{"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":63,"pdf_page":71,"physical_index":71,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"c23295355a14a9959fd5b96bf166ebc5dd628f2441f37ab4b56b20f55bbd8c57"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"One final possible explanation that should be considered for the failure of work hours to decrease is that changes in life expectancy, and in the organization of the life course, reduced the overall proportion of lives typically spent in full-time work. Increasing life expectancy, in conjunction with the greater possibility for retirement and more time spent in full-time education, meant that as the twentieth century progressed, people typically entered the workforce later and lived for more years after the end of their working lives. Since the proportion of life spent in full-time work progressively contracted over the course of the twentieth century, workers might not have worried so much about the failure of the working week to decrease. Indeed, they might have become increasingly concerned about funding their retirements, and an obvious response would be to maximize income during their working years in order to save as much as possible.\n\nLife expectancy increased substantially over the course of the twentieth century in the United States. In 1900, life expectancy for white males was forty-eight years and fifty-one for women. By the end of the century, it had increased to seventy-five for men and eighty for women. An increase in life expectancy of that magnitude might not have much efect on attitudes to hours at work if working life continued to the grave. However, the twentieth century saw the emergence of retirement as a new phase of life—one made possible by increased productivity. The advent of retirement reduced the number of years spent at work as a proportion of years lived. The combined efect of retirement and increases in life span led, between 1850 and 1990, to a sixfold increase in the average amount of time lived after the end of working life (Costa 1998b). Given the increased likelihood of life after the working years, it would perhaps make sense for workers to favor higher wages over more free time in order to build savings to fund retirement.32\n\nHowever, while an increase in prospective years of life after retirement probably had some influence on attitudes to wages and work time, it is questionable whether the efect was big enough to explain the quite dramatic shift toward higher wage income, at the expense of more free time, during the working years. As discussed earlier in this chapter, in the United States at least, savings rates have been consistently low over the course of the century. This suggests that pushing for higher income, as opposed to a shorter working week, for the most part was motivated by a preference for immediate consumption, rather than by the need to save for retirement. Moreover, there is, to state the obvious, no guarantee whatsoever that a given worker will survive until retirement or for many years after retirement. And, arguably, the extent to which retirement can be enjoyed is limited by overall health, which tends to decline with age. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to suppose that wage earners would discount the value of postretirement time compared to free time when fit and healthy.33 Economists of a psychological bent, such as Tibor Scitovsky (1992), could respond by arguing that people have a bias in favor of minimizing discomfort over maximizing enjoyment and that this influences the rate at which they discount the well-being of their future selves. Since with age comes greater exposure to discomfort, it arguably makes sense for people to adopt a strategy of forgoing enjoyment when young so that discomfort will be minimized in the future. But even if comfort is the overriding desideratum, there is little reason to think that people will act to secure the comfort of their temporally distant selves rather than maximizing their comfort in the present. As we have seen, the experimental findings of behavioral psychologists indicate that people are, to a significant extent, hyperbolic discounters, attaching much more importance to wellbeing in the moment than to that in even the medium-term future. This suggests that the prudent model of the economic agent is not an accurate one (Ainslie 2001). One could, in a philosophical spirit, even follow Derek Parfit (1984) in questioning whether there are any strictly rational grounds at all for supposing a continuity of identity between present and distantly future selves. The supposition that people have rational, self-interested reasons to arrange their lives to take account of the welfare of their far future selves, Parfit argues, rests on a questionable metaphysics of identity, according to which there is an essence that connects the identity of the person across the life course. Why should people sacrifice current satisfaction for future selves given that continuity of identity rests on metaphysically shaky foundations?34\n\nEmpirical Pattern in the United States\n\n63","previous_page":62,"next_page":64}