Plenitude: the new economics of true wealth

After Homeward Bound I read "Plenitude: the new economics of true wealth" by Juliet Schor. I had read another of her books, The Overworked American, at university so her name was familiar when I saw this book referenced in Homeward Bound.  I hadn't read an economics book since university but it was quite an easy read and was pretty inspiring.

The book sets out why the "business as usual economy" is incompatible with the current environmental challenges we face.  Schor points out that the blinkered pursuit of economic growth is contributing to excess consumption, waste, intense resource use and long working hours.  She puts forward a new way - the Plenitude model - which is based on four principles:

1. reduced hours of market work
2. high productivity self provisioning
3. "true materialism" - an environmentally aware approach to consumption
4. revitalisation of community and social connection

All sounds lovely doesn't it? Initially I felt a little cynical about these ideas and thought they were only really the choices that people can make when they are wealthy enough to have that luxury. But Schor hasn't written this book to convince the rich to change their ways, she has ideas for everyone.

The appeal of fewer hours of market work is obvious, but the downside is having less money. The book covers both of these dynamics, and I really liked this quote:

"...income is positional but leisure time is not. The benefits of more vacation days or shorter hours are durable, remaining even when others gain free time."

In other words if you had a 5% pay rise but everyone else got 10%, you'd probably feel hard done by even though you have extra money. But if you have more leisure time you'll enjoy what you have even if others have even more.  

On the productivity point, I wondered how we are meant to achieve this if we are doing everything ourselves? Homeward Bound talks about the downside of spending all your time in the garden or in the kitchen...Schor instead focuses on innovations to maximise output so time is freed up for other things. One such innovation that she talks about is the vertical garden.  Highly productive, they have been used on tower blocks, they can reduce energy consumption by insulating a building to keep it cool in summer and warm in winter, purify the air and look beautiful...wow.  I looked up the French landscaper Patrick Blanc, who invented the Vertical Garden and the results are amazing...as you can see here.

The concept of "true materialism" is about caring about the things we have and what we buy, not over buying and throwing away.  There is a great section in the book on fast fashion, i.e. buying cheap, low quality stuff and throwing it away as soon as fashion changes (or it falls apart).  Schor doesn't think we should be living in homemade hessian sacks, she'd rather we buy special things we'll love and keep for as long as possible.  I have to say...this did put me off shopping in the January sales (well, not completely).

The last principle is about community and social connections. If you're spending less time at work then of course you will have more time to spend with other people.  One of the other things Schor talks about is how self provisioning can bring you closer to your neighbours, and I know this to be true based on our own early endeavours in back yard growing. After a glut of green beans we ended up distributing them to the neighbours and it was always a nice excuse for a chat.

All in all a powerful book that made me think about what we spend our money on, whether we really need that stuff, and what we throw away.

How to Worry Less About Money

"How to Worry Less About Money" by John Armstrong is another book in the School of Life series.  It is a really great (and short) book which gave me a completely different perspective on money, my thoughts about it and what I spend it on.  The author offers a very refreshing and honest insight into his own money worries and how he has learnt to process them constructively.  In his own words, the book is about

"how we can bring imagination, self-knowledge, emotional maturity, and our big ideas about life and society, into the way we engage with money."

Armstrong kicks off by explaining that money worries aren't the same as money troubles (i.e. not being able to pay your bills).  He says worries are connected to imagination and the emotions, not just to what is happening here and now. Instead of simply asking how can I get more money or manage with less money, we should be asking how much money do we need and what do we need it for.

He argues that money worries are just other worries disguised as money worries, and urges us to think more deeply about the underlying cause of our worries. He illustrates this by talking about his car, which makes him feel anxious about money. He's worried that it's starting to get a bit rough round the edges, needs various repairs, isn't as fancy as other people's cars at the tennis club, and he can't afford to replace it. He digs into this a bit deeper and concedes that what he's really worried about not taking care of things properly. He's worried about his character, and buying a new car isn't going to change this, it will not make him better at looking after it.

Although I don't worry about financial security I do think about money a lot, mostly because I worry about the prices of things and I generally feel guilty if I spend a lot of money on something. I should probably spend some time thinking about what it is that I'm really worried about...

Armstrong makes some great comments about worrying (which I know I do quite a lot):

"Worry is a name for mental effort: ideally one wants to worry more insightfully and more purposefully. The aim of adult life, one might say, is to worry well. We worry about things that matter; worry implies care."

He talks about money as a medium of exchange and reminds us that almost anything can be turned into money, and money can be turned into anything.  We need to think about how we make money, and what possessions and activities we turn our money into. It's a mistake to think that the means are the ends, and that the medium of exchange is a "real thing". He argues we should think about money's relationship with flourishing (rather than happiness).

"Money brings about good consequences - helps us live valuable lives - only when joined with 'virtues'. Virtues are good abilities of mind and character."

I found his thoughts on Need versus Want really interesting.  He argues that needs are not necessarily just basic food, shelter, or the cheapest thing.  What we view as a "need" depends on what's important to us.  This is what he says:

"Need is deeper - bound up with the serious narrative of one's life. 'Do I need this?' is a way of asking: how important is this thing, how central is it to my becoming a good version of myself; what is it actually for in my life? This interrogation is designed to distinguish needs from mere wants."

He gives as an example a fine violinist who needs a very expensive bow, because this bow has a central role to play in this person's life.

He also looks at price versus value, and he says something here that made me think of the pursuit of material things that I talked about in the Status Anxiety post recently.  He talks about something inexpensive that he bought and collected over time, that he said he gets "a reliable, everyday thrill from using."

The pleasure we get from our possessions can be very real - I asked my husband to list his favourite things and he said our collection of photos and art, his guitar, and his surfboards.

When I was early in my career living in London I lusted after, and then after some encouragement from my flatmate Suzanne, eventually bought, a gold trench coat. It was GBP250 and the most expensive item of clothing I had ever bought. I loved wearing it so much, I used to joke to Suzanne that wearing it made me feel like a better person.  I have photos from a girls' weekend in Paris of me wearing that coat and it makes me so happy to see it (and remember the weekend of course).  The flip side of clothes shopping (which I do much less nowadays, and enjoy it far less than I did when I was younger), is impulse buying, bargain shopping (especially on the internet), basically buying for the sake of it. Most of the time this gives me a very short lived shopper's high, then a week later I forget I've even bought it. I hate this type of shopping and I want to try to cut it out.  

After reading this book, I want to spend money in a more mindful way, buy things that we'll treasure, that will last, that will give us a reliable, everyday thrill or allow us to flourish.  As Armstrong says, we have to look into ourselves and think what money means to us, not simply try to maximise the amount we have.

Status Anxiety and its solutions

I've finished reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. In his "solutions" section he puts forward some interesting ideas we can draw on to counter status anxiety and feeling bad about our position in society or how we think other people view us.

He groups them into big themes: Philosophy, Art, Politics, Religion and Bohemia.

In Philosophy, he talks about some of the philosophers in history who argued that the rest of society is stupid / ill informed / wrong and therefore we should dismiss and ignore other people's opinions of us.  He goes on to state that the obvious result of this sort of attitude is that one will likely end up with no friends. Hmm, doesn't sound very appealing.

Next he talks about Art - specifically novels, painting, tragedy and comedy.  He points out that novels have the ability to show us the moral good in people who would, if only based on their lack of outward symbols of status like wealth or power, be regarded by others as unimportant.  He says in life we only give praise to moral goodness that is outwardly displayed, but in novels we can listen in to the characters' thoughts and eavesdrop on conversations, which can give us a different perspective on them and make us appreciate their deeper qualities. In making his arguments he makes references the implicit social commentary in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and George Eliot's Middlemarch. I liked this idea and it reminded me that novels can teach us a lot about life, it doesn't always have to be through non-fiction. I haven't read either of these books so I'm adding them to my list.

The rest of the Art section didn't really strike a chord with me, but the Politics section made up for it. He starts by talking about what "status" meant in different societies through history and found that it was sometimes contradictory, and ever changing. In 2004 when the book was written he said that high status meant:

"[someone who has] been able to accumulate money, power and renown through his or her own accomplishments (rather than through inheritance) in one of the myriad sectors of the commercial world (including sport, art and scientific research)."

He talks later about our pursuit of material things, and how advertisers sell us things like cars:

"...[the advert will] fail to mention our tendency to cease to be excited by anything after we have owned it for a short while...We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction...Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another...The new car will be rapidly absorbed, like all the other wonders we already own, into the material backdrop of our lives, where we will hardly register its existence..."

This section made me think a lot, particularly the lines quoted above. I mentioned it to my husband and we had a good chat about our different buying styles, and which of our possessions give us pleasure beyond the initial rush of buying them.  I think this will probably deserve a separate blog post on its own...

The other part that I liked in the politics section was his recounting of a scene from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.  Woolf is denied entry into Trinity College Library at Cambridge University because she is a woman (she was told she could only enter if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or if she had a letter of introduction).  Instead of thinking "what's wrong with me?" she thought "what's wrong with them?".  After this she came up with a set of political demands for women, which included "a room of one's own".  I've never read this book, but that was my university library so it caught my imagination - I know that as a naive 18 year old I took it completely for granted that I could come and go as I pleased.

The remaining sections of the book cover Religion (where he reminds us that in the end we're all going to die so status anxiety is a bit pointless) and Bohemia, where he pointed out that there are groups of people who choose to forgo status giving activities and possessions, and he talked about Henry David Thoreau and his time at Walden Pond as an example.  

So...to wrap up, I liked this book and definitely had a different perspective reading it now than when it was first published.  Even so, the quote about status in Roman Krznaric's book is still my favourite on the topic and had the most impact on me and how I think about status. So punchy, so simple and so true.

Thoreau on learning

The third instalment of the Walden Pond posts picks up on some of Thoreau's comments on learning and formal education. These comments are so relevant now.

On the costs of formal education:

"Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made."

On formal education vs. learning by doing:

"If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and science, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighbourhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life...Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month - the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this - or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and received a Rodgers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?"

On lifelong learning:

"It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.  It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure - if they are indeed, so well off - to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord?"

I love these.

Wading through Walden Pond

I have been reading Walden this week by Henry David Thoreau.  It's something I thought I should read given the number of other books that have referenced him and his ideas.  He's quoted all over the place.  This book was written in the 19th century and is about the author's experience of living away from civilisation in a house he built himself at Walden Pond, when he maintained himself for 2 years without any formal "job".

There are some brilliant flashes of wisdom and funny observations, much of which are still relevant today, but the bits in between aren't so engaging and I've found my mind wandering off (which is why it's taking me ages to read...).  That said, I thought I'd take stock now by sharing some of the highlights for me so far.

On what we wear (and why we bother wasting money on more clothes than we need):

"No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience." 

"It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes."     

"I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes." 

"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."

On housing (and keeping up with the Joneses):

"Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbours have."

On luxury rail travel (he sounds unimpressed with the railways throughout the book to be honest):

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion."

Later he says:

"If we do not get out sleepers, forge rails, and devote days and nights to work, but go on tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? ... But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us."

On avoiding life's complications:

"Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail."

He would have enjoyed the internet:

"If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial? If we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once?"

Anyway, back to wading for me.

How to Find Fulfilling Work

I love libraries. I set up this blog in the State Library of New South Wales and I'm writing this post from Avalon Community Library on a glorious sunny spring day.

It was during an unexpected afternoon in my local library last month that I began reading How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric, one of the books in the fantastic School of Life series, which is edited by the equally fantastic Alain de Botton.  After about half an hour of starting the book, sitting in the study section of Manly Library, I got an excited urge to run out to the newsagents and buy a notebook and pen so I could remember the insights starting to emerge from the pages.  Five minutes later and back in the library, I spent the entire afternoon immersed in the book.

I think most of us at some time in our careers question whether what we're doing is the right thing for us. I happened to be in the middle of a couple of weeks off work so it was a good topic to reflect on.  I loved this book.  It completely changed the way I think about work - and how I use the time I have in my life - and found it quite liberating.

Thinking about work can be mind bogglingly complex.  Krznaric breaks it down nicely and works through the elements methodically.

He very neatly sets out his view that fulfilling work has 3 key elements:

• Meaning
• Flow
• Freedom

He then breaks down "meaning" into 5 components: money, status, making a difference, following our passions and using our talents.  He explains that money and status are extrinsic motivating factors and the others are intrinsic motivating factors. Given everyone will have different preferences and priorities around these components, Krznaric says there is no single blueprint for a meaningful career.

The next part of the book looks at each of the 5 components in more detail.  The role of money in life and happiness is a fascinating topic in itself (and the subject of another book in the School of Life series called "How to Worry Less About Money" - more on that later).  Status as a topic is also something that I find really interesting ("Status Anxiety" by Alain de Botton is on my list to re-read), and there's a great quote in Krznaric's book - which I've copied down from my scribbled notes so might not be word perfect but you get the gist:

"the universal desire for reputation in which we judge ourselves through other people's eyes is fraught with dangers"

Next he talks about "making a difference" and how this can weave into the world of work.   This made me think about the emerging world of social entrepreneurship and some articles I had read recently about people making a difference as individuals, and also prompted me to read "How to Change the World" by John Paul Flintoff - yes, you've guessed it - another in the School of Life series.

The fourth and fifth components are combined into a section on cultivating passions and talents. Again, he offers a great quote, this time from Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand:

"The master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labour and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both."

I love this quote.  It reminds me of an interview I read many years ago with the photographer, Mario Testino, who was talking about how he ended up becoming a professional photographer, and he said someone (father or grandfather...I forget who) told him that he should do a job he loved and use the weekends for rest, and not to choose a job that meant you had to fit your entire life into the weekends. I've never forgotten that.  There is another quote in the book, from Herminia Ibarra, that I absolutely loved and was an utter revelation to me:

"our working identity is not a hidden treasure to be discovered at the very core of our being - rather it is made up of many possibilities...we are many selves."

Krznaric argues that, because we each have within us a range of different experiences, interests and talents, we could find ourselves happy in a whole range of different jobs and we don't need to agonise over finding the one perfect thing. He encourages us to consider becoming "wide achievers" with "portfolio careers" (pursuing different jobs at the same time on a part time basis) or as "serial specialists" (doing a range of different jobs one after the other).  He encourages people to "act now, think later", because humans suffer from "negative bias" which makes them naturally cautious and more prone to focusing on what could go wrong.  He advocates decreasing risk by dipping your toes in the water of a new job or career by doing work experience, volunteering, undertaking training courses, talking to people who know about it and doing things in your spare time outside your main job (like write a blog!).

The remainder of the book talks about the other elements, flow and freedom, which I'll pick up in another blog post.

One thing I found really valuable about this book is the series of questions and exercises you are prompted to do throughout.  By taking the time to do them it makes the book more engaging and relevant to your own life. There is also a "homework" section at the back recommending further reading.

If you don't get round to reading the book, you can watch the author give a talk on it here.

Have a great weekend!