Yves here. I am surprised to see Richard Murphy put E F Schumacher, who I have to admit I have barely heard of because he is so rarely mentioned, implicitly as of similar importance as Karl Marx and Milton Friedman, who have been the focus of earlier “Economic Questions” posts.
To perhaps oversimplify Schumacher, bigger often is not better but actually worse. We have pointed out that many activities (like banking) exhibit diseconomies of scale once a certain size threshold is met. Murphy seems perplexed by the fetishization of size. Aside from its arguable origins in male equipment competitions, size (number of employees or size of armies, assets controlled) confers power, even when operations are poorly managed, as “too big to fail” attests.
By Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Funding the Future
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher was one of those rare economists who, as a humanist, saw that the purpose of economics was not to serve markets but to serve life. His book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered(1973) appeared amid oil shocks and environmental anxiety, but its message has lost little of its power.
Schumacher’s starting point was deceptively simple. The modern economy, he said, is built on the illusion that “bigger is better,” and that scale itself is proof of progress. Yet the pursuit of endless expansion, whether in firms, nations, consumption, and technology, destroys the natural, social and moral fabric on which prosperity depends.
He asked a question that economics still cannot answer: how big can we grow before we cease to be humane?
Hence, the Schumacher Question: if small is beautiful because it respects life’s limits, why do we persist in worshipping size, speed and growth when they destroy the very foundations of well-being?
Economics as if people mattered
Schumacher’s critique began with a reversal of priorities. Economics, he argued, should be a branch of moral philosophy concerned with human flourishing, not a calculus of output.
He wrote that the modern economist “is used to measuring the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” The fixation on GDP and productivity ignores whether work is meaningful, communities are whole, or the environment endures.
An economy that measures success only in money will destroy the things that money cannot buy.
The fetish of bigness
Schumacher saw “bigness” as the modern superstition. Large corporations, vast bureaucracies, and giant technologies all promised efficiency but delivered alienation. When scale outruns empathy, people become cogs.
Bigness centralises power; it dulls accountability; it creates distance between decision and consequence.
He proposed a different principle, which he described as ‘appropriate scale’. The right size of enterprise is the smallest that can do the job. The right level of technology is the simplest compatible with need. The right kind of system is one that keeps power close to people.
Small is not nostalgic; it is proportionate.
Technology with a human face
Schumacher rejected the technocratic fantasy that machines could solve every problem. Technology, he argued, must be made to serve man, and not the other way round.
He championed what he called intermediate technology, which comprises tools that enhance local capacity rather than displace it and that respect human skill rather than render it obsolete.
In a world now seduced by artificial intelligence, this warning is prophetic. Technology without moral direction becomes dehumanising. The question is never just what we can do, but what we should do.
The ecological reality
Long before climate change entered mainstream debate, Schumacher recognised that the economy is a subsystem of the environment, not its master. He described fossil fuels as capital being treated as income. By burning them as if infinite, we were liquidating the planet’s wealth.
Sustainability, for Schumacher, was not a slogan but a moral imperative. The economy must operate within ecological limits, or it will cease to exist. Growth that destroys its foundations is not progress, he said; it is self-harm.
Work as fulfilment
For Schumacher, work was not merely a means to an income but a source of meaning. He argued that the aim of work should be to liberate people from the compulsion of economic necessity, and to provide the basis for a good life.
When labour is reduced to cost and people to “human resources,” society corrodes. Small-scale, community-rooted production allows dignity and creativity to flourish.
The politics of enough
Schumacher challenged the ideology of scarcity that drives modern capitalism. The problem, he said, is not that we have too little but that we want too much. The pursuit of ever-rising consumption, he argued, is a moral and ecological dead end.
He proposed instead an economics of enough, where meaning is derived from sufficiency rather than accumulation, quality rather than quantity, and well-being rather than wealth.
It is an idea so radical that half a century later, mainstream politics still cannot speak it aloud.
Answering Schumacher today
To answer the Schumacher Question, we must abandon the cult of bigness and relearn proportion. That means:
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Localising production, requiring shorter supply chains, community energy, and regional food systems.
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Democratising ownership, with an emphasis on cooperatives, municipal enterprises, and worker-led firms that keep wealth circulating locally.
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Redefining progress, requiring the replacement of GDP with indicators of well-being, sustainability, and equity.
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Humanising technology, implying the redirection of innovation towards care, repair, and ecological restoration rather than speed and profit.
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Embedding limits, meaning accepting that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible, and redesigning prosperity accordingly.
Inference
The Schumacher Question exposes the moral void at the heart of modern economics. We have mistaken scale for success, quantity for quality, and growth for good.
Schumacher’s vision remains the antidote: economies rooted in place, guided by ethics, and organised for sufficiency rather than excess.
If small is beautiful, it is not because it is quaint, but because it is sustainable, humane, and free.
The task now is to make economics beautiful again and to design systems that serve life instead of consuming it.
The common requirement to “answer Schumacher” is to place a limit on wealth. If you cannot own more than £Xm, you will not be driven to seek more (if you are law-aniding at least). This pushes the drive to accumulate from *quantity* to *quality*.
This is what cannot be said in capitalist society!
It’s only part of the solution though:
– who owns the rest? Radical redistribution to individuals? Ownership by the state? Or by other collective structures (coops, trusts etc)?
– what about the agent problem? The managers of great institutions, public or private, have concentrated control even if ownership is dispersed and then therefore have all the incentives of bigness. Breaking up entities can only take you so far: returning the electricity system to municipal control still leaves key assets unaccounted for, such as the national grid (owned by all municipalities?) and indivisible assets like nuclear power stations.
– even if issues of quantity can be dealt with in the hands or principals and agents, there is no guarantee that people will pursue benevolent qualities. Managers who cannot pursue wealth and power directly may seek power through hiring people or through rationing access to their produce and/or suppressing competition. Setting a cap on wealth may just make economic life a more explicitly vicious zero-sum game than it currently is.
I like Schumacher’s diagnosis but I struggle to see the cure in an industrial society rather than in a society of gentleman farmers! Weirdly, it may be easier in a financialised society but ultimately a limit on wealth puts real power back in the hands of the controllers of real assets rather than financial claims.
There are goods ideas but not much in the way of how do you bring them about. There is an oligarchy in the US which was largely created by little more than changes to the tax code. This is politics and it will take a new political party dedicated to economic reform and economic equality.
For example, if an ordinary worker buys a lottery ticket and wins $20 million, he or she will pay taxes on their winnings but if a person from a well to do family inherits $20 million in stock they will not pay tax on their inheritance. Whatever people think about the estate tax the fact is it produces hardly any revenue at all due to numerous loopholes since 1990.
It’s true that high income earners pay higher taxes compared to ordinary workers. Yet, the wealthiest Americans avoid taxable income because their wealth largely comes from investments and inheritance which is excluded from the income tax system.
While low wage earners might pay little or no income taxes, they pay payroll taxes which fund programs like social security and medicare and, it turns out, are the most regressive taxes that we have.
When it comes to running the country, the biggest source of revenue is income taxes which is about 50% of the country’s revenue followed by payroll taxes which is about 35%. Corporate taxes are only about 11% of the governments revenue and estate taxes make up less than one-half of 1%.
The 1982 change which allowed corporate stock buy-backs has boosted stock prices and thereby dramatically changed corporate returns from taxable dividends to non-taxable growth in stock value.
A valuable presentation is provided by Prof. Ray Madoff “Why the Rich Don’t Pay Taxes” New Economic Thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLKacgW6YOI
> There are goods ideas but not much in the way of how do you bring them about. There is an oligarchy in the US which was largely created by little more than changes to the tax code.
When he published in 1973, the top tax rate was 70%. What was possible then has been subverted since.
At that time, environmental concerns were peaking, but they weren’t yet climate concerns, and Chicago School economics was the substrate for policy space. When I got my Environmental Science degree in 1992, it was considered a win that the Cuyahoga River wasn’t burning. But they didn’t talk about the Yellow River, and the outsourcing of pollution to China. That is the implicit corruption of the Chicago School perspective. They were monetarists then – ‘the cost of everything and the value of nothing.’
Right. 1973 was the high water mark of postwar liberalism and anti capitalist skepticism. They even got rid of Nixon. The empire stuck back and here we are.
And part of it isn’t ideological and is the simple fact that self sufficiency can be a lot of work and in an increasingly technical and specialized age many don’t have the skills.
It’ll probably take bankruptcy at the Wall St casino to turn things around again rather than a politics led by people like Trump and Pelosi. That late 60s surge in leftism was itself a response to the rightwing disaster of Vietnam. When Power makes mistakes they turn out to be whoppers.
“1973 was the high water mark of postwar liberalism and anti capitalist skepticism. They even got rid of Nixon.”
Not sure you intended it that way, but ‘getting rid of Nixon’ was certainly the end of postwar liberalism. Just recall that under Nixon we had the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, The Endangered Species Act, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. Nixon initiated ‘Detente’ with Russia, recognized China, and finally, ended the war in Vietnam and also ended the draft. During his term the 26th Amendment was enacted lowering the voting age to 18. His record of liberal policies stands up against all the subsequent Democratic presidents combined. It is enough to make one wonder about the real origins of Watergate.
I wouldn’t ascribe any of those environmental agencies and labor/safety acts specifically to Nixon. The late ’60’s and into the 70’s was a time of heightened national awareness of the need for clean air and water, safety in the work place, and protection of the natural environment. Congress and the national zeitgeist were very strong then. Nixon, a consumate politician knew to follow along.
Yes, and credit for the EPA goes mainly to John Ehrlichman, who is much better known for his involvement in Watergate.
He was a land-use lawyer in Seattle in the 1960’s with a penchant for the environment and won some early environmental cases, as the Cuyahoga River was burning, so he was in the right place at the right time to fit into the new aegis of the era, where we cared deeply about our surroundings.
i read Schumacher in the context of organic/sustainable farming, long before i endeavored to study economics, proper.
his ethos is so embedded in me that i often forget where it comes from.
ill bet a dollar i dot have that hes never mentioned in yer standard econ course.
Nice to see that name again – his books were practically a bible to me and many others looking for answers to the problems of modern society and economics back in the latter part of the 80’s and 90’s. While he has gone out of fashion – even among Greens and heterodox leftists – you can see his influence in many writers and thinkers. He was also very influential among the early Silicone Valley types – those who saw the rise of small powerful processors and the internet as a means of decentralising society away from global corporations.
Appropriate scale for organisations has always seemed to me to be one of the most overlooked answers to so many perplexing questions (which is probably why mainstream economics ignores it). Even the rise of the billionaires – if, for example, we had proper competition laws and had an insistence on very large companies having to justify their scale, then we’d have a far better internet, a far better economy, and a lot fewer super rich. It’s not the sole solution, but it is a relatively simple and achievable goal, and one that not just those on the Green spectrum or the left would agree with.
Richard Murphy is scheduled to speak at the Scottish Currency Group Conference 2025 at 9:45 am EDT. The discussion I’ve seen so far has been very much influenced by MMT, specifically by Wynne Godley’s “sectoral balances” approach.
I ended up watching some of this live, plan to watch the rest of it—and, in fact, added SponsorBlock segments because there are long breaks between the talks—and found the talk by Dr Thiebault Laurentjoye of Aalborg University, Denmark at the end really interesting, even if I understood only about a quarter of it. Thanks for the link!
Thanks for this one. This sheds light on what my subversive social studies teacher was up to 40 odd years ago. To teach us how politics worked, he invited a few politicians to class to talk to us, but not Democrats and Republicans. One was this guy from the Liberty Union Party, Peter Diamondstone who ran for something in just about every Vermont election. I remember him showing up to class sporting some rainbow suspenders like the ones Robin Williams used to wear as Mork.
I forget the name of one of the others, but he was from the Small is Beautiful party! He mentioned he was the only member of this political party and at the time I thought that’s where its name came from. If he mentioned Schumacher I don’t remember, but the article notes Schumacher’s book came out in 1973 and we met the politician about 8-9 years after that, so I’m guessing the party was named as an homage to Schumacher, given the politics of my tiny home state.
Some musical accompaniment from Mudhoney, with a nod to one of the remarks from Yves’ intro – I Like It Small ;) Just saw the pizza box in the video – any other current or former Seattle residents remember Hot Mama’s pizza on Capitol Hill? Yummy.
Thanks for the Mudhoney link. I love their take on social media too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNwo0dWvWt4 . Schumacher’s book was quite popular when I was in college in the ’70s and the small is beautiful ethos has been an important to my way of thinking about our place in the world.
The “Institute of Local Self-Reliance” has good ideas about re-localizing, at the state and city/county level.
Nate Hagan recently interviewed Stacy Mitchell from this organization.
https://ilsr.org
I really dislike Murphy’s reductionist contrivance of claiming a well known economist or thinker can be reduced to a single big question. As a coat-hanger for his own pre-occupations it is more polemic than considered analysis.
Schumacher and “Small is Beautiful” was absolutely central to the early 70s zeitgeist of growing environmental concerns, and very closely linked to the Meadows “Limits to Growth” for the Club of Rome which still causes unreconstructed growth economists to break into a cold sweat.
Basically, all economics which fails to accept and reflect resource limits is pulp fiction.
In the 60s and early 70s there was a significant political movement on the libertarian (not in the American right wing sense) left of human scale organisation evinced by European thinkers like Andre Gorz, but especially in Murray Bookchin’s social ecology, which was very much based on small devolved social and economic communities with collective decision making, and federalised co-operation.
Bookchin even embraced, and campaigned for, the first time election of Bernie Sanders.
Schumacher’s perspectives included elements of the work of such notables as his contemporaries – Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, Kenneth Boulding and Paul Ehrlich, Margaret Mead, and especially the ‘Limits to Growth’ and JK Galbraith.
Unfortunately, Murphy ‘s AI guided interpretation of Schumacher’s central thesis seriously oversimplifies and understates the emphasis on both resource allocation and reduces his views on devolved political and economic organisation to ‘bigness’.
The notion of destroying resources – so the capital assets of the planet – is absolutely central to Schumacher, but is mostly overlooked in the Murphy piece which concentrates on that ‘bigness”.
Murphy has missed a trick by treating his named individuals in isolation and failing to make the connections between them. JK Galbraith wrote whole books on the rise of ‘bigness’ in corporatism and analysed its monopolistic and plutocratic tendencies, comparing this with small businesses and their market organisation, yet his equivalent piece missed this very obvious link with Schumacher. It is JK Galbraith’s work which provided much of the backdrop for Schumacher’s own thinking on economic scaling – and they were colleagues in the same team in the 40s.
Also Schumacher was a friend and neighbour of Donella Meadows and shared her views on systems and human scale.
Murphy’s output has been greatly expanded since he started using AI to generate material, but, sadly it is often ‘never mind the quality feel the width’; usually derivative; misses nuances, and frankly, often does a disservice to the ‘greats’ he claims to represent in his “single question” approach.
AI has its demonstrable limits and has evidently reduced the value of Murphy’s writings.
This is a real shame, as he does have a lot to offer within his specialised field.
But he needs to stick to that to maintain credibility as a blogger.
Hear him, hear him. Schumacher really was a product of the intellectual fervor of the era. A contributor rather than an archetype. A shallow post indeed, and a sad commentary on the disappearance of the history of Political Economics in today’s Economics curricula. Giants like Baran and Sweezy left Schumacher in the dust.
Thank you for pointing out the AI problems with Murphy.
I mentioned that once in the comments to one of his posts and he said:
“What do you expect me to do, use a quill pen?” thus tarring me with the implied insult of Luddism.
I’ve pretty much stopped commentating on Richard Murphy’s site, as he usually responds that way to criticism – or what he takes to be criticism, which isn’t always the same thing.
His recent piece on genetics and “survival of the fittest”, badged under “quantum” thinking was embarrassingly inaccurate, both factually and in interpretation.
He got both science and history seriously wrong, but then over-reacted poorly to persons commenting to that effect.
Once he shifts outside his area of expertise he is barely worth reading. The quantum stuff has been dire, a hopeless extrapolation from the science to political economy, with the AI mechanistic bullet point stuff, and actually obscured some useful talking points.
But he’s working on hits and traffic these days and is confusing these with engagement.
The Schumacher piece is slightly better than that but is still overly simplistic.
The other essential economist who is willfully ignored is Herman Daly. Schumacher’s subtitle IIRC is “Economics as if People Mattered,” which is the key to a human scale political economy. We will eventually follow the precepts of both. Or perish. Our choice.
Human societies are administered by elites regardless of their respective popular ideological narrative – hence the idea of OUR CHOICE is unrealistic. I mean going back a fair way to economic authors is always the glaring fact that elites via social networks and money pick and choose not to mention set up guardrails on what is allowed. Hence the embrace of say Spencer back in the day vs Veblen.
Asking the average person to understand 100s/1000s of yrs of Natural History/Political history let alone Economic history is a non starter. Just on the question of money/currency its nuts, what is it, where does it come from, how does it effect me thingy. I mean dominate orthodox economics was pushing the reserve/fractional banking trope/meme regardless of the facts. Because it was a cornerstone to the ideological elite narrative being pushed. Akin to the bible being printed in language the unwashed could read for themselves and not subjected to the machinations of the royals and priest classes.
Gosh I go through this day in day out with clients, well heeled, knowledgeable in their lives and pursuits … but … so ignorant about so much. The McCrazzypants part is they see me working and the level of service with attention to detail and its not confrontational – I am not on the attack. In this they know I am an ex MBA/Executive that at this time and space decided to work at 64 yrs old in applying myself to preserve these homes and provide a top tier service – its not cheap. I mean rocking up to a huge old Queenslander owned by a well known and published author from the Philosophy of Science discipline is a hell of a thing. In first convo he said he met Deirdre McCloskey, Hilarity issued as I informed the story about coming out to her boss – thank goat – though you went Marxist. Not that she sees children as commodities or anything – life is a business balance sheet thingy.
I regress …
Blows me away how much some forget …
He’s responsible for one of my favourite quotes: Any third-rate engineer or researcher can increase complexity but it takes a certain flair of real insight to make things simple again
My intro econ class was taught by a long-haired hippy dude with a phd from Yale. Some of the books (that I can recall from that class I took almost 50 years ago) included Small is Beautiful, Global Reach, and Free to Choose (he had to have something to counter the others…).
If memory serves, Schumacher’s “strategy” (more philosophy) was focused on economic development of the “third world”, not the advanced countries?
I’m sure I still have those books on a shelf somewhere…
There is a chapter on the “third world”. Not, I think, his main concern, though his strategy would be very useful there. Many development efforts have been investment in modern industry, with few results that raise the standard of living or labor skills of the majority. It is interesting to me that his proposals for poor countries were similar to the more effective policies of China’s Great Leap Forward that preceded his work–for example, training rural workers to provide clinic-level healthcare, and producing chemical fertilizer. Obviously much was unsuccessful and overdone, but contributed to China’s later development.
Schumacher was also the fellow who originally came up with the idea of an International Clearing Union, which Keynes advocated for.
http://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/multilateral-clearing/
Thank you for posting this! I used to donate to/was a member of the Center for New Economics when it was called The Schumacher Center. Had forgotten all about it – almost!
Schumacher was a (not self-styled, but effective) postmodernist of the constructive variety, looking to use the technology developed by modernism selectively and in the service of a more humane and ecologically informed ideology, much like Jane Jacobs. The modernist worship of Progress, efficiency, simplification, economies of scale and profit maximization had for at least half a century been very obviously leading humanity into a deadly cul de sac. So you started to see some thinkers like Schumacher and Jacobs trying to steer us back on course towards a more sustainable and life-respecting society (of which the economy was a critical aspect). But the most influential planners of the global economy preferred to stick with a model of economic growth based on cancer as a model organism. And the deconstructive postmodernists were content with their language games and obsessions with “theory” (which were unthreatening to the ruling class) and had virtually no interest in the thinkers from more distant history (like Thomas Aquinas) that Schumacher drew inspiration from.
I started at a West Coast “narrative evaluations/no grades” university not long after the publication of Small is Beautiful and EF Schumacher was central to the later editions of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, a bible of off-grid living that we all read. There certainly were many other economists questioning growth for its own sake in those days, such as Paul and Ann Erlich and even JK Galbraith.
Then Reagan enabled the “Greed is Good” ethos of the cocaine-fueled ‘80’s that Clinton and Gingrich turned into Trump’s Billionaire Factory. There will need to be a total financial collapse to reverse this mania for elevating avarice as virtue. I’m going to need to dig-up the Whole Earth Catalog when that happens.
Why not dig it up now, and be ready ahead of time?
The Schumacher problem was also faced by EJ Mishan, an economics professor at the LSE, who found great diificulty in finding and persuading a publisher to take up his book, “The Costs of Economic Growth” which ompletely cut across the grain of post-war aspirational consumer economies of the indusrialised Wests. When we hacked right into it, in order to ensure that we could maintain a sustainable planet, it was pretty clear the only tools were persuasion, naked coercion, or a mass wipeout of the world’s population as a consequence of nuclear war, or some sort of combination of the three.
People weren’t then, and are not now, easily convinced that to save the planet and the life it serves, they need to modify the way they live and consume, change the work that they do, and alter their acquisative tendencies, and you would have to convince a helluvalot of them and to maintain their belief over time to have a measurable effect repairing the damage we have already done to the planet. It was a lot easier for Lewis Powell to convince a small group of very powerful people that business and trade should have the least possible regulation, if any, and that if you can grow as much profitable business as you can now, the future, which is inherently unpredictable because there are no problems that the application of money and a little bit of technological development can’t fix. But, then again, life is short and in the great scheme of things it’s over in the blink of an eye, so why bother with a pretty abstract problem now when, if it does turn out to be real problem then it’s up to more motivated future generations to sort it out?
It may just be that the Schumacher problem are people and the cultural blind alley of human nature and our quest for the immediate.
Mishan wasn’t a lone voice at LSE at that time, but he was a self declared Marxist economist (in its widest sense) and that tag followed him.
It is well worth reading again. Plenty of copies second hand.
Didn’t Pelican publish this at the same time as “The Affluent Society” ?
(could have been the Effluent Society but Rachel Carson and Vance Packard had those angles covered)
Like JKG and Schumacher, Mishan is pretty easily readable and tbh I don’t think modern equivalent popular authors have the same writing ability or talent to explain, possibly excepting Kate Raworth.
The environmental movement really took off about 5 years after this forewarning but I was involved in conservation work at that time in the late 60s as a teen, and people were genuinely concerned about the planet. It wasn’t just a loony fringe, as the mainstream might like to have painted us, but we were a minority. I was first taught about rising CO2 emissions in a Geography class in 1970, then without associated climate change predictions.
But… linking environmentalism to economic depradation came later in the 80s with the appalling excesses of corporate neoliberalism.
I think the earliest popular writer to challenge consumerism was Vance Packard, very much from the US context, writing in the late 50s and early 60s.
There was a period through the 60s to mid 70s where the best popular academics and authors, many like minded, wrote a lot of challenging and progressive sociology / education / economics / history / environmentalism for a popular readership, much on a coherent left agenda, and all we have had since is a lot of wheel reinvention.
I greatly admired Schumacher’s vision when I read his book when it came out. As a young engineer I was charmed by the idea of “appropriate technology”. I still am.
I have seen up close some of our best and brightest figuring out how to make a simple clean-burning stove fueled by agricultural waste, solar, etc. for use in poor countries, made with local materials. But this is being funded by the State Dept. (or used to) not VC, despite a huge market.
On the other hand, are we being naive in believing that “smallness” and “simplicity” can scale up to serve the needs of 8+ billion people, except in niche applications?
China is a good example of a country that has become the workshop of the world in part because of the gargantuan scale of its market. Scale is the reason China has been the darling of Wall Street for forty years. India, whose youthful population now exceeds China’s, is trying to be the next China. Even a poor rural Indian has internet and cell phone service because of the economies of scale of electronics.
Things like good roads, clean water and sanitation remain expensive (and out of reach to the poor) partly because they remain difficult to provide at scale and low cost. Healthcare is an example of a necessity whose costs keep escalating even as the scale increases. I can’t imagine a modern hospital without all of the bio-medical advances that have been achieved via globalized scale in finance, education, R&D, manufacturing, etc.
In an overpopulated world, it’s not either-or — either large scale or small, complex or simple. It’s both (imho).
Brilliant. Economics I can love.
Also, exactly how, in my opinion, governments are supposed to work too, and how currently they are not.
Thinking back to my collage daze, beyond Schumacher, I recall enjoying these two:
Heilbroner’s “Between Capitalism and Socialism” ( a third way?)
and on local organizing, Harry Boyte: ” The Backyard Revolution” (seems quaintly naive these days)
Have to admit, Trump couch-surfing in my brain has me all upgefucked. (apologies to the german-speakers)
High praise indeed for Schumacher which is 100% warranted. A long forgotten and ignored genius.
Schumacher’s other books are: ‘Good Work’ and ‘A Guide for the Perplexed’ both well worth a look.
Co-operatives are a great way of ensuring a community holds together when it could otherwise fall apart and disappear. They retain employment producing goods and services in a community. Quick example here is the petrol (gas) station closed here meaning long trips to the next town to refuel. So the community acquired disused railway land and funded a new one with a hardware store attached (this is a rural area). This both retains the facility locally and provides employment locally including for school leavers seeking work experience & savings. This co-operative is viable and pays dividends in many forms including cash.
Also worth a look in the same micro enterprise arena is: ‘Ripples in the Zambezi’ by Ernesto Pirelli,- the importance of a local catalyst person with new ideas (and know how to make them happen) for local communities eclipsed by “progress.”