We visited Jacques Fresco and Roxanne Meadows, at the Venus Project in Venus, Florida, on 27 December 2008.

In this section Jacque is discussing the housing and aviation types.

http://www.thevenusproject.com

Jacque Fresco is an industrial designer, author, lecturer, futurist, inventor, and a pioneer in the field of human factors engineering, based in Venus, Florida, USA. Fresco has worked as both designer and inventor in a wide range of fields spanning from biomedical innovations to totally integrated social systems. He believes his ideas would maximally benefit the greatest number of people and he states some of his ideas stem from his formative years during the Great Depression. In the mid-1970s, he started The Venus Project and the non-profit organization Future by Design together with Roxanne Meadows, that reflects the culmination of Frescos life work. To this day he writes and lectures extensively on subjects ranging from the holistic design of sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural resource management and advanced automation, focusing on the benefits it will bring to society.

A major theme of Fresco’s is the concept of a resource-based economy that replaces the need for the scarcity-oriented monetary economy we have now. Fresco argues that the world is rich in natural resources and energy and that — with modern technology and judicious efficiency — the needs of the global population can be met with abundance, while at the same time removing the current limitations of what is deemed possible due to notions of economic viability.

He gives this example to help explain the idea:

“At the beginning of World War II the U.S. had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war.”

Fresco states that for this to work, all of the Earth’s resources must be held as the common heritage of all people and not just a select few; and the practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counter-productive to our survival.

Duration : 0:3:21


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