Yes, of course he misses the lesson from EF Schumacher.

Small is beautiful and all that.

Hence, the Schumacher Question: if small is beautiful because it respects life’s limits, why do we persist in worshipping size, speed and growth when they destroy the very foundations of well-being?

Well, one answer might be to read some Krugman. His Nobel was about well, what happens when the efficient size – so, the size which uses the least resources to get the job done – is larger than one country’s economy, possibly even as large as the world economy?

But the real lesson fro Schumacher is very much more important than that. The lsat chapter of the book is an insistence that much more coal needs to be dug up and much more coal needs to be used and really, the UK should be doing everything to support the coal industry. Mr. Schumacher was the chief economist for the National Coal Board.

From which we can derive one of those truly important pieces of economics.

Incentives matter.

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