Part of the appeal of owning a consumer durable is, then, the prospect of possessing a notional quantity of use value surplus to likely actual use, therefore indexing a surplus of free time. Indeed, the activity time indexed by a set of goods can potentially exceed the absolute amount of time remaining in a person’s life, thereby perhaps suggesting that finitude has been transcended. In owning objects, possibilities seem to stretch beyond those realizable under average conditions of real use, and this makes the work-time-consumption regime typical of high industrial capitalism at least acceptable and perhaps even quite appealing.
1.5. Explains the Correlation among Saving, Spending, and Labor Decommodification across Diferent Capitalist Societies
Moving to a very diferent, much more macrohistorical and comparative, level of analysis, interpreting mass consumption as wage-labor commensuration suggests an explanation for the correlation between the degree to which labor has been decommodified (measured by the extent of development of the welfare state) and savings rates across the modern industrial capitalist world. It seems intuitive that capitalist nations with less developed welfare states should, in lieu of dependable social insurance, have higher savings rates than those with more developed welfare states. The larger the gaps are in a social safety net, the more reason individuals have to save money, in case they should fall on hard times. In fact, however, the countries with the weakest welfare states have the lowest saving rates. This is a surprising finding—yet one that is consistent with the commensuration theory.
In his important book, Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Gosta Esping-Andersen (1990) categorizes capitalist societies according to the extent of decommodification of labor produced by state policies.26 Esping-Andersen defines decommodification as the mitigation of pressure on people to sell their labor in the market. In providing alternative means of subsistence, welfare states lessen their population’s dependence on the labor market, in efect, making capitalism less coercive for labor. The more dependent people are on the labor market in a given society—that is, the fewer alternatives they have for getting a living apart from selling their labor—the less decommodified labor is in that society.
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Time for Things