3.1 Wages, Work, and Consumption in Mid-Century America
Early on in the Lynds’ (1929, p. 52) first study of Middletown, they ofer a synthetic overview of the moral economy connecting work and money to the life of the town: “The whole complex of doing day after day fortuitously assigned things, chiefly at the behest of other people, has in the main to be strained through a pecuniary sieve before it achieves vital meaning. This helps account for the importance of money in Middletown, and, as an outcome of this dislocation of energy expenditure from so many of the dynamic aspects of living, we are likely to find compensatory adjustments in other regions of the city’s life.” They make a related point in their second study, Middletown In
Economic Fairness and the Wage Labor Background
137