The corporate-backed ‘standard of living’ concept framed welfare as consumption

Evidence

Prior to the drafting of the UDHR, the ILO and the League of Nations had been sites for conflicts between the standard of living, which was viewed as an ‘American obsession’ with materialism and individual consumption, and a European focus on a ‘manner of life’, characterised by non-market concerns with taste, quality and preference. Between 1929 and 1931, the ILO had done extensive work on determining an adequate standard of living, sponsored by the department store magnate Edward Filene and the Ford Corporation, which wanted to pay workers in its European plants wages equivalent to those paid in Detroit to secure what one Ford manager called ‘the maximum efficiency of the worker’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 192

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how consumption-oriented welfare discourse originated — links to Chapters on the UDHR’s drafting and later minimalist ‘basic needs’ human rights. — connects to: Under capitalism consumption targets abstract value rather than bodily need — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 753; Rational administration of consumption masks the loss of individual control over life decisions — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 186; Adenauer-era economics aimed to dismantle the welfare state rather than build it — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2516 (+3 more)
• ADDENDUM: Gives the corporate backstory behind how consumption became the path to welfare — a direct historical root for the human-rights-as-subsistence framing that the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s economics touches tangentially, though the closer fit is the austerity/rights debate itself.

Broader Connections

• Under capitalism consumption targets abstract value rather than bodily need #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 753
• Consumption resists change because it is profitable and shielded from environmental costs #expands (0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2986
• Rational administration of consumption masks the loss of individual control over life decisions #expands (0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 186
• Adenauer-era economics aimed to dismantle the welfare state rather than build it #qualifies (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2516