Small Isn't Beautiful: The Case against Localism

by Trevor Latimer

“Eat local” has become a popular marketing slogan in recent years, based on the idea that food grown or raised nearby is better for you and friendlier to the environment than similar products shipped in from many miles away. That slogan reflects a broader worldview suggesting that everything local, including government and knowledge, is better than what originates somewhere else.

Small Isn’t Beautiful acknowledges that some things that are local are good, but denies that what’s local is always or even often better than what’s far away. “Localism” is based on an “undeserved aura of respectability, virtue, and good sense” and can produce results that are misguided or even dangerous. Particularly when it comes to public policies, decisions made at the local level are rarely superior and are sometimes unjust. Small Isn’t Beautiful exposes the supposed “virtue” of localism as a hodgepodge of weak arguments and misleading hunches. Trevor Latimer's engagingly written and provocative book will appeal to all readers who want to understand localism beyond slogans and marketing.

Genres: Nonfiction

277 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 15, 2023

Reviews

[Russell Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a frustrating book. It's smartly written, and filled with careful, exacting arguments, but I found so many of them philosophically flawed--in the sense of completely missing the basic conceptual frameworks that his target depends upon--that I ended up writing 3000 words expressing what I think he completely misunderstood. Read my long review here.

[Jennifer Schmidt · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very complicated reading with a lot of redundancy in the first 50 pages that I finally gave up. I wanted to like it but couldn’t