THE PROFESSOR 
AND THE PLUMBER

Written by Eric W Sager & Illustrated by Hanna Melin

​Two cousins meet for dinner. Who are they? Why is a plumber arguing with a professor? They begin to discuss one of the great problems of our time - inequality. Can they find solutions? Can they agree on the meaning of equality? Follow their conversation to its powerful conclusion.

In their conversations, the plumber and the professor introduce the reader to basic principles of equality and social justice. In accessible language they tell us about incentives, equal opportunity, fairness, merit, property, and reciprocity. They tell us how such ideas can and cannot work in an era of pandemic and climate change. They arrive at an agreement that all progressive thinkers and activists would do well to consider.  

​The ideas in the book are dramatized in eighteen colour illustrations by Hanna Melin.
A selection of illustrations from Hanna Melin in The Professor and the Plumber...
In Eric Sager’s book, The Plumber and the Professor (FriesenPress, 2021) two cousins argue about inequality over a lasagna dinner one evening. They compare a single mother living with her young son in Southern Ontario on $65 a day to an empty-nester CEO living with his wife in Toronto on $30,000 a day.
Their conversation deepens and they consider why the top 1% have so much more than the rest. They realize that this increasing inequality has created a rift amongst people, a decline in community, which is a weakening of a shared sense of responsibility. And where inequality is greatest, social cohesion is weakest. - B.C. BookLook, August 2021, interview with author Eric Sager (available for reading).

Also by Eric W. Sager...