consumer durables of various sorts. Indeed, Aglietta (2008) has argued that the demand for consumer durables formed a crucial stabilizing component of the Fordist mode of regulation. Drawing on empirical work in economics and economic history, and using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as census materials collated in The Historical Statistics of the United States, the present chapter examines this pattern in some detail, analyzing trends in productivity, wages, work time, and consumption over the course of the twentieth century. Getting a clear picture of these trends and their interrelations requires some auxiliary analysis of savings rates, credit, changes in retirement, life span, time spent in education, and the efect of the deployment of labor-saving devices in the domestic sphere. In order to properly contextualize developments in the twentieth century, it is also helpful to look further back in time at the history of work, so the chapter touches in passing on patterns in earlier periods.
Before pressing forward with this analysis, some attention ought to be paid to the view that there is nothing deeply puzzling about the relation between work time, hourly wages, and productivity that emerged in the United States during the twentieth century. Gary Becker (1965) sets out this position clearly in an influential paper on time allocation, written in the mid-1960s. He takes it as given that consumers are guided in their decisions by an ongoing concern to optimize utility under changing conditions. Changes in work time are, according to Becker, simply expressive of the shifting balance in consumer behavior between the income efect, where higher hourly earnings lead to increased preference for leisure time, and the substitution efect, where the added utility of higher hourly earnings leads to a preference for more work. Becker acknowledges that in the US economy, the income efect ebbs after 1940, but he simply assumes that this must have been because, for rational economic reasons, the substitution efect increased in strength.1 Yet accounting for the change in that way involves circular reasoning. The argument has the following form: the decline in hours slowed to a creep because higher earnings yielded relatively more satisfaction. How do we know this? Because the decline in hours slowed to a creep. Becker simply takes it as self-evident that the decline in the rate of decrease in work time from 1940 onward reflects rational, optimizing choices on the part of individuals. He does not even attempt to provide historical evidence to substantiate this interpretation. My theoretical analysis sticks more closely to the rough ground of history, which seems entirely appropriate when analyzing historical trends.
Empirical Pattern in the United States
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