{"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":299,"pdf_page":307,"physical_index":307,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"3652787f1b250c25e7bc0b079e56fdf5725fc9a03ff53fc9e1ea10d54f4eff43"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"35. More on this point follows, in the discussion of possible objections to the theory.\n\n36. Note that the finding is not that the young do not borrow but rather that they do not borrow enough to fund discretionary consumption at levels that would smooth consumption over the life course.\n\n37. A sense of urgency to turn money into things, in order to make it commensurable with labor, perhaps explains the feeling, and consequent pattern of behavior, described in the adage that “money burns a hole in one’s pocket” (the earliest origins of this adage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, can be found in the eighteenth century “My tyme lyes heavy on my hands, and my money burns in my pocket” G. Farquhar [1702], Inconstant v.iii 77 [OED]). What burns is the memory of a deficit, constituted by free activity sold as work. Spending money, then, is an attempt to fill this deficit and turn what might well have been experienced as an exploitative relationship into one retrospectively becalmed by the projection of an aura of equal exchange. The saying “work hard, play hard” is also suggestive with respect to the commensuration theory, as it evokes an equivalence between work and leisure—that the two need to be in some sense of equal intensity for them to be in a balanced relationship.\n\n38. It is perhaps not surprising that the struggle over hours took place mainly in an era before wage labor had become fully legitimate, a quasi-naturalized fact about social life.\n\n39. In acquiring things, people generally do not acquire more free time. But there are two possible exceptions to this. The first is certain labor-saving devices. However, as we saw in the last chapter, the empirical evidence suggests that the deployment of such devices has not freed up much more discretionary time (Cowan 1983; Robinson and Godbey 1999). The second exception is artifacts that increase life span. To be sure, warm clothes and adequate heat and nutrition can increase the life spans of the poor. But once afluent conditions prevail, it is not clear that further increments of consumption lead to further increases in life span. What of consumption directed to health care? An argument could certainly be made that spending on health care increases life span. Life-prolonging devices such as pacemakers clearly add time to lives, and it might well be the case that some part of the preference for higher wages over less work time is explained by increasing health care costs, at least in the United States. But it is doubtful that the general pattern described in the last chapter can be explained away in that way. The postwar pattern for real incomes to increase and for decreases in work time to slow to a crawl was also experienced in other advanced industrial capitalist nations. For example, it is also evident in the United Kingdom, which, from 1945 onward, has had a national health care system that makes access to health care independent of income. Furthermore, a very significant determinant of life expectancy in advanced industrial countries is lifestyle. Stress, lack of sleep, not having time to exercise, and eating badly all have a pronounced negative impact on life expectancy, and all are associated working conditions under capitalism. Given those correlations, working less at constant levels of income, if it leads to decreased levels of stress, might well yield a health and longevity dividend that more than ofsets the added longevity yielded by more health care at the expense of a longer work week.\n\n40. Perhaps this hypothetical plenitude of use value underlies the mistake of conflating increasing wealth with increasing well-being. The accumulation of material wealth entails (the service economy notwithstanding) the accumulation of commodity objects. But wealth is plausibly construable as a measure of well-being only if it can reasonably be expected that the useful powers subsisting within it will be deployed to improve lives. Otherwise, wealth remains inert, unused, and therefore useless. To see wealth as a gauge of well-being is to forget this basic point. Amartya Sen (1988) has repeatedly pointed out the perversity of this way of thinking, and the awful consequences it has for human welfare— yet this raises the question of why such odd habits of thought should have become so deeply entrenched.\n\nNotes to Pages 109–115\n\n299","previous_page":298,"next_page":300}