Daily Inspiration Quote by E. F. Schumacher

A tidy sentence, almost too polite for the heresy it commits: it tells capitalism to stop pretending physics is negotiable. Schumacher’s line works because it refuses the usual escape hatches - innovation will save us, markets will adapt, efficiency will decouple growth from stuff - and drags the conversation back to a blunt constraint: the world has edges. By framing “infinite growth” as a logical contradiction, he sidesteps ideological brawls and makes the claim feel like arithmetic. You can argue about policy; it’s harder to argue with a finite planet.

The specific intent is corrective. Schumacher isn’t merely warning about pollution or resource scarcity; he’s indicting an economic storyline in which rising consumption is treated as the default measure of success, and “more” is recast as moral progress. The subtext is that the crisis is not a glitch in the system but a feature of its ambition. If your economy requires ever-expanding throughput of energy and materials, then collapse isn’t a freak accident - it’s scheduled, just with an uncertain date.

Context matters: Schumacher wrote in the postwar boom when mass consumer culture was hardening into common sense, and in the shadow of energy limits that would soon become painfully legible in the 1970s oil shocks. As an economist, his provocation is to widen the discipline’s frame: treat ecology not as an externality but as the stage. It’s also a quiet ethical pivot - away from quantity as destiny, toward sufficiency as a serious, even radical, alternative.