b'My Reminders-in-Chief have been, ever since I first came upon their writing in the mid-1970s, E.F. Schumacher and Wendell Berry. Schum-acher speaks as an industrial economist affirming philosophical and spiritual values that transcend economics. Berry speaks as a farmer poet defending agrarian values against the destructive impacts of industrial-ization and globalization. Schumacher: Every science is beneficial within its proper limits, but becomes evil and destructive as soon as it transgresses them. The science of economics is so prone to usurp the resteven more so today than it was 150 years ago, when Edward Copleston pointed to this dangerbecause it relates to certain very strong drives of human nature, such as envy and greed. All the greater is the duty of its experts, the economists, to under-stand and clarify its limitations, that is to say, to understand meta-economics. 2Berry: A sentence of my own, written thirteen years ago, has stayed in my mind. In it, I was speaking of the connection between my work on the small hill farm where I live and work asa poet: This place has become the form of my work, its discipline, in the same way the sonnet has been the form and discipline of the work of other poets: if it doesnt fit its not true. 3Berry brings systemic economic questions down to earth with a mixof poetry and pragmatism that would be downright Thoreauvian,were it not so downright post-industrial, post-fiduciary, post-NPKand post-Twinkie. 2 Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, E.F. Schumacher (Blond & Briggs Ltd., London, 1973), p. 423 Standing by Words, Wendell Berry (North Point Press, San Francisco, 1983), p. 9279'