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 www.EffortlessEnglishClub.com