Schumacher’s People-Centered Economics

The environmental and economic crisis of our era, in which profit counts above people or the planet, is put into question by John Elkington (Elkington, 2004). Elkington elaborates on the triple bottom line (also known as “people, planet, profit”) to capture a broad spectrum of factors for measuring the economic, ecological, and social impacts of the globalization process. Economist and philosopher Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (1911–1977) was already writing about the phenomenon described by Elkington 40 years ago in his theories on a more planet-and people-centered economics. Indeed, looking at the environmental degradation alone makes the faith in progress seem untenable in reality and appears to offer no guarantee for smooth economic progress. In a special edition of Time (April/May 2000) on How to Save the Earth, Schumacher was described as one of the heroes of the planet.