1911-1977

British Economist

EF. Schumacher was an economist who argued that Earth could not afford the cultural and environmental costs accompanying large-scale capitalism. His book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered was named one of the most influential books published since World War II by the London Times Literary Supplement. It also made Schumacher a folk hero on the political left. Although Schumacher died in the 1970s, his opposition to excessive consumption, corporate domination, and growth for its own sake is echoed in the "simple living" movement of the late 1990s.

Schumacher, called Fritz by those who knew him, was born on August 16, 1911, in Bonn, Germany, into an academic family. After attending the universities of Berlin and Bonn, he studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and also at Columbia University in New York. In 1937, appalled by the rise of Nazism in...