Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Matthered, by E.F. Schumacher

Small may be beautiful, but this book is a decidedly mixed bag, some parts of it obvious truisms, other parts of it damnable errors, some parts sensible advice, other parts dangerous follies. A book like this is fairly frustrating to review. It is easy to praise a book that is uniformly excellent, or only possessing of minor and insignificant flaws, just as it is easy to condemn a work that has almost nothing worthy of value. But a book like this one which consists of some parts that are very excellent and other parts that are worse than useless, to the point of being extremely dangerous and harmful in their tendency, especially in a work that purports to be a masterpiece and that speaks of matters of the highest urgency, is quite a different matter to deal with.

Not all of the many and serious errors and problems of this book are the part of this author. It would be uncharitable, for example, to blame the author entirely for the intellectually dishonest way in which this book is often used to libel people in the private sector and to promote a gigantic sort of government establishment that the author claims in some parts of this book to hate. Nonetheless, the author is highly blameable for at least two of the massive errors that really eliminate much of the worthiness of this book, and that is both a grave inconsistency as well as a world-class level skill at demagoguery and pandering that is highly wicked and pernicious in its use by his fellow travelers of the left-wing in contemporary political discourse.

These two errors are worthy of some elaboration, as they make this book immensely frustrating and nearly useless except as a source of occasionally good quotes and far too seldom encountered wisdom. The first of these serious flaws is that the book has a grave inconsistency at its core. It claims to desire to undo the bias of modern society towards gigantic and bloated and inefficient forms, to defend traditional standards of worth and moral values against the overweening influence of greed and avarice, to support human virtues over mere market value, and to support the dignity of the rural dweller in peripheral areas from the hyper-modern corrupt core regions. These are all noble aims, it should be mentioned. On the other hand, the book ends up promoting the same tired and failed socialist models of nationalization and collectivism and forced redistribution of wealth through government theft of either profits or equity in large firms, showing its hostility to centralization is merely selective, preferring the crony capitalism of the recent bailouts to the free market system, and the vice of theft to that of covetousness. The author, in the end, does not stand for virtue at all, only a different set of vices, the vices of the socialist rather than the vices of the libertarian, not the virtues that stand opposed to both.

The other massive fault of this book is the fact that this author is a world-class panderer of the highest order, paying lip service to virtues and talking of a love of Ghandi and simplicity, talking of the need for townspeople to cease their contempt for the rural resident. The author pays lip service to the need to encourage entrepreneurs on the one hand, while on the other hand pointing out the “need” for governments to get their hands on more private resources to build infrastructure and reward the government for the goodies that businesses need to run effectively. The author claims to be a devout Christian while being selective in his denunciation of vices–not commenting at all against the vices of sterility and death through theft and sexual evil and only harping on the vices of greed and exploitation on the right. He also writes about “Buddhist Economists,” and talking up the virtue of the Burmese farmer or Indian villager, trying to pander to the New Wave leftist influences that have been common in Western intellectual life since the 1960’s (this book was published in 1973).

The book is organized into four parts, which are a mixture of overly technical government-speak and sermon-like odes to virtue that generally are long on exhortations and short on details about how one is to live virtuously in an age of increasing scarcity and waste. The first part is a typical leftist hostility toward the industrialization and remoteness of the modern world with all of its pathologies and alienation. The second part is a “limits to growth”-style commentary on the exploitation of this earth’s resources by the fortunate few. The third part is a discussion of the third world and some sensible comments on how to ameliorate their condition through developing hinterlands with modest technologies capable of a wide application. The fourth part is a rather disappointing socialist discussion on organization and (collective) ownership, showing the true colors of the author as being on the forces of theft and evil.

This book suffers from many of the problems I have noted in other discussions about the sustainable lifestyle [1]. Several of the particularly most troubling of these problems to me are as follows. First, the virtue of sustainability is urged on those who are without, as the author does not appear inclined to remove his jet-setting lifestyle of left-wing privilege. This brings the author under the charge of gross hypocrisy in his preaching. Second, the author lacks any kind of specifics how a labor-intensive agriculturally based economy is supposed to provide for the dignity and the well-being of the population in general. It is one thing to say that labor needs to be clothed with dignity and honor, but it is quite another to provide a meaningful way of how this can be done. A third and serious flaw is that elements of the author’s arguments are at cross-purposes–a love of socialism and collectivism counteract the author’s avowed intention (based on the title of the book) to support the development of small-scale enterprises.

The book, as a whole, spends a lot of time trying to score left-wing political points while engaging in a very selective presentation of an unbalanced and biased perspective. It mouths pious platitudes that everyone can (and does) respect, while providing little to nothing in the way of meaningful steps that can be taken to solve the admittedly massive problems of constant crisis that our world faces. Had the book been written by someone who was not a socialist, it could have been a vastly better book (especially its disappointing ending), and had it been written by someone who was less of a crackpot and more of a practical minded person, it could have answered the questions of “how do you suppose we go about doing it?” that I asked the author in mute frustration throughout reading this 300+ page book. The book was equally mute in response, eloquent only in dishonest posturing and discredited and dishonorable socialist solutions. Far more was expected from this book by the reader, and far more is needed if we wish to avoid a dark fate. This book, ultimately, fails to measure up to its hype and finds itself as part of the problem instead of part of the solution, as its wicked means do not lead to its highly noble and worthy ends, if those ends are really what the author desires.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/the-shibboleth-of-sustainability/