4
Technological Fantasy and Frugality
On September 29, 1980, Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon finalized the most famous bet associated with the environmental movement.1 They bet about whether the price of five metals would go up or down over the next decade (tin, nickel, copper, chromium, and tungsten). Ehrlich reasoned that increased population pressure and resource use would drive up the inflation-adjusted price of the metals, and Simon maintained that the free market and technological development would create enough abundance that prices were likely to go down. It requires a bit of background to see how the bet reflected two opposing views about our overall impact on the environment and human welfare.
In 1968 Ehrlich, a prominent Stanford University biologist, wrote an alarming book, The Population Bomb. He argued that human population was rapidly outstripping the resources necessary for humans to flourish and that mass famine and death would ensue even with serious efforts to reduce population growth. Thomas Malthus had voiced similar concerns as early as the 1790s. But the specter of near-term human population overshoot was highly salient in the 1960s. Another book, Limits to Growth, argued that unless we changed course, by the middle of the twenty-first century we would overshoot the capacity of the earth to provide the resources necessary to sustain our industrial society.2
By contrast, a group of futurists who are often characterized as Cornucopians believed that the free market and technological development would create material abundance even with rapid population growth. Simon, an economics and business professor, argued that as demand increases for nonrenewable materials like copper, we are unlikely to run out of them, because their prices will go up, and that will increase the motivation for recycling the materials, using them more efficiently, and finding alternatives. As a result, eventually the price of metals should go down as technological development increases the supply of alternatives. On this view, creating feedback loops that stimulate human ingenuity and fuel technological development is the best solution to concerns about growth, not restraining the growth of population or consumption. Thus, the bet was an expression of a deep conflict between ideological frameworks.
Simon won the bet. By 1996, the price of all five of the metals had decreased in inflation-adjusted dollars. Ehrlich paid him $576 dollars, which was the total decrease of $200 worth of each metal over the decade. Ehrlich did point out that if they had selected a different decade, the results would have gone the other way. No simple bet could resolve the conflict between these ideologies. But this result, and many like it, did give a boost to Cornucopian views and the skillful habits they emphasized during the last part of the twentieth century. I will call those habits “abundance skills” because their use is supposed to lead to the material abundance that Simon envisioned. The contrasting skillful habits associated with Ehrlich’s view are aspects of frugality, broadly understood: they involve “doing more with less” and thereby reducing the human impact on the natural world.
In eighteenth-century America, frugality was an ascendant social norm; people were proud of the skills that reflected the norm. Homesteaders in the New World engaged in frugal practices out of necessity. Benjamin Franklin celebrated such norms in his Poor Richard’s Almanac. But by the middle of the twentieth century, abundance norms had become dominant in the culture; the skills associated with the acquisition of material wealth had become central to a version of the American dream.
Four key cultural norms have expressed our current approach to material abundance. First, success involves financial wealth and material prosperity. Whatever else we pursue, if we achieve the status associated with success in our culture, we will have the wealth that enables us to enjoy conveniences, travel, fine foods, and so on. Second, technological development is progress; to improve human welfare and to address major issues, we should focus on increasing the sophistication of our technologies.3 Third, free markets typically produce and allocate goods in ways that enhance human welfare. Government may assist markets with subsidies, expertise, and safety nets, but markets far more efficiently allocate goods and build wealth. And fourth, growth is good. In general, the larger some group is, the more successful and desirable it is. Smaller organizations may be more nimble, but their goal is typically to grow their assets and become larger.
Much has been achieved as a result of our emphasis on material abundance norms and skills. We have modified much of the earth’s surface and turned what we have found into commodities that make our lives easier. Our improved agricultural yields enabled us to avoid the famines that would otherwise have accompanied our population growth. Our advances in medicine keep us alive much longer on average than prior humans. We have advanced our understanding of the world so we can reliably predict how to satisfy our growing desires. We have achieved average levels of prosperity that would be incomprehensible to our ancestors. Indeed, we have become one of the most powerful forces on earth.
And yet, we know that our increased material standard of living is a mixed blessing. Increasingly its negative side effects are more salient and more dangerous. Support for abundance norms has eroded in some quarters. Polling data shows steadily weakening support for capitalism among young people, and concern about the impact of technology regularly surfaces.4 “Small is beautiful” has been a slogan for some for over fifty years and has been renewed by the relocalization movement. Increasing resistance to abundance norms provides an opening for a revitalization of the frugality norms and skills I describe below. But material abundance norms still explain a great deal of our collective behavior and our institutions. For example, our dominant measure of progress is GDP, which favors financial growth. Our legal system makes it very hard to slow technological development or to constrain technology that does not have obvious deleterious consequences. Our schooling increasingly emphasizes job skills for the new economy.
Our abundance orientation is problematic now for three related reasons: First, as we saw in chapter 1, we are reaching planetary boundaries that technology alone cannot address, thus it seems very doubtful that we can sustain continued growth in population and consumption. Second, it is increasingly clear that material abundance and its technological engine are not really increasing human welfare; more material abundance seems unlikely to enhance flourishing on average in wealthy countries. And third, we have been able to sustain our material abundance so far only because it is not distributed justly across the population. The unfairness of this distribution has become more salient, and increasingly people are unwilling to accept the injustice. As we unpack these arguments, we will see why a rebalancing toward frugality will increase our resilience in the short term, and if widely accepted, it will facilitate a movement toward sustainability in the longer term.
Frugality, Necessity, and Self-Restraint
For many people, frugality or thrift seems an outdated virtue. Yates and Hunter note that in the last fifty years of the twentieth century, “thrift seemed to go the way of chastity, teetotalism and other quirky artifacts from a more morally uptight age.”5 Others think it ought to be outdated, for it suggests a small, crabbed existence of the sort manifested in T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, who has measured out his life in coffee spoons. Hart says, “As a value thrift is devoid of any element of the majestic or the mysterious, and so is impotent to stir our imaginations or inspire our wills; it does not enchant, beguile or inveigle us.”6 In an age when character is regaining significance in public discussion, the major psychological work on the topic, Peterson and Seligman’s Character Strengths and Virtues, does not even mention frugality in its eight hundred pages.7 To be sure, the simple-living movement continues to have some attraction, and environmental critiques of consumption are common, but few people turn to the historically important virtue of frugality to address the consumption issues that are at the root of our unsustainable lifestyles. Why is this so?
Part of the answer, I suspect, lies in its historical connection with necessity and deprivation. Poor peoples around the world typically exhibit frugality with great skill because they have to. Frugality played a key role in early American thought partly because of the scarcity of consumer goods and partly because of the influence of Puritanism and Quakerism.8 Most early settlers worked the land with tools they made and saved any surplus they had for hard times. But by the time Ben Franklin popularized frugality, consumer goods from England were more readily available in cities, and it was necessary to identify other motivations for thrift.
A similar pattern occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when a generation found it necessary to cultivate skills that early Americans largely took for granted. The generation that followed would either learn the skills without the need or abandon the virtue. Some young people today still see college as a time of enforced frugality, usually to be abandoned afterward when they reap the rewards of the degree. Sometimes nostalgia for a simpler time, when survival determined one’s priorities, extends frugality beyond necessity, but it tends to be a weak motivation in the face of the lure of luxury.
Another partial explanation of frugality’s unattractiveness is that we have an overly narrow conception of frugality. Like collaboration and humility, frugality is uncharitably understood today. The rise of consumerism as an engine of economic growth has led us to associate frugality primarily with a willful version of self-restraint. We have more and more opportunity to consume a vast variety of goods and services, and we are surrounded by advertising. It just takes one click on Amazon to satisfy a desire induced by some advertiser. Thus, we find that avoiding consumption requires increasing self-restraint, which can be exhausting. Self-restraint is important for one kind of frugality, which we might call restrictive frugality. However, we need to recover a broader conception of frugality—what I call constructive frugality, which is much more attractive as a core character trait for our times. Constructive frugality aims at building a life rich in intangible goods such as friendship, community, beauty, and spiritual growth and de-emphasizes the monetary and material spheres of life.
Let us begin with the narrow conception and build toward constructive frugality. Restrictive frugality includes skillful habits that enable us to avoid spending money and producing waste; many of these habits involve strategies of self-restraint. We are tempted to buy now (and pay later), to seek convenience, and to find status in possessions, but restrictive-frugality skills involve deferring gratification and making do in order to live well later.
The example of Benjamin Franklin’s early life and writings provides a useful window into some of the skills of restrictive frugality.9 Franklin was born in Boston in 1706, one of seventeen children fathered by Josiah Franklin, a tallow chandler. He was a bright boy and was sent to grammar school with the idea that he might join the clergy. But his father ran out of money, and Ben was apprenticed to his brother, who was a printer. After learning that trade, but coming into conflict with his brother, he ran away, first to New York and then to Philadelphia at the age of seventeen. Penniless, he found work in some printers’ shops, but he yearned to open his own printing business. After an unsuccessful trip to London to secure a printing press and time working off his trip as a clerk and bookkeeper, at twenty-two he entered into a partnership with Hugh Meredith to start a printing house. In these lean times, his frugality was a necessity.
While some successful merchants of the times flaunted their wealth, Franklin deliberately crafted his persona in frugal terms. Famously, he carried his paper in a wheelbarrow through the streets of Philadelphia. He dressed plainly and would not use china at his table. Because he had taken on considerable debt to start his business, he was as concerned to appear frugal as to live in accord with frugality’s dictates. His common-law wife Deborah Reed was similarly inclined. In his autobiography, Franklin says of this time, “It was lucky for me that I had one [a wife] as much dispos’d to Industry and Frugality as my self. She assisted me cheerfully in my Business, folding and stitching Pamphlets, tending Shop, purchasing old Linen Rags for the Paper-makers, &c. &c [etc.]. We kept no idle Servants, our Table was plain and simple, our Furniture of the cheapest. For instance my Breakfast was a long time Bread and Milk (no Tea), and I ate it out of a twopenny earthen Porringer with a Pewter Spoon.”10
Franklin started publishing a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, when he was twenty-three, and before he was thirty he started to write and publish the immensely popular Poor Richard’s Almanac. Issued annually for twenty-six years, the Almanac sold more than ten thousand copies each year and significantly enhanced Franklin’s income and reputation, even though he authored it under the assumed name Richard Saunders. Many of Poor Richard’s proverbs about frugality remain in circulation today:
Beware of little expenses, a small leak will sink a great ship.
Buy what thou has no need of and ere long thou shall sell thy necessaries.
All things are cheap to the saving, dear to the wasteful.
Who is strong? He that can conquer his bad habits. Who is rich? He that rejoices in his portion.
A penny saved is a penny got.11
These proverbs emphasize dispositions to save, to restrain consumption, and to avoid waste, which are central themes of restrictive frugality, but they do not highlight the skills that strengthen the dispositions. Franklin’s early lifestyle reveals many of these skills. He had mechanical skills that enabled him to fix broken machinery. He often found new uses for worn items rather than discarding them. He developed a successful strategy of systematic self-evaluation for reinforcing the thirteen virtues he wanted to perfect, including frugality. He also engaged his social skills in founding the Junto, a club that aimed at mutual self-improvement, which met on Friday evenings to discuss questions that Franklin developed. At Franklin’s suggestion, the Junto created the first lending library in the United States, in part as a way to avoid buying books that might be more economically shared, thereby reducing material consumption while expanding access to scarce material goods. Franklin enjoyed significant wealth and the luxuries that it enabled later in life, but as he tells the story in his autobiography, his early self-restraint in the face of temptations to consume led to the wealth he acquired.12
It is useful to separate self-restraint skills into several categories that can be learned in different ways. These skills are well known, but they often are underdeveloped where necessity does not require them. The first group involves techniques for managing temptation; it includes strengthening willpower, distracting oneself from a salient desire, shifting focus toward a longer-term goal, and avoiding circumstances where temptations will be powerful. Walter Mischel’s famous “marshmallow experiments” showed variations in young children’s acquisition of such skills. Mischel tested four-year-olds’ abilities to delay gratification.13 Children were presented with one marshmallow and told that they could eat it, but that if they waited for fifteen minutes before eating it, they would receive a second marshmallow. Other parts of the experimental conditions were varied to see how they affected the results. Children who successfully delayed gratification to get the second marshmallow often used creative ways of distracting themselves. They turned away from the marshmallow, they sang songs, fiddled with their hands and feet, or invented games to pass the time. Such skills reduce the need for direct use of willpower. Follow-up research showed that those who were better at delaying gratification tended to do better in school and in social interactions more than a decade afterward.14 Many other studies have shown links between the broader category of self-regulation skills and achieving positive outcomes.15 The unpopularity of frugality may result in part from the focus on pure willpower, which in a consumption-oriented society may be exhausting over time. However, as the marshmallow experiments demonstrated, self-restraint skills include distraction skills, whose use is much less exhausting.
A different set of self-restraint skills involves making do with what one has—focusing on a larger goal and finding ways to achieve it without additional material consumption. Franklin’s creation of a lending library now seems an obvious move, but it was quite creative at the time. His use of a wheelbarrow and human power to move his paper stock enabled him to avoid the expense of a horse-drawn carriage. Examples from the twenty-first century include my replacing the battery on an older cell phone rather than buying a new phone, or my friend’s use of old bed frames as a trellis for her peas rather than buying a new trellis. Often, repurposing an object to serve another need—for example, using old bottles as a translucent building material—creatively addresses numerous goals.
The last kind of self-restraint skills I will mention are satiation skills, which typically involve accurate self-monitoring, a fine tuning one’s sense of enough, and finding the pleasure in becoming a person who stops consuming when approaching satiation. Franklin’s systematic self-evaluation served to put brakes on his pursuit of desire satisfaction and in effect strengthened his satiation skills. We know that some people habitually overindulge in food and drink because of the immediate pleasure it gives; they have relatively weak satiation skills. On the other end of the continuum are people who take great pleasure in self-denial; they are habitual ascetics. Ascetics rarely approach satiation and arguably live less fully as a result. People with strong satiation skills occupy the middle of this continuum. They pursue what they desire and live fully, but they have good brakes on their consumption.
Restrictive frugality’s emphasis on self-restraint evokes Plato’s image of our needing to pull hard on the reins of the steeds that represent the passions, but we have just seen that a number of the skills involve less willpower and more creativity. With such diverse skills, the work of curbing desire satisfaction need not be exhausting. A similar creativity is present in the next cluster of frugality skills—those in which consumption of market goods is restrained through the use of self-provisioning, repair, and reuse (SRR) skills. These skills involve self-restraint in the broadest sense: they reflect a tightening of the belt when it comes to material consumption. Thus, I lump them in restrictive frugality, but they do not reflect the direct use of willpower to avoid consumption. They serve as a bridge to constructive frugality.
The broad class of SRR skills is often emphasized in the simple-living movement, where people grow their own food, forage or hunt for wild foods, preserve foods for winter and save seeds for spring, build their dwellings, heat with wood, and fix older goods rather than buying new. The specific skills involved are too numerous to describe in any detail and too well known to require such detail. They are often described in ways that suggest they represent a version of the back-to-the-land movement in which people move out into the countryside to homestead on a small patch of land. Indeed, one historically important source for these skills is the Foxfire series of books, which gathered stories and practices of rural living in Appalachia and played an important role in guiding the 1960s and ’70s’ back-to-the-land movement. With the rise of urban gardens, home cooking, foraging in parks, and living in tiny houses, such skills now apply much more broadly. Kaplan and Blume’s urban homesteading book sketches many of these adaptations for urban frugal living.16
A common worry about developing SRR skills is that their use is time-consuming. It would be more convenient to just buy what we want. But other benefits arise from their use that more than offset the time demand. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Kimmerer writes eloquently about the knowledge and the joy that come from self-provisioning interpreted through her Native American heritage.17 Gardening connects us to the soil and teaches us the ways of plants. Gathering wild strawberries engenders appreciation for the gifts that nature bestows on us. Over time, we can learn how to integrate ourselves beneficially into our ecological communities and develop reciprocal relations with our more than human neighbors. The beauty and wisdom that lie therein lead us into the territory of constructive frugality.
We often associate SRR skills with increasing self-sufficiency. Instead of depending on complex supply chains to supply our food or professionals to repair our household goods, we learn how to rely more on ourselves for these necessities. But this picture is somewhat misleading, since few can master the wide range of skills necessary for individual self-sufficiency without sacrificing many of the advances of modern society. I know how to grow vegetables; my partner is skilled at making cheese and canning foods. I rely on a friend to help improve my composting. My neighbor across the street knows how to weld broken tools, and my brother can repair common machinery and fix electrical problems. We inevitably depend on a community of people who have different SRR skills, thus self-sufficiency is more easily approached at the community level than the individual level.
But can we realistically acquire enough of these skills? Many products like cars, cell phones, and computers are made in ways that render repairs so complex that only a professional can do the job, or so costly that buying new seems more efficient. Moreover, SRR skills are rarely part of standardized K–12 schooling.18 People who want to acquire such skills typically learn from family members or social networks, but in our increasingly postindustrial world the opportunities for learning many SRR skills appear to be declining. For those who cannot find community members to teach SRR skills, the internet provides a tremendous variety of sources that fill the gap, including YouTube repair videos, the giant Ifixit website (www.ifixit.com), and blogs on how to grow vegetables, hunt, and gather wild foods. The motivated can learn a great deal.
Box 3 summarizes the clusters of frugality skills we have surveyed so far and those associated with constructive frugality, to which we now turn.
Box 3. Frugality skills
Self-restraint skills
- Managing temptation and deferring gratification
- Making do
- Satiation skills—honing one’s sense of enough
Self-provisioning, repair, and reuse skills
- Growing food, hunting, and fishing
- Basic carpentry, plumbing, and mechanical repair skills
- Repurposing skills—finding new uses for old items
Constructive frugality skills
- Seeing the beauty in imperfection
- Finding social, spiritual, and cognitive fulfillment
- Touching the world lightly
Both self-restraint and SRR skillful habits are challenging to motivate when prudence does not require them and where material consumption is central to a good life. To more powerfully motivate cultivating frugality, we must turn to constructive frugality, which absorbs the practices associated with restrictive frugality into a life focused on pursuing social, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual good.
Reenvisioning Frugality
Simple-living movements, from Epicureans and Stoics to Buddhists and Christian monks, tend to be expressions of constructive frugality. Insofar as the Puritan and Quaker sources of frugality in early America aimed at glorifying God or on strengthening community relations, they too would primarily motivate frugality through a shift in focus to nonmaterial goods. The simple-living movements that have periodically appeared as a reaction to too much worldliness typically involve this approach to frugality. Bouckaert, Opdebeeck, and Zsolnai’s Frugality: Rebalancing Material and Spiritual Values in Economic Life contains numerous articles that highlight the benefits of constructive frugality in the current age.19 They analyze the impacts of the worldliness of consumer culture and recommend a rebalancing toward frugality both in business and in how we live. Juliet Schor argues that we should pursue reduced work hours, accompanied with shrinking incomes, and allocate more time to provisioning and sharing with neighbors. She sees this trend as a way of finding plenitude rather than decreasing our quality of life.20
Many of the skills associated with restrictive frugality are also central to constructive frugality. Being able to make do with what one already has is central to both; repurposing goods, repairing what is broken, creatively reusing waste, and sharing with others remain at the core of constructive frugality. But a distinct cluster of skills is highlighted by constructive frugality, including being good at finding beauty wherever one is, building social bonds and enjoying their fruits, and finding opportunities for growth where others find only travail. Epicurus is an excellent guide to some of the practices associated with constructive frugality. We learn to distinguish pleasures that are typically followed by pain from those that are not, and we pursue the latter. We habituate ourselves to a simple, nutritious diet. We pursue friendships and detach from worldly goods.21 While some techniques of self-restraint are still important here, they are not the focal skills, since one no longer craves that which once required restraint to avoid. We now look at three of these distinctive constructive frugality skills in more detail. The first is finding beauty in our daily lives.
Some experiences of beauty require significant expense—for example, traveling to the Swiss Alps, purchasing elaborate interior décor, or dining at a three-star Michelin restaurant. In the material abundance paradigm, such experiences set the standard for intense beauty, and only the wealthy have regular access to them. If, however, we broaden our repertoire of experiences that provide intense beauty, we find that many of these are virtually free. Moreover, as we learn to notice the beauty that is available without expense all around us, the pleasure it provides reduces our need to consume material goods. This is especially evident in the beauty that characterizes many of our natural and built environments.
Edward Abbey, the great environmental author, once said “there is beauty, heartbreaking beauty, everywhere.”22 He is musing about why he loves the desert so much, but he maintains that it is not just beauty, because one can find beauty in many natural and human settings, even in “the back alleys of Hoboken, New York City, Berlin … and Pittsburgh.” Abbey is not saying everything is beautiful. Without contrasting ugliness, finding beauty would be meaningless. He is also not just urging us to see the good—the beauty—in every place. This staple of positive psychology is too often interpreted as recommending an uncritical, Pollyanna-style approach to happiness, which Abbey eschews. Abbey is suggesting that we can learn how to find genuine beauty even in austere, flat, dusty deserts like the Pinacate in Mexico, and not just in their stunning sunsets and spring wildflowers. But what does this learning involve?
Most of us have learned how to appreciate culturally standard forms of beauty. Without effort, we see certain people as beautiful, we appreciate the brilliant colors of autumn leaves, and we hear the resonant power of certain chord sequences. But constructive frugality requires moving beyond these perceptions to experience a much broader range of beauty, such as the beauty in many older people, the beauty in city back alleys, and the beauty in struggling to master some sport. The skill of finding beauty where it is not obvious often involves learning about its history or its components. We may need to learn about its role in larger systems and the meanings that others give to it. Such knowledge enables us to see relationships that are not obvious. Terry Tempest Williams describes the threatened Utah prairie dog’s life in ways that help us to appreciate the beauty of the animal and the system it creates.23 Such knowledge helps us hone our ability to notice obscure details in a setting that reveals its beauty. A dissonant jazz piece may be heard as beautiful, but only if one knows what the musicians are attempting and notices the patterns they weave. It can take much practice to experience such patterns. Similar points can be made about the song of the robin.
Cultivating a broad sense of beauty also involves connecting what we notice to poignant emotions. Take the beauty of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, a painting of three customers sitting in a late-night diner whose glow illuminates the empty streets. Its beauty comes in part from the painting’s powerful evocation of loneliness. The loneliness is not itself beautiful, but the poignance of the painting is. What a painting can do, our own experiences of street scenes can also do. Abbey’s appreciation of the desert has some of this magic.
I have found tremendous joy in expanding my own appreciation of beauty on our farm. When chores call, it is so easy to quickly walk past spiderwebs glistening with dew, yet just pausing there for a minute reopens me to my surroundings. For years, I walked past the moths that settled next to our windows, without appreciating their stunning array of subtle colors. Now I photograph them and look them up. Buying a cheap set of watercolors and trying to paint landscapes on long winter evenings taught me to appreciate the magical complexity of clouds, which I do on a daily basis. Asking ourselves how to paint something is a surefire way to focus on its subtle patterns. With practice, I even learned to see the brief flashes of color in the cedar waxwings chasing each other over the pond. The beauty repertoire I have learned to expand is mostly in nature, but that has inspired me to find the beauty in other unusual places.
A second group of constructive frugality skills functions similarly to finding beauty but expands the kinds of satisfaction that we can experience with minimal material consumption in our daily lives. These skillful habits enable us to increase our social, spiritual, and cognitive fulfillment. If we improve our capacity to acquire fulfillment from social, spiritual, and cognitive dimensions of life, we tend to focus less energy on material consumption. Of course, such fulfillment often involves some material consumption, as would strengthening social bonds by inviting people to dinner, but because material goods are only means, not the ends of the activities, their importance is greatly reduced.
Habitually finding fulfillment in social, spiritual, and cognitive dimensions of life involves a broad range of skills. People typically excel at only one or two of these dimensions. The spiritually skillful often have learned how to find meaning in ordinary struggles that would otherwise be tedious and oppressive. They often know how to achieve equanimity amid strife through meditation. They know how to call forth joy in response to ordinary events and compassion for many forms of suffering. The socially skillful typically have the collaborative skills sketched in chapter 3, but they are also good at building friendships, making acquaintances feel valued, and organizing events that build community. Those skilled at finding fulfillment through cognitive endeavors such as learning a new language or a complex game, mastering ArcGIS or bird identification, typically have the curiosity skills discussed in chapter 3 and also research skills, memorization skills, and the skills of making fine distinctions. The more developed such skill sets are, the more likely one will be to find pleasure in using them. Such pleasure is the motivational engine for constructive frugality.
The third constructive frugality skill set is more general than those above and less familiar in the West. It is best described metaphorically as “touching the world lightly.” Like the material abundance orientation, the pursuit of intangible goods can be pursed in a heavy-handed fashion that emphasizes increasing acquisition. The aggressive consumption of nonmaterial goods—acquiring a vast quantity of “friends” or beautiful digital pictures—seems antithetical to the spirit of frugality. Also, the dominance of intangible goods can cut us off from the values of material existence, like the taste of an excellent craft beer or a well-cooked meal. The skills of touching the world lightly involve a habitual moderation that enables both saving and savoring things of value. They integrate both self-restraint skills and a balanced skillful engagement with intangible goods into a form of artful living, which is good in itself.24 Such skills include honing a keen sense of what is enough in each realm of life, acquiring what one needs without force, and using the least effort to secure the goods we desire.
If we look for traditions that seem to cultivate touching the world lightly, Taoism stands out. Frugality is one of the three treasures identified in the Tao Te Ching: “Given frugality, I can abound.”25 Its central position as a virtue seems clearly associated with Taoism’s pervasive theme that when one aligns one’s action with the Tao, benefits flow without effort. The character trait expressed by 儉 (jian, or frugality) is not just a means to some other end but rather a beautiful way of being in the world—an end in itself. To be sure, this skill of acting by touching the world lightly is said to create abundance, but that comes as a byproduct, not the goal. The goal expressed partly in terms of frugality is aligning one’s virtue with nature. Taoism’s central metaphor of acting like water involves not grasping for more than one needs and acting without heaviness—without exerting effort.
The skills involved in touching the world lightly enable a non-acquisitive, non-consumerist approach to financial, material, relational, aesthetic, and spiritual dimensions of life. They undergird the ability to enjoy without overindulging and the judgment to know in a context when to avoid temptation and when to savor something of value. They permit developing a taste for excellence in music, or food, or clothing, but while exercising such taste sparingly. Their creative use yields a motivationally powerful artful approach to life, which celebrates intangible goods while appreciating the value of material goods. If frugality is seen as involving the skills of touching the world lightly, it seems capable of being a central organizing trait for our lives amid the turbulence of our times.
Frugality and Flourishing
Although constructive frugality skills are more intuitively attractive than reducing material consumption through self-restraint, their appeal is likely to be insufficient for many embedded in the material abundance paradigm. If we can afford the convenience and pleasures associated with material consumption, why not pursue them? Emrys Westacott’s fine book The Wisdom of Frugality summarizes many reasons for cultivating frugality.26 I will focus on those reasons that are tightly linked to the age of climate change. Westacott notes that the distinction between prudential and moral reasons for being frugal is often very blurry. We often have many reasons for cultivating a character trait, and frugal skills easily serve multiple goals. Still, the distinction helps us to organize the case for frugality. The prudential reasons that begin our summary may convince the broadest range of people, though the moral reasons may make the most powerful case.
Perhaps the most salient prudential reason for cultivating frugality skills is that they enable us to reduce spending and thereby to save our funds to tide us over in hard times. The increasing turbulence we should expect in the age of climate change makes job losses, recessions, social crises, and natural disasters more common. Having some financial buffer increases our resilience and reduces economic anxiety. This reasoning may not induce the wealthy to cut consumption much, since they may already have adequate financial buffers, but it provides good reasons for most of us. Moreover, these skills also enable more saving for investment in new enterprises that may grow during reorganization phases of the adaptive cycle. During rapid growth phases of the adaptive cycle, lack of adequate investment can leave promising initiatives under-resourced, which increases their failure rate. Fath, Dean, and Katzmair call this “the poverty trap.” Increased saving would also reduce the economic anxiety that many Americans have about retiring comfortably and would reduce the emotional burden that often accompanies large student loans and credit card debts.27
The above financial buffer argument for frugality is complemented by the physical buffer that self-provisioning, reusing, and repurposing skills can provide in crises. As turbulence increases, supply chains are more likely to be disrupted, making it hard to acquire goods that meet basic needs, like food, transportation, heat, and clothing. Those who know how to make do or self-provision are more likely to meet their needs amid such disruptions. It helps if our needs are fairly simple in the first place.
Those whose constructive frugality involves cultivation of a wide range of social skills are likely to have social buffers that augment financial and physical buffers in crises. A more densely woven social fabric increases the general resilience of community members.28 It strengthens generalized trust, and thus we need not allocate as much time to protecting against those who might take advantage of us. The resilience one acquires from these buffers is not just valuable in severe crises: it provides peace of mind when disruptions threaten, which is all too common. We are more likely to flourish when our anxiety about meeting needs is low. Those living in poverty often cannot develop much financial buffer, but they often have strong extended families and social networks that offset some of their financial disadvantages.
Another prudential reason for cultivating frugality skills highlights the comparative impact of material abundance and constructive frugality on human happiness. Survey data indicate money and material goods provide limited increases in happiness. Between 1962 and 2018, US personal consumption spending increased from $2.15 trillion to $13.3 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars.29 The mean square footage of new single-family houses increased by 60 percent between 1973 and 2015.30 Our information-processing capacity as measured by operations per second doubled every eighteen months between 1971 and 2009.31 Our communications and transportation technologies have dramatically expanded our opportunities. We have a great deal more stuff and more opportunities on average, yet according to the US General Social Survey, our overall happiness has been roughly static across this period, and it has dropped somewhat since 2000.32
The doubtful connection between material abundance and well-being is reinforced by two other kinds of studies. A meta-analysis of 259 studies found a significant negative correlation between materialist values and well-being.33 Here, having materialist values involves focusing on acquiring money and possessions that indicate status, which is only one aspect of the material abundance orientation. This meta-analysis measured the values people have, not their actual possessions, so it does not show that having money and possessions is negatively correlated with well-being. But if valuing something highly tends to makes us less happy, then we should consider emphasizing other sources of value.
Another kind of study looks at correlations between level of income and measures of well-being. A number of studies have indicated that below incomes of approximately $75,000 per year, increased income is positively correlated with increases in happiness as measured by balance of positive and negative affect; but above that income level there is no such correlation. Struggling economically is tough on happiness, but getting a big raise once one is already doing well financially is not likely to increase happiness over the long run. My argument here is not that material abundance has no relation to human flourishing, but rather that in our context, there is considerable reason to doubt that doubling down on material abundance norms and skills will be the best way to increase flourishing in the United States and other developed nations.
By contrast, strong social relationships, the enjoyment of beauty, and spiritual goods seem to yield deeper and more long-lasting satisfaction. Perhaps the most robust finding in happiness research is that having high-quality social relations correlates with well-being.34 This applies both to close relationships and more distant friendships. People recover from illnesses faster if they have strong relationships; they suffer less loneliness, and they feel greater satisfaction with their lives. Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, puts the point succinctly: “The lesson that came from tens of thousands of pages of that research was that good relationships keep us happier and healthier.”35 Spiritual practice and finding beauty throughout our surroundings also seem to be strongly correlated with happiness. Today many find that engaging in spiritual practices and seeking beauty in nature lead fairly reliably to an inner peace, which Epicurus argued is the highest form of pleasure.
The happiness benefits of frugality, however, are not just a function of pursuing intangible goods. The more frugal we are, the fewer hours we need to work at a job, and the earlier we can retire. Sometimes a job is a joy, but most people would prefer more work/play balance. Working less enables us to spend more time pursuing other activities that enhance our lives and provides more time to practice self-provisioning, repair, and reuse skills. Juliet Schor makes the shift to working less a cornerstone of her low-consumption “plenitude” economy.36
The above prudential reasons for cultivating frugality tend to support our individual flourishing no matter what anyone else does. The following moral reasons are most powerful if they influence the actions of many people, since they focus on the environmental and social impacts of material consumption. By reducing our material consumption, we decrease our contribution to the environmental degradation associated with creating and disposing of physical products. We also reduce our contribution to consumption injustices resulting from economic inequality.
Most environmentalists have long ago internalized the IPAT formula—that negative environmental impact (I) is a function of population (P), affluence or consumption (A), and technology (T), which can mitigate or accelerate negative impact. Having just one child (or none) is one way to reduce impact, in part by reducing future consumption.37 We can use technologies that reduce impact (e.g., solar panels and electric vehicles). But one of the most direct ways to reduce impact for people in relative wealthy countries is to reduce consumption and/or to shift to less impactful consumption. A growing “conscious consumption” movement is shifting product marketing and presumably business practices, but this does not deal with the root problem of overconsumption. As John Ehrenfeld puts the point, “Most of what businesses are now doing in the name of sustainability is really focused on reducing the unsustainability of a flawed economic development system that is increasingly based upon an addiction to commodified, material consumption.”38
Avoiding unnecessary consumption altogether has a greater positive effect on the environment. It may have some short-term negative impacts on economic and social dimensions of sustainability if practiced widely, but the economy will adjust.39 If we ought to protect the environment, then we should cultivate frugality skills that support reduced material consumption. Many people believe we have obligations to leave enough habitat for other species to flourish. For them, the habitat destruction and biodiversity decline resulting from our consumption habits provide a powerful reason for cultivating frugality skills.
Even those who are skeptical about obligations to protect the environment should be concerned about the unfairness of consumption habits in wealthy nations. Consumption levels in the US could not be exported to developing nations without rapidly speeding environmental degradation and immediately threatening the welfare of a large portion of the human population. The ethics of just consumption deserves more discussion; the interested reader may wish to start with works by Crocker and Linden; Singer, Barnett, and Cafaro; and Newholm.40 Those who want to look at just basic information on the topic can consult the University of Michigan fact sheet on the per capita US environmental footprint looking at food, energy, water, material use, and greenhouse gases. It estimates that if the current global human population lived like Americans, our environmental footprint would be approximately five earths.41 There is room for considerable difference of opinion about what global justice requires regarding consumption, but it is hard to find a plausible account of justice that permits the current distribution of consumption.
These moral arguments are commonly understood as based on principles that we should avoid causing unnecessary harms to others. But we know that reducing our individual consumption does very little to reduce harm. From a consequentialist point of view, it is easy to rationalize a bit more consumption because its impact will be negligible. For example, many think they ought to buy only fair trade, shade-grown coffee. But if just a few of us purchase accordingly, our actions will not affect coffee-growing practices. However, we can each serve as a model for our friends, family, and acquaintances (flawed models, to be sure). But if enough others cultivate their own version of frugality virtues, then the impact of frugality magnifies, and our culture becomes more sustainable. While we can each contribute a little to actualizing this goal, we need not depend on its being reached for the moral arguments to serve as powerful motivators.
Given the combined reasons for cultivating frugality and the increased attractiveness of constructive frugality, we might expect that frugality skills would be on the rise, especially among young people who are highly concerned about our approaching planetary boundaries. Yet, despite some pockets of frugality enthusiasm, overall material consumption levels have not retreated. I suspect that the primary barrier to serious cultivation of frugality is the widespread belief that technological advances will enable increasing material consumption for all.
Technological Fantasy?
Technology has substantially increased our ability to live within our planetary boundaries, so why suppose that will not continue into the foreseeable future? Andrew McAfee argues that technology is currently enabling us to continually reduce our impact on the planet, in effect enabling us to get more goods from fewer materials; he thinks that technology and capitalism are the main drivers of this progress, which he thinks will continue.42 To justify shifting our emphasis to frugality skills, we must have good reasons for thinking that purely technological solutions for sustainability challenges are likely to be a fantasy. In short compass, my reason is that the power, scale, and speed of technological fixes to global problems are likely to have unintended side effects that destabilize other aspects of the socio-ecological systems on which we depend. As we fix one problem, we create another very soon and on a scale that is equally problematic.
We know that even the most beneficial of our technologies have negative side effects. Indeed, it is hard to imagine implementing any technological solution without incurring risks. Take the example of medical technologies, most of which have strong benefits. With drugs and medical procedures, we are told about potential negative side effects (admittedly often in fine print). These are foreseeable and quantifiable, but many longer-term systemic risks are not easily anticipated or quantified until a problem surfaces. We learn that trace amounts of medications can be found in our post-treatment drinking water, creating other potential health risks, or that the ease of treating mental health issues with pills has led to overprescription and lack of development of alternative treatment approaches.
Still other risks come from the long-term results of the technology achieving its intended goals. As we prolong people’s lives, we increase population pressure on the environment, and as birth control becomes more available, we shift toward an aging population, which creates long-term economic risks. Other systemic risks come from the accumulation of power in medical and pharmaceutical companies, whose interests sometimes diverge from those of the populations they serve, as in the case of the OxyContin addiction epidemic. And then there are risks that come from shifting our cultural patterns of interacting with others and the natural world, which potentially impoverishes our lives. Arguably, the medicalization of death has shifted our relation to the dying and reduced the likelihood of having a “good” death surrounded by family. This incomplete sketch of systemic risks of drugs and other medical advances illustrates why even the most beneficial technologies typically create a host of problems that demand further technological development, leading to one version of the technological treadmill.43 Many technologies are less clearly beneficial but still create a cascade of problematic systemic impacts.
The standard response to this kind of argument is that when negative side effects emerge, the free market will reward those who mitigate the negative effects. The incentives for investing in the innovations that address these side effects are high, so solutions arise fairly quickly. But this typically works only with a subset of problems, those that have a specifiable solution and that arise at a scale, speed, and level of complexity that can be addressed by current institutions. It rarely works with wicked problems, as explained in chapter 1. As our technologies become more powerful and their adoption is rapid and globalized, their negative side effects tend to become wicked problems that can only be managed through negotiated agreements and cultural shifts even when accompanied by further technological development.
The problem of climate change provides a clear case in point. On small scales, coal and natural gas used by some early cultures as energy sources caused few intractable problems. After the Industrial Revolution we needed much more energy, which was easily supplied by fossil fuels that had high energy intensity and were cost-effective to acquire. As the by-products of fossil fuel burning became a pollution problem, the development of pollution-control technologies like scrubbers in smokestacks and catalytic converters on cars helped address these problems (though because of policy changes, not just free-market incentives). This enabled greater use of fossil fuels with fewer immediately obvious negative side effects.
We made massive investments in infrastructure supporting fossil fuel use, such as coal-powered electric plants, our highway system, our aviation system, and a plethora of gas-powered tools. This tended to lock us into a fossil fuel energy system. The levels of twentieth-century CO2 emissions began to acidify our oceans and to warm the earth. When it became widely appreciated that CO2 emissions were increasing rapidly, our infrastructure commitments, the power of the oil and coal lobby, and skepticism about governmental regulation made it politically difficult to address the issues. Climate change is a paradigmatic wicked problem. Renewable energy and electric transportation are often touted as the new technological fix, but the speed and scale of implementation have been inadequate to the need to keep average temperature increases below 1.5° Celsius. We would need a great deal of individual behavior change, economic support, and enforceable global agreements to supplement our renewable technology development. The free market will not do the job.44
Moreover, massive shifts to renewable energy raise a host of new questions about potential negative side effects. Wind and solar energy are intermittent; we need either energy storage or a supplementary energy to meet demand. Can we store enough renewable energy in battery systems to provide energy when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine? Will the creation and disposal of huge battery systems lead to other environmental or health issues? Will we need new investments in nuclear energy, which has an intractable nuclear waste problem? Does the increased mining of zinc, copper, lead, and lithium necessary to create these technological fixes actually expand our use of energy, requiring even more renewable system development? Michael Moore’s controversial 2020 film, Planet of the Humans, explores some of these questions. Many have criticized details in the film, but his point remains that it is unlikely there is a renewable-energy technological fix for climate change unless it is conjoined with massive lifestyle changes. For similar reasons, carbon capture and storage at the requisite scale is likely to create other wicked problems that require culture change, not just more technology.
For climate change and other large-scale global problems, technological changes are certainly important, but they are insufficient. More importantly, the scales at which they must be used create social problems that cannot be solved technologically. The green revolution in agriculture, the use of computers to increase efficiency in the schools, and many other examples confirm this general point. If we assume that new technologies will solve our problems, we are unlikely to undertake the more arduous task of shifting who we are as a people. And as each of us tries to navigate the challenges of our times, we cannot wait for the next technological innovation to figure out how to flourish amid the turbulence. Frugality skills will be highly valuable no matter what technologies emerge.
A Frugality Journey
What would it look like for us to buck the current norms and become frugal activists? My own story provides one possible answer and a few lessons. Early on, necessity played little role in my frugality journey. I was born into relative privilege, in the suburbs of New York City. My parents, who had been children during the Depression, were fairly frugal, but like so many in my generation, I rebelled against them, and especially against their focus on long work hours and deferred gratification. As a teenager, I was expected to find summer jobs like mowing lawns and painting houses, but I strongly preferred to work as little as possible. Walking in the local woods became my favorite form of free entertainment. My small circle of friends reinforced early skills of making do and creating our own fun.
In college, I fell in love with philosophy and found that the pursuit of wisdom required few resources other than some used books. My enjoyment of cognitive goods blossomed. I cared little that career paths for philosophy majors were few and underpaid—no doubt another symptom of my privilege. Much to my father’s dismay I bypassed the law school that had accepted me, and instead pursued a PhD. Frugality was a necessity in graduate school. There I began to strengthen the self-restraint skills that would support the long slog toward a tenured position. Finally, I had a strong reason to defer gratification.
As luck would have it, my grandparents had a sheep farm in upstate New York, which I had enjoyed as a child. During graduate school, some friends and I built a cabin there. I reveled in learning how to work with my hands. Local farmers helped us and taught us a great deal, as did my great uncle, who had been a boat builder. We grew much of our food, cooked over an open fire, and explored the landscape. I began to develop the skills of finding beauty in my surroundings and building supportive relationships with neighbors. At first, this was a diversion from graduate school; later it became a way of life. My motivation for cultivating these skills was primarily prudential.
I had been very shy growing up. I felt most at ease in nature and grew to love the outdoors. The environmental movement influenced me in college, but I did not become an environmentalist until later, during my first teaching job in rural North Carolina. There I was surrounded by cotton fields that were defoliated every fall during harvest. A low-level radioactive waste site was slated for development in our county, which we successfully fought against. I started teaching environmental ethics, which was transformative for many of my students and for me. I began to emphasize the moral arguments for reducing material consumption in justifying my frugal behavior and to craft a personal narrative that integrated restrictive-frugality skills with the social, aesthetic, and spiritual skills I had been developing. This narrative played an important role in reinforcing frugality habits when I started to have some discretionary income to spend. Although my starting salary for my first full-time teaching position was only $13,000 ($37,240 in current dollars), the habits honed in graduate school made that more than enough for living comfortably.
The temptations to live in accord with the dominant material abundance norms grew, however, as I advanced in my career and had a child. My extended family embodied these norms, and necessity no longer required that I avoid them. Why deprive myself of consumption pleasures that I can afford? This question has been a constant companion over the last thirty years. My answer has been: because morality requires decreasing environmental impact and promoting consumption justice, and because my frugality skills have become increasingly central to who I am.
Several lessons emerge from the story so far. Typically, mixed motivations, fortuitous coincidences, and indirect pathways contribute to cultivating frugality skillful habits when necessity does not demand them. We often practice relevant skills without focusing on their link to frugality. The same point applies to other clusters of skillful habits we have explored. To weld them into a character trait, however, we also need to develop a personal narrative that synthesizes habits acquired by happenstance into our self-image. This kind of narrative reinforces the process of refining the skills and deepens our motivations for applying them.
In mid-career, I moved back to upstate New York to live on my grandparents’ farm and teach at nearby Green Mountain College. I soon became dean and then provost there and had the responsibility to try to envision and enact a sustainability-themed liberal arts education on a shoestring budget. Now frugality emerged as an institution-level priority, but the tradeoffs with investment in people and sustainability innovations became much more salient. Self-restraint no longer answered the key questions, since the puzzles were about investment and allocation strategies. The kinds of judgment involved in advanced frugality skills became crucial. Penny-pinching in the wrong places was as bad as extravagance.
At the same time, I had more discretionary income than I ever expected to have. Almost worse, the time constraints of my administrative roles made my self-provisioning and making-do habits seem questionable. I did spend and consume more, especially in the social networking and traveling that came with the job. Was I slowly abandoning frugality, or adapting it to new circumstances? The puzzles about what frugality requires became highly salient. I began to adjust my judgments about various balances involved in touching the world lightly—for instance, the balances between savoring material consumption and pursuing intangible goods, between saving time and saving money, and between deferring gratification and enjoying the pleasures of the present.
Of course, the tensions persisted, and the danger of self-deception seemed ubiquitous. For example, as I presented a frugality paper in Los Angeles, I wondered aloud whether the expenses of travel to the conference and a nice dinner afterward with friends violated the norms of frugality. If we say that such forms of luxury consumption are compatible with frugality, then it is not clear why buying a small yacht and a personal jet are not frugal purchases for a rich person. The kind of consumerism that frugality was supposed to counteract now seemed potentially compatible with it.
I did go out to dinner with friends after that talk, when I could have bought some locally produced apples and cheese for a light meal. My friends would not have enjoyed a picnic, especially as there was no place to have it. I could afford the meal and would not seek college reimbursement. I weighed these elements and many others, not in some complex calculation, but as a set of improvisations on the theme of touching the world lightly.
The lesson that this part of the story conveys is that judgments about how to express frugality in a context are often complex and debatable, especially where they articulate a balance between appreciating some material good and emphasizing frugality. This balance involves the binocular vision we explored in prior chapters. Such judgments require weighing the impacts of different actions in an imaginative process to see which best embodies touching the world lightly in that context. Steve Fesmire emphasizes this role of imagination when he likens moral decision-making to jazz.45 The process is highly responsive to the context of decision-making. It is a social activity, involving empathetic skills to envision how others will interact with a riff. It requires creative improvising and adjusting to the reactions. But of course, it is not just impromptu experimentation. It is based in a refined set of habits developed over time that enable one to harmonize the disparate factors in a social context to create an elegant solution for touching the world lightly. Here we do not usually find a single correct view of the demands of frugality, but only better and worse interpretations.
Throughout my time at Green Mountain, I continued to practice most of the self-provisioning skills suited to my region. I cut wood for heat and grew all the vegetables and meat that we ate at home. I invested in solar panels that covered all household electricity needs. Much of my entertainment came from friendships, forays into the surrounding farmland, and occasional camping trips. In semiretirement, I have more time and less income, so the delicate balances have shifted. As noted, I appreciate more beauty on a daily basis, but I am also more inclined to irrationally hoard old shoes and duct-taped work gloves. I spend more time learning how to fix things that I should probably send to an expert. I must be vigilant to refine my judgments about the limits of reasonable frugality. My narrative attempts to integrate the various skillful habits of frugality and make such judgments easier, but it certainly has not eliminated judgment errors. They are inevitable. Skillful habits must evolve as circumstances change.
Our personal narratives reveal how we attempt to resolve the tensions between our various enterprises and the skillful habits that enable them. They highlight questions we struggle with, and they reinforce development of the skills needed to achieve our goals. Of course, they can be flights of fantasy, detached from reality and laden with self-deception. Or they can be well grounded and highly salient stories of who we really are. If our narratives are to reinforce the skillful habits we need, they must be brutally honest and rooted in our best understanding of the systems within which we operate.
We can encourage that honesty by creating practices that regularly remind us to focus on evaluating how well we are living up to our narrative. Ben Franklin tracked in a small book each time he failed to live up to the virtues he was trying to cultivate.46 At the end of each day, he would survey his activities and note any faults he observed on the page designated for the virtue in question. In this way over time, he could assess his progress in eliminating faults and perfecting his virtues. Sonia Sotomayor always asked herself two questions before going to bed: “What have I learned today? What have I done for others?”47 In reflecting on her answers, she kept her focus on continuous learning and on helping others. Some people put notes on their refrigerators; others rehearse quotations that evoke a habit. We need practices that stimulate the reflective skills discussed in chapter 3.
To root our narratives in the context in which our lives play out, we need to emphasize the development of our systems-thinking skills, which are the subject of the next chapter.