One possible objection to the reasoning I follow here is that it does not take into account that commodities can vary greatly in the amount of utility they produce per unit of time spent using them. Becker and Lancaster could argue that as new products emerge, the activities they facilitate become more eficient at generating utility so that the same amount of utility can be generated in less time. As goods become more eficient in this way, consumers might well have good reason to seek to upgrade their set of commodities, progressively retiring products as better ones become available. If higher income makes objects yielding more utility per unit of time-in-use afordable, then it might make sense for people to use increases in their hourly wages to raise their incomes (in order to acquire those objects) rather than reduce work time at constant income.42 But while this point might be valid on a formal level and might, indeed, account for some accumulative consumer practices, it is unconvincing as a comprehensive explanation for the general pattern of accumulative consumption in afluent capitalist societies. It certainly does not account for the accumulation of multiple, functionally equivalent items or for the acquisition of items that seem unlikely, given constraints of time, ever to be made use of enough to justify their expense. Moreover, if it was the case that the utility-generating productivity of consumer goods increased at a rate suficient to ofset the decline in the time available for making use of them, surely that should be reflected in a positive correlation between increasing income and subjective well-being. If increasing spending at fixed amounts of free time increases the amount of satisfaction experienced in that time, then as income increases, so should happiness. However, as we have seen, the evidence indicates that this is not necessarily the case in afluent societies.
Thus, the neoclassical theory of the consumer seems unable to provide a good explanation for accumulative consumerism, at the expense of increasing free time, under conditions of afluence. The notion that modern consumption is fully accounted for in terms of the realized utility of the things acquired stands in some tension with some general patterns in modern capitalism, particularly in its US incarnation.
The Puzzle
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