Mennonite Weekly Review

In Cheap We Trust by Lauren Weber is a treatise on Americans’ proclivity to spend. Raised by a father who used tea bags 12 times and never turned the heat in their New England home higher than 50 degrees, Weber inherited his frugal outlook on life.

As an adult, she’s made her own laundry detergent, acquired new clothes by swapping or through occasional trips to Goodwill, and, at one point, pulled 20 percent of the food she ate in a week out of dumpsters.

That’s not, she knows, how most of us want to live — nor, she concedes, did she, for very long. But there is a lesson in that kind of denial, and therein lies Weber’s book.

Tracing our ideas about spending and saving through time, the book moves like a fugue whose themes cycle back on themselves. The dominant cycle is of war and peace: War begets hoarding; peace begets spending.

Tracing our financial proclivities through time, Weber charts a social history of the United States. A loosening of the collective purse strings ends up freeing women from the oppressive daily grind of home economy; no more making your own soap. When the consumer economy shifted, so did women’s attention — from what they had to make to get by, to what they could afford to buy. Suddenly women were double-entry bookkeepers, chief executives of the home — and, as we know, eventually outside it.

The American conversation about and relationship to money hasn’t changed much in the last 200 or more years. One prominent early-19th-century figure wrote that charity encourages the poor “to rely on gratuitous and undeserved assistance” and thereby “destroys their sense of dignity and self-respect, degrades them … and reduces them to … daily dependence.” Sounds a lot like an argument we heard during the welfare debates of the 1990s.

Just before the Depression, Weber writes, consumer debt nearly doubled as the new world of advertisements coaxed Americans into believing they could afford the kind of economic excess that had come to feel like the American dream. And throughout history, Weber finds examples of Americans told that to be a good citizen means to be a good consumer.

Weber’s not arguing for a spending freeze, but what she does want is the very thing her book proves we’re not so good at: a little moderation. “Too much indulgence,” she writes, “dulls our appreciation for those treats, those luxuries that punctuate the routines and boredoms of ordinary life.”