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

1. In part this is because such studies tend to compare countries, and comparative data on hours of work are not good.

1. Perhaps part of what keeps people attached to the current work regime are the opportunities work provides for social interaction. That would mean that for the switch to noncommodified productive activities to capture the same set of benefits as paid work, people would have to shift in concert away from paid work—so that they could be productive with other people in noncommodified ways. I discuss this issue in more detail in the following chapter.

1. There is some evidence, from a German study, that while being unemployed is associated with a low overall assessment of life satisfaction, when the unemployed are asked to report on their moment-to-moment emotional state, their overall level of happiness is about the same as that of employed persons (Knabe et al. 2010). The authors of the study suggest that their findings indicate that the control that the unemployed have over their time produces enough happiness to cancel out the “saddening efect” of unemployment. For a given activity, the employed experience more happiness than the unemployed. But the fact that the unemployed are more able than the employed to steer their time toward those activities that produce relatively more happiness for them means that they can make up for the happiness deficit they experience for any given activity. This is a surprising finding given the stigma attached to being unemployed in modern capitalist societies and the tendency of the unemployed to become socially isolated.

1. In the 1990s, Robert Brenner criticized the sanguine view of post-Fordist work expounded by Piore and Sabel and, to a lesser extent, by the regulation theorists, according to which work, after the demise of the mass production paradigm, became reskilled and increasingly democratized. Brenner noted that the new work regime involves a combination of the micromanagement of workers, so that their productivity comes to be measured by the number of seconds worked per minute, and the use of a superficially horizontal work team organizational structure to make workers responsible for quality control. As he and Glick argue in a 1991 paper: “Whatever else it ofers, ‘lean’ production does nothing to increase the level of the workers’ skill, let alone make them into craftspeople. Indeed, far from the anti-Taylorian revolution that Regulation theorist Alain Lipietz envisions, the foundation for the productivity gains secured on the shop floor is hyper-Taylorization—the super-deskilling of jobs by means of their breakdown into their simplest possible components” (p. 118). The authors go on to argue that insofar as workers under the new regime gain any initiative, it is solely in the matter of “helping the company further identify slack and waste in the system” (Brenner and Glick 1991, p. 119).

1. Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath, “Why You Hate Work,” New York Times, May 30, 2014, SR1. Research indicating the discontents of work is not a new thing. Investigations by industrial sociologists in the middle decades of the twentieth century, for example, likewise discovered widespread dissatisfaction with work (Watson 1940; Walker and Guest 1952; Chinoy 1955).

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Notes to Pages 18–20

1. The deflating take on this reaction is that it reflects a culturally and historically specific sensibility that is hostile to materialism—a legacy of some combination of valuesystems such as Victorian sobriety, Protestant asceticism, monastic self-abnegation, or perhaps even (reaching more deeply into the past) classical Stoicism. On this view, the question of overconsumption is not a real question at all but rather is just an expression of value judgments made within a particular culture. I want to resist this kind of argument, insisting instead that we take seriously our puzzlement about modern patterns of consumption. After all, any question, scientific or otherwise, can be explained as a product of the culture or history within which it is formulated. To interpret the surprise we feel and questions we have about the world as merely expressive of the violation of normative expectations that are essentially arbitrary is, in efect, a species of skepticism (what some philosophers call “genealogical skepticism”)—according to which our normative responses to the world are questionable because they are held to be nothing more than contingent consequences of culture, historical forces, society, and so on. But of course, to assume that position raises the question of the status of the skeptical claim itself, since skeptical arguments can (and indeed should, for the sake of consistency) be made against skeptical positions. After all, skepticism is no less contingent on culture and history than any other position. So why should the skeptical stance be the only valid one? In taking seriously the question of consumption and free time under conditions of afluence, as I have construed it, I am admittedly assuming to some degree a normative position with respect to economic life. In doing so I follow the tradition—with origins in Aristotle and most powerfully represented in modern times by Marx, although also supported by economists such as Amartya Sen—that seeks to ground theories of economic behavior in a general account of our social and ethical makeup. See Scott Meikle (1985, 1992, 2000) for an excellent discussion and defense of this tradition.

1. On the Marxian view, commodities must have some use value. Yet use value is ultimately only realized through final consumption. Capital goods can of course have use value in the production process, but the usefulness of that process is in turn tied to the production of consumer goods. For that reason, in order for the capital goods produced in Department I to realize a profit, they must be connected to the consumption of final goods produced by Department II. Capital goods must be used to facilitate the production of consumer goods. Those consumer goods must in turn be sold, or else the demand for capital goods will eventually collapse. If the means of production are not used to facilitate final consumption, they are ultimately useless.

1. It is possible in the short run for irrational collective optimism about the future prospects of Department I to manufacture economic booms. But, as Magdof and Sweezy (2013) note, “sooner or later—many factors, technological as well historical in a broader sense, affect the length of time—the weak growth of final demand for consumption goods works its way through the system and brings the boom to an end.” Demand for consumer goods works in this way as an ultimate limit for demand for capital goods.

1. The idea that the capitalist economy faces a structural contradiction of underconsumption is quite controversial within the Marxist tradition. Marx in general wanted to locate the central contradiction of capitalism on the side of production, in the tension between the tendency of the organic composition of capital to increase over time and the constitution of value by labor time. Nonetheless there has been a persistent current of Marxian theorizing that has drawn attention to systemic problems of aggregate efective demand and profit realization created by the downward pressure on real wages relative to productive capacity.

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1. The other condition described by Aglietta was that the working classes be separated from the means of consumption. One of the structural imbalances in early industrial capitalism was that while a workforce was created by concentration of ownership of the means of production, households still created their own means of consumption. In order for the productive capacity of industry to be absorbed by commensurate levels of demand, domestic production of consumer goods for the use of the household had to be halted.

1. Aglietta could argue that fewer hours would mean a further increase in the intensity of the labor process, in order to increase the rate of relative surplus value creation. But there are limits to the extent to which that is possible as production becomes increasingly capital intensive, and improvements in productivity increasingly come from technological change rather than more “sweating” of labor.

1. “When the capitalist class is ‘too strong’ it shifts the income distribution in its favor, reducing the ratio of working-class consumption to national income and rendering the economy prone to crises of under-consumption or—in more contemporary Keynesian terms—a failure of aggregate demand” (Weisskopf, Bowles, and Gordon 1985, p. 226).

1. This relative lack of attention to the question of the sources of demand, as opposed to the conditions under which given demand becomes efective, is odd given the importance attached by SSA and regulation theory to custom and habit as forming the environment within which the capitalist system functions. Surely the kind of contextual and embedded approach to the workings of the capitalist economy sought by these theorists should give an account of that which gives rise to a dynamic, materialist form of demand?

1. Keynes took the propensity to consume to be a given. The argument of this book, however, is that we can explain the behavior that underpins the propensity to consume under industrial capitalism in a way that makes it endogenous to the cultural and social organization of capitalism—specifically, it can be explained as a consequence of the grounds on which wage labor became construable as a legitimate form of economic exchange.

1. Piore and Sabel argue that the Depression only took hold in 1931, following a withdrawal of capital from investment. The importance of the initial financial crash of 1929 was more psychological than substantive.

1. Piore and Sabel follow historian David Brody (1993) in arguing that welfare capitalism was instituted because big industrial capitalists realized that finding a market for their products depended on the expansion of efective demand. The most famous example of welfare capitalism in the 1920s was Henry Ford’s decision to pay his workers five dollars per day.

1. Piore and Sabel’s account of the nature of these dificulties is the most perspicuous of these. On their account, Fordist mass production demanded very large fixed capital investments upfront, in order to get factories up and running. Given these large capital investments, in order for those factories to be profitable they needed to be run quite close to maximum capacity. The result of this was that the Fordist economy was very vulnerable to demand shocks.

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Notes to Pages 23–27

1. Indiference would lead to passive acceptance of businesses’ preference to avoid cuts in work time.

1. This discussion to some extent rehearses the points made in the previous chapter, in which I introduced the puzzle.

1. Economists tend to claim that they don’t have much to say about preferences. People want utility because, rather tautologically, utility is, by definition, something that is wanted. What gives rise to utility is not supposed to be a question for investigation within economics. However, there is a tendency among economists to assume that utility is most accurately and conveniently measured by money.

1. Marx likewise made the content of use value exogenous to his theory—a product of collective self-discovery through history. There are exceptions to this generalization about the neoclassical exogenization of tastes. Becker and Stigler (1977, p. 76), for example, infamously argued that preferences are endogenous, claiming “that tastes neither change capriciously nor difer importantly between people.”

1. Joseph Stiglitz (2010), considering the question of why Keynes’s prediction of falling work time failed to come to pass, expresses skepticism about the standard economic explanation. He notes that the capacity of economic theory to explain anything is reason enough to be suspicious of the theory. Stiglitz also points out that the research on happiness casts doubt on the invocation of utility maximizing consumer choice as an explanation for why Keynes’s prediction failed. If subjective well-being is any measure of utility, then it seems not to be the case that consumption under conditions of afluence continued to increase because by doing so it increased utility. Part of the dificulty economic approaches to consumption have when confronted with apparently substantively suboptimal patterns of the kind under investigation in this book is the tremendous emphasis they put on choice. As Amartya Sen (1985, p. 12) points out, choice is very limited as a gauge of welfare because “it confounds choosing with benefiting.” The emphasis on choice as the key index of valuation in economics suits the positivist inclinations of the discipline because choices can easily be observed. Yet any theory of welfare must rest on more substantive grounds.

1. The usual response given by neoclassical economists when presented with their often quite implausible assumptions, for example about the degree to which instrumental rationality can be precisely operationalized, is that their models seek parsimony and so must be as simple as possible.

1. The point of saving might be to buy time later on in life (by, say, early retirement) or as insurance against unforeseen eventualities, as a form of risk control. It is not obvious, theoretically, which of the two—leisure or savings—should increase. As noted, Frank Knight thought that the demand for leisure would increase with income. Keynes, by contrast (and somewhat in tension with his argument in The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren), argued in The General Theory that in the short run, the savings rate would increase.

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1. Savings rates obviously vary considerably across diferent capitalist economies. To the extent that this is so, arguably the argument of this book best fits a specific variety of capitalism—Fordist mass consumption–driven capitalism rather than, for example, the export-driven capitalism of newly industrializing countries. However, the pattern of accumulative consumption could conceivably be a condition on a capitalist economy developing a largely internally driven market (in which domestic efective demand is suficient to support mass production). Export-led growth tends to be seen as a stage on the way to developing a mature economy, led by endogenous aggregate demand. Note the importance attached, for example, in contemporary China on transitioning from an export-led economy to one driven by an internal market for consumer goods.

1. The time-utility intensive (as opposed to extensive) dimension of the utility conferred by objects can be framed in a quite abstract and prospective way. One could use a concept similar in spirit to a measure dear to health economists—the quality-adjusted life year, or QALY—to capture the idea that increments of free time vary in value according to how productive they are of utility (Pliskin, Shepard, and Weinstein 1980). Thus, we could speak of quality-adjusted leisure time units (QALTUs). As commodities become more eficient at generating utility, the value of each QALTU increases.

1. This is not an exhaustive list of approaches to consumption. It does not include Bataille’s (1988) theory of consumption as sacrifice, which has been influential on anthropologists of consumption such as Daniel Miller (1998). I also leave out Colin Campbell’s (1987) neo-Weberian account of modern consumerism. The discussion does cover what I take to be the main paradigms researchers on consumption have worked within. It should be mentioned in passing that both Miller and Campbell fail to provide adequate explanations for the materialistic bias underpinning modern mass consumption. While Miller might account for the role of shopping in the ritual reproduction of the family as a transcendent value in modern life, his theory cannot explain the historical pattern under investigation in this book. Campbell’s approach is more historical than Miller’s, yet his theory does not explain why hedonic expectation should fix on things, rather than practices, as foci for exercises of the imagination. More is said about this in Chapter 4 of this book.

1. My discussion of the behavioral economics literature, which is large, diverse, and fast growing, is by necessity extremely truncated and selective. The aim is simply to give some sense of the general orientation of the approach where consumer behavior is concerned.

1. This assumes that interest payments are compensation for delayed gratification. Since interest is paid at an exponential rate, this suggests that the discount function is also exponential.

1. Ainslie suggests, interestingly, that the two modes of behavior, exponential and hyperbolic discounting, can be mapped onto Freud’s distinction between the reality principle (concerned with long-term outcomes) and the pleasure principle (concerned with immediate gratification).

1. Kahneman (2011) has set out a very general account of this kind of view of the architecture of the human brain.

1. Status is what economists call a positional good, competition for which is a zero-sum game—for a given person to improve their position in a status hierarchy, the status of others must decline. This means that the status value of goods is also positional. As increasing wealth broadens access to a given good, its status value will decline.

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Notes to Pages 30–37

1. This point is made by Avner Ofer (2006, p. 279), who notes that “widely difused consumer goods confer distinction only temporarily if at all” and that “only at the more costly end of cars and housing is consumption a prime means of signaling status.” Ofer notes, as an aside, that Vance Packard’s hugely influential 1959 jeremiad against status competition, The Status Seekers, contains only one brief chapter, out of twenty-four, about conspicuous consumption.

1. Samual Bowles and Yongjin Park, in a 2005 paper, claim, on the basis of analysis of data on work hours in ten countries between 1963 and 1998, that work hours are predicted by the degree of inequality. They interpret the correlation between inequality and work hours as evidence for a “Veblen efect.” Their argument is that higher inequality means that the material trappings of the wealthy are further removed from the mass of the population, and this leads to increased willingness to work, so as to earn more income and “catch up” with the consumption of the emulated class. I find their argument unconvincing because they use quite historically limited data as a basis for a very general claim about economic behavior. As we have seen, the supply curve of labor in the late nineteenth century (ironically, more or less at the time Veblen was writing Theory of the Leisure Class) was backward curving. And yet that period in American history was one of extreme inequality. Why, then, were late nineteenth-century American workers not willing to work more hours to fund pecuniary emulation? Moreover, there are many alternative explanations for why inequality should be correlated with higher hours. For example, higher inequality generally indicates a situation in which capital is more powerful than labor. Since capitalists tend to prefer longer hours, the correlation between hours and inequality could just indicate the degree to which capitalists are able to enforce their will.

1. De Certeau (1984, p. 31) sets up the opposition between consumption and production in the following terms: “In reality, a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular, and clamorous production is confronted by an entirely diferent kind of production, called ‘consumption’, and characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation . . . its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products . . . but in an art of using those imposed upon them.”

1. Desublimation, according to Herbert Marcuse (1964), is the reversal of the Freudian process of sublimation, by which desire, under early capitalism, became channeled into work. To facilitate mass industrial production under capitalism, desire first had to be “unleashed” and then attached to commodity objects.

1. Economists have argued that advertising simply serves to provide consumers with information and has little efect on tastes (Nelson 1974, 1975).

1. It is possible, however, that advertising has the aggregate efect of biasing people toward material accumulation rather than reducing work time.

1. The preference for stable work hours is a contingent matter. It made some sense for mid-century businesses engaged in industrial mass production, as plants had to be in continual operation to cover their expenses (Piore and Sabel, 1986). Under current postindustrial conditions, however, businesses have shifted toward flexible hours. It should be noted that the flexibility demanded by the “gig economy” reflects the preferences of business rather than of workers.

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c h a pt e r 3 : e mpi r i c a l p a t t e r n i n t h e u n i t e d st a t e s

1. Becker (1965, p. 507), in any case, does at least admit that “the productivity of working time has probably advanced more than that of consumption time, if only because of familiar reasons associated with the division of labor and economies of scale.” But if this is so—if it takes increasingly less time to produce the equipment used to generate utility, while the time it takes to use that equipment to generate that utility has grown relatively more slowly—why then does work time not fall at a rate closer to the rate at which productivity is increasing?

1. There are eforts to incorporate changing product quality in measures of productivity by coming up with hedonic price indexes, for example to register the added value of faster processors in ICT. However, there are serious dificulties with operationalizing hedonic pricing (Block 1990).

1. Multifactor productivity (MFP) is productivity net of changes in labor and capital inputs. The idea behind MFP is to isolate that part of productivity that is not accounted for by increasing capital per worker (“capital deepening”) or by changes in the composition of the labor force (which afects its average quality). MFP is calculated, roughly speaking, by subtracting percent changes in inputs of labor and capital from percent changes in output. If the calculation yields a residual, this is taken to represent the contribution of technical improvements to productivity.

1. Angus Maddison (2001) breaks down annual improvements in per hour output (combined across all economic activities) in the long twentieth century as follows: 1870–1913, 1.92 percent; 1913–1950, 2.48 percent; 1950–1973, 2.77 percent; 1973–1998, 1.74 percent. The project of this book is to inquire into what was done with increasing productivity regardless of whether its source is capital accumulation, compositional change in the labor force, or exogenous factors such as technical improvements to the production process. My question is: Given ongoing improvements over the course of the twentieth century in productivity per hour of labor from whatever source, why have work hours not been reduced to a greater extent than has been the case? For the purposes of answering this question, the blunter measure of labor productivity is more relevant than multifactor productivity, and the most relevant sector is manufacturing, since it was organized workers in that sector who pressed hard up until the Second World War for reductions in the working week and largely let the issue drop in the postwar period.

1. According to the “Baumol thesis,” services are intrinsically less amenable to improvements in productivity, and this accounts for the lag in services productivity compared to manufacturing productivity. However, Zvi Griliches argues that the diference between productivity rates in these two sectors is largely explained by measurement issues (Baumol and Bowen 1966; Griliches 1992).

1. The shift in the labor force toward services to some degree accounts for the apparent slowdown in productivity growth in the last third of the twentieth century.

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Notes to Pages 43–45

1. The roughness of this estimate indicates how challenging it is to come up with precise figures measuring this expanded concept of productivity. However, DeLong argues that most economists who have studied the issue agree that the true increase in productivity figure lies somewhere in that range.

1. Per capita income in 1900 was \$4,200 in 1999 dollars, while in 1999 it was \$33,700, an eightfold increase (Fisk 2001).

1. On the assumption that average marginal productivity of the workforce declines with added units of labor, all other things being equal, shedding labor would also increase productivity.

1. A recent Gallup poll about work time found that people worked forty-seven hours each week, with only one in ten people working the oficial forty-hour week (Saad 2014).

1. The exact numbers vary according to which source is used. The census of manufacturing shows a drop in hours from 59.6 in 1900 to 51.2 in 1919. Ethel Jones (1963) found that hours in manufacturing dropped from 55.5 in 1900 to 46 in 1919. John Owen’s (1976, 1988) analysis of hours for nonstudent males over the same period finds a decrease from 58.5 hours in 1900 to 50 hours in 1919.

1. For a very critical assessment of Schor’s argument, see Lebergott (1996). However, research by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (1997) indicates that workers did put in more hours on average over the last quarter of the twentieth century. Total hours worked per year, for those who worked at all between 1976 and 1993, increased from 1,805 to 1,905 for men and from 1,293 to 1,526 for women.

1. The current population survey of work time is based on how many hours of work people do in total each week, so numbers of jobs is controlled for.

1. Annual work hours in the United States were 1,983 in 1950 and 1,764 in 2014, while productivity increased from \$18.24 per hour in 1950 to \$63.35 in 2014 (Roser 2018).

1. 433/10 = 43. A 43 percent increase in productivity multiplies person hour output by 1.43. Forgoing that increase in output, the person could produce the same output as she did before the increase in productivity in about two-thirds of the time. So, had this portion of increasing productivity since 1929 been used to reduce work time, the working week would by 2007 have been reduced by about one-third (48 hours in 1929/1.43 = 29.3 hours). Applying the same calculation, converting 20 percent of the 433 percent increase in productivity between 1929 and 2007 into less work time, at the cost of lower output, would reduce working time in 2007 compared to 1929 by about one half—so workers would put in a 24-hour workweek, rather than a 39-hour week. Of course, a 24-hour week would result in 2007 output dropping by close to 40 percent, a very substantial reduction and obviously one that people in 2007 would be not likely to countenance. However, the decision to take some of the benefits of increasing productivity in the form of fewer work hours at the same level of income would have been made incrementally over time.

1. Interestingly, Hobsbawm (1964) notes that this did not always militate against the interests of the employers. Customary rates also applied to compensation, so if the profits of an enterprise increased, workers would not demand an increased share of revenues.

1. Costa’s explanation for the growth of female part-time work is that it was a response on the part of firms to a decline in the female workforce, caused by lower age at marriage, the baby boom, and increasing college attendance by women. By ofering flexible, part-time work, businesses hoped to entice women back into the workforce.

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1. The most recent (2011) labor force statistics from the current population survey indicate that average hours at work, including those who work part-time, are 38.3, while for fulltime workers the figure is 42.4.

1. Moreover, casual work tends not to be unionized and so was not part of the collective bargaining arrangements of the middle part of the twentieth century. For this reason, arguably full-time hours give a better measure of the work time regime than do aggregate hours worked.

1. Ofer’s findings have recently been echoed by a National Bureau of Labor (2015) report on combined hours of married couples. In 1969, married couples between twenty-five and fifty-four worked a combined average of fifty-six hours per week. By 2000, this had increased to sixty-seven hours.

1. This is a much-debated topic. For a study of more recent trends in domestic labor, along with an overview of the debate, see Bianchi et al. (2000). Their finding is that housework hours have declined significantly since 1965, in part because families became smaller and marriage occurred later and in part because households made greater use of services in place of domestic work. It is hard to get clarity on this issue because time use surveys are subject to misreporting.

1. Robinson and Godbey also note that most of the increase in free time went to older people. Moreover, the additional free time was broken up into very small increments, making it more dificult to make use of it in a satisfying manner.

1. Time use surveys also have very patchy coverage over the course of the century. The most recent annual American Time Use Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, only stretches as far back as 2003. Time use surveys are also in their nature quite unreliable since they rely on self-reporting.

1. Wage compression between high hourly earners and low hourly earners mostly took place in the 1920s. Costa suggests that this was at least in part a response to electrification, which allowed for shift work, and hours legislation.

1. Labor historian David Brody (1993) estimates that between 1939 and 1945, union membership increased from 9 to 15 million.

1. Compared with 7.3 percent of private sector workers in 2013 (Desilver 2014).

1. I tracked reports about strikes for shorter hours in newspapers between 1869 and 2015, using a database of historical newspapers to search abstracts of articles using the terms strike and working hours. The results certainly corroborate Hunnicutt’s (1988) narrative. There are 294 newspaper reports about strikes where reducing hours was cited as an objective. Of these, 273 took place between 1870 and 1945 (with the majority of strikes occurring between 1880 and 1920), while only 21 took place between 1945 and 2015 (significantly, most of the strikes post-1945 were of salaried workers rather than those paid on hourly rates). Press coverage greatly increased over the time period, as did the size of the workforce. With increasing numbers of workers and more newspaper coverage, if the concern with reducing hours had remained constant, there should have been a greater number of reports of strikes about work time in the later period. While industrial action declined after about 1980, between 1940 and 1980 there were a great many strikes—on average around 300 large (1,000-plus employees)

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Notes to Pages 52–58

strikes each year. Similarly, while reports on all strikes become less common in the 1990s, they do not vary in number by that much over the preceding decades. So, at least until the last decade or two of the century, the dramatic decline in the number of reports about strikes over hours cannot easily be explained just by a general reduction in industrial action. Now it could be that union leaders post-1945 simply ignored the preference of rank-and-file members for fewer hours. Yet it seems very improbable that, had concerns about hours been as intense in the postwar period as in the first fifth of the century, so few strikes would have taken place about the issue after 1945. Union leaders are, after all, elected oficials.

1. The stabilization of work hours in the postwar period was partly encouraged by the state because of concerns about maintaining production during the Cold War. Fear of a return to depression also played a role, particularly with respect to union attitudes. Since the received narrative about the Depression was that it was caused by inadequate efective demand, pushing for higher wages rather than shorter hours seemed like a way to secure jobs. For a rich synthetic discussion of the political economy of this period of US history, see James Sparrow (2011).

1. Something akin to what Hochschild describes—the embrace of work as an alternative to the discontents of family life—certainly seems to have been a big factor in in the decision of women in the middle decades of the twentieth century to enter the workforce. Indeed, the trade-of between leisure and work was (and probably still is) diferent for women than for men, as not being at work for women meant being constrained by traditional gender roles (Friedan 1963). To the extent that work was an alternative to the shackles of domesticity, it is not surprising that many women threw themselves into paid labor.

1. Indeed, the fact that from the mid-century onward pay and conditions were set by collective bargaining meant that it would have been easier to coordinate a general move to a new work-time regime.

1. As philosopher Elizabeth Anderson (2000) has noted, the idea of unpopular norms, kept in play because of intersubjective ignorance about real preferences, does not give a good account of how such norms take hold in the first place. The theory of unpopular norms presupposes that people are quite passive with respect to the making of norms, following them purely in order to avoid the consequences of violating them. Yet for any norm to get up and running, some significant part of the population must be willing to sanction those who fail to follow the norm. Especially in the early stages of the development of a norm, people’s motivation for sanctioning others for failing to follow the norm cannot be reduced to fear of others sanctioning them for failing to do so. While a norm could conceivably live on even after everyone has ceased to believe in it, that state of afairs is, as Anderson observes, likely to be highly unstable.

1. The social security safety net, which began to be extended with the Social Security Act of 1935, arguably lessened the urgency of saving for life after retirement—yet this still leaves the question of why not having to save led people to spend more rather than work less.

1. Another possible argument that adduces life expectancy as a variable to explain people’s preference for more income over more free time during their working lives is that income and life expectancy are correlated such that at higher incomes, life spans are longer. While there is certainly an empirical relation between income and life span, this is, I think, nonetheless a rather weak argument. At the aggregate level, higher average incomes do not necessarily mean longer life spans. For example, Costa Rica has a higher life expectancy than the United States, even though its per capita GDP is only 12 percent of that of the United States (Ofer 2006). So, it is certainly possible for a society to have a high life expectancy at quite modest levels of income. Moreover, under conditions of afluence, the correlation between income and life expectancy is mediated by the correlation between income and lifestyle. It is possible, once a certain minimum standard of living has been achieved, for people on relatively modest incomes to live in a healthy manner, increasing longevity. In addition, work is itself often a source of profound physical and psychological stress, which tends to reduce life expectancy. It might well be the case that working less, given the right background conditions, would decrease stress to a degree that would make up for the life span increasing efect of income.

Notes to Pages 59–64

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