- Indeed, housing, construed as a consumer durable, is one very prominent exception to the marginal position of the market for rented goods—although renting housing is less common in the United States, it is the norm in many parts of continental Europe.
- Esping-Andersen uses the term decomodification rather than commodification because all of the countries he analyzes are capitalist, so the default state is for labor to be commodified. The action of diferent welfare state regimes to difering degrees decommodifies this antecedent state of afairs.
- The liberal group is Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, and Ireland; the corporatist group is Italy, Japan, France, Germany, Finland, and Switzerland; and the social democratic group is Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
- The OECD countries in the corporatist group consist of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Switzerland; the OECD social democrat group, of Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, and Sweden; and the OECD liberal group, of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada.
- At the same time the countries of continental Europe have shorter working weeks, and renting homes, as opposed to homeownership is more common than in the liberal states.
- For De Vries the direction of causality between wage labor and consumer demand is the reverse of the argument of this book—the desire to consume prompted an “industrious revolution,” the result of which was greater participation in labor markets.
- And indeed, there is at least a loose correlation between early periods of capitalism, in which the putting out system predominated and what many historians have referred to as a “traditional,” or “customary” attitude to work and time existed, in which the inclination to work was either relatively insensitive to changes in pay rates or else declined as hourly pay rates increased (Thompson 1991; Hobsbawm 1964; Gutman 1973).
- According to this theory, humans are endowed with two diferent thought systems, system 1 and system 2, which developed at diferent points in our evolutionary history. System 1 is fast and makes use of heuristics, while system 2 is slow and involves reasoning (Kahneman 2011).
- As philosopher John Rawls (1999, p. 293), expressing the intuition underlying the normative objection to hyperbolic discounting from the point of view of rationality, puts it: “Rationality requires an impartial concern for all parts of our life. The mere diference of location in time, of some things being earlier or later, is not a rational ground for having more or less regard for it.”
- On the other hand, perhaps the prospective ratio of what Frank Knight (1921) calls risk and uncertainty changes over future time in a quite nonlinear fashion. In Knight’s definition, risk involves measurable probabilities, like the chance of getting a six on a role of a die. Uncertainty, on the other hand, refers to situations in which we have no measurable probabilities. Perhaps in the short term, risk predominates, but, at a certain point in the future, an epistemic horizon is reached, making it impossible to assign probabilities on a rational basis. At that point the world switches quite abruptly from being risky to being uncertain. If any two given days more than, say, a year in the future will be equally dominated by uncertainty, then there would not be a good reason to distinguish between them. They would be equally “unknown unknowns.”
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Notes to Pages 100–108