And yet in the context of the labor process under industrial capitalism, those other goods—freedom, creativity, self-expression, and so on—seem very far from being realized in most working lives.19 Labor under industrial capitalism has tended to become progressively deskilled, even given the supposed renaissance of artisanal work ushered in by the era of “flexible specialization.”20 Recent survey research conducted by Gallup indicates that in the United States only 30 percent of people feel at all engaged by their work, while the average proportion for a set of 142 countries was found to be a mere 13 percent (Gallup 2013).21 The studies on the sources of happiness thus cast doubt on one of the explanations ofered by the economists mentioned in the introduction for Keynes’s failed forecast: that the twentieth-century pattern in afluent industrial societies for productivity and real income to grow much more rapidly than work time decreases can be explained by the increased satisfaction of work (Zilibotti 2010).
In sum, the research on the happiness (or lack thereof) produced by income and work under advanced capitalism certainly does not support the contention that increasing income necessarily means higher levels of subjective well-being, at least independent of the association between income and social status, which is a purely positional matter. The trend toward increasing income at fairly stable levels of labor time, which became firmly established by the middle decades of the twentieth century, is not easily explained by attributing a “happiness efect” to income and consumption suficient to outweigh the discontents of most work under capitalism. Indeed, the empirical findings on happiness suggest that criticisms of the materialistic bias of capitalism, which have been a prominent cultural current within industrial society in the era of afluence, are not just driven by ideology but rather rest on the perception of a genuine pathology in modern capitalism. Society (to put it rather abstractly) seems significantly puzzled by its own trajectory, and this should alert us to the presence of some underlying tension or contradiction.22 Given how persistent and pervasive has been the critique of capitalist materialism, it ought not, especially in light of the empirical findings about the relation between happiness and wealth, to be dismissed as backward-looking romanticism, aristocratic prejudice, or starry-eyed utopianism.
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Time for Things