I was looking for your book ( Plenitude ) in the Barnes & Noble in downtown Seattle but only the DVD is available and published I was told. I am sure there is a paperversion.

I also tried in my home country Belgium and in Luxembourg but no joy…I keep on trying. I would like to pass it on to my 28 year old daughter. Your book got my attention while reading an article in Knack magazine ( Dutch, Flemish language )recently.

Keep up the good work !

Friendly regards,

Ronald

From: David Bean
Subject: Contact me concerning Plentitude

Message Body:
I so agree with your premise and yet, alas, disagree with your solution.
I agree that the economy from within its own process must limit grow, if we are to be here for seven more generations.

But DIY – Do It Yourself results in decay of quality and increasing volumes of poor quality efforts. Yes, it is a good means of adjusting to poverty, but plenty of slipshod is shortening the life of goods… impoverishing.

Competitive advantage multiplies wealth among workers! That is what gave the middle class its great success. We just must be engaged in
‘green’ labor, and what takes fewer materials than art?

I propose this alternative. The Art Economy. Two percent of us (Mexicans actually) produce our food, and we all must trade something to get some. So to put EF Schumacher’s lament on its head, lets create employment that refines people… it worked as driver in ancient Athens.

Fritz wrote ~Today crude materials go into a factory, then come out refined, and labor goes into a factory and comes out degraded.

Today robots are in factories and the internet has stripped the economy
of half of its income distribution function.

Juliet, This was my comment to your great animation page.

We’ve got corporations with lots of cash, but they won’t hire. We’ve got salaried employees working 70 hours per week and more, while their neighbors struggle to find work. As I attempted to research unpaid overtime, I was shocked that I could not locate a single study in the U.S. of unpaid work. I did find a U.K. government study which showed that professionals tend to work between 2 and 5 more hours PER DAY when they are salaried (“Investigating hours worked measurements” by the Labour Market Division of the Office of National Statistics), and The U.K. Daily Mail reports that teachers and lawyers put in an extra 17 hours per week unpaid (“900,000 toil for ten hours a week unpaid”). I see this as exploitation of the professional. People seem to think that it’s okay. “I’m a professional, so my company can make me work like a dog, and that’s just the way it is.” We need people to question this thinking. (I’d also love to see government and universities conducting studies similar to the U.K.’s.)

My solution would be to eliminate the salaried exemption, and to phase it in over several years so as not to disrupt people’s wages. This would make everyone an hourly worker, with overtime paid at time and a half. Instead of a 40 hour cutoff, professionals would start off at 55. In subsequent years, the hours would be reduced by 5 hours each year until we got down to 40.

It would be nice if business saw the benefit of people working reduced hours. Excess hours means people aren’t getting enough sleep, exercise, relaxation, or proper nutrition, and aren’t spending time with their families and friends. And they’re stressed. All of this is proven to reduce people’s happiness, satisfaction, work engagement, creativity, productivity, good decision-making, and health – I could go on – all leading to reduced profits. (Check out Shawn Achor’s excellent book, The Happiness Advantage, on positive psychology and business. We might also wonder whether overwork of CEO’s and politicians might account for them seeming to be out of touch with their own humanity, and therefore making decisions that serve their own dark needs instead of the greater good.) Unfortunately, I don’t expect business to lead the charge.

That leaves two options: unionization of all professionals, and congress. Either of these require the people to step up and speak out. Lawyers, who have some of the highest unpaid overtime, might ask whether the salaried exemption could be considered arbitrary and capricious. Lower income workers should support the charge, because it means more opportunity for everyone.

That’s it for now. Thanks again, Juliet!
Steve Hingle, CPA for Nonprofits in Madison, WI
Certified Life Coach
steve@hinglecoaching.com

The international monetary system acts as glue and lubricant of the global financial, economic and commercial systems. Transforming this underappreciated system it means significantly changing those other systems. The TIERRA SOLUTION presents a pathway to transform the international monetary system by adopting not a pure or flexible gold but a CARBON MONETARY STANDARD and a UN -affiliated Global Central Bank. By being based upon a carbon standard, this Tierra monetary system not only provides a solution to the present dysfunctional international monetary system, but also combats the climate crisis and advances a sustainable development model. Details of the system will be available in the forthcoming TIERRA SOLUTION: Using a transformed international monetary system to combat climate change and advance low carbon and climate resilient development to be published by Cosimo Books.
This monetary transformation which is far more profound than the many reformist monetary proposals is predicated upon a credit- rather than a debt-based financial system as proposed by many outstanding economists in the 1930s and by an increasing number of economists and other social scientists at this present time. This carbon-based international monetary system is also predicated upon a banking system that is based upon a 100% reserve model. This means banks become utilities without the privilege of money creation and control.
In conclusion, the Tierra system with its truly transformed international monetary system, a credit-based financial system and a democratically controlled banking system has enormous implications for development. It integrates the three pillars of sustainable development, it includes a pathway out of the climate crisis and it presents a financing model of development that is not based upon scarcity, but plenitude.