"Slowly, he attracted followers, like-minded individuals interested in living sustainably, outside traditional supports, who were captivated by his thrifty ways and homesteading solution..."

"... and by the lovely short videos he posted: of desert cottontails eating off his mother’s Limoges plates; of dung beetles rolling a cow patty like a stone; of bees drinking from a pan of water. Within a few years, nearly a million people had visited his blog — more recently, the number was well over four million — and he had a core group of 1,000 or so regulars who followed his daily struggles and small triumphs...."

I'm reading "John Wells, 64, Who Fled New York for the Solitude of the Desert, Dies/A fashion photographer, he built a do-it-yourself life on 40 lonely acres in West Texas, living like a modern-day Thoreau and telling millions of his experience on a blog" (NYT).

Is it good to see the word "blog" in an obituary? Yes. 

It's also good to see someone memorialized for his frugality: "[H]e sold his house for $600,000 to a family of five, winnowed his possessions down to what he could fit in a rented truck and set off to build a new life. He paid $8,000 in cash for his 40-acre parcel. His property taxes that first year were $86.... He started with a tiny shack, where he could live, and equipped it with a bunk bed, a galley kitchen and a desk...."

"Until now, arguments for limiting consumption have tended to come from the left rather than the right."

"They date back at least to the economist Thorstein Veblen, who, at the start of the twentieth century, wrote acidly about the 'conspicuous consumption' engaged in by grandees of the Gilded Age. More recently, a 'degrowth' movement has emerged, which aims to decrease consumption and to de-prioritize G.D.P. growth on the grounds that they are harmful to the environment and that, in any case, accumulating more 'stuff' doesn’t really increase the well-being of people.This argument depends on two concepts familiar to economists: the diminishing marginal utility of consumption, which is, roughly speaking, the notion that if you already own nineteen dolls, buying a twentieth won’t give you much pleasure, and competitive consumption, or the idea that many people are trapped in an endless cycle of trying to outshine their friends and neighbors with their purchases.... 'Trump, degrowther,' the leftist journalist Doug Henwood commented online last week.... 'What he is doing is fairly unprecedented: explicitly saying that he is willing to pay an economic price in terms of growth in order to protect something else that he thinks is valuable and important,' Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King’s College London who is the author of the 2024 book 'Growth: A History and a Reckoning' told me...."

Writes John Cassidy, in "Donald Trump Versus Barbie/Can the Administration retain public support for a trade policy that could force Americans to buy less stuff?" (The New Yorker).

Why don't the anti-consumption lefties embrace Trump? 

My first reaction to Trump's "Maybe the children will have 2 dolls instead of 30" was: "This reminds me of what those on the left used to say to us

The looming doom is creating main character energy.

I'm reading "Are You the Only One Who’s Broke? Or Is It ‘Money Dysmorphia’? The ‘boom boom’ aesthetic meets the gloom and doom of market turmoil" (NYT).

"Phone-eats-first type of food, whatever viral sweater is going around on TikTok, the new work bag," said Devin Walsh, 25, who lives in New York... listing the tempting purchases that flit across her Instagram, even, stubbornly, this past week.... [T]he draw toward prudence feels especially tricky for her generation because of the shared sense that they’re living under a cloud of incessant crisis.... "We’re more inclined to spend frivolously because of this looming main character energy of 'The world is going to end anyway,'" Ms. Walsh said....

In February, she splurged on hosting a Valentine’s Day party in her Hell’s Kitchen apartment, spending hundreds of dollars on heart-shaped sunglasses that she mounted to the wall to feel like a Sunglass Hut, a sink filled with alcohol and a new $150 heart-printed dress. “Was it a rational use of funds?” she said. “Maybe not.”...

Talk about the human phenomenon of plunging into irrational, extravagant pleasures in anticipation of swiftly arriving doom.

Bonus language topic: The word "doom" originally meant statute.

I created a new tag this morning and I noticed an old tag that I can never use anymore.

The new tag: Frugality. This morning's post about the "stingy challenge" in Chinese social media pushed me over the line. I went back into the archive and found 10 old posts that deserved the "frugality" tag — Remember the FIRE movement? Voluntary houselessness? "Financial Secrets of the Amish"? Remember when Scott Walker branded himself with Kohl's? Do you care about Sir Jeffery Amherst? Is Mr. Money Mustache still around? Remember me seeing "potential for resurrecting the old division-of-labor model in which one spouse earns a good income and the other contributes in kind, unpaid, saving many expenses and keeping the couple's tax-bracket low"? Want to know how frugality links the "Xi jacket" to the "Mao suit"? How Salon tried to make us hate Trump for his cheapness? It's all there, under the "frugality" tag.

The old tag: "Written strangely early in the morning." There's no earliness in the morning that can be strange anymore. I used to think it strange to put up the first post in the 4-o'clock hour, but now, it would only be strange if I put up the first post before midnight, and that wouldn't be "morning" yet — no "a.m." The last post in this once-important tag was January 23, 2022 — "Why Ayn Rand is trending on Twitter under the heading 'Sports.'" — published at 3:10 a.m. Yes, that seemed notably early, 3 years ago. But now, when I wake up, feeling refreshed after what seems like a long sleep, and I look at the iPhone hoping it's not too early — which wouldn't be strange at all — I'm pleased if I see it's at least 3 a.m. Yesterday, when I looked — ready to leap out of bed — it was only 12:35 a.m. There are so many old posts with that tag! Here's the first one, in my first year of blogging, 2004: "Did you see that the first post today has a 4:33 a.m. timestamp? And yesterday's was 5:02? My two-hour 8 a.m. class has completely transformed my biorhythms, apparently. I was already a morning person, but this is a bit eerie. At least the NYT is already here at that hour...." That was 20 years ago, back when "the NYT" referred to a folded paper concoction stuffed in a blue plastic bag.

"Cooking at home really saves lots of money. Guys, it just hit me that frugality can be the primary productive force."

"After losing my job, I barely ordered any deliveries, because I genuinely could no longer afford them. … For a month, I bought stuff online to cook at home. … Oh my gosh, I spent only 332.34 yuan [in one month]! What a money-saving genius I am!"

That's a translation of a social media post by Xue Yang, a 28-year-old woman in Shanghai, quoted in "Could you feed yourself on $70 a month? Chinese millennials are trying. The cost of living is weighing on consumers everywhere. But some Chinese, worried about making ends meet in a slowing economy, are taking this food-spending challenge" (WaPo). 

That's a free-access link, so you can see, among other things, many photos Xue Yang took of her food. And 332.34 yuan is only $46. The social media trend is to stay under 500 yuan for one person — $70.

The translated words "frugality can be the primary productive force" really do need some additional translation to be easily comprehensible in English. I believe what she means is what Ben Franklin said: "A penny saved is a penny earned." The best way to progress financially is to conserve as much of your earnings as you can as you go along.

Frugality can be interesting and even fun, and social media can help. Americans could benefit from copying this trend, and, in fact, I'm sure it's already happening. Yeah. I found it. Here's "How to Live Off 100 A Month for Food" on TikTok. You only have to watch a few of these to hit upon the most obvious tip: Prepare your own food at home using basic, wholesome ingredients.

I note that there's a health bonus in addition to the money saved. Somehow I'm hearing that observation in the voice of RFK Jr. 

"All in all... I prefer a campfire-roasted porcupine that I killed and butchered... slathered with highbush cranberry ketchup..."

"... foraged chickweed salad with mushrooms on the side, a hot cup of stinging nettle tea to wash it down and a handful of wild blueberries for dessert. Bugs, sticks, sand and assorted forest floor debris sometimes makes it into my vittles but... 'It’s clean dirt.'.... My toilet is a hollow cottonwood stump and I bathe with a kettle of hot creek water. Some places along the highway offer showers but they cost money and contribute to ecocide, so I clean my crotch in the creek occasionally. But personal hygiene is not a priority.... Instead of washing my clothing – layers come cheap from thrift shops – I air it out, hanging it on a tree branch for a snowstorm or two, then turn it inside out and put it back into rotation.....  My presence on this planet leaves little trace, which is how I feel it should be. While that’s pleasing to me, I also understand my withdrawal is meaningless in the grand scheme. The world needs systemic change. In my solitude and self-imposed isolation on the side of a mountain in an undisclosed location, I find it all mildly amusing."

From "Houseless in Alaska: why I opted for mountain views and porcupine dinners/Homeless implies a moral failure while being houseless – lacking a permanent three-dimensional structure – is less stress on the planet and on my brain." Just something I noticed in The Guardian this morning. It feels like something Brits want to read about America. And for some reason it makes me want to embed this video I happened to watch yesterday:



I can see that this is a whole genre. Women go on camera and list 50 things they don't buy anymore. I'm interested in frugality as an active avocation.

"How to Retire in Your 30s With $1 Million in the Bank/Fed up with their high-pressure jobs, some millennials are quitting and embracing the FIRE movement."

FIRE = financial independence, retire early. This is an idea I remember from the book "Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence," which was originally published in 1993. If I'd had that book in 1972 or even 1982, I'd have lived my life very differently.

The post title is the headline in the NYT, and I'm pleased to see that it does talk about the book:

One of the bibles of the FIRE movement, “Your Money or Your Life,” which teaches readers to reduce their spending and value time (or “life energy”) over material gain, was published in 1992.

But Vicki Robin, who wrote that financial guide with Joe Dominguez, said the FIRE crowd is a different breed of dropout than those in the ’90s. “Our aim was not just to have a whole bunch of people quit their jobs,” Ms. Robin said. “Our aim was to lower consumption to save the planet. We attracted longtime simple-living people, religious people, environmentalists.”

The FIRE adherents are, by contrast, “very numbers oriented, fascinated by the minutiae of taxes and accounting,” Ms. Robin said.

Millennials are more rational? That would make sense, given the depth of the bullshit that came from us Baby Boomers. I'm 67 and retired now, and I still think of what I'm doing in terms of (my own version of) hippiedom and revolution (even as I freely concede that's a lot of bullshit).

[M]uch of the conversation around FIRE, on Reddit message boards or blogs like Mr. Money Mustache, revolves around hacking one’s finances: strategies for increasing your savings rate to the hallowed 70 percent, tips for cheap travel through airline rewards cards...

Here's a tip: Don't travel.

... ways to save nickels and dimes at the grocery store.

Some practice “lean FIRE” (extreme frugality), others “fat FIRE” (maintaining a more typical standard of living while saving and investing), and still others “barista FIRE” (working part-time at Starbucks after retiring, for the company’s health insurance). To be “firing” is to slash one’s expenses to maximize saving while amassing income-generating investments sufficient to support oneself. To have “fired” is to have achieved that goal.

“A lot of people think you’re a new-age hippie,” said Mr. Jensen, who sold his four-bedroom, four-bathroom house, downsized to a more modest home and maxed-out retirement accounts while firing. “They can’t even wrap their minds around it.”... “People always assume there’s an external circumstance: ‘Oh, you must have received an inheritance,’” Mr. Jensen said. “We’ve just chosen to live far below our means. That itself is a radical idea.”...

"Your Money or Your Life" had the idea of becoming independent from paid work so you could pursue causes or art — some work that wouldn't pay a living. That made the book less hippie. The hippie idea that I think is still meaningful — and that I hear from Jensen — is freedom. Reclaim your time. Don't sell it so you can buy things. If you radically rethink what you need and what you want, you may want a lot more of your time and not very much more stuff.

[Taylor] Rieckens, who works in recruiting, was initially reluctant to give up her BMW and beachy life and the prestige that went with it, until she saw a retirement calculator that showed they could retire in 10 years if they adopted FIRE and moved, or when they are 90 if they continued their upscale lifestyle in Coronado....

“The whole retire early thing is unimportant to me. It’s more about gaining control of your time,” [Scott] Rieckens said. “If you dive into the definition of retirement, what you’re retiring from is mandatory labor. It’s not necessarily about piña coladas on the beach.”

Notice how the NYT promotes real estate transactions but mutes and almost erases the option of giving up the dream of travel.

A lot of these FIRE people — or at least the ones the NYT found — seem to be using their free time to blog — to blog about FIRE. Well, I'm all for blogging, but why, upon escaping bondage to working for money, are you blogging about your money?!

The article ends with the story of Jason Long, who retired at 38:

... lost all interest in talk of FIRE now that he had achieved it, feared a looming stock market crash, had nightmares that “I’m back at work and arguing with morons,” finished a marathon in a personal best sub-three hours, felt moments of social isolation, took a two-week road trip across the heartland...

Yeah, that's the right kind of travel.

... and went twice to the beach in Florida with his wife and watched their net reach its highest point, despite not working, which he attributed to “the passage of the tax cut for wealthy job creators like myself.”

Oh, and he started a blog....

The link to the blog doesn't work right now, presumably because of all the NYT clickers, but I hope it's not a blog about his finances!

He had been watching the movies from They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? a website that ranks what it calls the 1,000 greatest films. He’d watched 600 or so....

I hope it's a blog about movies. But I'm just showing my interests. I have never been interested in finance. If FIRE is about watching the stock market, it's just another bad job. I am interested in frugality, however. Here's another old book, one that's not mentioned in the NYT article... "The Tightwad Gazette." I read those "Tightwad Gazette" books when they came out. I read them for sheer entertainment and also for inspiration. It's so obvious that not spending money is more effective than making more money.

Perhaps this — mentioned in the NYT article — is the modern equivalent, "Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living." But don't buy that book. You can read their blog.

Wouldn't cheap + billionaire be the best combination?

Seen, just now, in a sidebar at Salon:



Of course, Salon wants to stoke its readers' loathing of Trump, but this one should backfire. It seems like the best combination for a political leader, because: 1. This person was able to acquire great wealth, and 2. He has systems in place to prevent waste, even in small things.

When it's not about Trump, the frugality of wealthy individuals is celebrated. Here's "The surprisingly frugal habits of 8 extremely wealthy people":

Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, still lives in the same home he bought for $31,500 in 1958....

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, drives a manual-transmission Volkswagen hatchback....

Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, still flies economy and often rides the bus....

Judy Faulkner, founder of Epic Systems... has had only two cars in the past 15 years and has lived with her husband in the same Madison, Wisconsin, suburb for nearly three decades.

Then there's "10 of the Richest Cheapskates of All Time" at Money Magazine begins:

Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor, is known for his frugality, living in the same unostentatious Omaha home he bought in the 1950s.... The Buffett diet includes five Cokes a day, as well as Cheetos and potato chips.

Sam Walton, the late billionaire co-founder of Wal-Mart, also lived comfortably, but without all the showy toys he could easily have afforded. “Why do I drive a pickup truck?” he asked in his autobiography. “What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?”

The article goes on to highlight actual stinginess, such as JFK — recipient of "a trust fund worth $170 million in today’s dollars" — allowing "his friends, flunkies, Secret Service agents, and even dates to pick up the tab wherever he went."

"Trump... is strangely handsome, well proportioned, puts you in mind of a sea captain..."

"... Alan Hale from 'Gilligan’s Island,' say, had Hale been slimmer, richer, more self-confident.... His trademark double-eye squint evokes that group of beanie-hatted street-tough Munchkin kids; you expect him to kick gruffly at an imaginary stone. In person, his autocratic streak is presentationally complicated by a Ralph Kramdenesque vulnerability. He’s a man who has just dropped a can opener into his wife’s freshly baked pie. He’s not about to start grovelling about it, and yet he’s sorry—but, come on, it was an accident. He’s sorry, he’s sorry, O.K., but do you expect him to say it? He’s a good guy. Anyway, he didn’t do it. Once, Jack Benny, whose character was known for frugality and selfishness, got a huge laugh by glancing down at the baseball he was supposed to be first-pitching, pocketing it, and walking off the field. Trump, similarly, knows how well we know him from TV. He is who he is. So sue me, O.K.?"

Writes George Saunders in a New Yorker piece titled "Who are all these Trump supporters?"

"No need for ironing, neat, stain resistant, and with a common touch... This has made the jacket a favorite informal attire for Chinese officialdom."

"The jacket has been loved by generations of leaders, because it is versatile and easygoing... The jacket look is lively and exudes vigor."

Quotes from Chinese media about the "Xi jacket" — the navy-blue, zippered windbreaker worn by President Xi Jinping of China, from a NYT article titled "China’s Leader Wears Many Hats, but Only One Jacket."

And here's a quote from an Australian professor, Louise Edwards, who, we're told, "has studied the political symbolism of clothes in China":

“It is sufficiently distinct from the worker ant conformity of the Mao suit but still invokes the same spirit as the Mao suit: frugality, practicality, proximity to the people.... He wears the windbreaker when he wants to show he is down to work.”

The jacket’s message, she said, is, “Running the country is my job, I labor at it, I am a political worker.”

In the summer, Xi just wears "a long-sleeved white shirt and dark trousers." According to the NYT, in what I would have thought as too potentially racist-seeming to print: "When accompanying officials follow suit, as they often do, they call to mind a rookery of emperor penguins."

"It’s this notion of this growing equality between husbands and wives having this paradoxical effect of growing inequality across households."

Said University of Wisconsin sociology professor Christine Schwartz, quoted in a NYT article titled "Marriage Equality Grows, and So Does Class Divide."

The headline confused me at first, because I'm used to the term "marriage equality" referring to same-sex marriage. Here, it means that men these days tend to marry women who work at jobs that are at an equivalent economic level. It's not so much the executive marrying the secretary and the doctor marrying the nurse anymore. Executives marry executives and doctors marry doctors — in opposite-sex marriages (and in same-sex marriages too, I suppose, but that's not what the article is about).

The "class divide" in the headline is prompting us to feel bad about male-female equality in marriage, because it means that in one couple 2 high salaries are added together and the next family is stuck pooling 2 low salaries. In the old system, you could have made 2 middling economic units out of these 4 individuals, and now you've got one rich-getting-richer couple and one poor-getting-poor couple. Whatever happened to the olden days when a man being rich was like a girl being pretty? The rich man found the most beautiful woman and the family income averaged down, more like that next family.

Now, we've got "assortative mating," in which "people marry others they enjoy spending time with, and that tends to be people like themselves."

The top-rated comment is:

Let's stop relying on "non-assortative" mating as a protection against inequality, and start encouraging women and men to seek financial independence instead. This means things like fair wage laws, better support of workers, reasonable childcare policies, parental leave for women and men, and even earlier down the road, more emphasis on education and employable skills. The days of Marriage as Career Path are declining fast and in my humble opinion, that's a very good thing.

I still see potential for resurrecting the old division-of-labor model in which one spouse earns a good income and the other contributes in kind, unpaid, saving many expenses and keeping the couple's tax-bracket low. If 2 individuals marry because they are a lot alike and enjoy spending time together, should they not maximize their time? All this frenetic 2-career activity, complicated by children who must be shuttled about to childcare, with evenings soaked up in housework — why are we living like that?

Here, please read this: "The Scold/Mr. Money Mustache’s retirement (sort of) plan." Why not put all your effort into making what you need and preserving it, with frugality, and reveling in the time of your life?

Mr. Money Mustache is the alias of a forty-one-year-old Canadian expatriate named Peter Adeney, who made or, more to the point, saved enough money in his twenties, working as a software engineer, to retire at age thirty. We’re not talking millions. More like tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, which he and his wife diligently salted away at a time of life when most people are piling on debt and living beyond their means. He calculated a way to make these early paychecks last using a strategy of sensible investment and a rigorous, idiosyncratic, but relatively agreeable frugality.

He is, by his own reckoning, a wealthy man, without want, but he and his wife, who have one child, spend an average of just twenty-four thousand dollars a year. Adeney is a kind of human optimization machine, the quintessence of that urge, which is stronger in some of us than in others, to elevate principle over appetite, and to seek out better, cheaper ways of doing things. He presents thrift as liberation rather than as deprivation. Living a certain way is his life’s work. “I’ve become irrationally dedicated to rational living,” he says.

"I think you’ll be pleased to know that it was a unanimous vote against using the Lord Jeff."

"I said to my staff, ‘We’re moving on here; the Lord Jeff is done.'"

Here's an article from the Amherst College website about Sir Jeffery Amherst, including the key sticking point:

Meanwhile, Native peoples west of the Alleghenies grew restive. Here, Amherst’s ignorance, scorn and frugality bred discontent. In particular, in an effort to cut costs, he severely reduced the distribution of presents to Native peoples, saying he would not engage in “purchasing the good behavior, either of Indians, or any others,” believing instead that “When Men of What race soever, behave ill they must be punished but not bribed.”

This attitude played a direct role in inciting a wave of attacks during the late spring of 1763 that Natives directed at British forts and colonial settlements along the colonies’ western frontiers. In a matter of weeks, British power west of the Alleghenies vanished, and Amherst found himself scrambling to find troops to stabilize the situation. In early July 1763, he advocated spreading blankets infected with smallpox among the Natives, a measure that his subordinate at Fort Pitt, Capt. Simeon Ecuyer, had already employed in late June on his own initiative. Historians debate the degree to which these actions promoted outbreaks of smallpox. The presence of a pre-existing infection at Fort Pitt strongly suggests that a smallpox epidemic had already broken out along the western frontiers of the British colonies. Still, by recommending such a course of action, Amherst and other British officers revealed their contempt for Native Americans and a willingness to promote genocide by spreading lethal diseases.

"In battle for authenticity, Scott Walker looks to Kohl's."

A CNN article about how Scott Walker has branded himself with a brand — the Wisconsin-based retailer Kohl's. CNN enumerates 4 reasons for Walker to use the Kohl's brand: 1. It signifies frugality, 2. He has a way to connect it to tax policy, 3. He can contrast himself to Hillary who probably shops at more expensive places, and 4. He can leverage easy jokes like saying "Is it from Kohl's?" when someone gives him something.

What I find weird is that CNN writes an entire article about how Walker has connected his name to Kohl's and seems to try to find everything possible to say about that but never got around to the fact that the name Kohl's has long been connected to a Democrat. Has everyone forgotten Herb Kohl already? It's his family's business and the source of all the money that allowed him to run as "Nobody's Senator But Yours":



Great slogan for a rich guy, no? It argued that he could care for us and connect with us precisely because he was wealthy, and he didn't need to get money from other people. And now, ironically, the always middle class Scott Walker is using Kohl's name to send the message that his lack of wealth connects him with us.

ADDED: WaPo has a similar article "Scott Walker stresses his discount attire and ‘regular guy’ credentials," and it also misses the Herb Kohl connection.

"How to save $400,000, raise 14 children and buy a $1.3 million farm."

"Financial secrets of the Amish."

It’s this incredible bone-deep thrift, which is not really stinginess. It’s a generous frugality. They will go to great lengths to re-use, re-cycle and re-purpose. They don’t do it to be green, they do it to be thrifty.

Here's the book: "Money Secrets of the Amish: Finding True Abundance in Simplicity, Sharing, and Saving."

You can flaunt or be ashamed of either profligate spending or frugality.

So why not feel good about whatever it is you're doing? Why not make a fun game out of all of our problems?