1.1. Explains the Rough Coincidence of the Rise of
Consumer Society and the Acceptance of Wage Labor
On the most general, macrohistorical level, the theory suggests an explanation for the rough coincidence between, on the one hand, a set of large-scale changes that marked the rise of consumer society and, on the other, growing acceptance of wage labor as a fundamentally legitimate institution, by virtue of its potential to be objectively fair. The set of changes includes the increasing force of the income efect and the ebbing of the substitution efect (as increases in hourly wages were used to increase household consumption rather than decrease work time), the ascent of the modern brand, the development of new forms of credit, the consumer durables revolution, the rise to prominence, in culture and politics, of the figure of the consumer, and the growing importance in politics of the concept of purchasing power. This set of developments unfolded, in the United States, roughly between the beginning of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the middle years of the twentieth century, and coincided with the ascent of wage labor as a legitimate form of exchange (Strasser 2004; Glickman 1997, 2009; L. Cohen 2003; Olney 1991). It seems unlikely that changes in consumption and changes in wage labor were unrelated, and yet the nature of the connection is unclear.
The obvious account of how they might be connected is that as living standards improved, allowing for the development of the mass consumer economy, the trade of labor for a wage simply became more tolerable. However, a condition can be tolerable without being thought of as being legitimate. Think, for example, of a very well-treated slave. So, improvements in living standards alone do not explain why wage labor increasingly came to be regarded as legitimate, potentially fair, and even in the nature of things. Furthermore, living standards understood in broad terms, as overall well-being, rather than narrowly, as per capita income, can improve along diferent dimensions. Increasing real income can improve well-being, but so, too, can decreasing subjection to work at constant levels of real income, especially under conditions of afluence, with widespread access to basic goods. The consumer economy was, as we have seen, characterized by a push for higher income, rather than working fewer hours at the same income. Potential increases in free time were sacrificed in order to secure increasing real income. This pattern suggests a materialistic bias in the uses to which improvements in labor productivity were put, one not easy to explain in utility maximizing terms.
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Time for Things