October 16, 2023 – John Abrams

A particularly prescient book about economics turned 50 this year. EF Schumacher’s classic Small is Beautiful predicted what the human story would soon become: our push for endless growth is doomed to fail and a fundamentally different orientation is possible, beneficial, and essential. The subtitle of the book is Economics as if People Mattered (but it could just as well be Economics as if the Planet Mattered.)

Schumacher’s book has influenced a generation of social entrepreneurs who operate on the principle that there is such a thing as “enough” and who emphasize quality over quantity and equity over exclusivity. Small is Beautiful endures not only due to its wisdom, but because of its early call to action. “If we want to survive and give our children a chance for survival,” Schumacher wrote, “we have to have the courage to dream.”

That dream has been advanced for more than 40 years by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, a nonprofit located in Great Barrington, MA. To celebrate the anniversary of their namesake’s book, the Schumacher Center has convened a series of conversations to envision the next 50 years, with topics relating Schumacher’s theories to the central issues of our times.

This Thursday, the conversation will focus on “Rethinking Ownership & Work: Shared Responsibility & Reward.” Having admired and engaged with the Center’s work for decades, I am honored to join Beth Spong of Dean’s Beans and Julian McKinley of the Democracy at Work Institute in this free online event on October 19th at 2:00 PM. I invite you to join us.  It promises to be a provocative discussion.

Small is Beautiful anticipated, in 1973, the problems of our contemporary global economy. Schumacher recommended local control over large corporate entities and celebrated the use of “appropriate technology” – a phrase that became widespread in the seventies and refers to technology that is local, environmentally sound, and promotes self-sufficiency. The term has largely been replaced today by “localization,” a movement that grows consistently stronger and is characterized by local commerce, food, and energy production.

When I first read the book, in 1974, it fully resonated with the back-to-the-land practices we had explored in prior years, but I didn’t know then how influential it would become in the business I was beginning to build. Schumacher named something that many of us were practicing.

As South Mountain established itself, we embraced localization and dismissed the “bigger-is-better” imperative, which author and environmental advocate Ed Abbey once called “the ideology of the cancer cell.”

I recently reread the book. Absorbing Schumacher’s sensibility and observations of the world around him 50 years ago, I can imagine that our propensity to inflict lasting harm on our planet and to allow wealth supremacy to reign would have been heartbreaking – but not surprising – to him if he were here today.

On the other hand, he would have been inspired and uplifted by the ascendance of counterforces like regenerative agriculture, distributed renewable energy, employee ownership, fair trade, and prioritizing Main Street over Wall Street. He would have loved that the internet allows us to think globally and act locally. He would have been impressed by the 7,300 B-Corps worldwide which are using business as a force for good, and by the breadth and strength of today’s diversity, inclusion, and equity efforts.

Many aspects of these current developments can be traced directly to Fritz Schumacher’s work and influence, including his Buddhist Economics concept, which measures prosperity by the well-being of all people and nature. As he said, "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.”

When Small is Beautiful was written, there were indicators that supported Schumacher’s theories. It was the year of the first energy crisis, when oil prices skyrocketed and we lined up in our cars for gasoline. Earth Day had gathered 20 million people three years before to launch the environmental movement. In 1972, systems thinker Donnella Meadows and her colleagues released The Limits to Growth, the first study to call attention to the finite nature of the earth’s resources.  

Marjorie Kelly, in her just-released book, Wealth Supremacy, says:  “the great task ahead is the task of creating a system designed not to maximize financial wealth but to keep life flourishing.” Transitioning to a just and sustainable economic system has become the fundamental long-term challenge of our times. Fifty years ago, Fritz Schumacher gave us a framework to help us with this world-changing work.

Please join us remotely at the Schumacher Center on October 19th as we rethink ownership and workplace democracy.