As a society, we need to invest in areas and activities that we've been neglecting: our communities, our families, and our planet.<br /><br />Question: Why is austerity a bad idea right now?Juliet Schor: What we really need to do as a society is <br />invest in a series of activities and areas that we've been neglecting. <br />The average American is working longer hours today than he or she has, <br />you know, at any time since you know, for many, many decades. What <br /> this mean is that as we have sort of over invested in money and <br />consumer goods and so forth, we've let other sources of wealth erode. <br />We've neglected our communities, our families, and our planet. So, <br />austerity is really not addressing that issue. We've got to actually <br />take our effort, our money, and our effort to investing in the things <br />which we have eroded. Because hollowing out our communities, hollowing <br />out our families, long-hour lifestyles and so forth, undermine <br />well-being and they undermine our ability to actually have a more <br />plentiful and abundant future. One of the ways to think about <br />it is that from the ecological point of view, it's pretty clear we need a <br /> major shift to a whole new set of technologies. The technologies of <br />the industrial revolution which took nature as if it were endless and in <br /> free supply and we could pollute the atmosphere without paying <br />attention to it, pollute our rivers, cut down all our trees, and so <br />forth. Our technology, our economic system, the way we value things, <br />it's all based on that idea, which is a crazy idea and the sort of the <br />chickens are coming home to roust on that as we've befouled the climate, <br /> run down our ecosystems and so forth to get to a new kind of production <br /> and consumption system which actually respects and restores the Earth, <br />it means we're going to have to do a lot of investing. But <br />that's investing at a local scale; at a smaller scale. It's a whole <br />different economic model than the one we've been using.Recorded on June 2, 2010Interviewed by Jessica Liebman<br /><br />Question: Why is austerity a bad idea right now?Juliet Schor: What we really need to do as a society is <br />invest in a series of activities and areas that we've been neglecting. <br />The average American is working longer hours today than he or she has, <br />you know, at any time since you know, for many, many decades. What <br /> this mean is that as we have sort of over invested in money and <br />consumer goods and so forth, we've let other sources of wealth erode. <br />We've neglected our communities, our families, and our planet. So, <br />austerity is really not addressing that issue. We've got to actually <br />take our effort, our money, and our effort to investing in the things <br />which we have eroded. Because hollowing out our communities, hollowing <br />out our families, long-hour lifestyles and so forth, undermine <br />well-being and they undermine our ability to actually have a more <br />plentiful and abundant future. One of the ways to think about <br />it is that from the ecological point of view, it's pretty clear we need a <br /> major shift to a whole new set of technologies. The technologies of <br />the industrial revolution which took nature as if it were endless and in <br /> free supply and we could pollute the atmosphere without paying <br />attention to it, pollute our rivers, cut down all our trees, and so <br />forth. Our technology, our economic system, the way we value things, <br />it's all based on that idea, which is a crazy idea and the sort of the <br />chickens are coming home to roust on that as we've befouled the climate, <br /> run down our ecosystems and so forth to get to a new kind of production <br /> and consumption system which actually respects and restores the Earth, <br />it means we're going to have to do a lot of investing. But <br />that's investing at a local scale; at a smaller scale. It's a whole <br />different economic model than the one we've been using.Recorded on June 2, 2010Interviewed by Jessica Liebman
