(We're here with Juliet Schor
this is in Manhattan
and
She's a professor at Boston College
cofounder of the Center New American Dream
She also wrote the books
the overspent american
the overworked american
and recently she published about FeF in Plenitude
tell us more, maybe more about yourself
How we got here
what do you see as the point of collaborating)
I think there are a lot of them
One we're both interested in shifting
to ecological sustainable production systems
Number two
we both understand
human reproduction can be done using
far less labour than it is today
so there are tremendous efficiencies posible
by changing to new forms of economy
and new technologies
I focus more on the new economic forms
rather than the technologies
understanding that they go together
but I spent a lot of my career
basically working on the ways the current
extraordinarily wasteful
and how we could have
good high-quality high-satisfaction
low eco-impact lifestyles
with very low levels of hours of labour required for them
american
being a society
to reduce hours of work
to one in which in which the average american is
working more and more hours, and unnecesarily so
(now you're gonna republish
Plenitude
tell us more about it)
So Plenitude is a book about
which involves sort of
withdrawing from the market economy
working fewer hours
spending less money in the consumer economy
and get involved in more DIY
the term that I used in that book
came from the wonderful visionary phylosopher
Richard Bergman
one of the key messages from the book
is that it's now posible
at a very small scale
to be highly efficient productive
the scale of the industrial era which was big
the optimal scale has declined pretty dramatically
and what this means for individuals, households and communities
is that they can do a lot of the production of their own needs locally
high skilled and high productivity labour
but actually with local
much of the philosophy of Plenitude
and the principles of Plenitude which are
shorter hours of work
and time affluence
and the business as usual
new time of consuming
true materialism
and the fourth
social capital
creating economic interdependence
very local scale
connection
local scale
those are very much the same
I think many of the principles of FeF and OSE
(yeah)
parallel lines in terms of the economic ideas behind the models
(yeah, yeah)
(how do you think we can work together
on these topics
so what are some of the practical aspects
from these meetings)
i would love collaboration
network
plenitude practitioners - i wouldn't name
spreading these ideas
people doing more high-tech self-providing
delinking
also some interesting issues
on the educational side
MacArthur
connected learning
connection is a word you use quite a bit
people-nature, people-people
connected technology
so on and so forth
i think that's another area
I'm going to be studying
open source hardware movement
(so we'll be a case-study)
upskilling
yes, you'll be a case study
in the research that i'm doing for MacArthur
which is a fundation Chicago
(hum, hum)
I just want to end by saying
I love FeF OSE
i love this project
really visionary and practical at the same time
and it's the way of the future
(thanks Juliet)
and Happy New Year!
(yeah)