The Big Ideas podcast: EF Schumacher's 'small is beautiful'

Some big ideas have had such an immediate impact, we barely notice when we quote them. Ernst Fritz Schumacher's "small is beautiful" is certainly one of those ideas. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. Originally the title of a collection of essays published in 1973, the phrase neatly slots in amid the kind of business-speak it opposed. Schumacher sought to expose the flipside to glib mottos such as "growth is good" and "big is better", questioning our obsession with economic growth and economic expansion. But did we heed the spirit of the phrase or just the letter? In the year of Schumacher's centenary, Benjamen Walker talks to Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting , Andrew Simms from the New Economics Foundation and photographer Brian Ulrich to consider the true impact of "Buddhist economics".