openpolitics.com

One of Westacott’s central preoccupations in the book is why, if so many smart people have championed frugality, it hasn’t become the global norm.

.. Spartan laws and culture, Westacott explains, were fine-tuned to make citizens courageous, disciplined, and uninterested in wealth. At those same tables, Westacott writes, “The rations were meager to keep the young men lean and supple and accustomed to functioning on an empty stomach.”

.. the bulk of how present-day Americans think about frugality—or really, how they think about anything—was established during two especially fertile philosophical periods, in Greece two and a half millennia ago and in Western Europe a few centuries ago.

.. Thinkers in the first of those two periods were preoccupied with material wealth, and whether securing it could bring happiness, as aristocrats of the era seemed to think it could. This is the time when Epicurus warned of having to brown-nose in order to make money, and a number of his contemporaries chimed in with other critiques that echo today’s skepticism of acquisitiveness. Plato, for his part, advocated for modesty in housing, clothing, and food, arguing that simplicity in those realms would encourage moral purity. This vision of the ideal life is one that has proved extremely durable. Plato’s position essentially set the precedent for every homespun lifestyle blogger with a garden, a kitchen table made of reclaimed wood, and a penchant for serving drinks in Mason jars.

.. Whereas the ancient Greek philosophers were for the most part skeptical of selfishness, the 18th-century theorists Adam Smith and David Hume spun it as a virtue. Smith contended that when men acted purely in their own interest, “an invisible hand” ensured that they would contribute to the greater good.

.. “What has always been condemned as private vices came to be reassessed … on the grounds that they confer public benefits,”

.. “It seems,” Westacott writes, “that our culture is still torn between accepting acquisitiveness as a necessary condition of economic growth and denouncing it as an undesirable character trait that bespeaks false values and encourages unethical conduct.

.. Baking one’s own bread, for instance, has become a potent symbol of wholesomeness and self-sufficiency, but, Westacott argues, it’s hardly an act of pure independence. Since most home bakers are not growing their own wheat, grinding their own flour, constructing their own ovens, and so on, they are aided by labor-saving technologies that are miraculous and yet commonplace. It’s perfectly valid to bake bread because it’s cheaper, fresher, and less connected to processed-food supply chains, he suggests, but don’t get carried away: Baking bread at home is the result of the remarkable interconnectedness of the modern economy.

.. generation after generation has yearned for a simpler version of life that they imagined to have come before them. Two and a half millennia ago, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote longingly of the era of the first humans, a “golden race of men” who were “free from toil and grief.” Seneca, writing 500 years later, pined for “the age before architects and builders,” before humans felt that their happiness depended on such luxuries as “hewing timbers square.”

.. Some who desire more radical social change might even argue that the advocates of frugal simplicity effectively encourage people to accept an unfair economic system

.. Some who desire more radical social change might even argue that the advocates of frugal simplicity effectively encourage people to accept an unfair economic system. … But this criticism is misguided. The teachers of frugal simplicity criticize avarice and consumerism on the grounds that working ever harder to make ever more money to buy ever more stuff is not the road to a satisfying life. … The alternative is to argue that working, getting, and spending are the essential ingredients of human happiness.

.. However, the actual argument is that public policies should ensure that the poor can afford their first house before the rich can afford their third or fourth.

.. Olen describes how personal-finance coaches and large banks popularized the idea that by cutting back on small daily luxuries—a latte at Starbucks being the quintessential example—anyone could retire a millionaire; all they had to do was invest the money they saved from not buying a coffee into the market (and, preferably, let the personal-finance coaches and the banks manage those funds). “Collectively,” Olen writes, “they fed into the American streak of can-do-ism, our Calvinist sense that money comes to those who have earned it and treated it with respect.”

Housing, health care, and education cost the average family 75 percent of their discretionary income in the 2000s. The comparable figure in 1973: 50 percent.

.. The acts on Extreme Cheapskates are socially unacceptable, and besides, they are pointless economic rebellions, doing little to affect people’s financial security in any meaningful way. Mr. Money Mustache had saved up $250,000 by the time he’d been working for five years—no amount of cleaning plastic straws with T-shirt shreds would have gotten him there.

.. Westacott at one point dwells on how wealthy people spend money to acquire status. It used to be that a fancy car or a country-club membership sufficed. But as these became available to more and more people, the acquisition of physical things has mostly taken a backseat to the acquisition of exotic experiences. Now, Westacott writes, because “not working is in itself no longer a badge of honor,” what the economist Thorstein Veblen in 1899 called “conspicuous leisure” is being displaced by conspicuous recreation.