Although many theorists who are perhaps not much in contact with real life continue to worship the large scale, practical people of the real world feel a deep longing for the advantages, the humaneness, and the manageability of the small scale, and are striving to make the most of it. In 1973, the economist E. F. Schumacher published the successful essay Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered, which tried to present a way of giving economics a human scale. Schumacher warned about the excesses of a society gravely affected by uncontrolled economic growth, and with that, criticized the distancing of economics from the people on the street, advocating a more humane discipline that he linked, already then, to the small and the natural...