Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Juliet B. Schor: New Economics of True Wealth

So tonight I'm pleased to welcome Juliet short. She joins us tonight to speak on her book plenitude. The new economics of true wealth. Now more than ever Americans need guidance on some very serious issues. And if we can do something positive for our environment and improve our own well-being then we may be that much more likely to act. Publisher's Weekly states that plentitude has a commitment to enjoying not explaining nature's richness to envisioning environmental economic and physical and psychological health as braided and capable of growing symbiotically and more securely in the business as usual practices then imploded in 2008. She encourages readers to match it by breaking out of a work card spin hard cycle thereby improving both the environment and quality of life. It might be utopian but it's also fresh persuasive and passionately argued. Speaking to the individual and the collective mid-tour is a professor of sociology at Boston College and before that taught at Harvard University for 17 years in the Department of Economics and the Committee on degrees in women's studies. In 2006 she was awarded the Leontion prize by the global development environment and Environment

Institute. Previous works include born to buy the commercialized child the new consumer culture the overworked American and they overspent American. We are thrilled to have her with us tonight. Please join me in welcoming Juliet. Sure. Well it's a great pleasure to be here. And an historic one I used to have an office just half a block from here. Great to see some of my friends from women's studies in economics. I believe when I was at women's studies we were the first program or department at Harvard to order textbooks through Harvard bookstore when the coop went to Barnes and Noble and we wanted to support independent bookstores. My English colleagues informed me yesterday actually is has

a name and that's called it a talk read which means that I am both going to talk and also do a little bit of reading from the book. So I guess the first thing to say about plentitude is that it's a book about solutions. I wrote three previous books which are really more about problems. And although they had the sort of requisite you know last chapter on solutions I was never all that satisfied with that part of the book. And you know often felt that the analysis of the problem was stronger. And in this book I really felt it was time to write something write something that would help us to get out of what I feel is a real gridlock in this country around both economic issues and sort of moving forward to change our economy in ways that will make it work for people and the

planet. And that gridlock is happening obviously at the political level we're all watching that day by day. A belief that change is possible. And so and at the environmental level because what we are doing is what I call in the book really eco side but we are destroying the planet's ecosystems that most fear systems that terrestrial systems marine ecosystems at a rate which is absolutely unprecedented in human history and we risk really you know we're jeopardizing our very conditions of life. And that's because of the way we have organized our economy and it doesn't have to be this way. One of the big messages of the book and the reason I use the word plenitude rather than another word is that the mainstream argument which is that if you want to protect the environment you're going to have to suffer for it. You're going to have to pay there's a

tradeoff between environment and well-being that that is absolutely wrong. And a key message of the book is that what is good for human beings is also good for the planet that there are ways to move forward that actually enrich our lives at the same time that they protect ecosystems. But to move in that direction we really need to we need to make some big changes. You can't do it by tinkering with the system that you have that the system that we have is the room to maneuver is narrowing the trade offs are getting worse. And so the dire predictions that well you know it's going to cost a lot to solve climate change or you know deal with energy the oil spill going on now possibly the worst environmental disaster in all of human history. We don't know yet. That could be what we're looking at. If you make if you make really fundamental system changes you actually get a lot of new options that you

don't have when you stay in the sort of you know what I call the business as usual economy borrowing a word from the climate discourse which is sort of the business as usual emissions path so the book is about living differently but it's also it's both my own vision of how to do that. It's my analysis of what's wrong with the mainstream economic discourse so one of the chapters is devoted to how economists think and talk about the environment and write about it and what's wrong with a lot of that perspective. And what's in that not only wrong but also inadequate. I mean some of what what's being said is right and some of it just doesn't go far enough. But the one and the the other point about it is that I make the argument in the book that the kinds of things I'm talking about are actually happening. So I argue that plenitude as a lifestyle as a set of principles and I

you know I can talk about what those principles are is emerging on the ground that the recession that began in 2000 seven has actually dramatically accelerated the move toward these kinds of new lifestyles in large part because it altered the calculus between time and money. It made money much scarcer time much more plentiful for people who are underemployed and unemployed and a lot of that sort of time is a real linchpin in the sort of Plenitude paradigm that I'm talking about. People need time to live the kinds of lives that I'm talking about and if you're in a job that requires very long hours for example it's hard to it's hard to live these kinds of lifestyles. So we see it happening. The sustainability movement is dovetailing with unemployment and underemployment and sort of casualties of the of the recession. And so it's actually I think it's a real movement

that is emerging on the ground how far it will get. Of course we don't know. That's part why I wrote the book to name it to make it visible to talk about the economic intelligence that these kinds of new ways of living represent the potential that it represents. So that's what we shall see. I wanted to read two sections from the book. The first one is called shifting the economic conversation. And it's it starts with what happened in the fall of 2008 in the fall of 2008 as panic swept through the financial system and the economy began to implode. There was a widespread sense that changes. Even big changes would be necessary. Business as usual was suddenly called into question. Even capitalism itself was up for discussion within six months. Only 53 percent of adults would agree that quote capitalism is a better system than socialism.

20 percent preferred socialism and 27 percent were not sure. Adults under 30 were about evenly divided between the two options. And by the way these numbers have actually stayed pretty constant since since this was April of 2009 when that poll was taken. But gradually as conditions stabilize the status quo reasserted itself. The mainstream conversation about how to reorganize the economy was back in neutral especially when it came to fundamental questions about how our system is affecting the planet. Some things didn't change after three years of dominance conservative economics had lost credibility. Everyone agreed that we couldn't go back to the politics of the policies of the previous decade in the United States. The litany of no longer permissible included the mushrooming of household debt and the national savings rate of zero. The massive export of import excess of imports over exports and an annual flow of 453 billion for imported oil and a financial system run amok. The country needed more savings and investment and the

constituency for getting off fossil fuels had grown but the backdrop for these views was a return to some vision of normal albeit a slimmed down model. As a result what was offered was a series of bandaids bank and insurance company handouts. Tax cuts to induce spending. Automobile industry bailouts and extended unemployment benefits. Some hope that financial regulation and health care reform would be sufficient to end strong long term stability. It's a long shot. The reason the one reason the conversation reverted to its usual outlines is that macro economists who focus on growth employment and the overall economy have been slow to incorporate ecological data into their world. During 2007 and 2008 the same period that the housing and credit markets were collapsing dramatically bad news was surfacing on the climate front development since the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC report whose data ended in 2006 have been grim.

Arctic sea ice was melting it hitherto unimaginable rates and oceans were rising more than double the IPCC reports maximum possibility drought conditions were spreading world emissions were up sharply in 2007 and in June 2008. James Hansen NASA's leading time climate scientists told Congress that the target we have been aiming for is a disaster. By February 2009 the news was worse with science reporting that the speed of climate change was already beyond anything considered in the last range of models. Hansen and his colleagues warned that carbon dioxide levels beyond 350 parts per million are incompatible with preserving a planet similar to that on which civilization developed. But we were already at 385 and rising yet it was as if the people charged with tending the economy were unaware of the breaking news on climate. The main conversation was how to get about how to get more money into people's hands and how to get them back to buying cars any cars building more houses whatever their dimensions and

accumulating more stuff. The bailout and recovery efforts cost trillions. Yet only 6 percent or 52 billion of the stimulus was actually green. Amazingly General Motors and Chrysler were handed $30 billion without a requirement for conversion to hybrids much less any provision for the far more fuel efficient mass transport that the nation desperately needed. The approach relied on reviving a highly destructive pattern of consumption and growth and the fiction that our economic system is basically sound. Barack Obama tried to do more to address ecological impacts but has made limited progress as the world was hurdling toward an ecological precipice of unfathomable dimensions. The macroeconomic conversation was basically about how to get there faster. So one of the things that we need if we're going to think about a different economic system is to start looking at different economic

indicators. In the last year Joe Stiglitz in a march sent came out with a an important report on what's wrong with the GDP. Looking at its narrowness and short short and its failings. But even that perspective hasn't gone far enough. And one of the things I argue in the book is that we need to pay attention to what ecological economists and industrial ecologists are looking at which is material flows or flows of wood are also called material throughput because those are a good proxy for environmental impact. So how much stuff how much of the Earth's ecosystems of its ores and fossil fuels and trees and metals and so forth are being extracted processed manufactured and discarded in the everyday

workings of the industrial global economy. And it turns out the answer is quite a bit. And in contrast to the economist's view on this which has been articulated since the 1970s when we had the Limits to Growth debate and I talk about that in the book and the economists critique of the idea that there will ever be limits to growth. I mean economists still holding onto this idea of infinite growth because they say well we can just dematerialize. So growth in dollar values can increase at the same time that we're using fewer and fewer materials and of course that is in theory correct. But if we look at what's happened since that debate in the night which took place in the 1970s we look at the material flows in the world economy and in North America it turns out that nothing of the sort has happened overall for the global economy we've had about 45 percent increase in material flows. And even in the

United States a very wealthy country which has the technical ability to deal materialize quite a bit in terms of our production. We've had a very very poor record. Europe's done a lot better in large part because of high energy costs. But even Europe like the United States is is exporting a lot of its material used to other countries. Maybe something like 20 percent broad you know round number of all of the material requirements sort of called material climates of the U.S. economy are actually being used up in China for example because we are importing so much from China. So the shift to a global production system means that the material requirements data for the wealthy countries look a lot better than they should. And now people have started to incorporate the trade flows into this looking on a consumption basis and not just what's being produced in this country. But let me just tell you I was able to get some unpublished numbers

on American material requirements and these include both the what gets used in the production of products and also what gets what's called overburden. So there's actually a huge fraction of stuff which just gets discarded. Even often in early stages if you think about mining for example I mean huge amounts of earth move to get you know one small diamond or an ounce of gold and so forth. I mean the numbers are just phenomenal. Some of these industrial colleges talk about actually just 1 percent of the total materials ending up in the actual final product so 99 percent of it gets discarded used up in some way in the production process on a per person basis. And this is globally. Materials used has been nearly constant over the last twenty five years. That's the good news is much more efficient use of materials has been counterbalanced

by expanded production. That's the bad news. In 2005 the global average was about 8.8 metric tons or just under 50 pounds of materials used per day. So that's average person of course. The numbers vary widely and average is not a really great number you know sort of poor people in India Africa use you know a few pounds Americans you'll see a lot more. The U.S. consumer However consume two and a half times the global average or 23 metric tons. But even this is an understatement because it doesn't include the flows of imported materials which are large and have grown rapidly. Unfortunately the data to track imports and exports by country is not yet complete. However the researchers who are putting it together were able to give me the numbers for 2000. So these are an under estimate we don't yet have the 2000 later years that year total U.S. material consumption including imports and overburden that's the extra stuff was seventeen point nine billion metric tons.

That works out to fifty nine point eight metric tons or 132 thousand pounds of oil sand grain iron coal and wood for every person to produce the United States GNP. That's annual. Divide that by 365 and it yields an eye popping 362 pounds a day. It's not a sustainable number. So if you start from that and you say well we've got to reduce footprint we've got to dramatically get that requirement down but we need to do so in a way that's going to enhance people's well-being. What do you end up with. And I came to what I call the principles of plenitude. And I will just finish up by mentioning what they are and then I'll open it up for questions and conversation. I think there are four principles of plenitude.

The first one has to do with time and I mentioned it briefly but if you want to live sustainably we've got to get out of an economy in which all the incentives are for speeding up. I mean that in some sense you can think about the development of a capitalist economy as as what it was really about was speeding up economic activity and the whole concept of growth is about really speeding up moving capital more quickly getting returns more quickly and so on and so forth financialization of course intensified that process quite a bit. So the first argument that I make is that the that people will be rational for people to begin diversifying out of what I call the business as usual economy to spend fewer hours there diversify their sources of income and sources of well-being for two reasons. One is that that economy is going to be yielding less and less

over the medium term. So the average wages I think are going to go down average profitability is going to go down. We're a declining economy in a world with increasing resource scarcity. So that's a longer conversation we can talk about it. It may or may not be right. That is my sense of what's happening for the U.S. economy. So what if that's true then people will be well-served to reallocate their time and move some of their time out of the market. The last 30 years the average American has been putting more and more and more time and effort into the market. If you diversify you're not only moving out of a declining asset but you're also protecting yourself against the other phenomena I think we're going to see which is more and more instability both financial instability and we've already begun to see that and also instability generated by ecological ups and downs climatic events and

so forth weather floods hurricanes droughts etc.. So diversify pull time out of the new economy. But then what. I mean if you just spend that time sitting on the couch watching TV you're going to be worse off. That's the sort of thing that most the standard economic discourse usually says well if people work less they'll just be you know watching television. So the second principle of Plenitude is the idea of the clunky term for it is high tech self providing but it's basically making and doing more for oneself outside of the confines of the market. So people who are you know the biggest thing that's happening is vegetable growing but there's a lot more than that. There's urban homesteading there are people doing micro. Like energy generation there's whole DIY home construction people are doing small scale manufacturing fabricating I talk

about these fabrication labs and personal fabricators in the book a whole range of things that people are doing. They are learning new skills. The high tech part of this is important because if we are just going back to old labour intensive sort of low productivity ways of using our time people won't necessarily be better off they would probably be better off keeping all their time in the market. But if there are new ways of using time which rely on advanced technologies which allow people to be much more productive then these things make sense. We've seen a lot of that happening in the information area obviously in software where there's this is you know exploding. We see it happening in arts and culture where people are doing huge amount of art and cultural production. What's what I'm arguing in the book is that there are also opportunities in the material economy in food in housing in small scale manufacturers in energy which use intelligence and in particularly what I call ecological

ecological knowledge's which are developing rapidly to use this time freed up in a more productive way. So there's a lot in the book about that third principle is what I call true materialism and it's a different way to consume. I started the section on consumption by saying you know shop to your heart's content plenitude consumer this is not about how you can't have stuff it's not about how you can't care about what you wear or any of that. If you're a consumer like go for it. But just as long as you keep your footprint low which means that you have to limit the amount of new things that you buy. And but there's a thriving economies of reuse recycling sharing I mean incredible innovation going on a lot of it web based in these new kinds of economies of research collations secondary economies we might call them so that's the third third

dimension and the fourth You know I suppose in some sense is the most important and that's about social connection and building social capital. One of the casualties of the work and spend economy and the long hours of work and so forth of course has been less and less social connection more isolation and a reduction in our interactions with each other particularly economic interdependence. And what I argue in the book is that economic interdependence is really key. It's it's absolutely central for surviving uncertainty and bad events. We know from research including research done by my friend and colleague here Gene Rhodes that in disaster times like Katrina people with denser social networks and more social capital did much better. And there's you know there are a variety of pieces of research on this. We are all going to need this. Times are going to get tougher because of what's happening with climate and its

impact on other ecosystems. And we need to repair the degraded social connections of our society and that is one of the things that these plentitude practitioners are doing they are opting out of a highly market orientation in order to do more sharing time banking bartering local currencies a whole range of social innovations that are happening freecycling Couchsurfing. I mean it's just it's ride sharing it's fantastic what's going on. It's just an absolute explosion of social innovation. And one of its big intentional purposes for many of the practitioners is to bring people together to make them economically interdependent. And I think that's really the basis of rebuilding community in this country. Thank you. So I'm happy to take any comments or questions. Yes

these kinds of data are not broken down by end users unfortunately on carbon we do know a lot more because there's a lot of detail data on end users. So households are directly responsible for less than half of the carbon use. Of course the U.S. military is the number as the biggest carbon footprint of any actor in the world. What I what I would say to your question is the following two point two parts to it. Number one the household households are directly responsible for is not it's not negligible but it's not you know it's limited. So you know somewhere between maybe 25 and 50 it's going to depend on the product and carbon being the most important. It's somewhat under it's under 50 percent but particularly for those of us who are more at the at the sort of cutting edge of this movement reducing our

personal footprint is absolutely central for credibility and legitimacy. And so I think it's important other work that I've been doing that I don't talk about in this book looks at the relationship between people making personal changes in their lives to consume differently reduce their footprint and so forth and their likelihood of getting active socially and politically to try and change others an institution it turns out they're very closely connected. So I would say it's important in in large part because it's a part of a pathway to actually making change in those institutions. So your point is is a very important one. You know at the end of the book I say what we really need to do is get active. So most people don't get involved politically. Period. So that that's just the way it is only a small fraction of the population or activists and will ever be. The point

I was making about my research and actually also I'm the first person who's done research on this for the United States is here with a graduate student of mine named Margaret Willis. There have been studies for Europe which find the same thing. The people who make those choices are more likely to be activists so they tend to go together. There is a current of opinion quite prevalent in the United States which takes your view which is that people do this and that's it. And that turns out not to be right. Actually many people take one step and then another and another or another so they get more and more involved but they also do tend to be more active. At least that's what the data we have we have two different data sets that have shown that so although yes there are the people who are just doing the buying. They would they they wouldn't be active anyway. I think that that's that's my analysis the reading of the evidence that I've seen. And you know predated the development of permaculture which

is a much more intelligent way to grow things which uses less human labor mimics nature systems and so forth the kinds of construction that's going on now straw bale some of that slip form Stone and other things that I talk about in the book are more technologically advanced ways to do things that people were doing in the 1970s. And I think for me a big part of the difference is that I think in the 70s there was more of a commitment to a sort of backward looking life which was you know a rejection of modernity and looking to the past as holding the solutions. This movement is much more forward looking. It's it's very connected in terms of Internet information new technologies new ways of doing things. So that is not to say that it is you know a breeze to do all these things. It is work but I think in part because it's

re-integrating mental and manual people are finding it intellectually satisfying. I'll give you a story I have a brief discussion of it in the book. The man who invented the term high tech self providing it's not my original term is a guy that I've collaborated with over the years named Fritjof Bergman who started something called the new work movement has anyone heard of him. He's not at all well known. But anyway. Interesting. He was into a lot of this stuff back in the 1970s I think and decided that he wanted to replicate Thoreau's experiment. He was a philosopher at Princeton and but he decided he wanted to do. Go it go to the woods and do what Henry David Thoreau had done. He moved up to southern New Hampshire and he lived in a log cabin. And you know chopped all his wood and so forth. And it was a particularly really cold winter. He planned to do it for two years and he stopped because it was so brutal and difficult and backbreaking. And he said this is awful. This is

not what this should be about. And he said and it doesn't have to be. There are high tech ways of doing this. And he started working on a series of it's funny you mentioned tomatoes Miracle-Gro boxes actually that the tomatoes you know virtually grow themselves a car a small scale power generation so there's a whole series of high tech innovations that he's worked on that actually allow us to meet needs without backbreaking human labor and I think that's one of the big messages here which is there's another way to do it now. And you know if I encourage you to take a look at see what you think. And you know as I say it's not it's not magic. But I do think that it's a different moment. Well first let me stand up for Kansas because one of the examples that I have in the book is an amazing farm in Kansas they took and they converted a soybean farm

into a collective of people living out these kinds of principles that I'm talking about. They're using high tech personal fabrication technologies. They're building machinery they're building compressed earth structures. I mean they're fantastic and they're doing this stuff online. They when they figure out a project that they want because they're doing a lot of diversified kind of permaculture they put it up on the web and then they have people all over the world work on trying to figure it out. So it's really interesting it's called the factor e farm for the mathematical constant of their. They're kind of heady people anyway. I think. Well I mean I wrote a book about to try and you know my answer to that question was to write about it. I think that we need to model it. I think that we need to advertise make visible the people who are doing it.

I argue in the book that it's a smart thing to do. So yes it's the moral thing to do but it also makes sense for people and I think you don't get big large scale social transformation purely for the moral if it's against people's sort of economic interests if it just doesn't make sense for them. You know it's hard to get them to change. And so I think what we need in this country is a conversation and that's what I'm trying to do with this book which says actually the moral thing to do is also going to be good for you. And so that's that's my that's my hope so I will I will hope to be in those synagogues and churches and you know I do tend to go to those places. But I think you know anyone who sort of is interested in this or believes in these kinds of changes. I think one of the big messages now is just start something yourself. Do it in your own way in the world that you know and where you can be effective I mean that's what Bill McKibben

did to start 350 dot org. You know it's like he was at Middlebury College he took a group of you know recent graduates and let's just do it. And I think we just need as many different kinds of actions as we can get. And all of us do it in the way we do it. I write books so I wrote a book about it. I mentioned it a little bit in the book Transition Town movement is it's a movement which is interested in both climate change and peak oil so they they believe that oil is not going to be available in the way that it has been and they are working town by town for at the local level to come together for people to develop alternatives to the fossil fuel economy. And it started in England it kind of spread out quickly and there's a whole group of people in this country. It's it's a little bit. I think a mixed bag at this point in the sense that it's it's not a blueprint. It's just a process.

So some of the towns who have started the process have done some pretty interesting things and others have gotten sort of mired down in stuff that's not too transformative. But it's I think it's important. I think it's you know one of many things that that really is kind of percolating and kind of you know the kinds of things that ultimately are going to add up I think to something significant. So it's interesting because you've got a very there's a wide range of people involved in these things in terms of socio economic status and also race which is interesting for though whites who are involved. They tend to be not necessarily high income because many of them are living lives we're not earning that much income but they are very high. You know what we call cultural capital so very high levels of education. And that's that's true whether you look at sort of the conscious consuming movement or you know what I'm calling the plentitude movement. So those are people who are making voluntary choices to earn a lot less than they could if they went into the

formal economy. But it's also happening in inner cities among populations of color in very interesting ways. I talk in the book about what's going on in Cleveland a little bit. The Co-operative movement there where you have people from the inner city have with with help from some of the major city institutions like founded Cleveland Foundation big hospitals and so forth are starting for sort of ecologically oriented cooperatives where these workers are all the owners so it's the kind of Mondragon movement which is gaining steam in this country. They've got a news media newspaper media's a laundry an urban farm and a solar alternative energy solar business business in the South Bronx you have the green worker cooperatives. I was out in Worcester in the fall there were a group of people ex-convicts who have started a cooperative

brokering biodiesel bio biofuels. So it's interesting. I think you haven't seen as much as more in the white working class but in the inner cities some of these communities of color and also among highly educated. It's a very interesting simultaneity and I do believe that certainly the sustainability movement is starting to get better about making those bridges and linkages in a way that you know 10 years ago they were pretty hopeless on that sort of stuff. Well the book has a lot about work time and reducing work time and how that's going to be really a necessary part of getting back to balance in the labor market and also shorter hours are what makes possible all of this other kind of activity that I've been talking about the people doing the DIY and the high tech self-invited and so forth. So it's more of a balance in people's lives between market and non market time.

Take Back Your Time movement is moving along. I got something from someone on John Conyers staff the other day because I had a piece in The Nation about this and I said well you know it's kind of stalled out and he said no no we've got a bill and so it's sort of it's there it's happening but it's it's it's been it's been difficult to get it onto the the mainstream agenda because there is still I mean that goes back to what I'm talking about the beginning with the growth and this sort of you know the myopia about the conversation. So in the nation piece what I argued was you know we've got to get this issue into the conversation on unemployment even even the sort of progressive left doesn't want to talk about it because they tend to be much more focused on maximizing income and that that's the route to well-being and you know a big message of this bill because there's another way. So it hasn't taken off in the way that you might think it should. Why aren't people more excited about this idea. I mean so many of us work too much and our jobs are too demanding

and certainly the statistics before the recession showed you have about a third of the workforce reports of chronic overwork with you know bad impacts in their outside lives and so forth. So it's limping along. Yes. I do think that you know assuming things move the way you know we think they will. The health care reform should give people a lot more possibility for arranging their working lives in ways that they want and not being tied to the job for the insurance. I'm a little bit hopeful about that. Yeah. And you know I talk about a little bit in the book I'm a little bit hopeful about it. So you know we'll see how it actually works out. We'll see how much these alternative plans cost and what they really offer. And I mean but I think Massachusetts as you know gives us some good hope to think

that actually there is more possibility there one than you know than we had before. So there are a lot of these sites now there's Freecycle where people are giving stuff away free unlike Craigslist. Well Craigslist has both free and pay. There's the Couchsurfing which is this thing where you can go and if people have extra beds or empty couches in their homes and they are willing to offer them to people who want to travel they put them out there and then people who you know and you reciprocate. So then you have you can go into other people's couches and they go in yours and they're you know this is a little bit more of a young people's thing but they're going all over the world and on these couches and it's fantastic. I have a friend actually that the founder of Zipcar which of course is a car sharing who started the ride sharing program in which you know because these transponders now that we have in our cars can give us

incredible information you can get real time information about who's moving around from place to place in their cars and in very short periods of time. You can you know hop rides from people from your neighborhood who are going where you need to go and there's share share something dot.com I have the exact You are all in the book I can't remember which is about where people in a geographic locality offer things up that they're willing to share with others in this community. It could be lawnmower it could be a pickup truck. I mean a whole range of things. And so that's another one of these sharing kinds of things. And those are those are just some of the examples. I mean the factory farm is another great that gets us into the whole peer production thing interest. Also Collat you know the sort of online collaborative production where people in their spare time are actually creating whether it's software designs and so on and so forth.

The other important thing and I have a long discussion Well not long nothing in the book is long it's a short book but I have a whole section in the last chapter which gets more at the macro economics how this all works out the sort of innovation and information efficiency those kinds of issues because those are really important if you want an economic system that works. Where I talk about the development of sort of green not ecological knowledge and how we diffuse it. So give the example of Harvard and its lawn care when they switch out of a fertilizer and chemical intensive long program to a program which didn't use any of those products but which needed a lot of brainpower to know how to make it work because it you know using knowledge about how soil works and micronutrients in the soil and so on and so forth. So they developed all that knowledge and that was intensive and expensive. But if

Harvard shares what they learnt and puts it out there for other places to go to have to adapt locally. But I mean that's an incredible use of this technology that allows us to diffuse information new ecological knowledge rapidly. And I see that as actually even more important than the sort of coordinating functions which are what all those other things. I mean those are just sophisticated bulletin boards. The second chapter I look at the you know what we might call the great churn but that's the speed up of acquisition and discard of products and some of those I mean the cell phone is probably the most salient example of planned obsolescence that we have in our economy right now. I think a lot of products get discarded not because they're truly obsolescent but because they become socially I call it social death socially. So listen people want to move on to the next thing but that. So I've got new

data on that showing how how rapidly we've been acquiring and then discarding products and it's just like pretty stunning actually. So in the section about well how could we do it differently. I do talk about product durability and why that's important in it. It requires. You've got to be costing those materials until you do that you know you're not going to get it. And also until you can do something about you've got that imbalance in the costs of materials versus the cost of repair. So we have so few repair people so the repair costs are very high. But you know that that's sort of in a way just a technical issue. If we could put some Paulet government policy could solve that you know relatively easily you have extended producer responsibility laws that have come in in Europe and some other places which help with this. But even just paying the

true materials costs would get us to doing a lot more. And of course you saw it once the recession happened people started having their shoes resold. And you know I talk about buying something expensive but keeping it for a long time and some of these more ecologically oriented companies like the shoe companies will redo the shoes so you can keep these expensive shoes for many more years so that the per year cost of the shoes you know won't necessarily work out to be that much more but you have to be able to have that upfront. You know the money upfront to pay that two or three hundred dollars which of course many people don't have even you know you might use those shoes for 10 15 years which is a long time in terms of American shoe use. Believe me it is true that demand for new products puts a lot of material requirement in to the account so in part it would depend on what. How much do you drive what's the mileage of that used car that you get and so forth that you're just thinking about your own footprint. The problem is so if

everybody wants to buy used cars that's good except you know we're going to have to do something about the demand because the like if we stopped producing new say of a fix supply abused the you know unless you have a reduced demand it's not going to be able to to fulfill it all. So the problem is that we've been getting more and more cars per person. So we have now I think I can look at these statistics for this book but I think I did for my last book you know more more than one car per person in this country now. So the good news is that vehicle miles traveled started to fall with the rise in gas prices and with the recession and that has continued so that's been a couple of years of a trend now. So that is a good thing I think for the transport issue. We've got to really start looking at mass transport more biking. I mean baking is a great example

because it solves a number of our problems it solves our exercise problem it solves or overweights all elements of the solution from you know so if we had more varied transport right now we have such a car centric society. But if we had sort of a more multi multiple types of transport that we use simply to great a great example a great way of thinking about this when we need to move one you know a person who weighs about 150 pounds. You know some few miles and to do that we get these machines that way you know four five six thousand pounds to move them. You know you could hop on a Segway and get there. So I think that's really a part of it is reducing the demand for new cars. But a part of it also increasing the demand for other modes of transport. I think you need to have periods of unplugging that's key. I mean the 24/7 connection model I think is not a good one.

I think you need to make sure you have the both the on and off line dimensions of it. So I think some of the social isolation problems are also for people who are not connected technologically connected. Lower income people older people are some of the most socially isolated but not only because we have social isolation problems that every sort of in every demographic group I think. But I don't know. I'm not a huge expert on that on that issue but I think that's what I would say. I mean another key thing is control of it. You know not everyone because of their work situation not everyone has the privilege of turning off. And I think that's really crucial I mean what the data show in terms of connection outside of work like in the household is you know a big increase in the extent to which people have to be connected for their work during their

house home and family time. And I think then it becomes very oppressive and I think one of the things is who's controlling that use is does the individual have control or are they embedded in a larger structure that is sort of dictating their availability. I mean if you think about the field of sustainability which started in the summertime in the 70s early 80s it has actually grown tremendously. It hasn't had an impact yet at the national political level. That's why we feel that you know it's not happening because we can't get a climate bill through. And we had the Bush administration which was so retrograde on environmental issues and because we've had a big push back from business and the right wing which has demonized environmentalists and you know kind of turned them into cultural others and just you know that's been a tough battle. But if you look at in many cases if you look at the state and local level there's a lot happening you look in

business. I mean businesses many businesses are greening themselves some of them are greenwashing but others are really you know doing a lot. So I guess I have a different point of view on it I think we haven't sort of pushed through where we need to push through. We've got a lot more resistance but in a sense I think that's because we've gotten more powerful. So I think this is this is a lasting movement because the I believe that the resource scarcities I mean particularly atmosphere if you think of that is that you know the scarcity of clean atmosphere is not going to go away in a way that in the 70s and 80s we were just pretending none of this was happening. But we can't pretend anymore because climate change is not something that's going to happen to our grandchildren. Climate change is something that is happening now and more and more people are seeing it and going to realize it. And I think that will also spur action. Thank you so

much. It's been a great conversation.