{"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":73,"pdf_page":81,"physical_index":81,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"f2cc7f2bae6ce0474697631271e5e964402c00fb99e942d9f2110a40325d5fbf"},"chapter":"FOR","content":"The evidence thus indicates that consumers began in the early twentieth century to accumulate durable goods, and they did this in lieu of investing money or working fewer hours. But what kinds of goods did they acquire? Three categories immediately stand out: automobiles, houses, and appliances. The importance of car ownership in the first half of the twentieth is clear in Robert and Helen Lynd’s (1929, 1937) ethnographic research. The Lynds found ample evidence of the new obsession with cars in their studies of “Middletown” (Muncie, Indiana). Time and again, the Lynds’ informants speak of their obsession with owning and driving automobiles. During periods of hardship, the Lynds were informed, the very last expenditure to be cut back on is gas and other car-related expenses: “I’ll never cut back on gas! . . . I’d go without a meal before I’ll cut down on using a car,” one informant tells them (1929, p. 63).46 The Lynds’ impression is borne out by aggregate data. Between 1916 and 1926, car sales tripled from 1.6 million to 4.3 million per year. The proportion of the population owning cars between 1910 and 1930 increased from 1 percent in 1910 to 26 percent in 1920, and by 1930, it had reached 60 percent. According to the 1929 census of distribution, Americans spent 18.08 cents of every dollar on automobiles and their upkeep—as much as on food. There are of course good practical reasons for owning a car given the progressive dispersion of urban form in modern America, with the growth of suburbs, in conjunction with a generally inadequate public transportation infrastructure. Yet this poses a chicken-and-egg question: Which came first, the taste for automobiles or the reorganization of social space such that they became necessary? I will consider the significance of automobiles as consumer durables at greater length in Chapter 5 of this book.\n\nA second consumer durable that showed dramatic growth over the twentieth century was housing.47 Houses are not always immediately thought of as consumer durables, because they are often regarded as investment assets. However, except for a fairly small class of speculative real estate investors, houses are, for most people, primarily consumer durables. At the beginning of the century, only 36.5 percent of Americans owned their own homes. By 1960, homeownership had spread to 62 percent of the population. The stock of rental accommodation actually shrank in the post-1945 era as Americans collectively pursued the dream of homeownership. At the same time, in the postwar period there was a huge building boom. A quarter of the housing stock in the United States after 1960 was built in the 1950s (Cohen 2003, p. 122). In part, the switch to homeownership was in response to significant federal subsidies, in the form of income tax deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes, the origins of which date back to the tax reforms of 1913 (Prasad 2012).48 Yet even given homeowner-friendly tax policies, it is dificult to make sense of this striking trend in terms of the narrow economic benefits of homeownership. Home prices track markets more generally, so it is unclear why investing in housing makes more sense than other kinds of investment. Indeed, some studies indicate that renting and investing, as opposed to buying and paying a mortgage, is a superior strategy for wealth creation (Beracha, Skiba, and Johnson 2017). Furthermore, the United States has tended to have high levels of geographical mobility. Although we lack good time series data for geographical mobility prior to 1935, more contemporary data indicate that more than one-third of all home buyers move within five years, which is generally too soon for them to have been able to build enough equity to cover transaction costs.49 Under those conditions renting housing would seem to make more sense than buying it. More generally, switching from renting to owning, for many, corresponds to a decline in the quality of life, as households become highly leveraged—house rich and cash poor. The strength of the preference in the United States for home buying is, therefore, quite puzzling.\n\nEmpirical Pattern in the United States\n\n73","previous_page":72,"next_page":74}