Small is beautiful: A study of economics as if people ... (ISBN 0349131406)

Classic:
A bit outdated but given that it was written in the 70s this book is very inspiring ans still very applicable (if not even more applicable today than in the past).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.

great insights but the book could nave been better:
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.

Pioneering Book on Sustainability...Still Very Relevant:
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 from machines to banking and currency systems to help lift up a local populace. And while of course our perspectives have shifted over the many decades since this book first came to light, it is definitely worth revisiting every few years. Shel Horowitz's award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, demonstrates how to build a business around ethics, environmental sustainability, and cooperative practices--and how to develop marketing that highlights those advantages.

I (Who Have Nothing):
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.

Buy this Inspirational book from your locally owned bookstore:
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".