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Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, by Juliet B. Schor. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2010. 258pp. $25.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781594202544.
Juliet Schor is extraordinarily good at identifying new social and economic trends and addressing them in out-of-the-box ways. In Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, Schor explores the economic and ecological future of the planet, offering a prescient analysis of where the planet is headed if the world remains on its "business as usual" (BAU) course and a hopeful appraisal of the kind of world we could create if we were to change our relationship to "the market" and make ecologically conscious decisions about how we inhabit the earth. Her book is a clarion call to abandon our selfdestructive consumption practices and to create a new economy that values, nurtures and produces a very different sort of wealth. That new wealth - plenitude - involves living lives that are richer in time and social relationships and less dependent on the formal market economy and the continual acquisition (and disposal) of material goods.
Schor 's notion of plentitude is based on four basic principles: a new allocation of time, in which people spend less time working for money and have more time to do other things; self-provisioning, that is, making, growing and doing things for oneself; true materialism, or an environmentally-aware approach to consumption; and a restoration of our social ties, which have been attenuated by the domination of the cash nexus. Together, these principles can be summed up as: "work and spend less, create and connect more." As one can intuit, and...