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Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

But wasn't the counter-intuitive result that women spent more time washing since it was so "easy" now, they could wash things much more frequently.

I can't find the reference but I did read it recently.

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No [1], that's not the case. Even while we own more clothing and wash it more often, it still takes less time. You can also do other tasks while a washing machine is running.

[1]https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mfr/4919087.0011.104/--deconstr...

I do not think that your source supports your claim, although I might have missed something. To the contrary, it states:

> Although the physical labor of laundry was lessened somewhat by the machines, the actual time housewives allocated to their family laundry increased.

(This is claimed to be the result of housewives being responsible for the entirety of laundry, instead of employing help, however.)

If the time spent stays the same but more stuff gets washed that's still a win for living standards. If you reduce the cost of something then that labor gets spent elsewhere, maybe on more of the same but then you have more to show for it. Labor hours are fairly fungible at scale like that.

Your cuts are less likely to get infected when your clothes don't have the manure you put on the field last week on them.

That's the Jevons Paradox, generally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It could be, but not in the way the parent thinks. Washing machines and dish washers are what allowed women to enter the work force, but they didn't cause them to spend more time washing. It probably increased demand for freshly washed clothes and clothing in general.

The Jevons Paradox is an economy-wide effect, not (just / only) an individual one.

Cheaper washing machines mean more clothes, more laundry, more people washing more often.

Individuals may spend less time doing laundry. But more laundry is being done, above and beyond simply meeting previous latent demand.

Right, I was clarifying that it didn't in this case mean more time spent washing at an individual level, the resource here is probably labor.

I don't think that's the case for washing machines, but it is the case for some inventions. Like the typewriter, which allows you to write four-five times faster than when using a pen, and communications networks that are however many million times faster than carrier pigeons and pony expresses and what have you... So we should be spending less time writing and sending letters, and more time frolicking in the sun, right?

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