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By Andrew Simms A message conveyed by the classic green movement book Small is Beautiful is that things go wrong when they are too big, and that economic power, when remote and concentrated, is oppressive and inefficient. Thirty years after the book's publication however, the same mistakes are still being made
 September this year marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of Ernst Friedrich Schumacher's classic book Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Matter. The book, together with the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, forms the cornerstone of the global green movement.
Small is Beautiful, often referred to as the environmentalist's bible, influenced more than one generation of thinkers and activists -- from pragmatic reformers to visionaries, and natural capitalists to Buddhist economists. But considering the long shadow it has cast, Schumacher's book was almost an accident. Its status, built upon that unforgettable, catchy, worshipped and derided title, almost certainly is. Reportedly the author hated it, but had the title forced upon him by his publisher. The book itself was not even written as one. Rather, it is an ad hoc collection of essays and lectures that Schumacher had produced over a period of time, cobbled together to make a publication. And it's hardly pulp fiction -- thoughts about management practice, industrial resources and the problem of production. However, Schumacher was able to define something - a new approach to economics and a set of questions that hadn't yet been put forward so clearly. A common thread running through the essays is that things go wrong when they are too big, and that power which is remote and centralised becomes oppressive and inefficient. This observation holds true for everything from the power supply industry and its technologies like nuclear power, to agriculture and biotechnology, through to the size and organisation of firms. But although Schumacher may have introduced a new economic paradigm, 'as if people mattered', the same mistakes are still being made today. Since its publication in 1973, across most sectors of the economy, from banks to food shops, things have become bigger and power has become increasingly centralised. Ironically, this is in complete denial of the evidence of economic efficiency. For example, in less than one in three cases do mergers leading to ever-larger corporations actually add value for the corporation's shareholders. In other ways, though, Schumacher's concerns have moved inexorably up the political and economic agenda. His thoughts on peace and social cohesion, on technology with a human face, on the use of natural assets like land, on ownership and on systems thinking in general, describe the core of the New Economics Foundation's work programme. The thing that strikes one most about Schumacher's book is that great people don't care where a good idea comes from. He borrowed his best one from the Catholic Church. 'It is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organisation can do.' That was the papal Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno describing the 'principle of subsidiary function'. The concept of subsidiarity was briefly fashionable more than a decade ago when Britain spectacularly failed the first test of European monetary union. It was a concept employed to allay fears about the centralisation of power in Europe. Put simply, it means that things should be done at the lowest, or most local, level. Why is this principle so important? Because when you have problems at both the local and the global level -- and all those in between -- it means a non-dogmatic approach to finding solutions. For example, if you need a global authority to control truly global firms, you have one. If local authorities need local powers to ensure the health and diversity of their high streets and prevent the take-over by chain-stores, they should have them too. It settles the fruitless, and false, debate between people arguing for long-term, fundamental reform of big institutions like the World Trade Organisation, and others who are fighting immediate practical challenges to protect local economies. Like many great thinkers Schumacher, it seems, died before his most important idea would suffer its most important test. The responsibility instead has fallen on us to do justice to his work. Thirty years on, are we up to it? - Third World Network Features, September 2003
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