{"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":117,"pdf_page":125,"physical_index":125,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"17c016dc59587af7846417b496784eafb1e028b76aa9cfb83ed51bf4cfadbab1"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"Moreover, the aforementioned “marketization” of services provision is arguably precisely a consequence of the time bind in afluent societies, caused by the failure of the working week to decline by much as productivity increases. The motivation for the consumption of some services—for example paying for day care for young children—is to free up more time in which to work. Outsourcing services is also a response to the demands made on individuals by the commodity objects they own. Television sets must be watched, cars driven, pots cooked with, large houses cleaned and maintained, and, underlying all of this, wages spent. The purchase of time-saving services might be driven in part by the need to shop for and maintain consumer commodities as well as to find time to make use of them.\n\nA final thought is that there are grounds on which to wonder why the service sector, despite its growth in recent years, is not much larger than it is. Like renting goods, buying services ofers a flexible form of consumption, one not requiring possession of a stockpile of goods. Moreover, because a service is consumed in real-time, at the point of purchase, it is an eficient way to satisfy some want. With services, the duration of useful activity (taking a taxi, having meals cooked, clothes washed, and so on) made use of is the same as that paid for, so nothing is wasted. But that apparent advantage becomes a constraint if the point of consumption is to achieve wage-labor commensuration. For only so many services can be consumed in a given unit of time, and so consuming services makes salient the limits imposed on consumption by the availability of time. By contrast, using money to accumulate goods can, in the context of a certain attitude to those goods, suppress the temporal horizon on consumption. As noted earlier, owning stores of potential activity power makes it possible to endlessly defer the question of whether a wage produces enough actual useful free activity to justify the labor given to obtain it—the issue gets projected into the indefinite future. So if the purpose of spending the wage is to make wage labor into a fair exchange, then spending it on commodities fulfills that purpose more efectively than spending it on services.\n\nA Theory of Mass Consumption as Wage-Labor Commensuration\n\n117","previous_page":116,"next_page":118}