Small is Still Beautiful Review, Part III

Part III of my Small is Still Beautiful book review and summary. See Part II here, and Part I here.

Schumacher outlines several ways governments can convert towards a small scale economy in the following ways:

1.      Favor small businesses and discourage larger businesses through a graduated tax.

2.      Reduce regulation: regulation decreases the ability for small business to be competitive, because it results in less flexibility for small businesses to serve the local population, increased costs from hiring lawyers, and more bureaucracy from dealing with red tape. Furthermore, small businesses cannot afford lobbyists to tip competition in their favor. In particular, overregulation limits innovation on green, sustainable farming.

3.      Stop subsidizing intensive farming. When New Zealand stopped subsidizing farming, its pasture lands began to recover, and agriculture recovered economically.

4.      Subsidize organic farming.

5.      Redistribute private property so that more individuals hold land, as opposed to a few

Small is Still Beautiful Review, Part II

This is Part II of my Small is Still Beautiful book review and summary. See Part I here

Heavy industrialization is a critical aspect of large scale economies, which is environmentally and socially damaging, especially of third-world countries. Industrialization requires heavy capital investment and high energy/electricity input (think of how much resources it takes to build a factory), resulting in debt, resulting in a need for greater production to overcome the sum of debt, interest, and resulting inflation. The inevitable result is that debt and environmental destruction only increases, leaving the workers with little advances in material wealth, let alone happiness. In addition, heavy industrialization inevitably leads to high unemployment rates, since factories are designed to eliminate the need for manual labor.

It is important to note that industrialization not only occurs in the cities, but in agriculture as well. Governments subsidize the use of environmentally destructive pesticides, antibiotics, intensive farming and livestock techniques, all of which leave the land unusable (similar to what happened in the Dust Bowl that led to the Great Depression). This industrialization of agriculture also leads to higher unemployment rates (because industrialization always moves towards requiring fewer workers), which forces millions into the cities, accelerating urban growth.

Urban growth is inherently environmentally destructive in the following ways:

Small is Still Beautiful Review, Part I

For obvious reasons, questions of the environment are a hot topic. What a lot of people have trouble with are the economic implications of "saving the environment." But these concerns aren't nothing new, and start as late as the 1970s. One such person to approach this question is EF Schumacher.   conservative environmentalism