Interwar experts believed home buying and consumer wants competed for working-class dollars

Evidence

Yet the conventional wisdom of the time held that a working-class family could afford a home only by economizing on a range of small purchases, from clothes to movie tickets. The 1931 presidential conference on homebuilding and homeownership even called for a “frank recognition” that the power of modern consumer advertising made home-buying more difficult, since advertising sought “the stimulation of wants.” As studies of working-class budgets proved, however, the members of successful homeowning families generally subordinated individual satisfactions to the collective need to save. — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 132

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postwar housing demand combined family, veteran, and depression fears into reform pressure — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 118; Interwar experts sold austerity as objective science concealing true economic facts from the people — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 744; Postwar American consumption was politically constructed — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1721

Broader Connections

• Postwar housing demand combined family, veteran, and depression fears into reform pressure #expands (0.75) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 118
• Postwar American consumption was politically constructed #corroborates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1721
• Interwar experts sold austerity as objective science concealing true economic facts from the people #expands (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 744