by Kate Monson

Last night saw Caroline Lucas, Professor Victoria Chick, and writer and journalist Madeleine Bunting revisit E.F. Schumacher’s book ‘Small is Beautiful’ to question the end of economics. With the globe seemingly hit by a new wave of financial, political or environmental crisis each week it’s perhaps no wonder that more and more people are questioning this powerful and pervasive paradigm.

In Small is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher calls for us to “scrap economics and start afresh,” championing instead ‘appropriate technologies’ that empower people rather than enslave them and implement lasting wisdom over short-term self-interest. The diverse panel presented a variety of viewpoints, but all agreed that, in short, the end of economics was not here. And probably never will be. Economics after all, as Victoria Chick pointed out, stems from the Greek word ‘oikonomia’ which literally means ‘household management’. And I only need to look at my home – inhabited by four full-time workers – at the end of the week to discover the importance of that!

Instead it was the current preoccupation with short-term financial gain that received the most attention. Victoria Chick lamented that “the bean counters have taken over” and Caroline Lucas bemoaned the closure of the Sustainable Development Commission and the recent proposed cuts to the Feed-in Tariff.

We’re caught up with thinking that the big questions need big answers, said Caroline, when really a decentralised approach is required. It’s less a matter of small is beautiful, more a matter of smaller is better. As Schumacher said, “…people can be themselves only in small comprehensible groups. Therefore we must learn to think of an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units.”

There does seem to be a movement towards people taking things in their own hands and “just doing it” as one elderly gentlemen in the audience proposed at the end of the discussion. And by their very nature these are on a human-scale; initiatives like The Big Lunch, Occupy London and the growth in allotment ownership are all examples of this. Occupy London in particular appears to have struck the chord of the current zeitgeist. But, countered Caroline, as well as these changes in behaviour and consciousness, we need changes in the framework otherwise things just won’t happen quickly enough.

So, is this the end of economics? No. But one hundred years after his birth, is what Schumacher thought still relevant? Absolutely. It’s radical even – a vision of an economic model that we are yet to evolve into.