{"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":294,"pdf_page":302,"physical_index":302,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"671cc8e59d0ef6d92e79281fad218b6dbd1d3a643e4fe5b724d96d1b9538bbdd"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"States and Europe. Although in Europe work hours continued to decrease through the end of the twentieth century to a greater extent than they did in the United States, the rate of decrease was substantially less than that experienced between 1870 and 1930. So, as with the United States, with increasing afluence, the rate at which hours declined in Europe decreased.\n\nc h a pt e r 4 : a t h e o r y o f m a s s c o n s u mpt i o n a s w a g e -l a bo r c o mme nsu r a t io n\n\n1. A growing body of work in the social and historical sciences has drawn attention to the importance of processes of measurement and commensuration in the making of modern society. Wendy Esperland and Mitchell Stevens (1998) give a useful overview of the issue from a sociological point of view.\n\n2. The literature on this topic is a vast one, including much of the social history and historical sociology stemming from the work of E. P. Thompson, and other historians. My account here is extremely schematic and abbreviated. The point here is to give a very broad overview of the contours of the history of labor under capitalism to adequately motivate the ensuing theory. A more fully fleshed out, although still brief, summary of this historiog raphy will appear in the next chapter.\n\n3. See E. P. Thompson (1966, 1993). One could, in the spirit of David Lewis (2002), make the argument that conventions and customs represent equilibrium solutions to coordination problems or, following Elinor Ostrom (1990), that they are solutions to collective action problems such as the tragedy of the commons. Part of what establishes consent to a given custom might then be that it represents a compromise between a fair distribution of goods and the pragmatic exigencies of a situation—the need, for example, to ensure that common goods are not depleted to the point of exhaustion. This would entail a contractual view of convention and custom. But explaining customs in such a fashion involves a good deal of projection. To interpret traditions and customs as rational solutions to problems of collective action risks falling into what E. P. Thompson (1966) famously described as the “condescension of posterity.”\n\n4. Gareth Stedman-Jones (1984, p. 85) notes that historians of medieval law have discovered that the phrase “since time immemorial” in practice could refer to customs in existence for as few as twenty-one years. The important point, however, is that practices were regarded as legitimate to the extent that they were supported by established norms rather than because they were appraised as being fair on an objective basis.\n\n5. Along with the idea of a fair wage, there were also a variety of ideas about what constitutes a decent or minimally acceptable wage. These would include the notion of a “living wage” and the “family wage.” But note that these concepts stipulated a bare minimum standard for what wages should aford—essentially, providing for a decent living standard (whatever that might be thought to entail). They do not set out criteria for what makes a wage a fair one, once that minimum standard had been met. Although the ideas of a living wage and family wage had great rhetorical power, they provide no guidance about what should happen when productivity increases—whether and to what degree increasing wealth should be returned to labor. The conception of fairness in economic exchange underlying the notion of the living wage is continuous with earlier notions about the right to subsistence, with roots in the preindustrial moral economy (Thompson 1991). Perhaps for this reason it works very imperfectly as a normative guide to distribution in the context of the very dynamic growth conditions, characterized by a strong trend for the productivity of labor to increase, created by capitalism.\n\n294\n\nNotes to Pages 79–81","previous_page":293,"next_page":295}