Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered

Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered is a collection of essays by German born British economist E. F. Schumacher. The phrase "Small.
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They were later snaffled up by corporate giants. Small became cool but only as part of a branding strategy which masked the ongoing concentration of political and economic power. The power of the global multinational and the financial institutions was beginning to become apparent in the early 70s, but it has grown exponentially since, unaccountable to national governments. Schumacher warned that a city's population should not rise above ,, but we are now living in an era of the megapolis and several cities around the world are heading towards 20m.

Small Is Beautiful

Schumacher would be weeping over his herbal tea at the fate of his big idea. However, small is beautiful is an idea that keeps reappearing — the latest incarnations are farmers' markets, and local cafes baking homemade cup cakes — because it incorporates such a fundamental insight into the human experience of modernity. We yearn for economic systems within our control, within our comprehension and that once again provide space for human interaction — and yet we are constantly overwhelmed by finding ourselves trapped into vast global economic systems that are corrupting and corrupt. Many of the issues Schumacher raises we are still wrestling with.

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He questioned the shibboleth of economic growth as the central preoccupation of politics; he talked of resource constraints on economic development. Above all, he insisted again and again that human happiness would not be achieved through material wealth.

He had a vision of human need that would strike a 21st-century reader as oddly puritanical, and his frequent references to Burma as a model jar badly. But his point is still valid as the wellbeing debate today demonstrates; despite our increased wealth since the 70s, we are no happier.

Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

Schumacher warned against exactly the issues we are now dealing with as levels of mental illness — depression, anxiety, panic attacks, stress — rise and the World Health Organisation predicts that depression will be the second most common health problem in western developed nations by Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph A. Confidence Men by Ron Suskind. Great Political Theories V. Coolidge by Amity Shlaes.

Small Is Beautiful - E. F. Schumacher - Paperback

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Harper Perennial literary fiction and nonfiction. Chapter 3 of this part concludes with advice to Socialists who presumably are at the Commanding Heights:. If they can do this, they have the future in their hands.

If they cannot, they have nothing to offer that is worthy of the sweat of free-born men. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Small Is Beautiful Cover. Economics As If People Mattered: Wendell Berry Ernest Callenbach G.