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

1. “\$35,000 More Urged for Federal Work on Auto Problems,” Washington Post, December 23, 1923, p. 55.

1. “Motor Body Asks for Funds to Aid Standards Bureau: Experiments Save Motorists a Huge Sum Every Year,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 13, 1924, p. A6.

1. Henry Litchfield West, “Standards Bureau Driving Machine Is Used at Columbia,” Washington Post, March 28, 1924, p. S3.

1. Katz notes that one index of the change was a change in nomenclature from “members” of CU to “subscribers.”

1. Consumer Reports 20, no. 2 (Feb 1955): p. 56.

1. Consumer Reports, 1, no. 3 (July 1936), p. 2.

1. Consumer Reports, 1, no. 1 (May 1936), p. 24.

1. Ibid.

1. Although, as Jacobs (2005) shows, in the postwar period control of inflation then became as important an issue as wage levels—and once inflation became politicized in this way, it was a short step to labor itself becoming divided, as one part blamed another (the more heavily unionized part) for causing inflation by pushing wage demands.

1. The shift from perishables to durables also reflects change in orientation of the Consumers Union. In its early years, CU was very much concerned with encouraging rational utility-maximizing consumption and discouraging conspicuous consumption of the kind described by Veblen. For that reason, CU deliberately avoided paying attention to goods it categorized as “luxuries” (N. D. Katz 1977, p. 280). At the same time, it was very dificult to draw the line between “necessities” and “luxuries,” especially as new products were continually appearing in the marketplace.

1. Consumer Reports, 1, no. 1 (May 1936), p. 24.

1. The test-focused turn of the organization was not uncontroversial with some of its members. It was CU’s narrow emphasis on product testing, at the expense of consumer advocacy and activism, that prompted Ralph Nader in 1975 to depart from the board of directors of the organization “Notes on People: Nader Quits Consumers Union,” New York Times, August 23, 1975, p. 10.

1. Harry Braverman (1974) describes this as the separation of conception and execution in the labor process. Increasingly simplified and divided labor on the factory floor was accompanied by the emergence of specialized engineers, product designers, and management, who planned and orchestrated production. Modern, Taylorist techniques of production thus greatly narrowed the perspective workers had on the making of whole products. This deskilling in the workplace had the efect of reducing the level of knowledge and understanding people had about products. Product testing then evolved to fill this knowledge gap.

1. Marshall (2013, p. 103) introduced the concept as follows: “We have already seen that the price which a person pays for a thing can never exceed, and seldom comes up to that which he would be willing to pay rather than go without it: so that the satisfaction which he gets from its purchase generally exceeds that which he gives up in paying away its price; and he thus derives from the purchase a surplus of satisfaction. The excess of the price which he would be willing to pay rather than go without the thing, over that which he actually does pay, is the economic measure of this surplus satisfaction. It may be called consumer’s surplus.” Although Marshall coined the term, the idea of the consumer surplus has deeper historical origins. The consensus is that it was first thought up by French engineer Jules Depuit in 1844. See R. W. Houghton (1958).

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Notes to Pages 203–214

1. Becker could perhaps evade this dificulty by invoking his conception of preferences as definite, ordered, and fixed. In his theory, economic agents, including households, have, in essence, constant tastes and variable means to satisfy those tastes. According to Becker, “tastes neither change capriciously, nor difer importantly between people,” and therefore, all diferences in behavior can be accounted for in terms of variation in income and price— while conversely, holding price and income constant, all households should behave the same way (Becker and Stigler 1977, p. 76). But what this amounts to is the position that the economic behavior of households is (along with all other economic behavior) rational by definition—which clearly involves very questionable assumptions.

c h a pt e r 9 : mo r a l p a n i c a b o u t u t i l i t y

1. Searching through the Proquest database of nineteenth-century newspapers, for example, turns up over eleven thousand pieces in which some mention is made of the issue of adulteration.

1. Note however that in applications where a substantial margin of safety is required, and safety is a function of material robustness, overengineering can be desirable.

1. Slade’s (2006) suggestion that material obsolescence is just the application of science to the traditional practice of adulteration ignores the alternative interpretation of that form of obsolescence as “value engineering.” While it is entirely unclear how, in the paradigmatic case of adulteration, adding gravel to bread to reduce cost while also reducing calorific and nutritional content could possibly be seen as increasing eficiency (even in the unlikely scenario in which price is reduced to match the cheaper costs entailed), one can entertain a plausible story about the eficiencies gained by only building into an item as much durability as is required for a given pattern of predicted use.

1. Business Review, April 1958, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Economists have argued more recently that style obsolescence under monopoly conditions produces a suboptimal social welfare outcome, since firms do not have to internalize the loss of value of older models consequent on the release of updated versions, and so produce more models than would otherwise be the case. See Waldman (2001).

1. Of course, the suggestion could be that what is objectionable is savvy marketing manipulating the consumer into desiring the latest version of a product. But as we shall see, in the discussions about style obsolescence, the main issue is just the fact that models are changed, rather than the exact means used to promote new models.

1. A lexical search of Google Books using NGram Viewer shows up a slightly diferent pattern—the term takes of in the mid-1950s, becoming increasingly common until reaching a peak in 1974, at 0.0000079877 percent of all bigrams.

1. According to Giles Slade the term “progressive obsolescence” was first coined by Christine Frederick’s husband, Justus George Frederick, an ad man, in a 1928 article in the trade journal Advertising and Selling (Slade 2006).

Notes to Pages 215–227

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1. Frederick wrote: “Just as old George F. Baker, the greatest living banker, discovered that the way to relieve panics was for banks to unhesitatingly pay out their resources instead of hoarding them, when stringency arrived, so we have learned that the way to break the vicious deadlock of a low standard of living is to spend freely, and even to waste creatively” (Frederick 1929, p. 81).

1. In 1956, Burke wrote an essay in The Nation in which he expresses surprise that an idea he had intended as satire had now become standard business practice. He commented: “In my original article . . . I thought I was making much sport of the trick psychological devices whereby a customer with a perfectly serviceable car was persuaded that he should get rid of it because there was a newer model available. In particular, I guyed the doctrine of ‘obsolescence’ that was implied in such high pressure selling tactics. But now I find Business Week referring quite respectfully to the way in which General Motors ‘adopted the annual model change, helping to establish the auto-industry’s renowned principle of ‘planned obsolescence.’ I had mistakenly thought that the principle was a joke; by now it has become ‘renowned’” (Burke 1956, p. 211).

1. Oddly, Gregory also noted that a condition of possibility for the new policy of obsolescence was the presence of oligopoly market conditions in the automobile industry. The question of why oligopoly should lead to psychological obsolescence was left unanswered.

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Notes to Pages 228–234

1. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 234–239

315

316

Notes to Pages 239–246

Notes to Pages 247–255

317

1. “Business Bulletin: A Special Background Report on Trends in Industry and Finance,” Wall Street Journal, February 21, 1974, p. 1.

1. Jerry M. Flint, “Styling Changes in Autos Wane,” New York Times, August 26, 1969, p. 1.

1. “Detroit in Uphill Fight with Small Car Imports,” Washington Post, November 27, 1969, p. H7.

1. Jaklich Allen, “Advertising Marketing: Auto Makers Selling ‘Steak,’” Chicago Tribune, July 20, 1970, p. C7.

1. Some, for example Robert Brenner (2006), stress the role of increasing competition. Others, such as Andrew Glyn (2006), give a more class-based explanation.

1. The argument is as follows. The cost of job loss was low in the postwar period because under conditions of near full employment, workers could be reasonably assured that should they choose to leave their jobs, other options would be readily available. This meant that labor had a strong bargaining position, and the result was increasing real wages. From the point of view of capital, this was acceptable and sustainable if productivity rates continued to increase suficiently. But for a complex and still somewhat opaque set of reasons, in the 1960s productivity began to slow down. Between this slowdown and ongoing wage demands, profits were squeezed. In response, the stable collective bargaining arrangements began to come under attack, resulting, for example, in the political sidelining of the National Labor Relations Board in the early 1970s. For extensive discussion see Marglin and Schor (1991) and Glyn (2006). Note that Glyn presents data that suggest a similar historical pattern across the advanced industrial capitalist world.

1. As we have seen, it also became displaced by the new environmentalism (which largely agreed with neoliberalism that the locus of economic action is the consumer yet disagreed that she necessarily knows best and so focused on the project of consciousnessraising), and by the increasingly prevalent current of opinion that obsolescence is a natural corollary of technological progress.

1. In this sense, the concern about the erosion of use value is continuous with postwar concerns about inflation, which also threatened the value of the real wage. Jacobs (2005) notes how fear of inflation became a very significant political concern in the postwar era (which was in fact not a period of very high inflation by the standards of the century).

1. To give a brief review, the hypothesis is that that mass consumption, particularly in the Golden Age of industrial capitalism, is to a significant extent motivated by and rationalized in terms of the commensuration of labor and its wage. The wage is commensurable with labor only insofar as it gets turned into a set of commodities the use value of which is seen as roughly equivalent to the free time and energy sacrificed as work. Since labor itself is some duration of life activity used by the employer, it is properly compensated by something equivalent to it—by wage goods that index a duration of free life activity. When construed as repositories of durations of potential free activity, commodities thus serve as rough equivalents to the activity sold as labor. The accumulation of commodities then to some degree negates the loss of life to work.

1. Where “function” is a temporal concept—that which bestows some notional quantity of use or, in the case of time-saving devices, saves some quantity of time.

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Notes to Pages 255–263

1. Simmel [1904] 1957. See Campbell (1992) for an account of the place of neophilia in consumerism.

c h a pt e r 10: c o n c lu s i o n

1. By normativity I mean the “ought-ness” produced by norms—how people think they ought to proceed in order to follow a norm, and what criteria establish whether a course of action counts as satisfactorily following that norm.

1. It is true that ad hoc decisions can always be made about what constitutes fair and reasonable exchange. Explicitly conventional systems of commensuration are, of course, certainly possible, and sociologists have charted the ways in which actors and institutions go about making things commensurable (Esperland and Stevens 1998). But to resort to pragmatic rules of thumb to provide a provisional solution to the problem of commensuration goes against the principle that exchange be objectively fair. The tension between any given conventional scheme for commensuration and the broad ideal that exchange should proceed according to some “natural” (that is, nonconventional and self-evident) and objective principle makes such schemes eminently contestable and therefore very unstable. That said, clearly ad hoc agreements about fair wage rates are possible, for a while at least—for example, the postwar convergence, discussed throughout this book, on a formula for determining wages, according to which wages should keep up with the cost of living while increasing (in real terms) in line with improvements in productivity. It is much less clear, for reasons briefly set out this conclusion, how individuals could arrive, even provisionally, at some objective sense of having been fairly compensated for their labor.

1. While the focus on normativity also makes my account diferent in emphasis from orthodox Marxist political economy, at the same time the approach is quite compatible with Marxism. There are certainly historical conditions of a kind that Marxist analysis tends to focus on—a balance of class power, for example, and certain technical conditions in production—that form background conditions to the emergence of the peculiar forms of economic normativity of capitalism. And the idea of capitalism as involving perverse forms of normativity is similar in spirit to the kind of analysis given by the theorists of the Frankfurt School.

1. Here I have in mind systems in which demand is anchored to ritual exchanges, expressing social relations of obligation and reciprocity. Feudal exchange would be one example and, also, from the classical anthropological literature, systems such as the potlach and Kula ring (Malinowski 1920; Mauss [1950] 1990; Polanyi 1957). In describing such economic systems as comparatively nondynamic, I do not mean that they are unchanging or unchangeable. Rather, economic action in such systems is, by comparison with capitalism, more immanently regulated by explicit, socially endorsed scripts. Those systems can, of course, change with time, yet do so in a way that is, in Polyanian terms, more fully embedded in, and therefore guided by, the social than is the case with capitalism.

1. Unless wage labor itself withers away, replaced by fully automated production. Under those circumstances, it is possible to imagine a leisured population, subsisting on some sort of basic income.

Notes to Pages 263–270

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1. Also, while Weber focuses on the content of norms, I’m putting more emphasis on the efects of their form—specifically, whether they have clear criteria of satisfaction and whether those criteria are public or private.

1. For Wittgenstein, rules and norms must be public things. As Wittgenstein comments: “To obey a rule, make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess are customs (uses, institutions)” (Wittgenstein 1953, PI 199). To follow a rule, to use a particular norm as guide to action, is, therefore, for Wittgenstein, to go on as we do. Rules and norms are not, and cannot be, private and abstract—exhaustive instructions available for internal consultation by way of reflection—but rather are open, social, public, interactional phenomena, embedded within histories and traditions of practice. On this understanding, a norm is correctly followed when it yields behavior that conforms to the public standards of a given community. In order for a rule or norm to be public whether or not it has been followed must, in theory, be subject to external, public checks. Rules and rule following thus rest on a concordance of practice within a community, and correct comportment is secured by way of external checks. Seen from this perspective, the degree to which economic normativity under capitalism is insulated from public ratification and characterized by notionally private conditions of satisfaction, suggests that it amounts to a kind of pseudonormativity, failing therefore to work as a stable guide to practice.

320

Notes to Pages 270–271

References