{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","id":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","uuid":"10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title":"Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption","normalized_title":"timeforthingslaborleisureandtheriseofmassconsumption","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780674250529","isbns":["9780674250529","9780674250536","9780674979512"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":355,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%20for%20Things%20Labor%2C%20Leisure%2C%20and%20the%20Rise%20of%20Mass%20Consumption","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/10f0f318-a2eb-4ea9-8798-d4fb0304f8c3/search"},"page":{"printed_page":101,"pdf_page":109,"physical_index":109,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"4d7e3c66905e211be4f6ca542e78c4b649a4fef4714c0290888b8c76ac34a328"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"If, however, consumption is to a significant degree driven by wage labor commensuration, then the bias in favor of owning becomes less puzzling. The preference for ownership over renting makes sense if the point of earning more money is precisely to enable the accumulation of a store of use value, one that can realize enough free activity to make up for the time lost to work. Indeed, the goods accumulated by wage earners can index an amount of potential use time greater than the actual leisure time available to them. The ongoing accumulation of commodities, insofar as they represent a reservoir of potential free activity to be undertaken in the indeterminate future, makes wage-labor seem at least potentially fair, and therefore more palatable. The use value of rented items, by contrast, cannot function so easily as commensurate compensation for work, because their use is limited to the period of time for which they are rented. This means that their use value is much more obviously constrained by the amount of real time available in which to use them. The explicit temporal anchoring of rented items thus means that their usefulness must be thought about in realistic rather than in hypothetical terms and cannot be construed as extending indefinitely into the future. Of course, consumers could choose to rent durables indefinitely and so have access to them as a store of use power. But doing so would draw attention to the diference between the amount of time the items are being rented for (twenty-four hours, seven days a week) and the amount of time available to make use of them (considerably less than that). Moreover, renting goods in an ongoing manner, as reserves of use power, to be kept on hand, like a retainer, to provide services as and when needed, incurs a very visible ongoing cost—as time passes, the cost of renting goods inexorably rises. Purchasing a good to own, by contrast, involves a one-time outlay (or, in the case of buying on credit, a commitment to make a finite number of payments), after which all of the potential use power of the object can be held in reserve without further payments. This makes it easier to defer the question of whether the object is likely to see enough use to justify its expense. Although an object might not be being made use of in the present, the possibility always remains that it will eventually, at some point in the future, get suficient use to justify the labor given in exchange for it—and, once the item has been purchased, the costs entailed by waiting for that point to arrive are not very visible.\n\nA Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration\n\n101","previous_page":100,"next_page":102}