“Small is Beautiful”
David Zetland
Book Review: “Small is Beautiful”
E.F. (Ernst Friedrich) Schumacher published Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered in 1973.
I read the book years ago [Whoops! Here’s my 2009 review, which is much shorter!] and even used it as “the text” for my microeconomics course ten years ago, but I had not re-read it for awhile. I’m glad that I did, as the book is (a) interesting and provocative (=you didn’t think of this) at the same time as (b) it makes a number of dated or mistaken assertions. So, the book is a mix of enduring (never dying?) truth and provincial fetish.
The book has four parts: The Modern World, Resources, the Third World, and Organization and Ownership. In each we see a side of EFS’s thoughts, i.e., the modern world’s problem with wasteful consumption (in contrast with Buddhist satisfaction with quality), the over-use of non-renewable resources (coal, oil, nuclear) and under-emphasis on renewables (water, wood, people), and a “soft path” of development at an appropriate scale and technology — ideas that EFS borrowed directly from Gandhi’s ideas of Swadeshi (self-reliance) — in contrast with producing commodities on the frontiers of technology and scale to compete in global markets.
The main point of this book — and the reason that I find it so interesting — is that EFS does not directly criticize “large is ugly” over-consumption of vast quantities of goods and inputs. He instead argues that we should get our happiness from adding more quality to our lives. Put differently, he favors getting the most from limited means over consuming everything you can.
Such a change in perspective would require one of two changes of heart: Either “society” changes is preferences from quantity to quality or the government limits society’s consumption. The first change is bottom-up, voluntary, organic and slow in comparison to the second, but it is easier from a political perspective. The second change wold “fix everything, overnight,” but it’s hard to think of any examples of a government that limits consumption while remaining in power. (“We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” — J-C. Junker, 2008.)
I read this in college, as part of a Religious Studies course. I can’t say it changed my life because I already embraced the underlying philosophy. And I can’t say it has had a discernible effect on the American consumer, to judge by their automobile preferences.