My copy of Joseph Pearce’s Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics As If Families Mattered arrived today, and I look forward to digging into it over the weekend (Nativity services permitting) and being prepared to join, albeit from afar, the conversation that will be beginning next Monday at the blog.
From an E.F. Schumacher quote cited at the start of Chapter I:
If an activity has been branded as uneconomic, its right to existence is not merely questioned but energetically denied. Anything that is found to be an impediment to economic growth is a shameful thing, and if people cling to it, they are thought of as either saboteurs or fools. Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be “uneconomic” you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
January 5th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Jon Luker
Apparently we’re on the same wavelength and postal delivery schedule. :-)
Have you read any of Schumacher’s original work, especially that which the title of Pearce’s book is “unimaginatively” borrowed? Are there other authors of this persuasion you might recommend as well?
January 6th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Daniel Larison
To my discredit, I have not read Schumacher’s original, which is something I hope to remedy very soon. In this area, I am sorry to say that I am only just beginning to learn the ropes and I don’t know all that many of the relevant authors.
January 9th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Christopher Hayes
Jon & Daniel -
I haven’t read Schumacher yet, but seeing excerpts from Pearce’s book, he sounds like Wendel Berry, whose writings I am just recently getting familiar with. He writes fiction and non-fiction, with much of the non-fiction being essay compilations, and all of it is beautifuly written.
To combine this and the Mormonism subject, I might also recommend Hugh Nibley’s “Approaching Zion” - a great piece of anti-capitalist/anti-socialist agrarian literature, as well as a scalding critique of some rank-and-file hypocrisy within the Mormon Church.
Nibley is anything but milquetoast.