On Saturday, April 5th at 3PM EDT, the Schumacher Center is hosting a two part event at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, MA: the Third Annual Robert Swann Lecture and the First Annual Common Wealth Prize. Barbara Wood and James Boyce are the speakers. The event is free but registration is requested. Please join us. More details below.
THE THIRD ANNUAL ROBERT SWANN LECTURE
Robert Swann and E.F. Schumacher were good friends who shared a similar analysis of the social, cultural, and ecological problems facing the World’s communities. And they shared a passion for building the framework of a new economics that would help communities thrive in all their multiplicity. We are pleased that Barbara Wood, Schumacher’s daughter and biographer, has agreed to deliver this year’s Robert Swann Lecture.
In her lecture, “Revisiting Schumacher: Challenge, Courage, and Change,” Barbara will address the two sides of her father’s work—the economic and the spiritual. These two aspects of his thinking are highlighted and contrasted in Schumacher’s books, Small is Beautiful and A Guide for the Perplexed, respectively. Barbara will argue that each of these are integral to the other. They were not separate avenues of inquiry, but rather one, informing each other in a quest for a deeper truth.
About the Robert Swann Lecture Series:
This series was inaugurated in 2023 in honor of Robert Swann, founder of the E. F. Schumacher Society, now the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. Bob Swann brought the pragmatic skills of a builder to his lifelong commitment to community and decentralized economics as a pathway to peace and ecological harmony. His 1960s civil rights work led to an effort to secure land for African-American farmers, serving as a model for the Community Land Trust movement.
Later on, in the Berkshires, Swann continued his work as a pioneer and advocate of Community Land Trusts as well as local currency initiatives— democratic tools for place-based economic transformation. The Swann Lectures provide a platform to those who embody Bob’s practical activism and who lead by example, advancing community-based economic transformation toward a just and regenerative future.
REGISTER FOR THE FREE IN-PERSON EVENT
THE FIRST ANNUAL COMMON WEALTH PRIZE
Author and entrepreneur Peter Barnes approached, the Schumacher Center last year with the idea for an Annual Common Wealth Prize recognizing a leading contributor to the field. We are delighted to host the Prize and are grateful for Peter’s vision and support.
The inaugural recipient is James K. Boyce, an author, naturalist, economist, and senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Following Barbara Wood’s presentation, Professor Boyce will deliver his acceptance talk titled Common Wealth for All: Caring for our planet and for each other.
About the Common Wealth Prize
from Peter Barnes
The two giant, tragic flaws of capitalism are that it inexorably destroys nature and widens inequality among humans. More than a century of attempts to fix these flaws through public policy have not succeeded. The purpose of the Common Wealth Prize is to spotlight another way to make markets work for nature, future generations, and all living persons together. That way is to protect and properly manage the multiple assets we inherit together and have a responsibility to pass on, undiminished, to future generations. In other words, it is to protect and share our common wealth at all scales.
E.F. Schumacher was one of the first economists to identify natural and social capital as massive but unrecognized contributors to human well-being. Common wealth is the sum of those two large troves of capital. What unite all these assets are two important qualities: they are gifts from either nature or our ancestors, and they rightfully belong to everyone together, to be held in trust for future generations. Which is hardly the way markets treat them today.
What is to be done about this?’ Schumacher didn’t answer that question fully, but he pointed in the right direction. “The market represents only the surface of society,” he wrote in Small is Beautiful. “Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself.” What’s missing, he said, is a set of ‘goods’ that have ‘not been privately appropriated, but are nonetheless essential to all human activity.’
Practically speaking, this means we need new property rights and ownership structures that assure that our common inheritances are priced properly in markets and that their benefits flow to everyone equitably. This may not sound like a big deal, but if it were done at scale it would have massively beneficial effects. Most notably, we’d wind up with science-based limits on human disturbance of nature, along with a steady stream of income for all humans.
Fortunately, there’s a small but growing group of visionaries that is pointing the way along this path. The Common Wealth Prize will recognize these visionaries and promote their ideas in the coming years, starting today. I thank E.F. Schumacher for lighting the torch and the Schumacher Center for carrying it forward.
About the Common Wealth Lecture
from James Boyce
The gifts of nature may be free, but securing them for the benefit of all is not. It takes hard work to safeguard lands, air, and water from being despoiled. It takes hard work to keep natural resources from being monopolized by a powerful few. Fossil fuels today exemplify these twin dangers. To stabilize the planet’s climate, nations must put a hard ceiling on the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. The resulting higher fuel prices will generate very large revenues. By recycling this money to the public as carbon dividends, we can consolidate support for protecting the climate by simultaneously protecting the economic security of working people. More generally, common wealth owned equally by all can provide the foundation for universal basic income, helping to forge a more just and democratic economy.
REGISTER FOR THE FREE IN-PERSON EVENT
Many good wishes,
Staff of the Schumacher Center