But it is also the case that many people in fact throw away much less stuf than might be expected, given the negative efect that excessive accumulation has on ease of life. In recent years, pathological hoarding has become a topic of great cultural fascination, reflected in reality TV shows and popular books about the condition and in the rapid spread of self-help groups (Frost and Steketee 2011). According one study, about 5 percent of the contemporary US population are compulsive hoarders, while another study found a similar percentage (4.6 percent) among contemporary Germans (Frost 2010, 2013). But hoarding tendencies are much more widespread than is suggested by focusing on a relatively small (but still quite significant) number of extreme cases. From one perspective, compulsive hoarding is just an extreme manifestation of the endowment efect—the tendency of people to become irrationally attached to the things they own—which, according to experimental research by behavioral economists, is a quite general disposition in modern capitalist societies (Kahneman, Knetsch, Thaler 1990, 1991; Knetsch 1989; Thaler 1980). Indeed, the contemporary fascination with hoarding suggests widespread recognition of the disposition underlying the pathology—which, in turn, probably reflects the degree to which hoarding tendencies are quite common in the population.42
The increase in throwaway consumption, however, is a product of not just the discarding of overaccumulated consumer durables but also the emergence of consumer goods that are disposable by design. For, in addition to the creation of supposedly high-quality consumer durables, the twentieth century also witnessed the appearance and rapid spread of a wide range of disposable products—razors, ballpoint pens, paper tissues (as opposed to cloth handkerchiefs), and so on. It is immediately not clear why demand for disposable goods should have taken of in the middle part of the twentieth century. Disposable products do not necessarily take up less space than more durable items; therefore, there is no reason why a consumer should own fewer disposable items than their durable equivalents—so the motivation for switching to disposables cannot be that they reduce clutter. Moreover, buying items that require frequent replacement, rather than more durable products, means devoting more time and energy to shopping. Why should consumers choose to acquire items that so frequently have to be replaced? The obvious explanation is that durable items require upkeep—straight razors, for example, must be honed, cloth diapers and handkerchiefs washed, fountain pens flushed and refilled, and so on. In addition, since regular provisioning for food occurs in any case, replacing disposables can, to a fair extent, be folded into a big weekly shop. Big shopping trips became increasingly possible with the dissemination of automobile ownership (which allowed more stuf to be transported by consumers), in conjunction with the concentration of retail space that took place with the emergence of malls and shopping centers in the postwar years (L. Cohen 2003; Longstreth 1997, 1999, 2007; Mertes 1949). In the context of these developments, using disposable items might well have been a more time-eficient option than owning and maintaining durable goods.
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Time for Things