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

2.2. Alternatives to Utility Maximization Explanations

Social scientists outside of economics, as well as some heterodox economists, have tended to take it as given that straightforward utilitarian considerations, anchored to the functional characteristics of products, fail to account fully for modern consumption practices, and have suggested alternative explanations. These may be loosely categorized into behavioral-psychological explanations, social status explanations, cultural accounts, and various forms of Marxism.43 In what follows I briefly consider whether these approaches (taking one or two theoretical accounts as exemplars for each) do a better job at explaining the pattern of productivity, work time, and consumption under capitalism.

2.2.1. Behavioral Economics

Recent work in psychology and behavioral economics has sought to jettison, or at least relax, some of the more unrealistic assumptions of neoclassical economics, especially those underlying the homo economicus model of the economic agent. The aim has been to develop an approach to economic behavior based on a more plausible, evidence-led theory of the human subject.44 Behavioral theories of economic action present a very diferent picture of the consumer, and by extension of consumer society, than standard economic theory, one grounded in actual empirical studies of how people behave. Perhaps, therefore, behavioral economics can explain the apparent materialistic bias suggested by the pattern of work and consumption characteristic of advanced industrial capitalism.

An early, influential example of an economic approach to consumption that is informed by psychology is found in the work of Tibor Scitovsky. Working within a behavioral psychological framework, Scitovsky (1992) suggests a theory to account for the irrationalities of consumerism. For Scitovsky, commodities produce utility along two dimensions. They can be endowed with a potential to produce functional utility—for example, the capacity of a chair to yield a certain amount of sitting utility before becoming worn out. But they can also be endowed with a potential to provide various forms of stimulation for the consumer. According to Scitovsky, in afluent industrial societies the capacity of things to stimulate people typically gets exhausted before their functional capabilities wear out. Put simply, people become bored with their still functional possessions and so seek out new and more stimulating ones. The psychologist Barry Schwartz makes a similar point in his work on the discontents associated with consumer sovereignty. He comments: “When the brief period of real enthusiasm and pleasure wanes, people still have these things [consumer durables] around them—as a constant reminder that consumption isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that expectations aren’t met by reality” (Schwartz 2004, p. 172).

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Scitovsky’s theory is at first glance compelling. It certainly sheds some light on certain characteristics of capitalism, such as planned obsolescence and the rapid turnover of consumer fashions. However, the theory fails to answer the question posed at the outset of this book: Why, given the costs entailed relative to the benefits gained by accumulative consumption, do consumers not switch to less object-mediated sources of stimulation, engaging in new practices rather than acquiring new objects? Behaving thusly would seem to ofer consumers a way to avoid the ennui produced by an endless cycle of commodity acquisition and disappointment. Indeed, Scitovsky himself implicitly raises this question in the solution he ofers to the problem of joyless modern materialism, which is to encourage people to cultivate engaging practices in place of endlessly acquiring commodities that can only ever be a fleeting source of stimulation. Yet given that the solution to the problem seems somewhat obvious, why does the problem persist? If, as Schwartz and Scitovsky suggest, accumulative consumption ultimately leads to disappointment, why should people choose to be disappointed repeatedly? Surely, after a while, they should conclude from experience that the combination of high income and consumption, at the expense of more free time, does not lead to happiness and so explore a diferent approach—freeing up time in which to cultivate skills in place of using it to generate funds for the acquisition of things. So what is it that makes a cycle of behavior that on reflection seems self-defeating nonetheless so compelling? Scitovsky suggests that at the root of the problem lies materialist culture. But that answer only raises the question of why that culture took root and became so entrenched. As is often the case with arguments that adduce culture as an explanation, Scitovsky’s account ultimately leaves some sense that the efort to explain has been prematurely ended.

A more recent current of work in behavioral economics that might explain our puzzling pattern of work and consumption challenges the assumption that people are rational in how they think about the prospective value of rewards at diferent points in the future. It springs from experimental findings that people are inconsistent in their intertemporal preferences, often preferring very short-term rewards to substantially higher ones with more delay while not discriminating in the same way between the same two rewards (one substantially higher than the other) with equivalent temporal spacing, only placed at later points in time. So for example, when subjects are ofered a choice between \$10 now and \$20 in one week, they tend to choose \$10 now, while when they are ofered \$10 in six months or \$20 in six months and one week, they choose \$20. George Ainslie (1992, 2001), a key figure in work on this subject, interprets this finding as indicating that people discount utility over time in a hyperbolic manner. Hyperbolic discounters discount the value of some good very steeply for short delays but at a much lower rate for long delays. The steepness of the slope of the devaluation curve at a given time in the future is roughly proportional to how far in the future that time is.

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If hyperbolic discounting is commonplace, this throws into question a basic assumption within neoclassical economics—that economic agents discount utility at a time insensitive rate, such that each temporal unit of delay in consuming a good reduces the utility assigned to that good by a set percentage. This procedure yields the exponential time-utility curve. While with hyperbolic discounting, the devaluation per unit of time changes depending on the total delay, with exponential discounting, valuation falls by a constant factor per unit delay.

The exponential model certainly describes how certain economic actors reason under particular circumstances. For example, banks discount the future exponentially when they calculate interest rates.45 However, the exponential model is less convincing as a general explanation for how people behave. Ainslie notes that the exponential time-utility discounting model does not cover apparently self-destructive and irrational behavior in which average utility over the long term is radically compromised in exchange for a short-term reward. One instance of such behavior is drug use, but there are many examples in consumer behavior, impulsive and compulsive buying for example, and perhaps also a fixation on the immediate gratification of higher wages and more spending, as opposed to increasing free time. In such cases, people apparently do not adjust utility over time delay until just before the point of consumption (or some other utility-yielding behavior), at which point expected utility spikes dramatically.46

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Ainslie (2001), rather strongly, asserts that “people’s natural discount curve is . . . specifically hyperbolic” (p. 31), suggesting further that this preference is commonplace in nature and can be explained as a product of natural selection. In line with a general tendency among behavioral economists to embrace naturalistic explanations, Ainslie interprets economic behavior as expressing a struggle in the brain between an ancient, reptilian part, impulsive and incapable of planning, and a more advanced, rational part, endowed with a capacity to reason about long-term consequences for welfare.47 To the degree that people discount hyperbolically, so the argument goes, this reflects the influence exerted by the primordial parts of the brain. The short-term propensity for people to consume, which might not be easily explicable in terms of rational utility maximization, is then, from this perspective, a result of the residual power in humans of drives that are a legacy of their animal ancestry. These instill in them an urge to seek maximum pleasure immediately—satisfying instant, first-order desires at the expense of the well-being of their future selves.

If Ainslie’s account is right, this suggests that modern, accumulative habits of consumption may simply be a consequence of a congenital human tendency toward myopic hedonism (an adaptive trait in a state of nature characterized by a profoundly uncertain future) when combined with industrial powers of production. However, while hyperbolic discounting might account for a consumerist tendency to spend rather than save, it does not explain the apparent willingness of people to push for higher wages to fund more consumption, rather than for more free time. For it is not at all clear why a hyperbolic discounter should attach more expected utility to acquiring things than to working less. Assuming that work tends to be a source of disutility, working less would seem to ofer a quite immediate kind of gratification—more so perhaps than acquiring some commodity. Moreover, the model of the hyperbolic discounter still assumes that where shortterm consumption involves the acquisition of commodities, it is motivated by the net utility produced by those commodities. This means that, for the hyperbolic discounter, short-term wage-funded consumption must produce a quantity of utility suficient to compensate for the disutility of the work required in order to earn a wage. Consequently, even if people are hyperbolic discounters, there are still good reasons why we should expect them to, beyond a point, demand time over things, so that their acquisitions can be put to use suficiently to yield their expected utility. And yet the demand for free time under conditions of afluence has been eclipsed by the demand for more consumption. Hyperbolic discounting thus fails to solve our puzzle.

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In general, behavioral economics, while generating lots of experimental evidence that disrupts the assumption that homo economicus is a good model of the economic actor, is less successful at advancing plausible alternatives. The field either amounts to a list of findings that are anomalous from the perspective of standard economics, with no underlying theory, or else quickly resorts to evolutionary just-so stories, such as the one suggested by Ainslie. The theoretical limitations of behavioral economics are perhaps a result of its commitment to discovering general behavioral laws by way of experiments, in conjunction with a strong commitment to a reductive naturalistic psychologism. With this end in mind, researchers in the field tend to bracket conceivably very relevant sociohistorical factors that could account for the behavior they observe in their experiments. Moreover, because experimental subjects in behavioral economics research are typically drawn from North American or Western European capitalist societies, little is done to control for the influence of such factors. As a theoretical resource for explaining modern patterns of accumulative consumption, behavioral economics therefore has some serious shortcomings. At the same time, I will argue, in Chapter 4, that some of the experimental findings of the field, approached in a contextual fashion—that is, precisely as findings about subjects in afluent capitalist societies—support an alternative interpretation, one in line with the theory argued for in this book.

2.2.2. Social Status Explanations

Social status approaches look at consumption behavior as a means for making and challenging status distinctions (Veblen 1994; Bourdieu 1984; Sombart 1967). Increasing consumption is explained as being a result of status competition in the context of an increasingly fluid social structure. From this point of view, modern accumulative consumption is a consequence of a very long historical process in which ascribed status progressively became supplanted by achieved status (Sombart 1967). Once social identity is set less by birth and becomes more contingent on variable life outcomes, social actors become motivated to find ways to index their status by way of their consumption practices. There then ensues the kind of object-mediated symbolic competition described by Thorstein Veblen and others.

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There is certainly something compelling about this argument. The status value of a good depends on its distribution across a population. As access to a given good becomes less exclusive, the status associated with it declines (Hirsch 1976).48 Therefore, as economic growth yields greater access to goods, those higher up the hierarchy will seek to defend themselves from the encroachment of those below by “upgrading” their product set in order to symbolically reestablish social distance from them. This makes commodities into weapons in a kind of status symbol arms race, and the result of this is a very rapid turnover of products. The status interpretation of consumption also suggests an explanation for why, after basic needs have been met, higher income (and further spending) does not produce increasing satisfaction— the so-called hedonic treadmill efect (Ofer 2006). If increased spending is about maintaining relative status position, then it is not surprising that it fails to produce increasing happiness.

However, the status competition approach to consumption ultimately runs into the same dificulty as the utility maximizing account. For establishing social distinctions by display of commodities is a certain kind of use made of commodity objects, and, as such, requires some investment of time. Conspicuous consumption must, by definition, be noticeable to have the desired efect, and display entails time spent in public, showing wares to signal status. As time available to display each status object contracts, the accumulation of more status goods yields diminishing marginal returns, and in response, we would expect people either to shift their preferences from further commodity accumulation to more free time (in which accumulated goods can be displayed) or else increased savings. To the degree that this does not happen, the puzzle remains.

Moreover, mass consumption meant that the power of goods to signal status diferences probably declined, just because they became so much more commonplace. As goods increasingly come within reach of the masses, they become less efective as markers of social distinctions.49 If the advent of mass consumption corresponded to a decrease in the capacity of things to index status, it seems unlikely that status competition can explain mass consumption. Some support for the declining significance of status-driven consumption with mass consumption is provided by the research of historian Richard Pollay (1985) on advertising content in the middle decades of the twentieth century (which I discuss in more detail in Chapter 7). While Pollay found that status is sometimes adduced in order to advertise the benefits of owning certain categories of consumer durable—especially high-end goods such, as luxury vehicles—most advertisements for products focus on their functional properties. If making, or defending against, invidious distinctions were foremost in the mind of consumers, then surely mid-century marketers would have cottoned on to that and incorporated, to a greater extent than Pollay’s evidence suggests was the case, the status associations of products in their advertising campaigns. So the most common forms of mass consumption cannot easily be explained by status dynamics.

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It is also worth noting that the postwar emphasis on increasing purchasing power emerged, at least in the United States, from a politics that represented a new kind of moral economy rather than being an aggregate efect of widespread concerns about status position (L. Cohen 2003; Jacobs 2005). The postwar industrial compromise—which pegged real wages to productivity and the cost of living, thereby ensuring that consumption would keep up with expanded production—was primarily a result of collective bargaining, in the context of a particular normative order. The tendency for consumption to keep pace with production reflected a general sentiment that living standards ought to progressively increase for all rather than a competition between individuals for status by way of conspicuous consumption. It is, of course, possible that each class was trying to emulate the consumption of those above it, and therefore, that collective, class-based status aspirations pushed the purchasing power agenda. But if that was the case, why was segmented marketing, which tailored products to the tastes of specific social groups, so successful? The success of segmented marketing strategies, which became prominent in the second half of the twentieth century, indicates the degree to which tastes were stratified, and stratification of tastes suggests a limit to emulative consumption. As we shall see in Chapter 5, there is evidence from social research conducted in mid-century America that the point of consumption for individuals was not to establish status distinctions, but rather was to fit in with collective standards and tastes specific to their reference groups. None of this is to say that status competition does not motivate consumption practices to any degree in the era of mass consumption. In some cases, the concern to increase real income might well in part be inspired by a felt need to keep up with the consumption of “the Joneses.” But the argument that status competition provides an exhaustive explanation for the puzzling bias toward increasing income and consumption under industrial capitalism, nonetheless, remains unconvincing.50

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2.2.3. Cultural Approaches

Cultural approaches to consumption tend to focus on its role in meaningmaking practices. The literature exploring these practices is vast and varied. Despite this diversity, cultural accounts have in common a tendency to view (and often celebrate) consumption as an expression of agency in the making of identity. This perhaps reflects the influence of Michel de Certeau (1984), the most important theorist in this current of work, who argued that consumption is a form of potentially counterhegemonic production. According to de Certeau, consumers, by cultivating creative practices in the sphere of consumption, can disrupt the ideological configurations that support the system of production.51 While not all cultural theorists emphasize the counterhegemonic possibilities of consumption, there is a general trend in cultural studies to focus on the role of consumption in creative projects of identity construction. As one sociologist working within this paradigm, Celia Lury (1996, p. 256), puts it: “consumer culture provides an important context for the development of novel relationships of individual self-assembly and group membership.”

The cultural approach to consumption, while often interesting and useful, nonetheless has some dificulty accounting for the general pattern of materialism under afluent capitalism. Although goods are indubitably deployed to construct and express identity, as with conspicuous consumption, using them in such a fashion requires time. As productivity and hourly wages continued to increase under industrial capitalism, why did wage earners not push more forcefully for shorter work hours, and therefore more time in which to engage in identity making practices? Furthermore, there are clearly modes of identity construction that do not require much in the way of income, but, rather, are more time intensive. Why should people be inclined to construct identity through commodity ownership rather than the cultivation of noncommodified practices? After all, practices, insofar as they demonstrate the ability to do something, would seem to be a more robust source of individual identity than mere ownership of objects. Surely engaging in, and mastering, practices constitutes a firmer, more reflexively convincing basis for claiming an identity than passive displays of objects.

More generally, the pattern of consumption and work that this book takes as its puzzle is an aggregate pattern, constituted by the behavior of all consumers / wage earners. To be sure, disaggregating that pattern will reveal a patchwork of distinct practices. But interpreting local practices is quite diferent from explaining why, under capitalism, there is a systematic bias toward accumulating stuf, as opposed to expanding free time. Cultural approaches, in emphasizing the plurality of meaning-making practices involved in consumption, thus fail to engage with the more general issue of the pervasive materialism of consumer capitalism. They risk missing the proverbial forest for the trees.

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2.2.4. Marxisms

An alternative current of theory, very much associated with Marxism, seeks to explain accumulative consumerism as an efect of the power of advertising, in particular, and of the “culture industry” more generally, to inculcate subjects with false needs via psychological mechanisms such as desublimation (Ewen 1976; Adorno and Horkheimer 1976; Marcuse 1964).52 Given the onslaught of marketing in modern consumer societies, this explanation has some intuitive appeal. However, although it might seem plausible that marketing has some aggregate efect on general patterns of demand, studies suggest that the power of advertising to stimulate novel demand is questionable (Schudson 1986, Nelson 1975).53 The efect of advertising seems mostly to be to redistribute given demand within a market rather than to generate new demand.54 Moreover, construing mass consumption as simply a result of the ideological production of false needs, predominantly by way of advertising, presupposes that people are passive receptacles for marketing messages—“advertising dopes,” as it were. Such a picture of the consumer is both empirically unwarranted and anthropologically suspect. At the very least, the success of marketing messages in penetrating popular consciousness should be interpreted not just as a sign of the influence of the culture industry but also as indicating something about the socioeconomic context (as well as the prevailing interpretation of that context) in which those messages are received.

Of course, the argument that the bias toward increasing consumption, as opposed to increasing free time, under advanced industrial capitalism is puzzling assumes that workers have a choice in the matter—that they could have chosen to convert productivity gains into more time (at a constant rate of consumption) rather than higher wages. But workers might well have little choice in the matter, if the compact of higher wages rather than more free time in exchange for increasing productivity is forced on them by capital (Schor 1991). If workers are compelled to take a higher wage rather than being given the option of a shorter working week, it seems reasonable that they would then spend the wage they receive. What good, after all, is an unspent wage? From this perspective, the bias toward consumption would simply reflect the preference of business for a stable work regime, including a regular working week, in conjunction with the fact that capital generally has more bargaining power than labor.55 If this is correct, then turning improved productivity into increasing real wages, in order to fund more consumption, as opposed to using it to reduce work, is just a matter of wage earners making the best of conditions not of their own choosing.

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While there is surely something to this view, at the same time it ignores the extent to which from the mid-twentieth century onward, workers in the industrial West entered relatively freely into corporatist arrangements with business. Unions were willing participants in the postwar compact, according to which increases in productivity would be rewarded by higher wage incomes. Furthermore, as noted earlier, wage increases can be saved as well as spent (with savings used for things like funding retirement or as a guard against unforeseen expenses). The balance of power between capitalists and labor has little direct efect on whether people choose to spend or save their discretionary income. The power of capital therefore fails to explain the surprisingly high propensity to consume (rather than save) under conditions of afluence.

To sum up, the status-centered, Marxian, cultural, and behavioral psychological interpretations of mass consumer society seem to fare little better than utility maximization as suficient explanations for the general pattern of modern accumulative consumerism—the accumulation of ever more commodities while free time remains relatively static so that the average time available to make use of each commodity decreases. While each approach captures some dimension of mass consumption, it nonetheless remains perplexing that the improvements in productivity in increasingly afluent societies were for the most part used to increase consumption. In Chapter 4, a diferent kind of explanation is presented for this pattern. Before developing this alternative theory, I provide, in Chapter 3, a more detailed empirical analysis of the pattern, focusing on perhaps the paradigmatic consumer society and economy—the United States in the twentieth century.

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