A couple of years ago I read EF Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. It’s one of the most enlightening books I’ve ever read and I’m returning to it now because I’ve forgotten a lot of the information it contained. And it contained a lot of information, which I consider somewhat perspicacious of today’s world, as I imagined it also would’ve been of the 1970s when it was first published.
This is probably Schumacher’s magnum opus. The full title of the book is Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered and in it, Schumacher makes arguments for a more sensible, sustainable attitude towards consumption. He is asking us to rethink how we use resources and to be mindful of the environmental impact of our habits.
If you’d like to hear a summary of the book and an insightful discussion of it, then I’d recommend the following episode of the Maxim Institute Podcast:
Instead of re-reading the book, I would like to do something different. I think that books such as this contain practical ideas and numerals, which one ought to explore beyond the book to truly understand, appreciate and apply. Besides, I’ll probably forget most of the content, yet again, even after re-reading it. Needless to say, this is a good way of crystallizing knowledge and insights from books—putting them into use, even if that means simply curating creating associations between them. I’ll continue to experiment with using Wolfram Notebooks as a medium for exploration. I expect that it’ll be particularly useful in this case, given that there are lots of real-world data, conceptual models and facts to explore. Additionally, it’d be nice to be able to pull congruent pieces of information from different sources and seamlessly blend them.
I would like to explore the book—gather my annotations, run some of Schumacher’s calculations and estimations, and so on. I’m not necessarily interested in critiquing the ideas in the book or commenting on philosophical and economical themes. Rather, I would like to better understand the ideas, especially from a historical perspective. It’s about half a century since this book was first published, and I’m curious: is small (not) still beautiful?