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Juliet B. Schor
(Photo: Jan Konitzki) 
Juliet B. Schor is Professor of Sociology at Boston College and currently working on issues of environmental sustainability and their relation to Americans' lifestyles and the economy and the emergence of a conscious consumption movement. Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard University for 17 years, in the Department of Economics. She is Board Member and co-Founder of the Center for a New American Dream, an organization devoted to transforming North American lifestyles to make them more ecologically and socially sustainable. Furthermore she teaches at Schumacher College, International Centre for Ecological Studies in the southwest of England. She is also author of several nonfiction books.
Selected Publications
Plenitude: the New Economics of True Wealth. Penguin Press, New York (2010)
Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture. Scribner, New York (2004)
Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the 21st Century. Beacon Press, Boston (mit Betsy Taylor) (2002)
Selected Quotations
"In this country, the excessive orientation to private consumption has squeezed these other things, which I would argue yield more welfare to people once they reach the middle class. More savings, more leisure time and more public consumption would raise wellbeing more than extra VCRs, cashmere sweaters and shifting from a regular car to an SUV. But the dynamics of production and consumption in the United States are heavily biased in the direction of private consumption."
Interview: Journal of Consumer Culture, 5, 2005
"Large numbers of people could be made better off, if we could agree to slow down together. National income has been rising for the last 20 years, but measures of the quality of life have fallen. And by the way, what's wrong with a moral message? Those who like it can listen. And those who don't are free to disagree or ignore. I have no qualms talking about values and morality even as I try to analyze our society."
Interview: TIME Magazine, May 20, 1998
"The decline of public goods, such as education, recreation, and culture, has led us into a vicious cycle in which we need more money to purchase private alternatives: Discovery Zone rather than the local playground. But that move to private substitutes further weakens support for the public good. What I argue in my book is that the intensification of competition in private status goods is in part creating pressures on income which undermines support for public goods."
Interview: TIME Magazine, May 20, 1998