“Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.”

Schumacher wrote extensively about natural capital consumption and his worry about the exhaustion natural resources, culminating in Small is Beautiful in the 70s. As a result, most of the ideas it presents do not feel new, largely because the ideas have been discussed widely since then. It remains, however, beautifully written.

I particularly liked his discussion of education, and found other chapters less compelling: I thought I’d share a few particularly good quotes, however;

 On Education

“The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty, and chaotic.”

“To do so, the task of education would be, first and foremost, the transmission of ideas of value, of what to do with our lives.”

“If the mind cannot bring to the world a set – or, shall we say, a tool-box – of powerful ideas, the world must appear to it as chaos, a mass of unrelated phenomena, of meaningless events.”

On Economics

“If we squander our fossil fuels, we threaten civilisation; but if we squander the capital represented by living nature around us, we threaten life itself.”

“We must study the economics of permanence.”

“A man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness.”

“The modern world, shaped by modern technology, finds itself involved in three crises simultaneously. First, human nature revolts against inhuman technical, organisational, and political patterns, which it experiences as suffocating and debilitating; second, the living environment groans and gives sign of partial breakdown; and, third…the inroads being made into the world’s non-renewable resources, particularly those of fossil fuels, are such that serious bottlenecks and virtual exhaustion loom ahead.”