, and if they can make
a higher return by closing a plant in one place and reopening in another, they
will do so, even if the first plant is generating a profit. But employee owners
take into account the effect of plant relocation on their jobs and on the taxes
they pay for their children's schools and their police and fire protection. Employee-owned
plants must operate in an increasingly competitive and even brutal marketplace.
They must generate a profit or they will be forced to close their doors. But when
the workers own the plant, the need to survive can co-exist with the need to remain
rooted .
We are living through an historical moment in which the vision and the values
of Fritz Schumacher and Peter Kropotkin and Louis Brandeis and Ralph Borsodi should
be translated into practical political programs and policies. Anyone who delivers
a lecture these days tells audiences that we are living in a time of great change.
I am no different. But I would remind you of the distinction Bertrand Russell
once made about the difference between change and progress. Change is inevitable,
Russell observed, whereas progress is problematic. Change is scientific whereas
progress is ethical. We will have change whether we want it or not, but to achieve
progress we have to get involved. We have to create new rules. We have to channel
human creativity in directions compatible with our value system. And to accomplish
that we have to know where we want to go.
Schumacher taught us that local self-reliance and humanly scaled systems and a
shortening of the distance between those who make the decisions and those who
feel the impact of those decisions are goals that are achievable, effective, and
popular. Today more than at any time in our history, we need to let his wisdom
guide us.
David Morris is one of the nation’s leading advocates for humanly scaled
economies. The author of five books, including Neighborhood Power (1975)
and Self-Reliant Cities (1982), his columns have appeared in over 200 newspapers
and journals, including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,
and The Washington Post. He co-founded the Minneapolis and Washington,
D.C.-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance in 1974 and currently serves as its
Vice-President and director of its New Rules Project. The Institute’s mission
is to identify public policies that promote strong, locally owned and environmentally
sound economies and to assist communities to move in that direction. Dr. Morris
may be reached at:
David Morris may be reached at: Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 1313 5th St.
SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414 (www.ilsr.org)
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