While better known for Small Is Beautiful, a book that helped popularize the idea that economies should serve people rather than the other way around, E. F. Schumacher wrote another book that deserves just as much attention. Good Work asks a question we rarely stop to ask: What is work for?

Modern economics looks at human work and mostly sees a cost to be reduced. Work is treated largely as a cost of production. From the employer’s point of view, the goal is to get as much output as possible from as little labor as possible. From the worker’s point of view, work is the price paid for wages and the leisure those wages makes possible. If technology could eliminate the work altogether, so much the better.

Schumacher thought this missed something essential about being human. Drawing in part on Buddhist thought, he proposed that work serves at least three purposes. It allows us to produce the things we need. But it also gives us an opportunity to develop our abilities and to overcome some of our individual isolation by working with other people toward a shared purpose.

Those ideas run through Good Work, published after Schumacher’s death from lectures he gave during the final years of his life. His concern wasn’t simply whether people were paid fairly or treated decently, important as those things are. He wanted us to notice what the work itself was doing to the person who performed it.

Does it require judgment? Does it develop skill? Does it connect us with other people? Can we see ourselves in what we make? Does the work contribute something worth making in the first place?

This is where Schumacher’s idea of Buddhist economics becomes especially useful. In the Buddhist tradition, right livelihood asks us to consider whether the way we make our living is consistent with the way we hope to live. Schumacher carried that question into economics. What if earning a living and becoming more fully human weren’t separate activities?

We spend an extraordinary portion of our lives working. If those hours are understood primarily as something to endure in exchange for money, we have accepted an enormous loss. Schumacher asks us to imagine something better: work that produces useful things, certainly, but also work through which people develop their capacities, participate with others, and contribute to a world they actually want to live in.

Maybe the measure of a good company isn’t only what it produces. Maybe it is also what kind of people we have the opportunity to become while producing it.

BOOK: Good Work