Two Sixties Rock Songs That Celebrate Capitalism’s Greatest Creation
Perhaps the greatest achievement of capitalism is the creation of the phenomenon of leisure, which has become the object of cultural recognition and celebration in modern capitalist countries.
For millennia prior to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe, the vast majority of men, women, and children toiled from dusk to dawn and beyond just to keep body and soul together. Leisure as we know it today did not exist except among kings and lords of the manor and their retainers. For ordinary people there were only brief respites from their labor on Sundays and holidays, during which they fulfilled their religious obligations. It was the enormous increase in the productivity of labor unleashed by the capitalist mode of production that bestowed meaningful “leisure time” on the masses, which has been celebrated in cultural media since the end of World War II. Because rock music is one of my favorite cultural media, I will analyze two classic songs recorded in the mid-1960s that recognize the close relationship between capitalism and leisure. Before I do so, however, I would like to say a word about the economics of leisure.
We tend to take leisure for granted because its production is instantaneous and its consumption is intermingled so closely with the consumption of the services of other goods in the form of “leisure activities.” Leisure is time that we choose to spend not working and therefore excludes the resting time physiologically required to restore the energy we need to function as acting beings. Working out at a health club, entertaining friends with a dinner party, and religious worship all require leisure as a complementary good. However, leisure is a good that cannot be bought and sold on the market. Like romantic love, friendship, and good reputation, it is also a (non-exchangeable) consumer goods because it is scarce and contributes directly to satisfying human wants and desires. Furthermore, just as spending money on exchangeable goods is costly, spending time on leisure activities also involves a cost. The cost of leisure is not directly monetary but rather the forgone opportunity to earn money from selling one’s labor services on the market to a business firm or laboring in one’s own business. For example, if a home care nurse earns $40 per hour and can vary her time worked in four-hour shifts, then it “costs” her $160 (before taxes) in forgone wages to “purchase” four additional hours of leisure by reducing her working hours from 36 to 32 hours per week.
Although leisure can be “produced” only by the person who intends to consume it and cannot be purchased from other people, the demand for leisure is subject to the same law of economics that governs the demand for exchangeable goods, namely, the “law of marginal utility.” This law states that as the supply of a good an individual possesses increases, the personal or “subjective” value he attaches to the good declines relative to the subjective values of other goods. Applied to the case we are about to consider, this law implies that as workers’ wages increase, enabling them to purchase greater quantities of consumer goods on the market, an hour of leisure tends to become relatively more valuable. This increases their willingness to “purchase” additional hours of leisure by reducing their hours worked and forgoing the wages they could have earned.
Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, which was ushered in by the ideology and system of capitalism, the astounding increase in saving and investment in capital goods and improvements in technology has driven labor productivity and real wages sharply upward. For example, as the graph below indicates, average weekly real wages—the amount of goods and services an average laborer could purchase with his or her weekly earnings—in the United Kingdom increased almost 20 times from 1800 to 2014. (An interactive version of the graph is here.)
In the United States, where the industrial revolution started much later than in Great Britain, the graph below shows that real average annual earnings of non-farm employees rose by 30 percent from 1865 to 1890. By 1988, an alternative index of real average hourly earnings in manufacturing in the United States was 55 times greater than it was in 1890. (An explanation and interactive version of the following graph is here.)
As real wages continued their dizzying rise, driven by rapidly increasing capital investment and
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
