IN CHEAP WE TRUST
You should read the book
The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue
I have a confession: I love my huge television.So I’m probably not the natural audience for Lauren Weber’s new book, “In Cheap We Trust.” The book is a combination of personal memoir, social history and political manifesto for extreme frugality. Don’t get me wrong: I like to save money. But I also like to spend it. Weber, on the other hand, is fervently . . . well, cheap.
Still, there’s a lot to like about the book. Weber presents an engaging, if slightly overextended, history of America’s complicated relationship with spending. Though one often hears calls for a “return to thrift,” our history of overexuberant consumption stretches back to colonial days, when the founders fretted that the colonists’ attraction to imported luxuries would undermine democratic self-rule. Ben Franklin and Henry David Thoreau may have embodied the American virtues of economy and simplicity, but figures from Thomas Jefferson (who ran up huge bills on fine living and died in debt) to Michael Jackson embody equally well our tradition of wretched overindulgence.
The best parts of Weber’s book are her personal stories of living cheap. She recounts childhood winters spent doing homework near the oven as it cooled, because her father insisted on keeping the house at 50 degrees. Weber, clearly among kindred spirits, praises their resourcefulness and “radical generosity.” If it was ever possible to discuss personal thrift without elevating it to a public quarrel, those days are long gone. Weber sees a refusal to consume as the consummation of a progressive environmental agenda. The popular evangelical finance guru Dave Ramsey has long told his followers to slash their lifestyles so they can become entirely debt-free, give 10 percent of their income to charity and save huge chunks of the rest.
The freegans and many of Ramsey’s followers are gorging themselves on parsimony. The freegans survive only because they are few and American society is so joyously, wastefully rich. Weber celebrates the thrifty way that housewives used to turn animal fat into candles and old clothes into quilts. She doesn’t really explore the obvious corollary: extreme frugality implies someone, probably a woman, staying home and spending all their time on it.
Besides, these calls to trim consumption voluntarily rarely work outside of wartime. True, barring huge advances in energy technology, the current American lifestyle is unsustainable. If you’re already financially secure and we’ve priced in the negative externalities of activities like driving and eating meat, then walking to work, lowering the thermostat and eating lower on the food chain isn’t virtuous.
When Ramsey demands that you live on beans and rice, the idea is not to spend the rest of your life counting every penny. Rather, his followers budget and save now, so that in the future they can stop worrying about money. That’s worth aspiring to, even for lovers of high-end televisions. But it’s not cheap.
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