In six months time London will be the proud possessor of the tallest building in Europe. The Shard, currently splintering skywards on the South Bank, will stand over 1,000 feet tall on completion. If the architects are to be believed, it will be a glorious monument to London’s ambition. But the ‘tallest building’ game is [...]
Archive | 2011
Some unexpected words from Bill Bryson
I won’t bother to review it here, but I’ve just finished Bill Bryson‘s book At Home: a short history of private life. It’s a long and fascinating journey through our everyday lives, looking at the stories behind our homes and the things that fill them. It’s an entertaining read, but tucked away on the last page [...]
What we learned this week
I remember whining at the number of time-waster candidates on Luton South’s ballot paper last May. I take it back. We had 12 candidates. Voters in Kinshasa this month had a 56 page booklet and over 1,500 names to choose from. Interesting to see how Newt Gingrich’s views on climate change and the need for [...]
Schumacher on film: videos
Fritz Schumacher only made one film. Two months before he died, he traveled to Western Australia to make an ecological documentary called ‘On the edge of the forest‘. It’s about deforestation, and shows the clear-cutting of ancient woodlands for paper pulp. The film was never screened in the UK, and was pretty much lost for [...]
Book review: Alias Papa, by Barbara Wood
Alias Papa is a biography by Fritz Schumacher’s daughter Barbara. It’s a straightforward chronological account of the man and his ideas, from his childhood in Germany, his peripatetic early adulthood, through to his career as an economist and finally as an early environmental spokesman. Along with the facts of his life, Wood devotes considerable attention [...]
10 things you didn’t know about E F Schumacher
1. He held the rank of colonel in the US army. 2. He was a member of a group called Men of the Trees, with a particular interest in developing ways to reforest the Sahara. 3. In 1938 he was part of a start-up company called Battery Traction Ltd that aimed to build a national [...]
The Schumacher legacy
On monday I posted a short biography of E F Schumacher. Today I want to look at what happened to his ideas, and how his thinking has continued to evolve. Schumacher’s work did not end with his death. It has carried on through numerous organisations, societies and individuals, some directly inspired by him, others incorporating [...]
Two lessons from Schumacher for stimulating the economy
There are all kinds of things in Schumacher’s writings that are ripe for rediscovery. Here are just two that caught my eye in my recent re-readings as being particularly relevant: The energy connection As a young man, Schumacher studied the problems of his country’s reconstruction efforts after the First World War. Germany’s coal production was [...]
It’s E F Schumacher week
Several years ago I came across a book in a second hand shop: ‘Small is Beautiful: economics as if people mattered‘. I bought it on the title alone, and having never heard of Ernest Friedrich Schumacher, I read it with no pre-conceptions. It was rambling, patriarchal and a little dated in style, but full of [...]
The life of Fritz Schumacher
This is Schumacher week here on Make Wealth History. To kick us off, a brief biographical post. Fritz Schumacher was German, born in Bonn in 1911. His father was an economics professor at a time when economics really mattered in Germany. The inter-war years saw the infamous devaluation, a subsequent recovery and the rapid emergence [...]
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