Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption · 第 292 页

1. Parfit has an answer, but it has nothing to do with rational self-interest. Rather, he thinks that we should be concerned about the well-being of our future selves in order to follow the general moral principle that we should always be concerned about the consequences of our actions for others.

1. For a good—and surprisingly positive, given the assessment quoted earlier—overview of the history of the life cycle hypothesis, see Angus Deaton (2005).

1. The pattern reported by Deaton also casts doubt on the suggestion that people choose earnings over free time in order to leave a legacy to their heirs.

1. Carter 2006, Table Bc523–536: Enrollment in institutions of higher education, by sex, enrollment status, and type of institution: 1869–1995.

1. Interestingly, in contrast to the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, the downturns of the early 1990s and late 2000s did not produce an equivalent spike in savings.

1. Angus Maddison (1992) observes that the pattern in the United States for savings rates not to increase as incomes go up is unique among developed capitalist economies. Keynes’s prediction about the relation between income and saving is more accurate with respect to other advanced economies.

1. On page 31 of The General Theory, Keynes (1935) states that “the marginal propensity to consume [is] weaker in a wealthy community” and that “with the growth in wealth [comes] the diminishing marginal propensity to consume.”

1. Those savings could either add to aggregate efective demand, as investment, or be hoarded. Keynes thought that ensuring the former outcome should be the primary goal of macroeconomic management in modern money economies.

1. The first was Diners card in 1949.

1. Ofer here is explicitly making a Ulysses and the Sirens–type argument, in which taking on credit works as a self-binding mechanism (Elster 1979).

1. The notable exceptions were the Depression years of the 1930s, during which consumption declined and savings increased somewhat, and, to a much lesser extent, the period of recession in the mid-1970s.

1. The whole idea that flexible production has advantages over mass production, for example, is that capital investments and capital stocks are kept lower in the former than in the latter, which facilitates greater flexibility in an unpredictable world.

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Notes to Pages 64–72