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

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Fig 8.1: Harvey Balls. mintsauce/openclipart.org/CC0 1.0

by CR is displayed in the lowest row in the figure. In CR’s system, two colors are used. The more red (represented here as gray) there is in the circle, the higher the quality of the product; conversely, the more black there is in the circle, the lower the product quality. The empty middle circle represents “average” quality.

The thing to note here is that this system of ideograms, although in one way presenting an ordinal ranking of quality, is graphically suggestive of proportional relations between what appear to be the quantities of quality represented by each circle. For example, in the system shown in the second row above, the fully shaded circle represents the highest-quality rating, while the empty circle represents the lowest-quality rating. This mode of graphic representation implies that as the circle becomes more completely shaded, quality proportionately increases. The CR system, shown in the bottom row, is more complex in that, as noted, two shading colors are used, red and black, with red denoting degrees of above average quality and black denoting degrees of below average quality. Yet still, an intuitive interpretation of the almost fully filled in red circle is that it represents roughly twice as much quality as the half-filled circle—which in turn contains twice the quality of the empty middle circle. And likewise, the half-filled black circle represents twice as much quality as the fully filled in black circle. The semiotics of Harvey Balls thus suggest a translation of qualitative assessments into quasi-quantitative ratings. The use of the same quasi-quantitative system of ideograms to rate a very wide range of consumer products implies that there is a metric by virtue of which qualitatively quite distinct items (for example, cars and stereos) can be rendered commensurable. Such a metric suggests the existence of a kind of universal unit of quality, which makes possible a comparison between proverbial apples and oranges. Later in its history, Consumer Reports shifted from the sole use of ideograms, to joint use of ideograms and a numerical product score for each qualitative dimension of tested items, along with an aggregate score for each item. In efect, this turned qualitative assessments directly into quantitative scores. This trend in the representation of product test results became quite general over the course of the last third of the twentieth century, with widespread use in the media of quasi- or fully quantitative scales to represent degrees of product quality.

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The increasing prevalence of quantitative measures of quality is suggestive for the argument of this book. For it indicates the growing influence of a form of thinking that reduces the use value of disparate kinds of product to a general, measurable, abstract unit of quality. Consumer products when construed as quantities of quality roughly map onto the wage, taken as a quantitative valuation of the qualitative activity given as labor. As wage labor quantified the qualitatively specific life activity given as work, so the qualitatively particular use values commanded by the wage became construed in quantitative terms. The conceptualization of quality in terms of quantity made more plausible the commensurability of labor and its wage, by virtue of the purchasing power of the wage over goods invested with units of quality.

1. Interpretation

How should the rise of consumer product testing be interpreted? In part, testing was a response to the increasing opacity of commodities. This opacity was, to some degree, a consequence of the advanced division of labor, which broke up work into increasingly specialized activities, and thereby disconnected individual labor from the finished product.26 The increasing technological complexity of consumer products also contributed to the estrangement between product and user. Consumer durables, in particular, became sets of propositions about functional capacities, sold to consumers as promises, attached to artifacts that were increasingly becoming black boxes. Product testing then involved interrogating those promises by opening these black boxes—a project of reverse engineering instigated, appropriately enough, by engineers.

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Seen in this way, the popularity of third-party product testing could be interpreted as simply reflecting an entirely reasonable ongoing efort on the part of households to gain information on the basis of which to direct consumption in a maximally eficient fashion. Product testing, on this understanding, performs essentially the same function for households as it does for business and the state. Businesses and state organizations test in order to monitor the quality of the goods and materials they procure, to ensure that resources have been used in an eficient manner. Likewise, for households, testing provides information to assist them in making rational decisions about resource allocation.

But drawing this parallel between households and firms raises a question: What output does the household seek to maximize? One account of what it is that buying units are trying to maximize could be derived from economist Alfred Marshall’s (2013) concept of the consumer surplus. The consumer surplus is the diference between what a buyer would have been prepared to pay for a good, and the actual price of the good.27 In textbook economics, the aggregate consumer surplus for a given good is represented by the area below the demand curve and above the point of price equilibrium. Consumers whose demand lies in that area would have paid more for the good than its equilibrium price, so when they buy at that price, they, as it were, pocket the diference (measured in virtual money terms). Another way of putting this is that their subjective valuation of the good is higher than the objective price it sells at—its market price. A household can be construed as attempting to maximize its total consumer surplus over the basket of goods that it purchases, and the degree to which it is spending eficiently can in theory be measured by the size of its consumer surplus. Testing then gives households information they can use to come up with accurate valuations of goods. However, the consumer surplus interpretation assumes to an implausible degree that consumers know with some precision what their subjective money valuation of a good is, and, further, that this maps onto its utility for them.

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An alternative account of what households seek to maximize could be taken from modern consumer theory. As we saw in Chapter 2, two prominent economists who, in their respective theories of the household production function, have come up with a theoretical answer to this question are Kelvin Lancaster (1966a, 1966b) and Gary Becker (1981). To recapitulate, Becker and Lancaster hold that households can be thought of as factories, using consumer products to generate utility, much as firms use capital goods to produce commodities. Within this framework, households use product testing to gain information they can use to develop a purchasing strategy that will maximize the utility they produce. Indeed, Lancaster (1966b, p. 18), makes reference to the product testing activities of Consumers Union in his 1966 essay on technologies of consumption, noting that CU’s testing performs the function of providing information about the utility generating power of commodities, on the basis of which households can make eficient purchasing decisions.

Although this explanation initially seems straightforward, on reflection an immediate problem arises. The firm can calculate the degree to which a given set of expenditures is an eficient one by comparing money costs of production to the realized or projected money value of output. However, it is not clear how a household can make equivalent calculations about utility. For that to be possible, the quality of experience of household members would have to be quantified so that the relative benefits of diferent allocations of household resources could be systematically compared. In addition, the total utility of expenditure would have to be compared to the disutility of the work done to generate household revenue. Yet without being able to use money as a proxy for quality of experience (the expedient move economists tend to make), it is not at all apparent how those kinds of calculations could be carried out. Eficiency calculations require a degree of precision that is possible where the objective is to maximize money revenues, because money is a public, therefore observable metric. But such calculations are much trickier where the object of maximization is construed in terms of the vague, essentially psychological, concept of utility.28

More concretely, as I noted in Chapter 2, even if we accept Becker’s picture of households as utility factories, his theory, when placed in the context of actual historical patterns, runs up against the empirical time / work / income puzzle. For if we assume, with Becker, that household decisions can be, and indeed are, directed by the goal of maximizing actual utility, with consumer goods working as capital equipment in the production of this final output, how can we account for the consistent tendency, identified in earlier chapters, for households to turn increasing hourly income into more capital goods rather than more time in which to use them? Following Becker’s reasoning, if consumer goods are household analogues to a firm’s capital goods, then units of leisure time are analogues to units of labor time. Labor and capital combine in producing an output, whether goods or utility. It makes no obvious sense, therefore, for the household, following an increase in hourly wage income, to use all of the extra income to buy capital (utility-generating) goods rather than allocating some of it to increase the amount of labor (free time) available to make use of added capital goods to produce utility. For a household to spend all its available income on consumer commodities while not increasing time available to make use of those commodities is equivalent to a firm purchasing capital equipment without hiring the labor required to put it to work. The result is that the equipment is left idle—hardly an eficient outcome from any perspective (what firm would be happy with investing in capital that subsequently languishes unutilized?).

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Of course, under any given regime of work time and income, it seems reasonable that households would use information from product tests to direct spending so as to generate as much utility as possible. But seeing product testing as just a reasonable guide to rational consumer decision-making, under the particular regime of consumption and work-time that developed in the mid-twentieth century, takes the institution of product testing, and all that it represents, to be exogenous to that regime. However, the institution of product testing was not independent of that regime, but, rather, reflected an attitude toward commodities that to some degree explains its emergence. This is because product testing emphasized the physical properties of consumer objects and did so in a quasi-scientific and quantitative manner. The fit between a given product and the conditions of life within which the product would typically get used, was not a matter that was given much consideration by consumer product testing organizations such as CU. The rapid growth of product testing then indicates that increasing importance was attached to specifying and measuring the potential utility inhering in the physical properties of commodities—which in turn indicates the growing influence of a narrow and hypothetical conception of use value, in light of which a money wage became more easily imaginable as commensurable with the labor given in exchange for it. In this sense, product testing has a significance similar to the developments described in the previous chapter—the rise of branded consumer goods, commercial warranties, and the emergence of the implied warranty. The efect of these developments was to stabilize and standardize the use value of wage goods while encouraging a tendency to think about matters of utility and usefulness in terms of the properties of objects rather than situated practices.

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To sum up this chapter, and the two that went before, standardization, where it concerned consumer goods, was as much a moral as a technical matter. The moral dimension of standardization subsisted in the value attached to the production of “honest” commodities—those imbued with solid and durable qualities, indexed by trustworthy signs (brands and product certifications), underwritten by commercial warranties, to some degree safeguarded by the regulation of the state and courts, and policed by testing activities in the public sphere. There was a clear sense in which people, as wage earners and consumers (or rather, as wage workers who consume), were, to an increasing extent over the course of the century, seen as being entitled to products that met those ideals. But this entitlement did not entail a right to a form of life within which accumulated commodities could actually be made use of in practice. Rather, the emphasis was on the properties of the things themselves, and particularly on the duration of useful activity they contain in potentia. In the next chapter, I consider the moral reaction to cases (imagined or real) in which the entitlement to fair, standard durations of use power in products was thought to have been violated by manufacturers.

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Moral Panic about Utility: Planned Obsolescence

Over the last three chapters, I considered a number of institutions and practices, closely associated with consumer capitalism, that are suggestive of a shift in the locus of utility from the total context of use to the material properties of things. These included the development of warranty law, specifically the change from express to implied product warranties, the growth of consumer product testing, increasing state regulation of products, and the emergence of the brand as an index of standardized product characteristics. All these developments can be interpreted in terms of an efort to fix or stabilize the notional use power contained in things. In the present chapter, I narrow my focus, turning to the debates and discussions about planned obsolescence that took place in the middle part of the twentieth century. The worries expressed about planned obsolescence amounted to, if not quite a moral panic, then at the very least a sign of significant moral disquiet, which reveals something about the normative grounding of exchange relationships in the capitalist economy of the so-called Golden Age of industrial capitalism (roughly spanning the years between 1945 and 1975). In particular, the concern about planned obsolescence indicates something about the nature and location of use value within a broad moral economy connecting labor, the wage, and consumer commodities. If the institutions and practices described in the last three chapters can be interpreted as indicating normative expectations about the quantity and quality of usefulness contained in wage goods, the situation under consideration in this chapter is one in which those norms were perceived to have been violated—in which the use value of consumer

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commodities was thought to have been intentionally limited or degraded by practices of so-called planned obsolescence on the part of industry.

Planned obsolescence has a complex history, the shape of which depends on the makeup of the set of practices and ideas to which the term is taken to refer. Concerns about planned obsolescence are from one perspective continuous with perennial worries about uncertain product quality. Product adulteration, for example, was an ongoing issue in America throughout the nineteenth century.1 Adulteration was a central concern within an older moral economy and was framed in terms of rights to subsistence in a custombound setting, the classic account of which is given by E. P. Thompson (1993). Food safety was certainly a matter of concern into the modern era of consumer activism. In the United States, worries about product contamination animated the consumer movement in its first phase, during the Progressive era, which culminated in the creation of the Food and Drug Administration in 1906. However, adulteration and contamination most often involve perishables rather than durable goods, so those worries were less applicable to the kinds of goods produced by the nascent system of industrial manufacturing. If planned obsolescence is taken to mean preemptive changes in product design reflecting awareness, on the part of producers, of the mercurial character of taste, then the practice dates at least as far back as the eighteenth century (McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1984). Indeed, the modern dialectic between shifting tastes and changing design probably goes back as far as the ending of sumptuary laws at the waning of the middle ages—and insofar as we have plenty of archaeological evidence of changing styles in artifacts manufactured for exchange, conceivably all the way back to the early beginnings of commodity production. The understanding of something like planned obsolescence as a necessary consequence of the industrial economy, on the other hand, can be found in the nineteenth century. For example, Charles Babbage (1832), the influential engineer and mathematician, argued that the rate of industrial technological progress was such as to guarantee that manufactured products would rapidly be superseded by newer, improved versions, rendering them obsolete.

Despite these conceptual precursors, the actual term planned obsolescence first appears in the 1930s, in the decade after General Motors introduced the marketing strategy with which the term was later to become synonymous. It was in the middle years of the twentieth century, however, that the term became a lightning rod for criticisms of industrial capitalism. The term began to gain notoriety following its promotion in the 1950s by the influential industrial designer Brook Stevens, dubbed “the crown prince of planned obsolescence” (Slade 2006). In a brochure published in 1953, Stevens defined planned obsolescence as “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, and a little sooner than is necessary” (Adamson 2003, p. 129). He later set out the place of the doctrine in the role of the industrial designer: “Our task is to induce the public to buy or to possess something that is always new, and thus to promote the industries to go on with production” (Heskett 2003, p. 4). The crystallization of the moral controversy around planned obsolescence can be dated in particular to the publication in 1960 of Vance Packard’s best-seller, The Waste Makers. Reflecting the timing of Packard’s polemic, The Barnhart Dictionary of New English Since 1963 (1973) registers planned obsolescence as an important new phrase in the language in the early 1960s. During that decade, the issues surrounding planned obsolescence came into sharp focus and were broadly thematized and discussed with some urgency across the public sphere. In the 1960s, planned obsolescence became part of the stock list of complaints about capitalism. It was, for example, listed as one of the chief ills of capitalism in the 1962 Port Huron statement, issued by the Society for Democratic Students. The statement condemned: “The tendency to over-production, to gluts of surplus commodities,” claiming that the system “encourages ‘market research’ techniques to deliberately create pseudo-needs in consumers—we learn to buy ‘smart’ things, regardless of their utility—and introduces wasteful ‘planned obsolescence’ as a permanent feature of business strategy” (SDS 1964, pp. 15–16). C. Wright Mills (2008, p. 177) made a similar point in his essay “The Man in the Middle,” written in 1958: “Continuous and expanding production requires continuous and expanding consumption, so consumption must be speeded up by all the tactics and frauds of marketing. Moreover, existing commodities must be worn out more quickly for as the market is saturated, the economy becomes increasingly dependent upon what is called replacement. It is then that obsolescence comes to be planned and its cycle deliberately shortened.” Assessments of this sort could be folded into the current of twentieth-century American social thought critical of the emergent industrial order, which included the writings of such figures as Thorstein Veblen, Vance Packard, Kenneth Burke, J. K. Galbraith, Marshall McLuhan, and Stuart Chase (Brick 2006; Horowitz 1994). However, the concern over planned obsolescence extended well beyond a narrow circle of public intellectuals. In the middle years of the century it became commonplace in discussions about the operation of the industrial economy.

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A central part of the argument of this book is that a precondition for the development and stabilization of mass consumer capitalism was that the use value of commodities became construed narrowly in terms of their material properties, with little consideration given to the broader contextual conditions required for their use. It was by virtue of use values being construed in this way that the wage relation could be represented as an exchange of commensurable substances. The mid-century concern about planned obsolescence reflects this preoccupation with fixing use, and especially a duration of use, in commodity objects. The moral force behind the negative reaction to planned obsolescence is at least in part plausibly explained by an underlying concern, implicit in the wage compact, with a just and fair exchange of use values.

1. Diferent Versions of Planned Obsolescence

What did people mean in mid-century America when they made use of the term planned obsolescence? Commentators writing at the time identified three kinds of planned obsolescence, which I will call material obsolescence, style obsolescence, and technical obsolescence.

Material planned obsolescence, the most straightforward of the three, is obsolescence caused by breakage. The product becomes obsolete because it has become physically compromised to the point that it is no longer able to perform the function it is meant to perform.

Style obsolescence, also referred to as “psychological obsolescence,” has a more subjective character. The product is able to function properly but is obsolescent because it is no longer the latest model of its kind. Not being “up to date” produces an impetus in consumers (the nature of which is unclear) to substitute a newer version of the product for an older one. The paradigmatic example of this is the obsolescence of older automobile models caused by yearly changes in model style (a practice begun by General Motors in the 1920s).

Technical obsolescence is obsolescence resulting from a change in the context of use that afects the use value of a product. The product retains its physical integrity, and indeed possibly also its psychological appeal, but is no longer compatible with other objects required for its proper functioning. This kind of obsolescence often follows changes in industry standards. An example would be an outdated computer, which can no longer perform certain tasks because current software requires more powerful hardware, while the older software that the machine can run is no longer supported.

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