(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)