This is the first of ('hopefully) a series of posts exploring the book small is still beautiful by Joseph Pearce.
Pearce embarks on a journey with us to the thoughts hidden in a book Small is beautiful. This new rendering is both a tribute to E. F. Schumacher and a encouragement to new generation to take over in a fight for a world better suited for humans. Both books begin with a proposal that people have souls - they matter because they are not just matter. Economy therefore should be ordered to an end which is not purely economic because no material gain can substitute for insulted self-respect and impaired freedom.
In the second chapter, Pearce asks important questions regarding our state of affairs in economics. The one which could sum all the others in a concise way, which I also heard on a youth camp last month, is this:
Does money buy happiness?
Answering this question is indeed a large part of the book, proving again and again that blind following of money and growth often corrupts our environment and lessens our freedom. The sense of true value can be obscured by prices which are changed by chance conditions or state experiments with subsidies. Economy needs a goal beyond itself, needs to be limited by values without which human life on this planet wouldn't be possible.
For Schumacher, another problem with the mainstream economic thought is the lack of distinction of goods. The least distinction according to him is that there are primary goods, secondary goods and services and the primary goods are either renewable or non-renewable. GNP (Gross National Product) and the markets ignore these distinctions and therefore cannot distinguish between "healthy" and "sick" growth. If a woman behaves economically and cooks at home, she spends less money for the food and the effect on GNP is lower - therefore what is economic in one context is uneconomic in the other.
Another interesting example from the book: 7.4% GNP of USA in 1990 was caused by costs of cancer, drug abuse and crime. This is surely not a healthy growth.
Concluding the first part of the book are some considerations from UN Report GEO 2000 (Global Environment Outlook) regarding the harmful effect of economic growth on the environment - loss of forests, extinct animals and loss of cultures which used to live in those forests. Also, the efforts to incorporate the poor countries into the world economy by using inappropriate technology have caused massive migration from rural areas to cities.
It is important to note that even for Schumacher, some growth is necessary but it should consist more of the healthy kind and less of the sick kind. I can only add that even for the current Pope Francis, who is a strong critic of contemporary economical reality, the economic growth is necessary but not enough for the growth in justice [EG 204]. Pearce uses a very visual analogy of a human being - until a certain age the growth is good and necessary but after becoming an adult, he can no longer grow taller and only becomes fatter which is a sick kind of growth.
These ideas resonate within me deeply. This part of the book is more like a diagnosis and doesn't show any partial nor holistic solutions to the pressing problems but shows the reality in its spectacular current darkness. Expand or die in economic terms becomes expand and die in ecological sense.
Pearce embarks on a journey with us to the thoughts hidden in a book Small is beautiful. This new rendering is both a tribute to E. F. Schumacher and a encouragement to new generation to take over in a fight for a world better suited for humans. Both books begin with a proposal that people have souls - they matter because they are not just matter. Economy therefore should be ordered to an end which is not purely economic because no material gain can substitute for insulted self-respect and impaired freedom.
In the second chapter, Pearce asks important questions regarding our state of affairs in economics. The one which could sum all the others in a concise way, which I also heard on a youth camp last month, is this:Does money buy happiness?
Answering this question is indeed a large part of the book, proving again and again that blind following of money and growth often corrupts our environment and lessens our freedom. The sense of true value can be obscured by prices which are changed by chance conditions or state experiments with subsidies. Economy needs a goal beyond itself, needs to be limited by values without which human life on this planet wouldn't be possible.
For Schumacher, another problem with the mainstream economic thought is the lack of distinction of goods. The least distinction according to him is that there are primary goods, secondary goods and services and the primary goods are either renewable or non-renewable. GNP (Gross National Product) and the markets ignore these distinctions and therefore cannot distinguish between "healthy" and "sick" growth. If a woman behaves economically and cooks at home, she spends less money for the food and the effect on GNP is lower - therefore what is economic in one context is uneconomic in the other.
Another interesting example from the book: 7.4% GNP of USA in 1990 was caused by costs of cancer, drug abuse and crime. This is surely not a healthy growth.
Concluding the first part of the book are some considerations from UN Report GEO 2000 (Global Environment Outlook) regarding the harmful effect of economic growth on the environment - loss of forests, extinct animals and loss of cultures which used to live in those forests. Also, the efforts to incorporate the poor countries into the world economy by using inappropriate technology have caused massive migration from rural areas to cities.It is important to note that even for Schumacher, some growth is necessary but it should consist more of the healthy kind and less of the sick kind. I can only add that even for the current Pope Francis, who is a strong critic of contemporary economical reality, the economic growth is necessary but not enough for the growth in justice [EG 204]. Pearce uses a very visual analogy of a human being - until a certain age the growth is good and necessary but after becoming an adult, he can no longer grow taller and only becomes fatter which is a sick kind of growth.
These ideas resonate within me deeply. This part of the book is more like a diagnosis and doesn't show any partial nor holistic solutions to the pressing problems but shows the reality in its spectacular current darkness. Expand or die in economic terms becomes expand and die in ecological sense.
