I am just blown away by the quality and utility of the Open Media Pamphlet Series, which brings very high-value thinking to the people in a very low-cost and easy to understand format.

Juliet Schor, author of two books on related topics, and a lecturer at Harvard since 1984, does a lovely job, in 64 pages, of hitting on the key issues that voters must address as they move forward in taking back the power from political parties now held hostage by corporations.

Her reasoned and logical discussion of basic premises (sustainability, democractic control, egalitarianism), of key issues in the relations between workers and their corporate employers, of how to achieve environmental as well as social balance, and of the larger global issues including needed changes in federal law, provide the single best primer I have ever seen for anyone--at any level of understanding--who wishes to invest time in understanding what needs to be done to protect future generations who have no one to represent them other than the people.

Downsizing isn't for everyone, nor does Schor suggest that it is. However, for whatever economical niche you are in, if you are unhappy, you need to take a step back and evaluate what you want and how best to get there.

If you have to spend all of your money on "necessities," are forever worrying about what happens if you lose your job because you don't have any accumulated wealth to cover the lease on your BMW, your $2000 mortgage payment and your country club memebership -- are you really happy?

If not, read this book and others like it and realize there is more to life than what you buy.

And then I read "the Overspent American." Now everything is starting to come together. I'm no different than most people in my situation. Apparently, the more you make, the more you spend (because those with money are generally more status-oriented, and "status" requires money...lots and lots of money). Couple this with one's general dissatisfaction in the workplace, and spending goes even higher because people with means buy more things to distract themselves from the general unhappiness that is their life.

'Lest you think this is a "bleeding heart" book that doesn't put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the irresponsible consumer, let me assure you that this book makes no excuses for our society's poor consumer choices. Like any well-documented social science project, this book merely explains the new consumerism, based on Schor's studies and interviews with downshifters and overspent consumers. It passes no judgment, but it does not give irresponsible consumers an easy scapegoat for their problems either.

On the contrary, I felt like this book was a wake-up call. First, it made me feel better simply to know I wasn't the lone idiot who couldn't get my finances together. But second, and more importantly, this book gave me hope. It talks about downshifters and other individuals who have successfully managed to get their consumerism under control. I am now more determined than ever to crawl out of the credit card existence I've been living somewhat uncomfortably in for the past 8 years. Like my one-line summary of the book suggests, I'm now seriously planning (rather than just hopelessly wishing) to be credit card debt-free in 2003!

For anyone who finds themselves living paycheck to paycheck, or struggling just to get by (despite a decent income), this book will shed light on some of the reasons why, and inspire you to make the necessary changes to ensure your long-term financial prosperity and conquer your short-term consumerist impulses. A quick, but powerful, read. Highly, highly recommended.

Ms. Schor is not the first commentator to decry "keeping up with the Joneses". This work is original in that she understands that the "Joneses" are no longer our next door neighbors, but a caricature of the upper-middle class presented in mass culture. The 90s version of keeping up is more pernicious than ever because the upper middle class standard is used as a reference by people who must spend everything they earn, and sometimes more, to even approach that way of life.

Her analysis of liptick purchase patterns illustrates her critique of mindless consumption; it is impossible to differentiate lipstick in terms of quality, yet women purchase large quantities of designer lipstick just to impress people by unveiling a case with a Chanel logo. Furthermore, Ms. Schor notes that more educated women are more likely to make "status" purchase, even when adjustments are made for income.

In fact, Ms. Schor is at her best when puncturing the pretentions of the educated, professional classes. She is funny and right about Ikea; it was the darling of yuppies when it represented a quirky, Scandinavian do-it-yourself sensibility. As Ikea became "McCouch", the affluent customers disappeared. If we are to call Ms.Schor a radical, it is for her understanding of the complex operations of class identity in the consumer culture.

Maybe her proposals for government intervention to put the brakes on the mindless cycle of work-and-spend are farfetched. Ultimately she does offer common sense advice that anyone can understand. Spend on what you genuinely enjo and forget about the futile, and pathetic, pursuit of impressing the rest of the world.

Harvard professor Juliet Schor spins a convincing and disturbing tale regarding the increasing numbers of hours we spend each week at work rather than leisure. This is a historical surprise, since most baby boomers emerged from the colleges and universities convinced we would have more leisure time and better ways to pursue our many avocational interests than any generation in the past. In this entertaining, topical, and quite readable book, the author surveys a plethora of reasons for the surprising trend toward overwork. The principal dynamic she pinpoints in influencing this trend is an economy that literally demands extra effort and time from its employees, an economy which until quite recently had a chronic shortage of available jobs and "surplus" labor pool of potential workers. Under such circumstances, anyone lacking the requisite willingness to work extra hours was indeed dispensable. Thus one becomes a careerist in an effort to survive. She also details how our culturally conditioned goal-oriented attitude toward time as a resource to be used effectively and efficiently rather than as a precious resource to be used to increase the quality of our own lives plays into the situation.

For Schor, we are on a treadmill, if not to oblivion, then to an impoverished cultural life where we are what we do occupationally rather than what we do and what we become in our leisure hours pursuing our avocations and our personal lives with family and friends. This is an important and path breaking book, one that we should find especially relevant given the fact that many of the jobs we are so seemingly addicted to will soon fade away in the new markets and new economies of the so-called "Third Wave". Anyone who has experienced "downsizing" at the hands of a large and impersonal corporation can tell you how quickly all those sacrifices and long hours are disregarded and forgotten by your employer. The emotional and economic impacts of such events can be devastating to the individual and his or her family. As a friend said to me recently, anyone who is what they do really isn't very much at all. Read and heed.

A decade later, following eight years of the Clinton administration's non-stop, machine gun style propaganda campaign advising America it "never had it so good" (quality of life-wise), Schor's book is almost forgotten, never discusssed seriously, and not regarded as what in fact it was and is, one of the great and important classic works by a scholar on the subject of labor in America at the close of the twentieth century.

Schor has gone on to write other, far less impressive books. Her recent books lack the gusto and fervor of THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN (1991), and are not about subjects as important. She seems, de facto, to have joined the people who nay-sayed the importance of her 1991 book. That's a shame, because the book was good, she was right to write it, and deserved/deserves far more acclaim and gratitude than she got when, it seems, she stuck her then young neck out and told the truth about a painful and politically incorrect subject, the brutal yet undiscussed and mostly unchallenged bad conditions which face American workers.

Her book, THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN, had implications discussed only by Ralph Nadar among Presidential candidates in the 2000 elections, and only briefly and superficially by him.

Do get a hard-back copy of this book (the paperback, which I haven't read, may well lack some of the good stuff included in the hard-back version....changes occur when hard back books appear in paper-back versions). ... if sold new today, and tells the truth about the American labor situation and quality of life situation not found elsewhere at any price.

Sometimes, only old books tell the truth about important subjects. That's what classics, even ones not yet accorded "classic" status, are all about.