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home | design projects | philosophy | qualifications | contact In 1974, E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977) wrote "Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered" reissued in 1989. "25 Years Later...With Commentaries" was published in 1999. "Small is Beautiful" is the classic of common-sense economics upon which many recent trends in our society are founded. This is economics from the heart rather than from just the bottom line. | | |
| | | | Schumacher was a Rhodes Scholar in economics and the head of planning at the British Coal Board. He was also the president of the Soil Association and the founder of the Intermediate Technology Development Group. Schumacher was a respected economist who worked with J.M. Keynes and J.K. Galbraith. For twenty years he was the Chief Economic Advisor to the National Coal Board in the United Kingdom, opposed the neo-classical economics by declaring that single-minded concentration on output and technology was dehumanizing. He held that one's workplace should be dignified and meaningful first, efficient second, and that nature (and the world's natural resources) is priceless.Schumacher proposed the idea of "smallness within bigness": a specific form of decentralization. For a large organization to work, according to Schumacher, it must behave like a related group of small organizations. Schumacher's work coincided with the growth of ecological concerns and with the birth of environmentalism and he became a hero to many in the environmental movement. | | |
| | | | "Small is Beautiful" is the perfect antidote to the economics of globalization. As relevant today as when it was first published, this is a landmark set of essays on humanistic economics. The 25th anniversary edition brings Schumacher's ideas into focus for the end-of-the-century by adding commentaries by contemporary thinkers who have been influenced by Schumacher. They analyze the impact of his philosophy on current political and economic thought. The polemic behind Smallstudio Design is to provide my own take on this book which has been inspirational in my approach to architecture and interior design and the general philosophy of community based public participatory visioning. Some quotes from Schumacher to think about:
"...measuring the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational ... the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity."
"...modern industry ...requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. ""Ever bigger machines, entailing ever bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful." "...greed and envy demand continuous and limitless economic growth of a material kind, without proper regard for conservation, and this type of growth cannot possibly fit into a finite environment." "The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty, and chaotic. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion ñ political or otherwise ñ which suddenly seems to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to our existence. It needs no emphasis that herein lies one of the great dangers of our time."
"Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful"
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