|
|
|
Market Visions: Expenditure Surveys, Market Research, and Economic Planning in the New Deal
Thomas A. Stapleford
| Materialistic desire may be the engine of capitalism, but those seeking to redress economic inequities in America have also found it valuable for building and strengthening unions, regulating production and retail practices, attacking monopolies and business collusion, and championing redistributive economic policies.1 Consumption is the universal virtue for capitalism; what better weapon to trim that system's excesses? But, protean like capitalism itself, the tactics used to muster the reformist potential of consumption have also evolved. Thus prior to World War I, consumption-based calls for higher wages relied heavily on a mixture of ethical and loosely physiological claims as labor activists implicitly or explicitly defined an appropriate (and continually advancing) "American standard of living" and demanded wages sufficient to reach that level. As the 1920s progressed, union leaders and their liberal allies emphasized a different justification: rising industrial productivity would require increasing working-class "purchasing power" to provide an expanded market for the abundance of goods now rolling out of American factories. This shift in justifications benefited labor activists in multiple ways: It countered conservative arguments that a minimum "living wage" was economically unsound; it moved the debate from a moral grounding (which had often proved ineffective) to one of pragmatic business self-interest; and it helped labor representatives build alliances with moderate or liberal mass-producers and retailers who recognized a similar logic, such as the auto manufacturer Henry Ford, General Electric's chairman Owen D. Young, and the department store magnate Edward Filene.2 It also bound proponents more tightly to the New Deal the discipline of economics, turned their focus to the broader role of consumption in the economy, and laid the groundwork for the consumption-based political economy that would flourish during the New Deal. |
1
|
|
My aim is to examine this transition by focusing, not on the policies that reformers advanced, but on the empirical knowledge required to support and guide their analysis. Though such an approach has proved valuable in other contexts, there has been little attention to the quantitative underpinnings of consumption-centered activism—for example, price indexes used to demonstrate the effects of monopoly power or profiteering, cost-of-living surveys used to argue for higher wages, and family income data used to show growing financial inequality—especially as they developed after the 1920s.3 My focus is the 1935–1936 Study of Consumer Purchases, an extraordinary national survey of family incomes and expenditures undertaken by the federal government during the New Deal. Encompassing annual income data from 300,000 families across the country, with 60,000 of them supplying information about annual expenditures (subdivided into more than 500 categories), the Study of Consumer Purchases was an order of magnitude more extensive, analytically sophisticated, and technically complex than any previous expenditure survey, at home or abroad.4 Created and administered primarily by left-leaning economists (most of whom entered the government during the 1930s), the project was intended to help design, justify, and implement economic policies that would raise mass purchasing power in order to overcome the Great Depression, thereby linking liberal objectives to economic recovery. It symbolized the union of social science expertise, state power for empirical research, leftist hopes for federal economic planning, and the political potential of consumption. Yet it failed to be an effective aid to New Deal reformers, proving far more useful to another group: advertisers and market-research professionals. How and why this happened illuminates the tensions embedded in the new strategies used to exploit the political power of consumption during the 1920s and 1930s for progressive ends while also revealing the ties that bound even statist economic planning to corporate capitalism. |
. . . |
There are about 15605 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
