The US case thus illustrates the kind of pattern that is quite typical of high industrial capitalism. After an initial period during which working hours decreased, further increases in productivity were relentlessly channeled into an expansion of output, while the rate of decrease in the length of the average working week diminished almost to zero. The pattern of trends in productivity, consumer spending, and hours of work described in this chapter is certainly hard to make sense of within the broad set of assumptions that neoclassical economists bring to their analyses. At the same time, explanations based on behavioral economics, class power, identity-making, or status-seeking, while making sense of certain aspects of the pattern that emerged in twentieth century capitalism, fail, for reasons set out in the last chapter, as full explanations for that pattern. An alternative approach, which I will take up in the next chapter, is to make sense of these trends in terms of changes in the normative framework underpinning wage-labor exchange. These afected the meaning, and especially the justification, of work under capitalism in a way that had significant consequences for attitudes toward wage goods and consumption.
Empirical Pattern in the United States
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