View source for Juliet Schor on the Four Fundamentals of Plenitude


=Discussion=

"From the perspective of the individual, there are four principles
of plenitude. The first is a new allocation of time. For decades,
Americans have devoted an increasing fraction of their time and
money to the market—working longer hours, filling leisure time with
activities that require more income per unit of time, and buying,
rather than making, more of what they consume. It’s time to reverse
this trend and diversify out of the market. This doesn’t just mean the
stock market, although its recent volatility suggests that’s one market
to which this point applies in spades. Today’s smart strategy for many,
if not most, households will be to begin a shift away from the formal
and centralized sets of institutions and arrangements that are called
the market. By “the market” I mean business-as-usual (BAU) economic
activity. BAU is a term that came out of the climate discourse
to indicate what would happen if we didn’t address rising emissions.
Here I use it to indicate the continuation of the current economic
rules, practices, growth trajectory, and ecological consequences of
production and consumption. It especially refers to the large corporate
entities that dominate the market and are heavily invested in
it. For individuals, relying less on the market spreads risk and creates
multiple sources of income and support, as well as new ways of procuring
consumption goods.

Concretely, what this means is a moderation in hours of work. For
time-stressed households with adequate incomes, it likely means making
trade-offs of income for time. Reclaiming time frees up resources
to invest in ecologically restorative activities and creates the opportunity
to replenish the human connections that were depleted in the
boom years. Of course, millions have had an altered equation of time
and money painfully thrust upon them through unemployment or
other losses of income. For that group, which already has a surfeit of
time and not enough money, the advice involves moving forward with
plans that are less centered on full-time employment in the BAU
economy and more oriented to the emergent sustainability sector,
which includes both businesses and the parallel economy developing
amid the wreckage of the collapse. This encompasses areas such as
household food cultivation, home construction and renovation, and
community initiatives such as barter and bulk buying.

This brings us to the second principle of plenitude, which is to
diversify from the BAU market and “self-provision,” or make, grow,
or do things for oneself. Indeed, the rationale for working fewer
hours in the market is not only, or even primarily, about reducing
stress in daily life (although that is certainly important). Recovering
one’s time also makes self-provisioning possible and reveals a liberating
truth: The less one has to buy, the less one is required to earn.
The downturn has accelerated what was already a robust rediscovery
of doing for oneself among sustainability pioneers. Plenitude aspires
to transform self-provisioning from a marginal craft movement into
something economically significant. That requires raising the productivity
of the hours spent in these activities. As I argue later in the book,
new agricultural knowledge and the invention of small-scale smart
machines make it possible to turn household provisioning into a
high-productivity—and economically viable—use of time.

These ideas reverse the direction most households have taken in
recent decades and contradict what modern economics preaches,
which is that specialization, in one skill or one job, is efficient.
Specialization may have made sense when the market was offering
better returns. Even as wages stagnated, ultra-cheap consumer goods
were hard to turn down. Today, in a world of ecological and economic
uncertainty and distress, putting all one’s eggs in the basket of the
capitalist market looks like a more dubious proposition.

The third principle of plenitude is “true materialism,” an environmentally
aware approach to consumption. In the United States, the
speed of acquiring and discarding products accelerated dramatically
before the crash. Consumers knew relatively little about where purchases
came from and the ecological impacts of their production,
use, and disposal. But many people do care, and want to lighten the
footprint of their spending.

Perhaps surprisingly, the route to lower impact does not require
putting on a hair shirt. Nor does it entail making consumption less
important. Indeed, the plenitude consumer is likely passionate about
consuming, and deliberate in the creation of a rich, materially bountiful
life. We don’t need to be less materialist, as the standard formulation
would have it, but more so. For it is only when we take the
materiality of the world seriously that we can appreciate and preserve
the resources on which spending depends. Living sustainably does
mean we can’t reproduce a lifestyle of gas-guzzlers, expansive square
footage per person, bottled water, and outsize paper consumption.
But it doesn’t mean we can’t have fabulous clothes, low-impact
electronic gadgetry, great local food, and a more leisurely mode of
travel. Plenitude means that you will actually have time to take the
slow boat to China if that appeals.

The final principle is the need to restore investments in one another
and our communities. While social bonds are not typically
thought of in economic terms, these connections, which scholars call
social capital, are a form of wealth that is every bit as important as
money or material goods. Especially in times of distress, people survive
and thrive by doing for one another. Interpersonal flows of
money, goods, and labor are a parallel system of exchange and savings.
One casualty of an intense market orientation is that community
has gotten thinner and human ties weaker. People haven’t had
enough time to invest in social connection outside their primary families.
By recovering hours, individuals are freed up to fortify their
social networks.

These, then, are the individual principles of plenitude: work and
spend less, create and connect more. In turn they yield ecological
benefits—emit and degrade less—and human ones—enjoy and
thrive more."
(from the book, Plenitude: [[New Economics of True Wealth]])


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