The Deleted Scenes - It Pays To Be Cheap
I wrote a little while ago about inflation and budgeting and the question of what, exactly, my grandparents meant when they told their children in the 1950s or 1960s, “We can’t afford that.” I don’t mean that I’ve never heard of or can’t imagine poverty. What I mean is, these are families which had multiple children, sent at least some of them to college, at some point owned their own home, owned at least one car, etc. By any standard of material consumption they would have been pretty solidly middle class. Yet they practiced a frugality that—to my mind—implies poverty. “Turn off that light switch, what do you, work for the electric company?” “No, honey, toys are only for Christmas time.” “That brand of ham is for special occasions.” That kind of thing—things that at the end of the day seem like they would be rounding errors in the budget of even of a lower-middle-class family in the postwar years. This one got a lot of comments, so I’m just going to share a bunch of the most interesting ones here to further elaborate these questions/thoughts, and share your best thoughts.
“The bundle of products known as a “car” just wasn’t as elaborate. That’s a really insightful way to put it. Not only is there more stuff available now, the same things aren’t really the same things. Some are actually cheaper, like computers, but some are more expensive and complicated. This kind of gets at one of the dynamics here: it was easier to be frugal 30 or 50 or 70 years ago because in most communities, there was just less stuff to spend your money on. You probably didn’t have supermarkets with caviar and USDA Prime dry-aged steaks and sashimi-grade ahi tuna. (Probably? You definitely didn’t have that in the vast majority of places.) You didn’t have boutique furniture and fancy over-engineered mattress companies and a million restaurants serving half the cuisines on the planet to lure you. It’s sometimes said that rich people were more humble in those days: that their lifestyle was much more similar to that of the regular people. I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, it’s probably partly because simply having money didn’t mean you could consume like a rich person without a lot of effort. All I need to do to serve caviar and a $100 French champagne for dinner is to put those items in the cart when I go grocery shopping (Wegmans—the cheapest store for grocery staples and also a luxury supermarket, all in one.) All of that is to say, the mental effort required to say “We can’t afford that” is much higher, and must be made more often, today. Everyone, everywhere, every day is bombarded with stuff they can’t afford. See this one:
Yeah. Expecting a lot of comfort and convenience is very expensive. That’s what convenience and comfort extract from you—the ability to do without them. I think that applies to a lot of things, and explains a lot. There’s also the question of prices for labor-intensive things rising as a country develops, which is a well-documented economic phenomenon:
There’s this comment about the psychology of saving before the New Deal and the (quasi) welfare state:
This one is really interesting, which challenges what I wrote at beginning:
Of course I love this comment:
This is really interesting:
And man, I love when a comment on some narrow area of interest illuminates a larger point:
I want to end with this one, the inspiration for the “It Pays To Be Cheap” headline:
This is kind of a subtle point. There are lots of things we need to do that don’t matter, in order to inculcate a habit that does matter. For example, my mother used to insist that I follow table manners at home, so that I would just unselfconsciously have the habit of eating like a civilized person. With work-from-home, I can see the creep of “Eh, I can lick my plate, I’m in my own house!” to “Hey, is the waiter watching? Keep an eye on him while I lick my plate!” There’s just no way to cut out the “unnecessary” part of that and keep the “necessary” only. I also think that applies to a lot of things and explains a lot. Lots of food for thought. Leave your own comment! Related Reading: How Much Of Urbanism Is Poverty? Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,000 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this! You're currently a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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