The importance of Schumacher's 'smaller' life

Nearly 40 years ago we were urged to embrace a “smaller” life.

The late E.F. Schumacher.

German-born British economist, E.F. Schumacher, developed the concept of intermediate technology and wrote about small being beautiful.

Schumacher’s idea quickly developed something of a cult following, but proved inadequate in the face of the growth-juggernaut that crushed all 20^th Century alternatives.

The appeal of growth has swept all before it, but promises of riches for all are unrealized with, in fact, many being plunged into poverty.

Some, very few, have become fabulously rich and many are equally fabulously poor.

Schumacher, who died in 1977, wrote about his ideas in his book, “Small is Beautiful”.
Sadly, those with the power in the early 70s took no note of Schumacher’s advice and today the world suffers because of those intellectual inadequacies and marches blindly toward the abyss because of that “short-termism”.

Today we need to turn away from the corporate structure of the world and work with urgency toward the concept articulated by Schumacher.

There is an urgency for “smaller”, which works in tandem with “slower”, and along with those concepts there is a need for an intense focus on localism.

We all need to work fewer hours and enable the enrichment of our lives through the freeing up of more purposeful leisure time.

Working hours should be restricted to four-hours a day, no overtime and no double-shifts, with those limitations being relaxed significantly for small privately owned businesses (employing no more than four people) or genuinely publicly owned and run enterprises, such as health, law and public transit systems, but not military forces as traditionally understood.
Some argue that a change should come from the bottom up, but such a change is so dramatic and launches us into such a significantly different paradigm that it needs to be a top-down led systemic change.

Such change demands leaders with hitherto unseen courage and a deep sense of fairness, individual rights and equality.

Schumacher's
 book.

Such super-souls are rare, but to ensure the future has a human history it is time that person; a compassionate, understanding, bold, patient and forgiving person stepped forward.

Those leaders need to be forthright about the incorporation of markets and government: markets as elucidated by Schumacher and a genuinely transparent democratic government unencumbered by the financial machinations that presently have civilization in a choke-hold.

A cursory look at the world economy illustrates manipulation of many by the power elite giving conspiratorial theorists something genuine to chew on, but conspiracies only become realities when good men do nothing.

Those driving the hedonistic growth economy promise a better life, but say nothing of the environmental or human costs while those of the Schumacher mindset promise only austerity and hard-work, but a good life.