While there is surely something to this view, at the same time it ignores the extent to which from the mid-twentieth century onward, workers in the industrial West entered relatively freely into corporatist arrangements with business. Unions were willing participants in the postwar compact, according to which increases in productivity would be rewarded by higher wage incomes. Furthermore, as noted earlier, wage increases can be saved as well as spent (with savings used for things like funding retirement or as a guard against unforeseen expenses). The balance of power between capitalists and labor has little direct efect on whether people choose to spend or save their discretionary income. The power of capital therefore fails to explain the surprisingly high propensity to consume (rather than save) under conditions of afluence.
To sum up, the status-centered, Marxian, cultural, and behavioral psychological interpretations of mass consumer society seem to fare little better than utility maximization as suficient explanations for the general pattern of modern accumulative consumerism—the accumulation of ever more commodities while free time remains relatively static so that the average time available to make use of each commodity decreases. While each approach captures some dimension of mass consumption, it nonetheless remains perplexing that the improvements in productivity in increasingly afluent societies were for the most part used to increase consumption. In Chapter 4, a diferent kind of explanation is presented for this pattern. Before developing this alternative theory, I provide, in Chapter 3, a more detailed empirical analysis of the pattern, focusing on perhaps the paradigmatic consumer society and economy—the United States in the twentieth century.
The Puzzle
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