My contention is that the reason why work failed to retreat in the face of relentlessly increasing productivity has much to do with the rise of practices and institutions associated with mass consumer society. Yet to adduce the supposed benefits of consumption as an adequate explanation for the failure of Keynes’s prediction to come true just raises the question of why spending should have seemed more beneficial than free time. After all, it is not unreasonable to expect that as incomes increase, so the demand for leisure will also increase. Canonical economists such as Frank Knight (1921) and Arthur Pigou (1932) certainly thought as much.8 With higher wage rates, the relative value of leisure should, according to these economists, increase, and workers should consequently feel less inclined to ofer their labor.9 The prediction that follows from this is that other things being equal, with growing afluence the supply curve of labor should become backward sloping. And yet the historical pattern under industrial capitalism between 1930 and the present day indicates not much evidence in support of that prediction. At the same time, there is evidence from late nineteenth-century America that workers in that period chose to use increasing hourly income to buy back their time—meaning that the supply curve of labor was, in the decades before the turning of the twentieth century, indeed backward sloping (Dora Costa 1998b, 2000a). So it has certainly not always been the case that increasing hourly wages has led to more consumption rather than less work. Yet after a certain point in history that is how things quite consistently went. We are thus left with some unanswered questions. What changed to make consumption as unbounded as production? Why did the value of free time apparently decline in relative terms as afluence increased? What was it about the set of institutions, practices, and moral norms associated with mass consumption that might have caused a shift in aggregate preferences away from free time and toward the accumulation of consumer goods?
I think that the answer to these questions might be found by attending to the problem of wage-labor commensuration and to the development of a form of consumption that seemingly resolves this problem. The problem of wage-labor commensuration is that the legitimacy of wage-labor exchange depends on labor being commensurable with its wage, but it is entirely unclear how the concrete activity of work could be commensurable with the wage, which, after all, is just an abstraction. The possibility of commensuration between wage and work rests, I argue in this book, on goods being framed and construed as stores of potential free activity. When wages are spent on goods that signify hypothetical durations of activity, wage earners receive a form of compensation that seems commensurable with the life activity they give up in labor. The actual time and freedom lost as work is compensated for by the notional free time indexed by consumer goods—and specifically, consumer durables, a category of product that became increasingly important in twentieth-century capitalism. Caught in a cycle of commensuration, wage workers were willing to take their share of rising productivity (realized as increasing hourly wages) as more consumption rather than more free time.
6
Time for Things