Degrowth: Small is Happy

In the influential collection of essays “Small is beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered” first published in 1973, the economic thinker Fritz Schumacher proposes the idea of “smallness within bigness”. For a large organization to work it must behave like a related group of small organizations. Perhaps more than any economist since Karl Marx, Schumacher called attention to the quality of people’s lives as producers,  stressing its importance over their lives as consumers. Work becomes in Schumacher’s philosophy a means towards satisfaction, fulfillment, and personal development.

Smaller people means more work per person.