Leaving Thrift

Writing in The Wilson Quarterly, Daniel Akst looks at how we moved away from a national culture of thrift. An excerpt:

I’m talking here about real thrift, which for the most part involves not spending money. It’s not to be confused with the smug species of faux thrift that’s been in vogue for a while. You see it in shelter magazines and newspaper home sections, where rich people boast of furnishing their multimillion-dollar homes with zany castoffs and repurposed industrial objets. Or how about the children of one Joan Asher? The Wall Street Journal reports that after three had in­patient nose jobs—attended by a private nurse each time—the fourth had to suffer through an outpatient procedure after which she was nursed at home by mom.

Real thrift, the skeptical, calculating kind that can make a difference between being solvent and not, is not a matter of cut-rate rhinoplasty. The quotidian penny-pinching I’m talking about used to have a bad name indeed, in much the same way as “spinster” and “cardigan,” as we know very well from Jack Benny. Like his preening insistence that he was always 39—or that he was an accomplished violinist—Benny’s pretend niggardliness was funny but also geriatric, unsexy, and possibly even emasculating. Men do in fact make passes at women who wear glasses, but do women melt for men who hoard gelt?