One of the most fateful of our age is the belief that 'the problem of production' has been solved. Not only is this belief firmly held by people remote from production and therefore unacquainted with the facts - it is held by all the , the captains of industry, the managers in the governments of the world, the and not-so- , not to mention the journalists. They may disagree on many things but they all agree that the problem of production has been solved; that mankind has at last come of age. For the rich countries, they say, the most important task now is 'education for leisure' and, for the poor countries, the ' of '.

That things are not going as well as they ought to be going must be due to human wickedness. We must therefore a political system so perfect that human wickedness disappears and everybody behaves well, no matter how much wickedness there may be in him or her. In fact, it is widely held that everybody is born good; if one turns into a criminal or an , this is the fault of 'the system'. No doubt 'the system' is in many ways bad and must be changed. One of the main reasons why it is bad and why it can still in spite of its badness, is this view that the 'problem of production' has been solved. As this pervades all present-day systems there is at present not much to choose between them.

The arising of this , so egregious and so firmly rooted, is closely connected with the , not to say religious, changes during the last three or four centuries in man's to nature. I should perhaps say: western man's to nature, but since the whole world is now in a of westernisation, the more generalised statement appears to be . Modern man does not experience himself as a part of nature but as an outside force destined to and conquer it. He even talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side. Until quite recently, the battle seemed to go well enough to give him the illusion of unlimited powers, but not so well as to bring the possibility of total victory into view. This has now come into view, and many people, only a , are beginning to realise what this means for the continued existence of humanity.

The illusion of unlimited powers, nourished by astonishing scientific and , has produced the illusion of having solved the problem of production. The latter illusion is based on the failure to distinguish between and capital where this matters most. Every and businessman is familiar with the , and applies it conscientiously and with subtlety to all affairs - except where it really matters: namely, the irreplaceable capital which man has not made, but simply found, and without which he can do nothing.

A businessman would not consider a firm to have solved its problems of production and to have viability if he saw that it was rapidly its capital. How, then, could we overlook this vital fact when it comes to that very big firm, the of Spaceship Earth and. in particular, the of its rich passengers?

One reason for overlooking this vital fact is that we are estranged from reality and to treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves. Even the great Dr. Marx fell into this devastating when he the ' of value'. Now, we have indeed to make some of the capital which today helps us to produce - a large of scientific, , and other knowledge; an elaborate ; innumerable types of sophisticated capital , etc. - but all this is but a small part of the total capital we are using. Far larger is the capital provided by nature and not by man - and we do not even recognise it as such. This larger part is now being used up at an alarming rate, and that is why it is an absurd and suicidal to believe, and act on the belief, that the problem of production has been solved.

Let us take a closer look at this 'natural capital'. First of all, and most , there are the fossil fuels. None, I am sure, will that we are treating them as although they are undeniably capital . If we treated them as capital , we should be concerned with conservation; we should do everything in our power to try and their current rate of use; we might be saying, for , that the money from the realisation of these assets - these irreplaceable assets - must be placed into a special to be to the of production and patterns of living which do not depend on fossil fuels at all or depend on them only to a very slight extent. These and many other things we should be doing if we treated fossil fuels as capital and not as . And we do not do any of them, but the exact of every one of them: we are not in the least concerned with conservation; we are , instead of , the current rates of use; and, far from being interested in studying the possibilities of of production and patterns of living - so as to get off the collision course on which we are moving with ever-increasing speed - we happily talk of unlimited progress along the beaten track, of 'education for leisure' in the rich countries, and of 'the of ' to the poor countries.

(Small is Beautiful by E F Schumacher)