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“This is what capitalism does best, right?” she told the journalist Ezra Klein on his podcast not long ago. “It first creates this enormous appetite for things, and then it tells us that whatever we have is not enough. I mean, I think that is a form of madness. It seems to me there’s no question about that.”
PRIVATE CARS WERE RELATIVELY SCARCE in 1919 and horse-drawn conveyances were still common. In residential districts, electric streetlights had not yet
Adam Hunger/AP Images for Target Customers online at Target for Black Friday January 23, 2021 The notion of human beings as consumers first took shape before World War I, but became commonplace in America in the 1920s. Consumption is now frequently seen as our principal role in the world. People, of course, have always “consumed” the necessities of life—food, shelter, clothing—and have always had to work to get them or have others work for them, but there was little economic motive for increased consumption among the mass of people before the 20th century. Quite the reverse: Frugality...