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Do people matter in this economy?

It is as if the influential British economist Fritz Schumacher coined the name of his famous book with our times of crisis in mind.

It is as if the influential British economist Fritz Schumacher coined the name of his famous book with our times of crisis in mind.

The name of the book is “Small is beautiful: Economics as if people mattered.”

As one would expect from the title, Schumacher’s writings harshly criticize monopolistic tendencies in the global economy and defends the small scale enterprise against the conglomerate, the general store against the shopping mall.

The debate over the size of economic enterprises, in particular that of the banks, has been in the news for the past few days, thanks first to US President Barack Obama’s declaration of war against ongoing irresponsible behaviour on the part of major investment banks in his country, and then to reverberations of the original declaration at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Fortunately enough, Barack Obama’s appeal for a more orderly banking industry created an even stronger echo, coming from French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who, without mincing words, called for a rethink of the capitalist system as a whole to put people at its core.

Not surprisingly, big bankers and financiers were not happy with the prospect of having their aggressive profit-focused practices checked by regulations, which should severely cut down their staggeringly big bonuses.

One tends to hope that this debate might have fired the opening shot in a major battle between those who want a more humane economic system and those who would like to keep the current one despite all its shortcomings.

The decline and ultimate collapse of the communist regimes in eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union was not only due to the inefficiency of the way they used their resources, it was also because those regimes recognized man as only the man/hour unit at the conveyor belt, but refused to understand and value the individual in that man.

With that system gone, the victory of the capitalist system has led to galloping at a far too high speed, ironically, in a similar direction: The communist system deified production and the capitalist system, the profit, which resulted in the current crisis.

Despite all the tragedy that it has caused, all the jobs that were lost, all the dreams that it swept to the dust bin, perhaps we should, after all, be thankful to the crisis because it stopped the galloping horses before the carriage was overturned.

Maybe we should now take all the time that we need to rethink all our practices and find out how we can create an economic system that will allow us to live in peace with each other and with mother nature.

— Mustafa Eric