Patten's optimism required the corollary assumption, directly opposed to the linkage of poverty and progress insisted on by George and Adams, that the growth of inequality could be reversed. Like Smith (whose work he nowhere acknowledged, probably because he shared the common misperception of Smith as another "philosopher of deficit"), Patten saw inconspicuous consumption—the "broadened consuming power of the poor," not the lavish spending of the privileged classes—as the motor of social improvement. If poverty starved desire, riches led too quickly to satiation. Neither "sumptuary idleness" nor "hunger, disease, and stagnant misery" enlivened the imagination and generated a demand for improvements. The promise of abundance could be realized only by an energetic program of reform designed to reduce social extremes. It was essential, Patten thought, that the "stragglers of industry, the guerrillas of the subsistence line," be "incorporated" into the "steady ranks of disciplined producers." The "extension of civilization downward" demanded the demolition of the "social obstacles which divide men into classes." Workers had to be seen as potential consumers entitled to an "emotional corrective of the barren industrial grind." Consumption would expand their "wants" and create the "possibility of choice"—including the choice of deferred gratification over immediate indulgence. Their "investment in tomorrow's goods" would make it possible for "society to increase its output and to broaden its productive areas."

Both the progressive movement and the New Deal drew heavily on this kind of thinking, which linked progress to the democratization of consumption and held out the promise of a new civilization based on leisure for all. The same machines that admittedly took the meaning out of work would make it possible to "reduce hours of work and days of work to the lowest minimum," in the words of Patten's student and protégé, Rexford Tugwell, a leading theorist of the New Deal. Those who suffered from "historic homesickness," as Tugwell called it, might lament the decline of craftsmanship, but "the gains seem to most people ... to outbalance the

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native both to socialism and to laissez-faire, that the "enormous increase in the productive powers" of capitalism had "called into question the entire range of assumptions made under conditions of scarcity."

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