{"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":108,"pdf_page":116,"physical_index":116,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"82254998b113d15720c69f453bdf7217214610e084205272b4f1afef6125ffd9"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"At the same time, agents, especially institutions, do sometimes discount utility in a supposedly rational, exponential fashion. For example, when people save, the usual expectation is that interest on savings (that is, the returns for forgoing consumption) will be paid at an exponential rate. So, it would seem that humans are endowed with two discrete discount curves— one hyperbolic and the other exponential. Behavior in some contexts is best described by the exponential curve, while in others the hyperbolic curve gives a better fit.\n\nAs mentioned in chapter 2 of this book, one strategy to explain this behavioral complex, advocated by George Ainslie (1992, 2001), has been to posit multiple competing selves within the agent, corresponding to distinct neurophysiological structures in the brain, each endowed with a particular orientation toward the future, reflected in its own discount curve. The behavior of a person is then a kind of equilibrium outcome, resulting from competition between these sub-self-level actors, at what Ainslie (1992) describes as the “picoeconomic” scale. Ainslie’s theory, like Kahneman’s, seeks maximal scope, and is consequently very insensitive to historical context. The objective is to come up with a robust theory of human behavior, understood on the most general of levels. Yet, as noted in the discussion of Kahneman, the experimental subjects whose behavior such theories attempt to explain are invariably subjects living in, and formed by, modern capitalist societies. We might do well, therefore, to look for an explanation of their behavioral tendencies in the proximate historical context of modern capitalism.\n\nIt seems quite possible that the high value people place on spending in the short term, compared with spending over the medium or longer term, reflects a sense of urgency, in a society organized around wage-labor exchange, about converting money into use values. Money wages form the most important component of income for the vast majority of people under capitalism. Consequently, for most people, money mostly means wage earnings. The disposition to privilege short-term consumption, rather than smoothing consumption over time, might well, therefore, have at least something to do with the identity of money wages as compensation for work. If commensurate compensation for labor requires that concrete potential activity be returned to the worker in the form of commodity objects, then there will be a strong impulse to spend earnings (and possibly also make use of credit, if wages are deemed insuficient to do the job of commensuration) to acquire such objects. Accumulating money, as opposed to things, by comparison works quite poorly as commensurable compensation for labor, even where the idea is to save in order to fund later consumption. Of course, people can fantasize about what they could do with their wage rather than spending it. Contemplation of the potential use values that a money wage can aford might for some time stave of the urge to convert that wage into commodity objects, especially if wages are being saved with some particular product in mind, such as a new home or car. But the use value of money wages per se has a second-order quality about it. The usefulness of unspent money subsists in the set of use values it can in theory command, which is, in efect, a potential to command stores of potential use value. For that reason, fantasies about how money could be spent are ultimately not concrete enough to be efective in making the exchange of labor for a wage seem like a fair exchange of commensurable substances.35 In order for a sense of commensuration to be achieved, the wage must be converted into actual stuf, endowed with use power. Wage earners will, therefore, tend to turn money wages into things, and do so sooner rather than later.\n\n108\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":107,"next_page":109}