Small Is Beautiful Main Text Hi, this is AJ again. Welcome to the next lesson. This lesson is called "Small is Beautiful." Small is Beautiful is the name of a book by E.F. Schumacher.

Small Is Beautiful Main Text

Hi, this is AJ again. Welcome to the next lesson. This lesson is called "Small is

Beautiful." Small is Beautiful is the name of a book by E.F. Schumacher. It's a very

interesting book. It's a little bit difficult to read. The level of English is actually fairly

difficult, but I do recommend it. If you have an advanced level of English, go ahead, try

to read Small is Beautiful. It's an excellent book. E.F. Schumacher was an economist,

still is an economist. And he wrote Small is Beautiful to talk about the economic

problems we have in the world. Now this book was published back in the late 70s, I

believe, and it has been updated more recently. But the basic idea of Small is Beautiful

is that our economies in the world are big, big businesses, have become too big. And

they are not sustainable anymore.

Too big, in other words, we're destroying the planet Earth because we are consuming

too much. Our economies are too big; our population, too big; our companies, too big.

Everything has grown too large and his solution, as you might guess, is that we need

smaller economies, more local economies, more green economies. So he was writing

about this long before Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth and a lot of other things which

are quite common right now. But he was writing about these things way back in the

'70s.

He realized that we're going to have to make some changes. Our planet is being

destroyed, we have to do something. And we need to start at the economic level. We

have to change our economic system so that it is more human, so that it serves human

beings not just super large companies. And, of course, he talks about these economies

and his solutions in a lot of detail. Like I said, he was an economist, he is an economist.

So he has a lot of very detailed economic arguments and he analyzes things from an

economic viewpoint. It's very interesting.

Today I want to read to you just a short passage from his book and this book and this

passage really talk about the key, central core problem in his opinion. What is the most

basic problem? What is causing all these economic problems we see in the world, all

the environmental destruction, the wars we see constantly, what's the root cause? And

let me read from the book right now.

"Economically our wrong living consists primarily in systematically

cultivating greed and envy and thus building up a vast array of

totally unnecessary wants. It is the sin of greed that has delivered

us over into the power of the machine. If greed were not the

master of modern man how could it be that the frenzy of

consumerism does not abate at higher standards of living and that

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