In Cheap We Trust

As part of my ongoing effort to read every book about frugality and simplicity in the English language, I recently finished Lauren Weber’s In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue. This is definitely on the intellectual side of the spectrum, and well worth it for anyone who wants a comprehensive of American frugality (history of, attitudes toward) as well as an overview of the ongoing arguments on the subject.

The book starts out as a history of American attitudes toward thrift, which has the strongest of pedigrees, starting as it does with Ben Franklin, founding tightwad. Franklin's attitude, of course, was that frugality is the way to wealth, and strains of this come through American history, through to Dave Ramsey today who basically says the same thing. Other historical highlights include the 19^th century “world’s greatest miser,” Hattie Green, who supposedly allowed her son’s leg to be amputated rather than take anywhere but the free medical clinic, and the “School Savings Bank” movement of the early 20^th century.

Weber also traces the transition a consumption-based economy and the resultant overturning of thrift as an American value, as in this quote from the self-help book Mrs. Consumer (1929):

There isn't the slightest reason in the world...why, for instance, bread crusts and left-over portions of breadloaves should be on the conscience of Mrs. Consider because she doesn't make a bread pudding or French toast out of them as foreign housewives do. Or hash out of yesterdays roast beef. Or dust cloths out of old undergarments,; or pantaloons for son out of father's cast off suits – and so on ad infinitum.”

Which, Weber points out, was “a 180-degree reversal from the official dogmas that had dominated advice to women a hundred years earlier.” And that is basically the tension that has been evidenced in American life since then – the tension between the Franklin “savings leads to wealth” and the “don’t worry be happy” invitations of businesses and the consumer press.

The final few chapters are more think pieces about various issues that are raised by a frugal attitude, such as John Maynard Keynes’ famous “paradox of thrift.” Short version: Keynes famously said that personal savings, while admirable on an individual level, were actually counter to recovery from the Depression, because economic growth depended on consumer spending. Weber points out that money for investing has to come from somewhere, and usually historically it came from personal savings; recently it’s come more from borrowing – on the individual level from loose credit, and on the governmental level from foreign countries, in either case an unsustainable model in the long run.

She also devotes a chapter to the question of whether frugality is some kind of mental illness, an anal retentiveness or guilt that evidences an inability to enjoy life. She points out that some research shows that frugal people may actually be more mentally healthy than their spendthrift peers, showing better self-control in other areas as well.

A topic of particular interest to this blog is chapter 4, “Cheap Jews and Thrifty Chinese,” which traces the stereotype of hyper-frugality that has followed these two populations in America. Jews, of course, also had the stereotype of the avaricious banker to contend with, which was supported by Henry Ford in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent in the 1920s, as well as the clueless-social climber stereotype which was evidenced (although Weber doesn’t mention it) in the Great Gatsby. Weber:

The character of the obsequious and avaricious Jew, like all stereotypes, was woefully exaggerated and largely untrue. It required the gross flattening out of reality – a reality in which many Jews struggled, worded hard to gain a modest hold on success, and generally lived unassuming, respectable lives.

Every synagogue in the Midwest has a dozen people in it whose grandparents were in retail in some small town and were likely the only Jews in that town. So that was how the townspeople experienced Jews, but by and large these were honest, hardworking people trying to make their way in America, which they did fabulously successfully, as evidenced by the doctors and lawyers their children have become.

All in all I recommend this book, for its historical overview, for its intellectual depth, and for taking seriously the urge not to splurge. One final quote:

Just as Americans imagined until recently that we inhabited a world of unlimited credit, so we have also been enjoying a sense of entitlement and false confidence about the natural resources that support and sustain us. The United Nations recognized this a while back; its 1992 report “Agenda 21” cautioned that “the major cause of the continued deterioration of the global environment is the unsustainable pattern of consumption and production, particularly in industrialized countries.” That’s why cheapness – buying less, blocking out the message that spending equals happiness or patriotism – can help us solve not just the economic insecurity of our time, but the environmental insecurity as well.

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Book Review: Pedaling Revolution

I just finished Jeff Mapes' Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities, and I want to post a brief review before I have to bring it back to the library.

Mapes is a political reporter at the Oregonian, which means he lives in Portland, about the most bike-friendly city in the US. The book is about the growth of bicyclists as an organized political force over the past, say, 30 years; the benefits of cycling for a city; how various cities (Portland, Davis, CA and New York (!)) have planned so as to make themselves more amenable to cyclists, and chapters on the safety concerns and health benefits of cycling.

One of the early chapters is dedicated to a visit to Amsterdam, considered the mecca for cyclists. European cities have not always been as bike-friendly as they are now; making them so has taken a combination of social contract and government encouragement and support (read: investment). The basic difference between European and American cities when it comes to cycling is that European drivers (and policymakers) accept that bikes have a right to be on the road, and that it is the car's responsibility to be careful of them. In America, most drivers - if they think about cyclists at all - consider them a nuisance at best. The attitude of our society to the biker's right to the road is exemplified when one thinks of bikers killed by motorists and the generally light consequences (to the motorist) that result. In Europe, if a motorists hits a biker, it's a big deal. Here, it's considered that the biker getting what he* more or less deserved.

*American cyclists are likely to be male; in Europe the ridership is more gender-balanced, primarily due to increased safety

The underlying assumption of Mapes and the scholars, activists, and cyclists he speaks to is that there is strength in numbers, meaning that the more cyclists there are in any given city the safer cycling will be - cars will become accustomed to looking out for them, and the city will make the necessary accommodations in planning.

Of course, the easiest thing a city can do to accommodate cyclists is painting lines on the street and inculcating a "share the road" ethos. In some cases where the streets are too busy for that, other options include a cycletrack, which is basically a separated cycle track set off from the road, sometimes between parked cars and the curb. Some cities put their roads on what are called "road diets," taking away lanes to make room for bikers and making the traffic calm down.

As you will read in depth on my mate John's vital blog Cycling in Wichita, most of the biking accommodations in Wichita are recreational, i.e., bike paths that go twirly twirl twirl and don' t you get you from one place to the other very fast at all. If you try to use bikes for travel you find pretty quick that most of the arterials are not where you want to be on a bike. 40 mph, two lanes right up to the curb.

There are some roads which could serve as bike routes with little loss to the convenience of motorists; I think of 1st Street on the east side going downtown. Some other roads would need to go on a diet to be useful, such as Douglas between Rock and the entrance to Eastborough, which is something of a miniature race course.

Which leads to the question of why a city like Wichita should make any accommodations for a mode of transportation which probably accounts for less than 1% of the travel in town. Shouldn't transportation policy be centered around the kind of transportation that most people want to use?

Well, there are a couple of things to say about that. First, surveys consistently show that more people would ride bikes if they were safer and more convenient to use. And as I said before, more is more, and the more people we have riding bikes the more people will see it as a reasonable option and will join them. And this is a topic that I plan to spend some more time on in the next couple of days in another context, but cycling has so many health benefits, as well as benefits to the livability of a city, pollution amelioration, etc., well, it just makes a lot of sense for some of the copious amounts of money the city, county and state spend on road construction and spend, say 2 or 3% of that on improving bike infrastructure.

The final chapter in Mapes' book is about getting children to bike. Let me throw in a quote:

A government travel study in 1969 found that 87 percent of all kids who lived within a mile of school walked or biked. ... That changed over the ensuing decades as traffic become more intense, parents became more fearful, the neighborhood school became less common, and two- and three-car households became ubiquitous. By 2001, only about 15 percent of kids were getting to school under their own power. And... as few as one-third of students who lived within a mile of school walked or biked.

He mentions how traffic patterns can be particularly intense right around schools, and that nearly half of students who are hit by a car on their way to school are hit by people driving other kids there too.

I know all this is true for us. Take a look at this, the location of my kids' elementary school:

Webb is a busy arterial and, just to the south of this picture, Central is one as well. There are hundreds of cars and dozens of buses going in and out every day. We live 1.8 miles away, and I think my wife may have walked it once or twice, but I never have. And there are no bike racks at the school.

As Mapes points out, the people who are the most ardent bicyclists, and the most ardent bike advocates, tend to be those who have good memories of biking when they were younger. We don't have much of that, these days. And that doesn't give one a lot of hope that the kids who never biked will grow up to be the ones who change the paradigm about transport in this city or this country. Something needs to be done about that, before it's too late.

And a good first step is reading Mapes' book!