Thus the problem with bringing work to people instead of forcing people to migrate to cities to find work was similar to the problem selling khadi. Decentralizing did not pay. Somebody would have to provide a subsidy to make it profitable to operate workshops at inconvenient locations. The dynamic that drives entrepreneurs to do what pays tends to swell the already overcrowded cities and to impoverish the already impoverished countryside. A better society –such as the sort of society Gandhi and Shiva propose—would decentralize production. But on the road between actually existing society and that better society there are many forks. At each of those forks people face their immediate problem, such as the problem of the would-be entrepreneur who wants to locate in a place where she or he can most profitaby buy the required inputs and most profitably sell the products. Shiva (who is a research physicist) demonstrates convincingly that in terms of net physical benefits, and in terms of net physical costs, humanity and the biosphere would fare incomparably better in the kind of society Gandhi envisioned. But the better society never comes, because at each fork in the road people take the turn that leads back to actually existing society. 

Gandhi saw the need for a different dynamic and proposed one. Swadeshi is usually discussed in connection with urging consumer preference for local goods. Thus Gandhi wrote, “Rule of the best and cheapest is not always true. Just as we do not give up our country for one with a better climate, but endeavor to improve our own, so also may we not discard swadeshi for better or cheaper foreign things. Even as a husband who being dissatisfied with his simple looking wife goes in search of a better looking woman is disloyal to his partner, so is a man disloyal to his country who prefers foreign-made things though better to country-made things.” (20) But swadeshi has the wider implication of an obligation to act for the good of the community. As applied to those who make decisions about where to locate business, ““Employers are to exhaust first whatever pool of local and unemployed workers there is before hiring more suitable labour from other towns or regions. Similarly, the workers would be more reluctant to leave a local employer in spite of more attractive job offers elsewhere. In short, economic agents living together in a community, region, or country, should first and foremost explore all possibilities to do business with each other before going outside in order to get a better deal. Swadeshi demands the sacrifice of utility for the sake of loyalty.” (21)