A guide for the perplexed
John Michael Greer, The Archdruid Report
E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful, once required reading in the appropriate-tech movement, has lost none of its relevance in the thirty years or so since the period of its greatest popularity. Some of its core ideas may turn out to be essential in making sense of the murky economic territory on the far side of Hubbert's peak.

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Third, Schumacher stressed the importance of a variable left out of most economic analyses – the cost per worker of establishing and maintaining a workplace. Only the abundant capital, ample energy supplies, and established infrastructure of the world’s industrial nations, he argued, made it functional for businesses in those nations to concentrate on replacing human labor with technology. In the nonindustrial world, where the most urgent economic task was not the production of specialty goods for global markets but the provision of paid employment and basic necessities to the local population, attempts at industrialization far more often than not proved to be costly mistakes. Schumacher’s involvement in intermediate technology unfolded from this realization; he pointed out that in a great many situations, a relatively simple technology that relied on human hands and minds to meet local needs with local resources was the most viable response to the economic needs of nonindustrial nations. Since the end of the age of cheap abundant energy bids fair to place the world’s industrial nations on something like a par with today’s Third World, struggling to feed large populations with sharply limited resources and disintegrating infrastructures, the same logic will much more likely than not apply to our own future as well.