{"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":105,"pdf_page":113,"physical_index":113,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"7959ccaba863d5e0feddbaec40497f0682523a252a42a5d772bfc71894cb9b35"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"The connection between the rise of wage labor and the increasing propensity to spend can also be found going further back in history. If the commensuration theory is correct, then, as labor becomes more commodified (assuming this is because wage-labor exchange becomes more legitimate), so spending rates should increase. And indeed, at least according to economic historian Jan De Vries (2008), the historical process of the commodification of labor was accompanied by a greater propensity to consume.30 However, where the labor process is to a greater extent under the control of workers, while at the same time what is being sold is the product of labor rather than labor power—as was the case in the protoindustrial phase of capitalist development—the economic exchange is somewhat diferent. Since, under those conditions, workers in theory retain ownership of their time, there is not the same imperative to turn increases in hourly wages into more wage goods (construed as an accumulation of congealed free time), as opposed to increases in actual free time.31 So in earlier periods of capitalism, before the full commodification of labor power, a more balanced attitude to the tradeof between free time and money was likely to prevail.\n\n1.6. Accounting for Certain Findings of Behavioral Economics\n\nChanging levels of analysis once again, another way in which the theory of consumption as wage-labor commensuration sheds light on modern economic behavior is its capacity to explain some of the more perplexing experimental discoveries of behavioral economics. As mentioned in the second chapter, over the past three decades research in behavioral economics has led to experimental findings that challenge the homo economicus model of the economic agent. The rationality presupposed in that model is not easily compatible with findings like hyperbolic discounting, the endowment efect, and nontransitive preferences, which behavioral economists have suggested are widespread features of economic behavior. Behavioral economists and psychologists have tended to interpret their findings in an ahistorical fashion, as indicating general patterns in human behavior. Daniel Kahneman, one of the founders of behavioral economics, takes the various biases and heuristics discovered in the field to be psychological primitives, natural facts about the human species that, as such, are universal in scope, explicable in terms of the selective advantages they conferred in our evolutionary past. In a synthetic theoretical work, for example, Kahneman (2011) explains the disparate findings of behavioral economics through a theory of the architecture of the human brain.32 Yet surely it is premature to leap so quickly to such a general level of explanation, without first considering the mediating influence of sociohistorical context. The experimental subjects of behavioral economics are, after all, almost always drawn from modern capitalist societies. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to interpret the discoveries of the field as reflecting the more proximate sociocultural and historical setting of the subjects on whose behavior they are based. Indeed, two prominent examples of supposedly irrational behavior discovered by behavioral economists are quite compatible with the theory of economic behavior under capitalism developed in this book.\n\nA Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration\n\n105","previous_page":104,"next_page":106}