2.3. How Do Services Fit In?
A further question about the commensuration theory is what place consumption of services has in the theory. For while the theory places great emphasis on consumer durables, advanced industrial economies have over time tended to shift in the direction of services. The three-sector developmental model of the economy, according to which economies move progressively from extraction, to manufacturing, and then to services, has proven to be an empirically very sound model of economic development. In advanced capitalist nations, the service sector has inexorably grown as a proportion of the economy. But the theory of consumption as wage-labor commensuration entails that as incomes increase, the demand for manufactured goods, not services, should expand. How, therefore, can services be made sense of in relation to the theory proposed in this chapter?
A Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration
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