After six or so educationally catastrophic years I studied Classics and Economics in college, then on to graduate school in Econ. It was all about math and "efficiency."
What the fuck is efficiency? It's something economists could claim made their field less of a soft science, is all. They wanted more mojo, a bigger academic dick.
I switched back to the study of Classics. There was an amorphous standard there, rigorously applied: honesty. They wanted to be scholarly. They aspired to be Einsteins.
They aspired to be Einsteins of the humanities, to have a clear and inclusive vision, to encounter everything on its own terms and without prejudice. It was humane.
It made it impossible to take people out of the equation, to turn them into objects and abstractions and have them fall through the cracks, to deprive them of their humanity.
This is Schumacher. He applied this moral imperative to Economics. Okay, the math is okay, but the context is everything. Without a humane context the math is meaningless.
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