Books : Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered.
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 330
EAN: 9780060904326
ISBN: 0060904321
Label: Harpercollins
Manufacturer: Harpercollins
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 290
Publication Date: 1974-06
Publisher: Harpercollins
Sales Rank: 2652155
Studio: Harpercollins
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
The classic of common-sense economics. "Enormously broad in scope, pithily weaving together threads from Galbraith and Gandhi, capitalism and Buddhism, science and psychology."-- The New Republic
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Having sung the praises last month of a book that invited businesses to get bigger, it's only fair to put out the other perspective: that human-scale enterprises tend to be considerably more people-centered, to be involved in their communities, and to use resources in more appropriate ways.
During and after high school and college, I read a lot of these books: authors like Ralph Borsodi, Hazel Henderson, Earnest Callenbach, and of course, E.F. Schumacher. Schumacher's most famous work is Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered; he has also written several other books, including Good Works and A Guide for the Perplexed.
Published 34 years ago and still in print, Small Is Beautiful was one of the first calls for economic and environmental sustainability to reach a mass audience. In places, he is eerily prescient, as when he predicts a violent struggle over oil if our society fails to curb its addiction, and discusses the stupidity of the then-mainstream economic perspective that failed to account properly for resource depletion, and also failed to recognize the consequences of creating islands of great wealth in a sea of poverty.
In his own words: "they automatically endorse the ecological stupidity of industrial man and his love affair with the terrible simplicities of quantification."
I believe it was Schumacher who coined the phrase, "appropriate technology"; certainly his books explore the power of simple devices ... Read More
Rating: -
Great book.....If you haven't read it and are considering a purchase, heed the wisdom in the title. Buy local, support small businesses. Amazon will do OK without you buying it from them. Otherwise, you could buy this book from Amazon to be "ironic".
Rating: -
Put in simple pop culture terms, the argument against Small, is: Imagine a steady rock & roll diet of nothing but local bands. No Berry, no Beatles, No Stones, no Dylan, etc., etc. Except we cannot even imagine that ~ local bands are always recasting, if not outright imitating, the latest sounds from all over the country.
Look, the Dark Ages were "green," too. Who hated industry and technology and science more than the Church? Even a 100 hundred years ago, before traffic jams, pollution, TV commercials and the Bomb, about 70% of this country was illiterate farm hands. With life expectancies of 50 years. But they had great banjo players.
Rating:  -
This book offers some excellent insights but lacks something that all big picture political/economic books must have - humor. That weakness makes it a long, heavy slog that is nearly worth the time spent.
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A bit outdated but given that it was written in the 70s this book is very inspiring ans still very applicable (if not even more applicable today than in the past). In any event it is truly a classic in ecological economics. There are certainly many critics of this book but its significance is immense. I must say that we economists really need to work on our writing abilities because not all of the works are easy to read for non-economist audience. Yet Schumacher manages just that.
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