{"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":26,"pdf_page":34,"physical_index":34,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"41b43eb8e55401d4a1e4e8d6b7e2a6f31f5e4ccf495766203334d9f4d8c9822b"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"Thus, in diferent ways Marxian theorists of underconsumption, those working within the regulation school, SSA theorists, and quasi-Keynesians such as Piore and Sabel see the management of aggregate demand as a central problem for twentieth-century industrial capitalism. To coordinate mass production and consumption (while ensuring adequate investment and profit realization) capitalism had to be regulated by an ultimately quite unwieldy set of institutions, policies, and practices. But once more, all of these theorists take it as given that ensuring mass purchasing power was a suficient condition for mass consumption. The solution to the problem of aggregate demand was to widen the distribution of spending power, primarily by increasing wages. As long as enough money could be channeled to consumers, and as long as investors remained confident that demand would continue to be robust, all would be well. On the Marxian model, profits could be realized, while for the Keynesians, this would ensure that capitalists would feel confident enough about the future prospects of the economy to invest their money, thereby securing the economy against the danger of falling into a liquidity trap. Yet, as noted, policies devised to increase the purchasing power of the masses, in order to stimulate the economy, crucially presuppose that increasing income will add to aggregate demand, rather than being used to reduce work hours. Measures like income-based tax credits, or industrial policy aimed at bolstering the power of unions so that they can increase their wage rates, only work to stimulate the economy if the extra money put in people’s hands has the efect of increasing demand rather than reducing work hours at constant levels of spending. However, it is not clear just why an increase in purchasing power per unit of work-time should lead to increased aggregate consumption rather than to decreased work hours. Indeed, it was not always the case that increasing hourly income was automatically used to increase consumption. There is, as noted in the introduction, historical evidence that wage earners in the later nineteenth century used increasing hourly rates to cut their work hours rather than to increase consumption (Dora Costa 2000a). Had that pattern continued—had increasing productivity been channeled into reducing work time at fixed levels of consumption—then the positive feedback loop between increasing returns to scale in production, increasing real wage income, and ever-increasing consumption would not have been possible. The Fordist economy would then quickly have run into demandside dificulties of the sort that its regulatory apparatus was supposed to prevent.33 For capitalism in the era of mass production to be sustainable, a stable pattern in which aggregate demand increases with increases in productivity and output was required. In order for aggregate demand to at least roughly match the output of mass production, it was not enough simply to raise labor’s real hourly wages, for increasing wage rates could, in theory, be used to reduce work time. Nor, for the same reason, would government measures to provide supplemental income have been suficient to stimulate the required level of aggregate efective demand. Rather, the coordination of demand and supply under industrial capitalism ultimately depended on an inclination on the part of the population to make use of increases in hourly wages to increase consumption rather than to reduce work time. A fundamental condition of possibility for the stability of the industrial capitalist order was, therefore, a general preference among wage earners for the accumulation of consumer commodities over more free time—or at the very least an indiference between the two alternatives, such that wage earners were amenable to an arrangement that privileged purchasing power over free time.34\n\n26\n\nTime for Things","previous_page":25,"next_page":27}