Did you ever hang out at the local dump and rummage through the stuff? I certainly did. My father took me there all the time. He loved digging through things and marveling at what people throw away. I swear he saw this trash as treasure. We never took any home, but he always explained his thinking at every step.
I never told my friends about this because I thought it was too weird. My father was actually a historian of the old school. He loved a good story with evidence to back it. He found millions of them in the city dump. That’s why we went. It wasn’t research as such; it was just a passion, a deep curiosity about what others found to be worthless enough to throw out.
He was looking for the opposite—evidence that people have no clue what is valuable and what is not. Too often people simply do not know, which is why so many thrift stores are packed with treasures. I could go from one thrift store to another all day, all weekend, every week. They thrill me to the same extent they disgust others.
America specializes in making trash and throwing things away. We see that as a symbol of how prosperous we are. Our ancestors did not think this way. They saw prosperity as linked with how much they could save and how little they spent unnecessarily.
Economics teaches that savings requires deferred consumption. That means thinking about the future more than the present. Savings is also the foundation of investment. Investment is the basis of prosperity. Add it all up and you get this: Sacrificing the comforts of today is the key to a better tomorrow.
Hardly anyone would argue with the above. It is stated very plainly in ways that make it entirely logical and unobjectionable.
And yet let’s add in one word, macroeconomics, especially as interpreted by John Maynard Keynes. He posited such a thing as the “paradox of thrift.” This happens when people save too much and don’t spend. Aggregate demand goes down and crushes producer hopes.
Business dries up, so we fall into depression, in Keynes’s view, which requires the central bank to print money and Congress to spend even to the point of national indebtedness. That’s the real key to prosperity, said Keynes: running up big debts and printing your way out. Also, government should take over investment.
I’m not going to explain the above further because it is wholly wrong. It is entirely based on fallacies punctuated by complicated language. That was Keynes’s specialty. He somehow managed to bamboozle generations of academics and lawmakers into setting their common sense on the shelf.
Quite often, he says, people will be in these stores and yell at the high prices.
“My father had one of those and threw it away. Why should this be so expensive?”
This misses the point entirely. It is precisely because his father threw that away that the surviving ones that are obtainable catch such a high price. Our ancestors worked much harder to keep what was valuable and threw away only what was useless or simply had to go. They tried never to acquire what they did not need.
Of course they did without, sometimes by necessity but also because they believed it was right.
My grandmother had a huge stack of quilts that I loved, but they were strange. They seemed all to be made of scraps of things. I asked her once. She said that her mother had sewn them from the tattered dresses worn by her 10 sisters. After hand-me-downs had run their course, they became blankets.
I kept one until it literally fell apart. I always treasured that blanket as embedding deep history but also a profound ethic of frugality.
Several generations have gone by since we met any really frugal person. I mean people who simply would never go out to eat, paying four times what it would cost to make at home, people who would never buy retail when it can be picked up at a Goodwill and so on. I’m a bit that way, but mostly performatively: I shop all the time on eBay and various online marketplaces with used things.
But it’s not the same. We don’t much care about waste anymore. We really should. With waste comes a lack of appreciation for the sacrifices others have made to bring us material blessings. And once you focus on frugality, it can be fun. See how far you can stretch things. Never empty unused groceries into the bin; figure out dishes to make to use them before they go bad. Learn to stitch your clothes rather than toss them. Look through your credit card statements to eliminate all subscriptions you don’t use.
And so on.
What is the point? Here is the paradox. The point is to become prosperous. We live poor in order to be rich. This is truly the difference between old and new money. It comes down the frugality of the old.
I once knew an extremely wealthy man who paid to put marble floors in his front entrance but balked at paying to paint the closets because no one would ever see them. Granted, he was a bit crazy, but he had a spirit of frugality even if it appeared in strange ways.
Our ancestors canned food. They froze leftovers. They handed down clothes. They made rags out of old sheets. They knew how to sew, bake, clean, paint, sand, saw, and so much more. We know none of this and it is sad. Today we think everything is at the store, waiting for us, and we toss anything and everything that becomes even slightly out of fashion. It’s all ridiculous.
And look at household debt! It’s awful. And the country’s debt—it is worse, even unpayable. We’ve paid a heavy price for behaving this way.
It’s easy to start with frugality. Stop buying things you don’t need, especially silly products like cleaning supplies when vinegar, bleach, baking soda, and other basics work as well or better. And here is one to which you will object and fine: I’m down on toothpaste which is sticky and sweet and mostly a racket. Plain baking soda costs a fraction as much and does a much better job.
I’m not going to offer any more in this list except to say that frugality is not a set of instructions; it is a mindset of buying only what you need, saving what is valuable, and throwing out only what is useless. It’s sport and wonderful.
The way things are headed economically right now, I suspect more of us are going to adopt frugality sooner rather than later. We might even find ourselves rummaging through the city dump to find treasures that others have mistakenly thrown out.
