5/26/2023 0 Comments Warped reality ted radio hour![]() is the primary cause of our rationing of opportunity, our excess industrial plant, our enormous wastes of competition, our high pressure advertising, our economic imperialism.” Since much of what industry produced was no longer aimed at satisfying human physical needs, a four-hour workday, he claimed, was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic. Dahlberg declared that “failure to shorten the length of the working day. One of the most influential was Arthur Dahlberg, whose 1932 book Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism was well known to policymakers and elected officials in Washington. Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity” - and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.įROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of the Age of Consumerism there were critics. In other words, the machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take. Machines can save labor, but only if they go idle when we possess enough of what they can produce. If anything, improvements to the labor-saving machinery since the 1920s have intensified the trend. Today “work and more work” is the accepted way of doing things. a measurable pull on production has been created which releases capital otherwise tied up.” They celebrated the conceptual breakthrough: “Economically we have a boundless field before us that there are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied.” President Herbert Hoover’s 1929 Committee on Recent Economic Changes observed in glowing terms the results: “By advertising and other promotional devices. The emphasis should be put on work - more work and better work.” “Nothing,” he claimed, “breeds radicalism more than unhappiness unless it is leisure.”īy the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse the dual threat of stagnating economic growth and a radicalized working class in what one industrial consultant called “the gospel of consumption” - the notion that people could be convinced that however much they have, it isn’t enough. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, typified their response when he declared: “I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance. For them, the new “labor-saving” machinery presented not a vision of liberation but a threat to their position at the center of power. The magazine went on to suggest, “It may be that the world’s needs ultimately will be produced by three days’ work a week.”īusiness leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a society no longer centered on the production of goods. Davis provided some numbers to illustrate a problem that the New York Times called “need saturation.” Davis noted that “the textile mills of this country can produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and that 14 percent of the American shoe factories could produce a year’s supply of footwear. In a 1927 interview with the magazine Nation’s Business, Secretary of Labor James J. Along with many of his corporate cohorts, he was defining a strategic shift for American industry - from fulfilling basic human needs to creating new ones. It was this latter concern that led Charles Kettering, director of General Motors Research, to write a 1929 magazine article called “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” He wasn’t suggesting that manufacturers produce shoddy products. ![]() Perhaps even more threatening was the fact that the industrial capacity for turning out goods seemed to be increasing at a pace greater than people’s sense that they needed them. ![]() They feared that the frugal habits maintained by most American families would be difficult to break. And although the first commercial radio station didn’t begin broadcasting until 1920, the American public, with an adult population of about 122 million people, bought 4,438,000 radios in the year 1929 alone.īut despite the apparent tidal wave of new consumer goods and what appeared to be a healthy appetite for their consumption among the well-to-do, industrialists were worried. In upper-middle-class houses, washing machines, refrigerators, toasters, curling irons, percolators, heating pads, and popcorn poppers were becoming commonplace. Cars dominated the streets and most urban homes had electric lights, electric flat irons, and vacuum cleaners. Just ten years later things looked very different. And within the home, electricity remained largely a luxury item for the wealthy. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet replaced many of the old gaslights. PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |