CONCEPT
Plenitude
Schor's alternative economic model — articulated in True Wealth (2010) — organized not around the maximization of output but around sufficiency of output combined with expanded time, community, and sustainability.
Plenitude is the positive counterpart to Schor's diagnostic work. Where The Overworked American and The Overspent American documented what was wrong with the American economic architecture, True Wealth (also published as Plenitude) articulated an alternative. Plenitude is an economics of enough — not austerity, not voluntary poverty, but a deliberate design choice to cap output at sufficiency and direct surplus capacity toward time, relationship, self-provisioning, and sustainability. The four core principles are reduced work hours, diversified economic activity, investment in ecological sustainability, and cultivation of production outside the formal market. The AI moment is the most powerful test of the framework that has ever presented itself, because AI produces the productivity surplus required to fund plenitude without reducing material standard.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework emerged from Schor's recognition that diagnosing the overwork and overconsumption problems was insufficient without articulating a viable alternative. The alternatives available in the early 2000s — mainstream policy reforms, voluntary simplicity movements, degrowth economics —