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    Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered
    Unavailable
    Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered
    Unavailable
    Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered
    Ebook282 pages5 hours

    Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered

    By Joseph Pearce

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A third of a century ago, E. F. Schumacher rang out a timely warning against the idolatry of giantism with his book Small Is Beautiful. Since then, millions of copies of Schumacher’s work have been sold in dozens of different languages; few books before or since have spoken so profoundly to urgent economic and social considerations. Schumacher, a highly respected economist and adviser to third-world governments, broke ranks with the accepted wisdom of his peers to warn of impending calamity if rampant consumerism, technological dynamism, and economic expansionism were not checked by human and environmental considerations. Humanity was lurching blindly in the wrong direction, argued Schumacher. Its obsessive pursuit of wealth would not, as so many believed, ultimately lead to utopia but more probably to catastrophe.

    Schumacher’s greatest achievement was the fusion of ancient wisdom and modern economics in a language that encapsulated contemporary doubts and fears about the industrialized world. The wisdom of the ages, the perennial truths that have guided humanity throughout its history, serves as a constant reminder to each new generation of the limits to human ambition. But if this wisdom is a warning, it is also a battle cry. Schumacher saw that we needed to relearn the beauty of smallness, of human-scale technology and environments. It was no coincidence that his book was subtitled Economics as if People Mattered.

    Joseph Pearce revisits Schumacher’s arguments and examines the multifarious ways in which Schumacher’s ideas themselves still matter. Faced though we are with fearful new technological possibilities and the continued centralization of power in large governmental and economic structures, there is still the possibility of pursuing a saner and more sustainable vision for humanity. Bigger is not always best, Pearce reminds us, and small is still beautiful.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 6, 2014
    ISBN9781497646773
    Unavailable
    Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered
    Author

    Joseph Pearce

    Joseph Pearce is the author of numerous literary works including Literary Converts, The Quest for Shakespeare and Shakespeare on Love, and the editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions series. His other books include literary biographies of Oscar Wilde, J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

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    Reviews for Small Is Still Beautiful

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    • 1/5
      The basic premise of this book is that there is no such thing as a purely economic problem because economics deals with human beings and a world with finite resources. Economic problems cannot be solved using purely economic methods. Material wealth cannot compensate humans for (in Tawney's words) "arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair their freedom," nor can it fix irreparable harm done to the world we need to sustain us. All good points!

      That said, this is not well written. This is basically a series of quotes, some several pages long, linked by Pearce's hamhanded* prose. The quotes themselves were part of the problem for me: for any one economics professor or real world example, there are two quotes from Catholic popes or GK Chesterton. To give Pearce some credit, I'm clearly not the target audience for this book. He makes few arguments of his own, but these few are all based entirely on Catholic doctrine, which I don't care about. And his points about economics not counting the true impact and cost of industry, the harm of the the WTO, IMF, and World Bank's neocolonialism, big businesses influencing governments and people instead of the other way round--I already knew all of this, generally with far more nuance and depth than he presented. I assume this book is for the Catholics out there who haven't yet done any research or thought into economics. For everyone else, this isn't useful or, for that matter, all that readable.



      *Here's one I just came across: "[Mansholt's Plan] has begotten the desert it deserves. The soul of the soil has been sold for cash, and farmer Faustus is left to reap the bitter harvest."

      1 person found this helpful