Abstract
By the 1700s, English producers improved manufacturing techniques. Josiah Wedgwood and others learned how to produce greater amounts of goods at diminishing cost. Producers helped inspire not only the desire for but also the ability to purchase luxury items, such as colorful pottery. The ability on the part of the growing middle class to buy consumption goods beyond basic necessities proved controversial. To create affordable products, Wedgwood and his peers needed a disciplined labor force; the transition from independent artisans to regimented labor proved bitter.
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- 1.
Friedrich Hayek claimed, “Even the poorest today owe their relative material well-being to the results of past inequality” (Hayek 1960, 44).
- 2.
Televisions of 1960 were superior to those of 1946, but by 1960 wealthy Americans were beginning to buy the new color televisions.
- 3.
De Beers diamond cartel practiced similar product placement, using the English royalty and American motion picture stars.
- 4.
For Boulton’s successes in selling to the Russian court, see Jones (1973, 216–217).
- 5.
Gilboy agreed, in essence, with McKendrick (Gilboy 1932, 629–630).
- 6.
Adam Smith was not a fan of Mandeville (Smith 1982, 308).
- 7.
Floud et al. (2011, 11, 17–18) for caloric intake and definitions of “wasted” and “stunted.”
- 8.
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Surdam, D.G. (2020). Birth of a Consumer Society in Eighteenth-Century England. In: Business Ethics from Antiquity to the 19th Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37165-4_12
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