{"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":25,"pdf_page":33,"physical_index":33,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"9bdd4c97b9277f00a9f4f62b3dfa69d478bc6138326c2dbb5cd680c8f86a619f"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"The quasi-Keyensian version of the problem of mass consumption, as developed by Michael Piore and Charles Sabel (1986), focuses on the contribution of investment to aggregate efective demand rather than directly on consumption.30 At the same time, because predictions about the future state of consumer demand have tremendous influence on investment, consumption remains a crucial variable in determining the stability of industrial capitalism. Piore and Sabel point out that an economy organized around mass production involves very substantial fixed capital investments in specialized machinery and argue that this presents challenges to the stability of the system. High fixed capital investments of the sort involved in mass production mean that in order to be profitable, factories must be run at or near full capacity. This makes the mass production economy very inflexible, limited in its ability to cope with sudden downturns in demand. If measures are not in place to ensure that aggregate demand is sustained at levels suficient to support full capacity production, there will be a risk of underinvestment. Thus, Piore and Sabel interpret the Depression in broadly Keynesian fashion, as caused by a loss of nerve on the part of investors about consumer demand. This led to a self-fulfilling prophecy, as falling investment led to increasing unemployment, which had the efect of depressing aggregate demand, which in turn made the outlook for further investment even grimmer, prompting further declines in investment and more job losses, and so on, in a vicious cycle.31\n\nLevels of aggregate efective demand commensurate with the growth in capacity of industrial production were secured by a series of institutional developments, stretching from the late nineteenth century to the postwar period. On what Piore and Sabel call the microeconomic side, the most important of these was the emergence of the corporation. Also important at the level of the firm was the development in the 1920s of welfare capitalism, which increased the purchasing power of wage earners.32 On the macroeconomic side, demand was stabilized by a new, government-backed industrial relations regime, by various components of the welfare state, including minimum wages, unemployment insurance, and Keynesian fiscal and monetary policy. Of these developments, the most significant was the system of collective bargaining that emerged in the years following World War II. This system reflected a compact between labor and capital, one mediated by the state. Norms of collective bargaining in the United States in the postwar period were set by the landmark 1948 agreement between the United Automobile Workers union and General Motors, which established the principle that wage levels should be reset annually according to the formula change in productivity plus change in the consumer price index. Real wages, and therefore mass purchasing power, thus became linked to the increasing productivity of the economy. This allowed the virtuous cycle of increasing returns to scale and increasing mass consumption to take root, ushering in the postwar era of economic expansion. Importantly, Piore and Sabel note that the success of the US model led to its emulation across the advanced industrial world, as various nations developed their own versions of Fordist regulation—the American model became a kind of paradigm for the regulation of capitalist economies in the postwar era. Indeed, the United States works well as a case study for Fordism precisely because it served, at least to some degree, as a model followed by other countries in that era of capitalism.\n\nThe Puzzle\n\n25","previous_page":24,"next_page":26}