At the same time as homeownership became increasingly prevalent over the course of the twentieth century, the size of the homes occupied by Americans got progressively larger. Between 1950 and 2006, the average home size in the United States doubled from around 1,200 square feet to close to 2,400 square feet. This was largely facilitated by suburbanization, which opened up cheap land for development. Yet it is tempting to interpret the growth in the size of American abodes as connected to the increasing accumulation of material durables, as larger homes were required to store and organize increasing quantities of things. Homes, seen in this light, are commodities used for the storage of other commodities.
Another category of consumer durable the demand for which took of in the early part of the century was domestic appliances. One possible explanation, touched on earlier in the chapter, for the failure of the working week to fall as wages increased, is that the commodities and services acquired with the wage had the efect of reducing necessary labor time outside work. So according to this line of reasoning, as income went up, the amount of time spent on unpaid domestic labor went down, with the net result that the amount of truly free time (left over after all necessary labor, paid and unpaid) per household increased. This explanation would seem to solve our puzzle. If increasing income at constant hours of work has the efect of reducing total household labor hours (domestic plus paid work) because the income is used to acquire domestic appliances that save time, then it might make sense to choose money over less paid work time so that more and better labor-saving devices can be acquired. However, it is not at all clear that the time-saving efect of commodities is suficient to account for the degree to which increasing productivity has not been used to reduce paid work time. As discussed previously, it is questionable whether the use of new domestic appliances significantly reduced time spent on housework, as opposed to increasing standards of cleanliness and order within the household (Cowan 1983). Moreover, research on the rates of difusion of diferent kinds of consumer commodities casts some doubt on the notion that the acquisition of time-saving consumer durables explains the preference for earnings over free time. Economic historians Susan Bowden and Avner Ofer (1994) compared the spread of time saving and time using consumer durables in the United States and the United Kingdom during the twentieth century and found that in both societies, time-using commodities difused significantly more rapidly than time-saving commodities. Consumers evidently directed their discretionary spending first at products whose use demanded, rather than saved, time. The prioritizing of time-using durables makes it implausible that any preference workers had for more income over fewer hours can be explained by the use of that income to acquire appliances and other products that free up more time.
74
Time for Things