{"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":280,"pdf_page":288,"physical_index":288,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"abfb5295dae05e001fb010f940c6d31e912c181c86135588cbd8dd0d95f85a9f"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"2. The roots of this insight can be traced to Bernoulli’s ([1738] 1954) solution to the St. Petersburg paradox, which, he argued, is the declining marginal utility of money. As mentioned in the introduction, economists Frank Knight and Arthur Pigou subscribed to some version of the theory. The doctrine also seems implicit in Keynes’s contention that, all things being equal, the propensity to consume added increments of real income should be less than unity, and increasingly so with growing afluence.\n\n3. Sen conceives of welfare as an irreducibly complex basket of incommensurable goods. Commodities are valuable insofar as they can produce capabilities to achieve certain “functionings” (“doings and beings”). Although Sen holds that the value attached to diferent functionings should be a matter left for democratic deliberation, at the same time he thinks that there are certain basic functionings—those facilitated by access to shelter, nutrition, health, and education—the importance of which is not in dispute. This suggests that money spent achieving these basic functionings will generally obtain a higher return in welfare than money spent in order to achieve more specialized ones. The underlying assumptions are then not so very diferent from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.\n\n4. Layard and Mayraz (2008) examined data on subjective happiness from fifty countries between 1972 and 2005 to estimate the average rate of declining marginal utility of income and found the rate of decline to be steeper than economists tend to assume.\n\n5. As noted in Chapter 1, in this book I employ use value to mean the value attached to the activities made possible by a commodity. Utility is a broader term, meaning roughly actual satisfaction. Utility does not necessarily entail the use of commodities. Use value by contrast, is always tied to things—it is, in the Marxian tradition, a property of commodities.\n\n6. Simon (1971, pp. 40–41) comments: “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention eficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”\n\n7. Attention economics dovetails with work in psychology, which has shown that when consumers are faced with more than eight choices, they experience cognitive overload and, consequently, discomfort (Schwartz 2004). Contemplating consumers become overwhelmed with information, making the decision at hand very dificult, with detrimental consequences for their psychological well-being. Yet even after they are owned, commodities call on our attention and demand choices. There is no reason to suppose that the choice about which item in a set of owned items to make use of at a given point in time should be less uncomfortably distracting than the choice about which commodities should be acquired in the first place. The cognitive dificulty of managing a set of owned commodities (potential sources of utility) is perhaps reflected in the sentiment commonly expressed by people that their material possessions feel burdensome—and in the sense of lightness and clarity that often follows a purging of stuf.\n\n280\n\nNotes to Pages 14–15","previous_page":279,"next_page":281}