2023 is the 50th anniversary of E.F. Schumacher’s classic, Small is Beautiful. As part of our year-long celebrations, the Schumacher Center is highlighting organizations and initiatives working to usher forward a ‘small is beautiful’ future.
We’re also inviting reflections on the impact of reading the book from those leading the call for an economics in which people and planet truly matter. “What most inspired you on first reading Small Is Beautiful?” “What most inspires you now from Schumacher’s vision as you look to the future?” Here is a collection of the responses, which we’ll continue to add to as the year unfolds. (Additional reflections are welcome at: Schumacher@Centerforneweconomics.org)
From Della Duncan, co-host of Upstream Podcast
“I was on a walk with a Buddhist Nun from Korea when I turned to share with her what I thought was a completely original question, one that connected the insights about the root causes of suffering from Buddhism with the systemic crises of our time, “what if there was a tradition of ‘Buddhist Economics’?”
From John Fullerton, founder of Capital Institute
“I read Small is Beautiful and I loved it…these two books [speaking also of Guide to the Perplexed] were absolutely foundational to what’s become my life’s work. And they had such a profound effect, I literally got in my car and drove up to Massachusetts, and cold-called the Schumacher Center…”
From Richard Heinberg, founder of Post-Carbon Institute
“My generation basically had all the information it needed. We had books like Silent Spring, Limits to Growth, and Small Is Beautiful. We could have tamped down consumption, but instead, we threw the biggest party in all of human history and we’re leaving the next generations to clean up after us. The least we can do is offer whatever bits of wisdom we may have accumulated, and try to help in any way we can.”
From Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of Local Futures
“I came across Small is Beautiful in Ladakh, and I sometimes wonder whether I, as a young woman, would have had the courage to write to the Indian government arguing that there was another way forward.
So I was deeply inspired and strengthened by Schumacher’s words, but sadly, never had the chance to meet him. However, over the years I met almost all his family members, and had contact with all the Schumacher centres in Germany, the UK, and of course you in the United States I visited Susan and Bob in the early 80s.”
From Donnie Maclurcan, Executive Director of the Post Growth Institute
“In the earliest years of the Post Growth Institute’s founding we ran an internal poll with our 10 volunteers: ‘what book influenced you most when it comes to the need for an economy that operates within ecological limits?’ At the time, our group was based across five countries. No one of us was working in the same professional or academic field. We had arrived at a shared moment from seemingly quite different paths…
To my surprise, all ten of us cited the same book: Small is Beautiful. I can’t say I know what inspired each of us by that book. Perhaps it was the quotes that age so well and could provide adequate soundbites for almost any modern day interview on a related topic. Perhaps it was audacious chapter titles like ‘Buddhist economics’. Perhaps it was the clarity and resonance it offered someone like myself, working in the field of post-development at the time. Or perhaps, and this I suspect most, we collectively appreciated how Schumacher effortlessly shaped any life-affirming consideration of economics as a spiritual exercise; the legitimacy this has afforded many of us who have reached for a deeper meaning in what we do, as we ride in his wake.”
From Richard Norgaard, Professor at the University of California, Berkeley
“There were so many inspiring books in those few years [1970s] — Georgescu-Roegen, Herman Daly, Meadows and Meadows, Commoner — but Small is Beautiful had a special way of enthralling students in the classroom, faculty too.”
From Ruth Potts, Director of Regenerative Economics, Schumacher College
“What strikes you when you reread Small is Beautiful today is the dense and vibrant mix of philosophy, of environmentalism, and of economics, and also its bold idealism. Schumacher is not somebody whose thinking is bounded by what already exists. He asks more— what should we be aiming for? It’s a book of bold, imaginative speculation, and we need much more of that kind of thing to meet the challenges of the times we’re living through today. 50 years on, what we know is that Schumacher was right.”
From Steve Toben, former Director of the Flora Family Foundation
“I have my own Small is Beautiful story. I took a Development Economics course at the University of North Carolina in the spring of 1977, and our professor, Eugene Fields, assigned the book to the class. I was profoundly affected by it. During one lecture based on the book, Dr. Fields actually broke down and wept, something I had never seen from an economist, before or since.”
From Stewart Wallis, Chair of the Wellbeing Economics Alliance (WEAll)
“I bought my copy of Small is Beautiful 49 years ago, so one year after it was published, and…it’s stayed with me and, really, accompanied me all my life. And it’s changed my life…
I feel more optimistic today than at any time in the last 50 years that Schumacher’s ideas are actually going to be implemented at scale. There’s a growing consensus of what the economy should deliver and to whom… We can see that in many parts of the world change is happening, people are prepared to collaborate in a different way, and its clearer what’s needed.”