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Many people find it difficult to believe that simple and inexpensive technologies could be really competitive in the modern world.
They are not considering that, in the modern world, far less than 10% of total working hours are directly invested to secure food, housing and services essential to human development.
As a matter of fact, more than half of what is industrially produced today (e.g. armaments) it is not directly beneficial to the vast majority of people and can be eliminated without causing a direct lowering of living standards.
Others products satisfy needs that depend on a particular situation. If you change the situation the need disappears.
No one, for example, is discussing the need of everyone to possess a motorcar in a modern city. But in a village designed for pedestrian, the motorcar will only be a luxury, not a necessity.
By reducing the numbers of motorcars, we will not only reduce the capitals and labour invested in motor car manufacturing, but in all related fields, from the extraction, distillation and distribution of petrol to the cost of parking meters.
Those saved capitals and labour can then be invested in order to satisfy real needs of the community.
Even social expenditures such as health services can be dramatically reduced in communities where the residents perform a job they like, have sufficient physical activity and eat healthy foods, simply because it will be less people needing care and those people will respond better to treatment.
It is not difficult to understand that, giving priority to essential products and services (and increasing the total time allocated to the production of such products and services), it will be possible to create and maintain a good quality of life even with low productivity technologies.
This is possible within set parameters. Communities with less than one thousand inhabitants hardly can diversify enough the activities in order to provide a comfortable lifestyle to residents, while communities of more than thirty thousand become expensive to administer, without showing a meaningful increase in the quality of living.
The appropriate technologies (based on tools and simple machines) are far more affordable than conventional technologies (that require complicated and expensive machinery, manned by highly specialized personnel). Appropriate technologies are also easier to learn and more pleasurable to use than conventional technologies and will allow more flexibility in the use of the work force.
Additional benefits include low cost job creation, better quality products, a more efficient utilization of non-renewable resources and a far lower level of pollution.
The decision of utilizing appropriate technologies to realize a new settlement (besides dramatically reducing the amount of capital required), introduces one element of very high tourist value, by giving the village an extremely valuable "bygone era" flavour.
In fact, each individual application of those technologies can become a primary tourist attraction on it’s own, especially for visitors originating from highly industrialized countries.
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