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# Time for Things Labor, Leisure, and the Rise of Mass Consumption

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Time for Things

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The Puzzle

1. The Puzzle of Productivity, Time, and Work in Advanced Industrial Capitalism

The puzzle motivating this book has two, closely related dimensions. The first concerns the relation between welfare, work, and consumption under industrial capitalism. Why, given the myriad costs imposed on individuals and on society by boundless output and consumption, and the increasingly questionable benefit of added increments of consumption once afluence has been achieved, does output nonetheless continue to expand so relentlessly? How can we explain the steady increase in consumption under conditions of afluence, while decreases in work time have slowed to a crawl? Surely there should be, as Knight asserted and Keynes simply assumed, a more even apportioning of the benefits of increased productivity between free time and higher incomes?

The second dimension of the puzzle concerns the structural dynamics of industrial capitalism. If we discard the assumption that exchange under capitalism is necessarily driven (and therefore is explained) by utility maximization—and that the capitalist economy is tugged ever in the direction of eficient equilibrium—how is it that production and consumption are, nonetheless, kept in balance to a degree that allows for the stable reproduction of the system? If consumption under industrial capitalism cannot be explained in terms of maximizing utility, how then should it be explained? What accounts for the scale and dynamic character of aggregate demand associated with mass consumption? Once the economy has been organized according to the principles of mass production, how is enough demand generated to ensure timely profit realization? The question is particularly pertinent in the case of mass production, because mass production involves heavy investment in fixed capital of a kind that tends to be very specialized. Capital-intensive production of that sort is only economically viable if output is kept close to full capacity. As mass production expanded, ever-increasing levels of aggregate demand were therefore required for profit realization. In theory, this made the economy very vulnerable to downturns in demand, either directly, by way of their efect on profit rates, or indirectly, through their influence on investment decisions. And yet, despite being a quite inflexible way to organize an economy, capitalist mass production has proven quite resilient—its output has tended to be met by an equivalent volume of efective demand.1 How, then, was it that enough aggregate efective demand was generated to support the growth dynamic of industrial capitalism in the era of mass production? One answer is that aggregate demand was stabilized by an imbricated complex of measures and institutions, including wages policy, a corporatist industrial order, government spending, welfare provisions, and fiscal and monetary management—the elements that comprised the so-called Fordist regime of capitalist regulation. Yet all of those Fordist regulatory strategies presuppose a tendency for higher real income per hour worked (from whatever source) to be converted into more efective demand rather than less work. It is hard to see how Fordist measures to regulate the economy could have been viable without the materialistic bias—the prioritizing of commodity acquisition over less work time—that underlay mass consumption. What then was the basis of that bias? The following two chapter sections consider in more detail each side of the puzzle. I move on to a more focused, empirical analysis of the puzzle in Chapter 3, which concentrates on the case of the United States in the era of mass production.

TWO

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1.1. Consumption, Work-Time, and Well-Being

Avner Ofer (2006), Tibor Scitovsky (1992), and Fred Block (1990), among many others, have made compelling arguments, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, that the notion that increasing material accumulation necessarily leads to increasing well-being is questionable. This is especially so in the case of afluent societies, because, as any basic economics textbook informs us, increasing consumption, ceteris paribus, yields diminishing marginal utility.2 While, to be sure, not all of the axioms and theoretical postulates of economics are plausible, the idea that, other things being equal, the benefit of each additional dollar of spent income (and of the consumption that it afords) decreases as income increases seems uncontroversial. It informs the moral logic of progressive taxation, can be derived from hierarchical models of need such as A. H. Maslow’s (1943), and is also implicit in the more sophisticated capabilities approach to welfare developed by Amartya Sen (1988, [1985] 1999).3 As will be seen, there is a good amount of empirical support, based on comparative analysis of diferent countries, for the proposition that the welfare produced by income decreases as income increases (Easterlin 1974, 2003; Layard 2005; Ofer 2006; Layard and Mayraz 2008; Kahneman and Deaton 2010). Indeed, the evidence suggests that the rate at which marginal utility of income (measured by subjective well-being) drops of is more rapid than would be the case if marginal added utility was, as predicted by utility theorists from Daniel Bernoulli onward, inversely proportional to increasing income (Layard and Mayraz 2008; Bernoulli [1738] 1954).4

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One of the intuitions underlying the theory of the declining marginal utility of spending is that there are certain existential constants that limit the extent to which commodities can be deployed in practices in which their use value gets realized.5 The most basic of these are limitations of time and energy, both of which are required to turn money (by way of commodities) into useful activities. All things being equal, as more commodities get accumulated, the amount of time and energy available for making use of each of them asymptotically approaches zero. A similar point holds if the pattern of ever greater commodity accumulation is considered from the perspective of attention. Inspired by the influential social scientist Herbert Simon (1971), economists have recently begun to conceive of attention as a scarce resource, on which demands are made by various aspects of the environment (Davenport and Beck 2001).6 The thought is that human beings have finite cognitive resources, which must, like any scarce resource, be distributed over a range of competing demands. Attention can be overwhelmed by too much information, and that can lead to suboptimal outcomes.7 Each commodity requires attention if it is to be put to use in some activity. Therefore, the larger the number of commodities a person owns, the greater the amount of attention is required from that person for their use value to be realized. Limitations of time, energy, and attention thus mean that as more goods are acquired, the constraints on realizing each of their use values become ever tighter. And yet despite these limiting existential factors, under advanced capitalism there is a seemingly endless accumulation of objects, at great cost to the environment, communities, and individuals. Not the least of these costs is the free time foregone in order to generate the income required to fund commodity accumulation.8 How does this state of afairs come about—how does it get reproduced?

The Puzzle

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1.2. The Sources of Subjective Well-Being

The pattern of ever-increasing consumption at fixed hours of work is particularly puzzling in the light of recent research on happiness and well-being. The results of this research throw into question the assumption that the trade-of of free time for increased consumption characteristic of industrial capitalism reflects the application of a utility maximizing calculus. This is because the correlation between increasing income and improvements in subjective well-being progressively weakens after a certain standard of living has been achieved. The research on subjective well-being also indicates that happiness does not necessarily require much in the way of expenditure. At the same time, it indicates that work, for most people, is not a particularly important source of happiness, while it can be a very significant source of unhappiness.

Measuring happiness and well-being is certainly rife with conceptual and methodological, not to say philosophical, dificulties.9 Empirical work on subjective well-being has tended to be cross-sectional and comparative rather than deeply historical, so it should be treated with caution when interpreting developmental trajectories. A more fundamental problem is that the evaluation of life has, as Amartya Sen puts it, a “complex grammar” that complicates eforts to measure well-being.10 Human welfare has a number of qualitatively distinct dimensions, which comprise what Sen ([1985] 1999) refers to as a “constitutive plurality.” Sen suggests that welfare should be thought of as a composite of goods realized along those dimensions rather than as reducible to the kind of atomic common denominator utility theorists have in mind—the economists’ hypothetical “util” of satisfaction. The conceptual complexity of well-being, and the often quite subtle diferences in the meaning of terms associated with it, means that the precise wording of questions about well-being influences the answers people give to them. This makes the attempt to measure well-being a rather treacherous endeavor. Nonetheless, it would be unwise to dismiss the growing body of empirical work on subjective well-being—it provides at least something to go on for those who are concerned with questions of welfare and certainly represents an advance on the expedient move economists tend to make of simply using money as a proxy for well-being.11 While self-reports of happiness are subjective, they tend to be corroborated by reports of friends and family members, which strengthens their validity (Diener 1984). Moreover, there is evidence that reports of subjective happiness are correlated with more objective emotional markers, such as how often people smile (Eckman and Friesen 1990). There is also an increasing amount of research indicating that subjective reports of well-being are associated with various physiological measures of health, such as inflammation levels, sleep quality, and cardiovascular and immunological function (Ryf, Singer, and Love 2004; Steptoe, Wardle, and Marmot 2005). The research on happiness and well-being could be plausibly interpreted as indicating that there is indeed something contradictory about the organization of economic life under capitalist modernity. In light of what seems to promote human welfare, broadly construed, there is a significant tension between how things are arranged under industrial capitalism and how they could be arranged. The relentless drive toward economic growth that characterizes capitalism as an economic system is not easily explained just in terms of its benefits for human welfare.

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The best-known finding that questions the association between wealth and human well-being is the so called Easterlin paradox, discovered by economist Richard Easterlin in the early 1970s. Easterlin (1974) found, through comparative analysis, that once basic needs are met, wealth is correlated with happiness within countries at a given point in time but that richer countries are not happier than less wealthy ones. Moreover, as afluent countries grew wealthier, they did not become happier. As an example, Easterlin points out that indices of happiness did not change in the United States between 1947 and 1970, even though income and wealth increased greatly over that period.12 Following Easterlin’s research, David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald (2004) found that happiness in the United States between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s failed to increase, even as per capita income increased by close to 60 percent.13 Research by Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer (2002), examining the United States over the same period, indicates that while real income increased for nine of the ten deciles in the population, average happiness only increased (and by a very slight amount) for the lowest decile. According to their data, the overall average level of happiness actually declined in the United States between the 1970s and the 1990s. Avner Ofer (2006), in an overview of the literature on the relation between economic growth and happiness, concurs with Easterlin’s assessment that well-being in afluent nations over time has not risen with rising income.14

The Puzzle

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The Easterlin paradox, it should be noted, has aroused much debate and contention. In one of the most serious challenges to Easterlin’s findings, B. Stevenson and J. Wolfers (2008) argue that analysis of time series data shows that log GDP (which Easterlin did not consider) is correlated with levels of absolute happiness. Easterlin (2010) responded to Stevenson and Wolfers’s study by noting that their data reveal only a short-term association between log income and happiness and adduced further longitudinal data to show that a longer-term relationship (greater than ten years) does not exist.15 Taking up the question once more, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (2010), examining US survey data collected by Gallup, found that emotional well-being—feelings of happiness and satisfaction in the moment, as opposed to “life evaluation”—increases with income up to about \$75,000 per year. Beyond that point, any further increases in income do not yield additional increases in happiness.16

The Kahneman and Deaton study suggests that perhaps both Easterlin’s research and the Stevenson and Wolfers study are on to something. Yet, significantly, Kahneman and Deaton did not add the variable of free time to their analysis—nor indeed do many of the other studies on income and happiness. Such studies typically compare reported happiness at diferent levels of income but not at diferent levels of income in combination with diferent amounts of leisure.17 The finding that emotional well-being, in a set of capitalist societies, is, on average, correlated with increasing income up to \$75,000 does not imply that there are not ways of arranging life at lower levels of income, with greater amounts of free time, that produce superior levels of happiness and wellbeing. It would clearly be unwarranted to conclude from the Gallup data that a capitalist society in which everyone earns at least \$75,000, but with all other features of capitalism in place, including its work-time regime, represents the best possible distribution of resources between income and free time. Despite the interpretive controversies around the research on the relation between income and happiness, one firm conclusion can be drawn from it for the purposes of this book: it is certainly not the case that that the empirical evidence supports the proposition that over time added increments of income necessarily increase happiness—even at a rate that is diminishing at the margin.

The research on happiness also provides some more fine-grained information about the sources of subjective well-being, in light of which the pattern of economic growth under industrial capitalism becomes yet more puzzling. Psychologists Leaf Van Boven and Tom Gilovich (2003, Van Boven 2005) found in their research that what makes people happy are experiences rather than the possession of things. Presumably some of those experiences are commodified and, therefore, demand money—but certainly not all of them are. The connection between valued experiences and the use or possession of commodities (or spending of money) is clearly a contingent rather than a necessary one. Indeed, other research on well-being suggests that it is associated with activities that can easily be pursued without much in the way of expenditure. The Gallup data on afect that Kahneman and Deaton make use of, for example, show that subjective well-being is most closely tied to a set of factors that seem to have little to do with direct consumption. These include being treated with respect, having close ties with family and friends, learning something new, exercising a skill, and having free time (Diener et al. 2010). It is not at all clear that the happiness derived from, for instance, the experience of being with friends and family is amplified in anything like a linear fashion, if at all, by the money spent during that experience.

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At the same time, the research on happiness does not indicate that work itself, at least under capitalism, is prominent among its sources. While the Gallup survey data used by Kahneman and Deaton point to two sources of happiness—learning something new and exercising a skill—that are sometimes associated with work, other research indicates that it is activities outside of work that yield the most happiness. In a 2004 study, the five most highly rated sources of happiness were found to be (in descending order) intimate relationships, socializing after work, dinner, relaxing, and lunch, with everything related to work firmly at the bottom of the list. (Kahneman et al. 2004). Derek Bok (2010, p. 29), summing up findings in the empirical literature on well-being, notes that the research indicates that “almost all of the pleasurable aspects of the day take place outside of work . . . the less pleasant aspects of the day involve activities associated with one’s job, including commuting.”

To be sure, happiness narrowly construed, as pleasure, is not the only thing that people value—freedom, creativity, and participation in meaningful activities, which clearly are sometimes features of working life, are surely equally important components of a good life. People might then organize their priorities so as to best realize various dimensions of the good life, rather than to maximize happiness, and this could well involve committing to some amount of work time. Indeed, the importance of work in the pursuit of these values was what encouraged many women in advanced capitalist societies to enter the workforce during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The example of women suggests that when people are deprived of the possibility of work, they often want work, and not necessarily just for material purposes, for work can be a source of value and meaning independent of its financial rewards. At the same time, it is important to note that positive attitudes to waged work might to some extent reflect the valorization of paid work under capitalism as a source of agency, self-expression, and even self-possession. This raises the question of why agency and self-expression become so bound up with the activities undertaken as paid labor. For clearly work understood simply as productive activity can take place outside the cash nexus.18 The association of paid work with personal fulfillment, in conjunction with the opportunities it ofers for social life beyond the family, means that, for any given individual, paid work might well have some intrinsic value, and this probably helps keep the capitalist regime of work time in place.

The Puzzle

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And yet in the context of the labor process under industrial capitalism, those other goods—freedom, creativity, self-expression, and so on—seem very far from being realized in most working lives.19 Labor under industrial capitalism has tended to become progressively deskilled, even given the supposed renaissance of artisanal work ushered in by the era of “flexible specialization.”20 Recent survey research conducted by Gallup indicates that in the United States only 30 percent of people feel at all engaged by their work, while the average proportion for a set of 142 countries was found to be a mere 13 percent (Gallup 2013).21 The studies on the sources of happiness thus cast doubt on one of the explanations ofered by the economists mentioned in the introduction for Keynes’s failed forecast: that the twentieth-century pattern in afluent industrial societies for productivity and real income to grow much more rapidly than work time decreases can be explained by the increased satisfaction of work (Zilibotti 2010).

In sum, the research on the happiness (or lack thereof) produced by income and work under advanced capitalism certainly does not support the contention that increasing income necessarily means higher levels of subjective well-being, at least independent of the association between income and social status, which is a purely positional matter. The trend toward increasing income at fairly stable levels of labor time, which became firmly established by the middle decades of the twentieth century, is not easily explained by attributing a “happiness efect” to income and consumption suficient to outweigh the discontents of most work under capitalism. Indeed, the empirical findings on happiness suggest that criticisms of the materialistic bias of capitalism, which have been a prominent cultural current within industrial society in the era of afluence, are not just driven by ideology but rather rest on the perception of a genuine pathology in modern capitalism. Society (to put it rather abstractly) seems significantly puzzled by its own trajectory, and this should alert us to the presence of some underlying tension or contradiction.22 Given how persistent and pervasive has been the critique of capitalist materialism, it ought not, especially in light of the empirical findings about the relation between happiness and wealth, to be dismissed as backward-looking romanticism, aristocratic prejudice, or starry-eyed utopianism.

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There are thus some sound reasons to be skeptical about the notion that the trade-of between work and consumption under industrial capitalism represents the best of all possible worlds—or even that capitalism tends over time to move in the direction of a more ideal state of afairs. To put the point in Marxian terms, under capitalism the connection among production, consumption, and realized use value seems from the point of view of human welfare to stand in need of explanation. The prominent French Regulation theorists Robert Boyer and Yves Saillard (2002, p. 38) define capitalism, in classic Marxist fashion, as a mode of production in which “the form of production and exchange relationship imposes the primacy of exchange value over use value and makes accumulation an imperative of the system.” Political philosopher G. A. Cohen (2000, p. 303) puts the point more directly: “if the goal of production [under industrial capitalism] were use value much less use-value would be sought, produced, and consumed than is in fact sought, produced and consumed.” A similar thing can be said of demand and consumption: that if the goal of consumption under industrial capitalism were actually realized use value, much less use value would be sought and consumed than is in fact sought and consumed. But this then raises a question. If Marxists such as Boyer and Cohen are right, and use value (in this sense meaning that which promotes real human welfare) in capitalism is sacrificed to the ultimately mindless end of the accumulation of exchange value, why should people, as workers and consumers, organize their behavior and priorities in ways that further that goal? How can we account for the role of workers and consumers in facilitating the operation of a system that seems far from having their well-being as its telos?

The Puzzle

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