Book Recommendation

Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics As If Families Mattered by Joseph Pearce.

From the back cover:

A third of a century ago, E.F. Schumacher rang out a timely warning against the idolatry of giantism with his book, Small Is Beautiful. Few books before or since have spoken so profoundly to urgent economic and social considerations. Humanity was lurching blindly in the wrong direction, argued Schumacher. Its obsessive pursuit of wealth would not, as so many believed, ultimately lead to utopia but more probably to catastrophe.

Schumacher's greatest achievement was the fusion of ancient wisdom and modern economics in a language that encapsulated contemporary doubts and fears about the industrialized world. He saw that we needed to relearn the beauty of smallness, of human-scale technology and environments. In Small Is Still Beautiful, Joseph Pearce revisits Schumacher's arguments and examines the multifarious ways in which they matter now more than ever. Bigger is not always best, Pearce reminds us, and small is still beautiful.

And from Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons (also from the back cover of the book:

This could hardly be a timelier book. More and more people are coming to the realization that the materialism, the rootlessness, and the hedonism of this consumer's paradise we've built for ourselves are taking America down a dead-end road. E.F. Schumacher shows where liberals and conservatives go wrong, and Joseph Pearce makes Schumacher relevant for a new generation - one that desperately needs to hear Schumacher's message. Pearce shows why 'small is beautiful' is the only sane and humane response to our insane 'supersize me' culture.

The author is holding a discussion of the book in blog format here. I recommend both the book and the blog discussion for conservatives who are looking for something more profound than the modern mainstream neocon offerings. Likewise, I recommend it for liberals who are interested in learning more about a traditional conservatism that is wary of globalization, "free trade" and which understands that the world's resources are finite.