Help To Those Who Need It Most – E F Schumacher Published in AVARD (Association of Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development) Newsletter, January-February 1961 I can, frankly, see no value in discussing such questions – very interesting from a purely academic point of view – as the ideal size of towns, the ideal location of industry, or the ideal transport system, because even the most brilliant answers to them will do nothing to mobilize the creative power of the people. Instead, I think, we should ask the much simpler and much more profound question: Why is it that the people are not helping themselves? What has come over them? On the whole, throughout history, all healthy societies have managed to solve their problem or existence, and always with something to spare for culture. Grinding poverty with malnutrition and degradation, with apathy and despair, as a permanent condition of millions of people, not as a result of war or natural catastrophe – this is a most abnormal and
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