The gospel of consumption
- Type:#blog
- Year read:#read2021
- Subject: Productivity
The gospel of consumption is the notion that however much people have it’s not enough.
As the capabilities of the american production industry improved in the 1920s, the business and political elite realized that the needs of the american population could easily be satisfied by working the factories way less than full time, and they saw that as a threat to their economical system. And so, from the 1930s onward, started the age of consumerism.
Interestingly, instead of following this trend blindly, Kellogg’s experimented with a six-hour workday and had fantastic results in the 1930s. However during world war II they worked a lot more and after the war 40 hours per week once again became the norm.
“If as a society we made a collective decision to get by on the amount we produced and consumed seventeen years ago, we could cut back from the standard forty-hour week to 5.3 hours per day”