One of the intuitions underlying the theory of the declining marginal utility of spending is that there are certain existential constants that limit the extent to which commodities can be deployed in practices in which their use value gets realized.5 The most basic of these are limitations of time and energy, both of which are required to turn money (by way of commodities) into useful activities. All things being equal, as more commodities get accumulated, the amount of time and energy available for making use of each of them asymptotically approaches zero. A similar point holds if the pattern of ever greater commodity accumulation is considered from the perspective of attention. Inspired by the influential social scientist Herbert Simon (1971), economists have recently begun to conceive of attention as a scarce resource, on which demands are made by various aspects of the environment (Davenport and Beck 2001).6 The thought is that human beings have finite cognitive resources, which must, like any scarce resource, be distributed over a range of competing demands. Attention can be overwhelmed by too much information, and that can lead to suboptimal outcomes.7 Each commodity requires attention if it is to be put to use in some activity. Therefore, the larger the number of commodities a person owns, the greater the amount of attention is required from that person for their use value to be realized. Limitations of time, energy, and attention thus mean that as more goods are acquired, the constraints on realizing each of their use values become ever tighter. And yet despite these limiting existential factors, under advanced capitalism there is a seemingly endless accumulation of objects, at great cost to the environment, communities, and individuals. Not the least of these costs is the free time foregone in order to generate the income required to fund commodity accumulation.8 How does this state of afairs come about—how does it get reproduced?
The Puzzle
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