{"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":297,"pdf_page":305,"physical_index":305,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f5ebc3d163fcfda14b51be5c6db7304aa4b7a90fa3058158aa4b5128fa7f99e1"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"19. For Marx subsistence standards—understood as the minimal level of wages that induces potential workers to sell their labor power—are historically variable and so can change over time. But I would suggest that a distinction can be made between a wage level that allows for brute biological reproduction of labor power, and one that allows for a material standard of living suficient to secure a willing and quiescent labor force. For capitalism, ensuring the latter is a structural necessity. For labor, securing the former is existentially necessary. But as we move further up a hierarchy of wants and needs, consumption levels become, from the point of view of labor, increasingly negotiable, and so the question of the trade-of between real income and free time becomes more salient.\n\n20. It might well also be that some nonwage sources of income are equally or even more likely to get spent on goods than wage earnings—windfalls such as unexpected inheritances or gambling winnings for example. In her ethnographic study of gambling, anthropologist Natasha Schull found that the unearned character of money obtained as winnings induces gamblers to gamble it away, continuing to play until their winnings are entirely depleted. Maybe the motive is to return the money whence it came, rather than withdrawing it and using it for other purposes, in order to restore a kind of moral equilibrium to the pecuniary universe (Schull 2012).\n\n21. Indeed, this is the idea behind Zip cars, civic bike loan schemes, and similar enterprises.\n\n22. As society becomes progressively segmented, so cultural codes become diferentiated along those segmented lines. In a complex and fragmented society, people have to negotiate code-switching between what Anne Mische and Harrison White (1998) have characterized as the discrete “netdoms” that constitute the structure of social space. One consequence of diferentiation is, therefore, increasing need for semiotic flexibility. If goods have quite local semiotic value, then being able to change them rapidly, as is the case where they are rented, enables greater ease of movement across social space.\n\n23. The question has particular force if one conceives of households, as does Gary Becker, as analogous to firms, deploying durables as firms make use of capital equipment, in order to, as far as is possible, generate optimal levels of an output—household utility—much as capital is used to produce goods with the aim of maximizing returns to investment. Since tastes are complex and mercurial, it would seem rational for consumers not to sink too much capital into fixed means of satisfying them and, therefore, to rent goods as need and desire dictates rather than own them. If the analogy between household and firm has anything to it, why, therefore, is the market for rented consumer durables relatively small compared to the market for purchasing goods outright?\n\n24. As noted in Chapter 2, the on average quite short period of property ownership between moves, in conjunction with high transaction costs of buying and selling homes, suggests that for most people owning is not primarily about securing good returns to an investment. Rather, owning a home seems to be, to a significant extent, an end in itself.\n\nNotes to Pages 97–100\n\n297","previous_page":296,"next_page":298}