The extraordinary advantage of local
In 1973 a critic of mainstream economic thought was published in Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher.
The author espoused a principle that small, appropriate technologies, policies, and policies were a superior alternative to the accepted ethos of “bigger is better.”
His thesis is the exact opposite of the forces driving market capitalism. In a competitive economy, firms strive for market dominance to achieve monopolistic-like power to better control the organization’s financial outcomes.
Schumacher advocated for a “persons-first” or humanistic economics as opposed to contemporary theories which emphasized institutional financial success over human well-being—sometimes caricatured as trickle-down economics.
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