Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

by Ernst F. Schumacher

seldom

affluence,

economic performance, economic growth, economic expansion, and so forth have become the abiding interest, if not the o...

strives

This means that an activity can be economic although it plays hell with the environment, and that a competing activity, if at some cost it protects and conserves the environment, will be uneconomic.

In a sense, the market is the institutionalisation of individualism and non-responsibility. Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself.

it would be 'uneconomic' for a buyer to give preference to homeproduced goods if imported goods are cheaper.

The logical absurdity, however, is not the greatest fault of the undertaking: what is worse, and destructive of civilisation, is the pretence that everything has a price or, in other words, that money is the highest of all values.

Edward Copleston

Professor E.H. Phelps Brown,

'The Underdevelopment of Economics',

'the smallness of the contribution that the most conspicuous developments of economics in the last quarter of a century have made to the solution of ...

'checking the ad- verse effects on the environment and the quality of life of industrialism, popu...

economics, as currently constituted and practised, acts as a most effective barrier against the understanding of these problems, owing to its addiction to purely quantitative analysis and its timorous refusal to look into the real nature of things.

infinite growth in a finite environment is an obvious impossibility:

beguiling

cognisance

the concept of 'cost' is essentially different as between renewable and non-renewable goods, as also between manufactures and services. In fact, without going into any further details, it can be said that economics, as currently constituted, fully applies only to manufactures (category 3), but it is being applied without discrimination to all goods and services, because an appreciation of the essential, qualitative differences between the four categories is entirely lacking.

eulogised

The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give a man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.

stultifying,

work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.

carpet

loom

contr...

warp

th...

J. C. Kumarappa

enlivens

The Affluent Society,

if the purpose of clothing is a certain amount of temperature comfort and an attractive appearance, the task is to attain this purpose with the smallest possible effort, that is, with the smallest annual destruction of cloth and with the help of designs that involve the smallest possible input of toil.

people who live in highly selfsufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade.

The teaching of the Buddha, on the other hand, enjoins a reverent and nonviolent attitude not only to all sentient beings but also, with great emphasis, to trees. Every follower of the Buddha ought to plant a tree every few years and look after it until it is safely established, and the Buddhist economist can demonstrate without difficulty that the universal observation of this rule would result in a high rate of genuine economic development independent of any foreign aid.

heedless

ineluctable

harbouring,

stale.

indigenously

thraldom

'megalopolis'.

slums,

crawling

hinterland

hovels

Bismarck

Imagine now that Denmark a part of Germany, and Belgium a part of France, suddenly turned what is now charmingly called 'nats' wanting independence. There would be endless, heated arguments that these 'non-countries' could not be economically viable, that their desire for independence was, to quote a famous political commentator, 'adolescent emotionalism, political naivety, phoney economics, and sheer bare-faced opportunism'.

you do not make viable people non-viable by splitting a large community into a number of smaller, more intimate, more coherent and more manageable groups.

secedes?'

in a mobile, footloose society the law of disequilibrium is infinitely stronger than the so-called law of equilibrium. Nothing succeeds like success, and nothing stagnates like stagnation. The successful province drains the life out of the unsuccessful. and without protection against the strong, the weak have no chance: either they remain weak or they must migrate and join the strong, they cannot effectively help themselves.

the desire for self-government and so-called independence, is simply a logical and rational response to the need for regional development.