Economics as if human survival really matters

Unbridled growth, even at the cost of burning to death in our own carbon wastes.

This is what the mantra of "ever bigger is ever better" is leading us to.

What it is not leading to is ever greater happiness.

For if the richest and most powerful among us are not happy, who on earth can be ?

Some apparently.

They live and work in smaller walkable communities without - thanks to the likes of Skype and the internet - feeling at all cut off from the great wide world and distant friends and kin.

They use less carbon energy than you or I not because they restrain themselves like monks but because their life is set up spatially to use and need less carbon energy.

They don't miss what they don't need.

More green energy is not the solution to our carbon addiction : more, more, more is never much of a permanent solution - in tumour growth or in real world economics.

We must develop full happy lifestyles where we need less energy to be well off and happy.

Many small communities in the past developed some of the ways to do so ---- often centuries and millenniums ago.

But before Internet and telegraphs and radio , it came at the price of emotional isolation.

Marry the new Internet and those centuries old ways of living compactly and what will be actually born will be hard to predict - but I feel at least confident that it can't be any worse than the route-to-hell we are now taking ....

May the small, like the Big, always be with us....

A blog that celebrates the small, in a world that drinks the Kool-Aid of Bigness ...

We certainly don't need a new blogger celebrating the Big : the world already has seven billion mouths doing that daily.

The Big are in absolutely no danger of disappearing, certainly not from our culture and not even as a result of rapid changes in the global environment.

The small also are hardly in danger of disappearing in the world's rapidly changing environmental situation.

In fact, when the environment suddenly changes they always do much better than bigger beings : always have and always will.

But culturally, the small are very much a collection of Rodney Dangerfields : never getting anywhere near the respect they deserve.

As microbe beings too small for us to see with our naked eyes, they keep this whole biological ball of wax afloat : without them the world would be a barren chunk of rock.

Small but visible species of plants and animals are the next layer of beings that help make this rock a nice place to live for us, those human parasites at the topper-most top of the whole food , air and water chain.

Within the human species and culture, 'small' humans (aka the poor, tired and huddled) still tend to be treated with general indifference.

Small places and institutions are still quickly dismissed as yesterday's entities.

This blog , by contrast, is devoted to reminding us of the comforting safety factor that comes with the diversity and flexibility of a world with many small beings and entities all exploring different options.

It seeks also to remind us of the danger of putting all our intellectual eggs in a few Big (tired) baskets as we face a rapidly changing world.

And  it seeks to remind us of the sheer joy we get out of being immersed in an incredible variety of experience.

And it intends to warn us of the danger of returning to being gray-suited citizens of a few unitary-minded empires that all look and act and feel alike as they march eagerly towards their environmental doom....

Could "Small is Beautiful" have topped 1930s bestseller lists ?

He is a brilliant young economist, regarded as one of the best of his generation--- educated at Berlin and Bonn and at the London School of Economics, given a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford and Columbia University, where he is hired as a lecturer.

He also has real world experience as an international investment banker.

No wonder then that this wunderkind's  PhD, "Small is Beautiful", is quickly published in 1938 upon his graduation at age 27, and soon climbs the bestseller lists and is translated into many languages and is regarded as a timeless classic and an epoch-making book.

Because most historians credit it for ending the then real possibility of a world-wide European War.

But alas, it is not to be : E F Schumacher had to wait 30 years and his retirement to begin writing the essays that made his 1973 publication the Bible of our Green Age.

His book or any book* like it, simply won't have become a bestseller in the 1930s.

(* Scott Nearing's "Must We Starve?" written from a back-to-the-land farm in northern New England in 1932, might be an example of a similar book, published in the 1930s that was largely un-read in the 1930s.)

The ordinary middle class members of the world of the 1930s  (the grandparents and parents of the people who did eventually buy it) were simply opposed to the main ideas of "Small Is Beautiful".

Simply knew - in their heart of hearts - that while Schumacher's ideas were well intentioned, they were also quite simply, naturally wrong --- proven wrong by Nature.

Science had proved it so : sorry, end of story.

The origins of WWII come down, in the end, to the fact that the general public's belief in the "Progress is inevitably Bigger and Better" meta-ideology was just as strong as that of Stalin and FDR and Hitler.

Only the public's achingly slow post-war assessment of the sad lessons of WWII (when that meta-ideology was given its wings to fly) led them to the position where they could come to see the value of "Small Is Beautiful" .....

Modern "Bigger is Better" vs Post-modern "Small is Beautiful"

Kiddies, don't agonize about the complex differences between modernity and postmodernity when your prof poses the question at your next final exam ( trust me on this one - they will).

Just remind yourself that great-grandpa back in the 1930s was as unlikely to say "small is beautiful" as today's intellectuals on public broadcasting would ever proclaim "bigger is better" ....