There is, it is true, a certain coldness about the word “frugality” that makes it off-putting.
It sounds mean and scraping, as if it were really just misery in disguise. In fact it is not so. It does not imply having less than one needs; it implies using no more than one needs.
It derives from the Latin word frux, meaning fruit (and by extension “profit” and “value”). The associated adjective “frugi” means “economical, useful, proper”.
There is really nothing mean and scraping about that. Frugality is not only a good thing in lean times, but arguably for all times.
The great philosopher of frugality is Dr Johnson; he described it as “the daughter of prudence, the sister of temperance and the parent of liberty” — liberty here meaning financial independence.
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“Without frugality none can be rich,” he said, “and with it few would be poor.” Today he would add that if humanity had always been frugal the world would not now be groaning under the devastations of excess.
For decades, the rich West has lived very unfrugally. We eat, drink and travel far more than we need, and therefore spend far more than we have. Business and governments have encouraged everyone to do this, in the relentless pursuit of frugality’s opposite, so-called “growth”.
The scramble to revive the economy is a scramble to return it to its unfrugal ways. Can that be a good thing in the face of debt mountains and climate change?
Between them these problems might succeed in teaching us that frugality is not just for (this) Christmas after all.
A. C. Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London