The concept of simplicity is not all that simple. Frugality is usually understood to mean living within ones means, living on very view resources, savings being the opposite to the extravagant. But i began to realize there is more to frugality than that. Frugality is considered a virtue in many cultures but it is closely associated with Simple Living and there is many different meanings of Simple Living including living within ones means, but achieving selfsufficiency, being close to nature, and being independent, enjoying the Simple Pleasures of life rather than requiring extravagant expenditures. You are a penny pincher yourself; right . I am rather. My family will vouj for that. I think it is worthwhile spending money on something that you really enjoy that is really valuable for you. The crucial thing isnt to never spend money on any kind of luxury at all. It is important to be self aware about what you really value and what is really worth spending money on and what is something where you are wasting money or spending it because people tell you this is the kind of thing you ought to be doing or guying. You wrote and throughout your pook you talk about various philosophers, 2,000 years worth of folks telling us we need to be cheap. I embrace the word cheap. You write and say if frugality equals virtue, wisdom and happiness. Why are rejecting it . That is a question that has been puzzling philosophers since the beginning of socretes. The good life is the simple life according to many philosophers it seems. And sometimes people will go along with that and say yeah, yeah, yeah totally agree but they wont actually practice what they preach. A good example of that is the christian tradition. One of the Great Teachers of simplicity you could say is jesus but yet many christians from jesus time onwards have not really heeded his advise to give everything to the poor. One answer that is simple is hypocrisy but i dont think that is the main answer. I think it is complicated and different depending on different periods. In the past, i think one of the reasons people did actively seek wealth was simple wealth represented security and in a very insecure world it made a certain rational amount of sense. Most people would be born poor and die porn until recent time. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution and consumer age up to today is it different. People enjoy security and now the recreational and vocational opportunities are greater than they used to be for many people. Now it is not so much just sock away money for security sake but it is more, you know, live life to the full, be willing to spend money for great experiences. So interesting. Those of us, and i count the two of us because we are similar. I love to be cheap and totally embrace it. I tell people all the time i breast fed all three of my kids because the milk was free. My kids hate when i say that because they are all teenagers. But you know, should frugality be considered a moral virtue . I can get on my moral high ground when i see so much waste. Could we be considered those that are so wasteful . The book started with the question should we consider frugality a virtue and i started asking myself why did people initially consider frugality a virtue and one reason is it kept people away from temptation. If you lived a simple life attend to the basic necessities you will not be tempted into decadence and decadence luxury. Another reason, and i think this is still true to some extent, to live simply shows people that you have got the right kind of values. Very noticeable to me who people want to praise someone who could live in a much more extravagant way they point to the fact they are living simply. Warren buffet, one of the richest men in the world, it is pointed out he lives in the house he bought in 1958. T the recently appointed pope, he shoed the palace and lived in a simple apartment. People took that as evidence to embrace a simple lifestyle was a sure sign of a kind of virtue. Is that true . I think that there may be some truth in it. I can it does reflect a certain set of values. Someone who starts buying lots of private planes, rolls royces, you wonder what are their valuables. That is a reasonable question. There is a part in your book since we were talking about how we look at those who live frugally and admire them but we are in a period where we have elected someone who exlimpifies excess. You write in the book many people Pay Lip Service to the ideals of frugality and simplicity about you dont see many politicians trying to get elected on a platform of policy shaped by the principle that good life is a simple life. On the contrite politicians promise and governments strive to raise their societys level of production and consumption. The value of continual Economic Growth is a given then you write the majority of individuals everywhere seem to associate happiness more with extravagant than frugality. That made me think about donald trump. Why does he appeal to the massive people who are working and lower class . Hes the example of the excess. Why is that do you think . It is good question. First thing i would say is he doesnt appeal to the majority. The majority didnt vote for him. But there is no question that people do admire wealth and extravagance. There is nothing new about that. You go back to the poem of homer and you will see tremendous praise for those who all wealthy. In the bible, you see heavy duty praise for solomons wealth and in ancient times, sometimes wealth was associated with wisdom like in the case of solomon. So there is nothing knew about people admiring the rich and the powerful. Whether the extravagance is spent for the benefit of the public you could even praise it. In the case of solomon building a temple for the benefit of the people or for that matter aristotle one of the great greek philosophers praises magnificence of the virtue he doesnt mean vulgar excess but in the sense of generosity with ones health to the benefit of the people. Then, again, that could be considered a virtue. I think in the case of the recent election and donald trump, you would hear this argument that well, he is very rich and that shows he is a Good Business man and knows how to handle money. I think it is a bogus argument since he was born into wealth. Why do you think it is a bogus argument . I love what you said because you talk about contradiction of thinking frugal and moral but when we see so much wealth it could be a badthi bad thing. Why do we disapprove of extravagant spending . There is a story of people spending 30,000 on weddings which is crazy. I bought a used Wedding Dress and my family was agast. They were out raged. I said the person who wore it before he is not going to be at my wedding so what do i care . There is this huge contradict n contradiction. Why do we love the rich but disapprove when they spend crazy . Well, there are good reasons sometimes to disapprove when you know there are millions of people homeless, that there are millions of people going hungry, that there are millions of people in dire need of care, and then you see people spending money on absolute huge amounts of money on something that is completely triefvial. A special mansion for their dogs. That money could be alleviating peoples status. It is vulgar i think some of the kind of excess associated with donald trump is not pleasant to look at. It comes back to expression of values. People take the way people handle money as an expression of values. It is an odd thing people spend money on a singleday celebration rather than put a down payment on a house. To me that is not very rational. Some people say it is an expr s expression of true lufbl. I have heard students say how much you are willing to spend on your fiance is an idea of how much you love her. That is craze talk. It is one day, folks. One day. I mean hiring of the car i got my cousin to drive us. We didnt have any liquor. I said go home and drink our own alcohol. You will see the same thing with instance coming up to the christm Christmas Holidays and some parents spend huge amounts of money on presents and some feel how much they spend is a measure of how much they love them. It isnt. It is misguided value. You talked about the song money cant buy love except we spend so much time doing that; spending money to show people we love them. I dont understand. Lets stay on this whole idea of extravagance. You said there is two ways extravagance is harmful. You talk about the knock off effect and being wasteful. Tell me about what the knockoff effect is. The knockoff effect is all of us look around us in society and particularly we look up to our socioeconomic superiors, to the people who are higher in various pecking orders than us. To some extent, we immolate them and to some extent we sort of want to be like them. Lets take a concrete example in Higher Education which is the field i work in. You look at the hiring of University President s. Some of the top University President s are making several millions a year. That seems to be ridiculous because after all universities and colleges are nonprofits, same with hospitals. Some of the hospitals have ceos earning in the millions and that is just their salary. There is something kind of unhealthy about that. But then you ask why is it that say the heads of charities, medical facilities and colleges are making so much money and the answer is because they are basically saying look how much ceo in the private industry make and i am a ceo and should be getting a comparable income. That is the knockoff effect. We talked about the negatives. When is extravagance good . You point out two ways. Economic growth and i love the part about culture and you mention a city high husband and i just visited which is florence and you go see david and you are stunned at this and some people paying attention say how can you possibly spend all that money to go to florence but those are two positive things about extravagance. Growth and culture. Talk about that a little bit. Wiin the book, it is called e wisdom of frugality and as we started out saying i have my own cheap scape tendencies so i am inclined somewhat to favor frugality but the book isnt a book telling everyone they must change their lives. It is genuine attempt to reflect fairly and philosophically on the pros and cons of frugality and also luxury and extravagance. When you try to achieve a certain objectivity you have to recognize a huge amount of what we value in our civilization and the result of extravagance. The music of baytoven and others was somewhat because of this. The great art of the renaissance in cities like florence was financed by the extravagance of families and none of those would have wished they would have been different. We dont wish those aristocrats had not spent the money. We spend our own hard earned dollars going to see and admire it. So there is a powerful argument in favor of a certain kind of extravagance. And here we have today in new york and perhaps while i am here i will splash out and take in a show which for me would be a big expenditure but why not . It is one of the things that make new york interesting to visit. One of the positives of spending is Economic Growth and in your book you talk about patriotism and said we are not just constantly encouraged to by stuff on credit but they are coupled with lowinterest loans and are told at times to be a consumer is to be a good citizen and then you end on this. That consumerism is a form of patriotism. Should we be spend tthrist to save our country . What im doing there is quoting famous people, famously, george w. Bush saying get out there and send as a form of patriotism. It is a problem for me. I think the general problem is our modern economy runs on a lot of people getting and spending. We do expect and require a fairly high level of Economic Activity in order to keep the boat afloat so to speak. I think that is a really difficult and complicated problem. At the same time, i think that there are solutions and i think that the way things are organized at the moment there is plenty of money in the system, but the money isnt easily distributed and there is plenty of work that needs to be done and yet strangely many people are unemployed or underemployed. So i am pushing for what i consider to be a more Rational Society where if there is work to be done, which there certainly is, and the people who want to do it and there is Resources Available to pay those people cant we organize in such a way this can happen . I think we can and and i think it requires a change in government policy but also a require in a change in peoples way of thinking. In particular, people need to think again about how they view work at the moment we sort of value hard work, push the work ethic and we are proud of how hard we work and everyone says how are you doing and you say i am really busy and that is great. But i actually think it would be a more Rational Society if we could find a way to redistrubutte work so everyone worked less and fewer people underemployed or unemployed. This as a bit of a utopian vision in the sense it will not happen any time soon but there is nothing wrong with a utopian vision where the purpose is to say stop, think again about how we are doing everything, and whether we could not organize things in a more rational way. I love what you are saying but it is so difficulty. Our u. S. Economy is driven on consumerism. Every day there is thousands of messages on Television Ads for people to buy, to replace, our homes are teaming with stuff. I notice in your book you talk about selfstorage space. We have so much stuff that our stuff has its own place and it is air conditioned. It is like crazy to me. We have been talking about this contradiction and on the other hand we want to be frugal and you talk about the spend thrift and you quote a ben franklin quote i live by which is the way of little expenses, a small leak will sink a great ship. I live by that. My grandmother taught me about being a penny pitcher and then there is oscar wild who writes i die as i lived beyond my means. Can you talk about the people that lived simultaneously. I am on team ben. Talk about that part of your book. Well, yeah, ben franklin, he is the representative of the one who said live within your means and he is saying he did and he and his wife lived very frugally and there is a funny antidote of how one time his wife decided he deserved slightly better cookery and they moved up. Oscar wilde is famously decadent and was basically lived for the moment and said screw the future. At least with oscar wilde there is a kind of it is a form of life. If we go with jon stewart mill and i want to encourage people to experiment i guess oscar wilde was an ex experiment in a lifestyle. He didnt die very happily but that was perhaps more to do with the time he lived in rather than the particular way he lived. You started out talking about consumerism. I think what i would want to say there is this. You are absolutely right. We are bombarded everybody day from all sides telling us to buy this and that. And the basic message is if you buy it you will be happy, more attractive, sexier, you will have better vacations, you will be more likely to make recuse or whatever. The question you have to ask is any of that true . Is it true that consumerism produces happiness . It seems to me the research on this points to the fact that it is just not true. There is a consensus among social scientists which is this to get out of poverty certainly improves your level of happiness. To achieve a basic level of comfort and security is derivable and your happiness will increase but beyond a certain point it doesnt make much difference. I think the figure they tote is a Household Income of about 70,000 a year. And i think that seems quite high to me. It seems to me that the question to ask about all the consumerism is just is it actually doing what it promises . Is it making people happier . I dont think it is. I actually think it is quite likely breeds distance. An interesting fact that i have been pause puzzling over is this in the recent election, millions of people voted for donald trump, and people who voted for donald trump were often described as angry angry with the system yet the average income of the household of a Donald Trump Voter was 7,000 72,000. And you wonder why are these people angry . 72,000 Household Income puts you in the top Percentage Points of the World Economy and you are among the richest people that ever lived in history . So why are people why are comforted in normal standards angry . Why are they angry . I have been puzzling over it and i am not sure. I think the answer is probably complicated and it has to do to some extent with the fact it is not just your objective circumstances that determine how you feel but your perceived circumstances. You may indeed be among the richest people in history but you may not feel like that because you compare yourself not with people below or worse off than you which includes people in the past but you compare yourself with perhaps where you expected to be, or where you would like to be, to enjoy it. It cost so much and that golden ring of the middle class life cost so much and any disruption in your income, one missed paycheck or illness frugality is not an issue because you will be frugal. Just like you say, there are places where the jobs are, the big cities rents and housing cost can be extraordinary high. So you need to make the money to avoid being homeless. We dont have the greatest system in the United States. I am in reconstructed socialistic, liberal type. I admire countries like denmark which provide people with a secure safety net, guarantee health care, paid for by their taxes, guaranteed housing and a decent education. You have high taxation although it is not particularly higher than the United States just more efficient use of resources. Maybe i can also live more simply and do things in my community. I think the anxiety is one reason for the stress. Host definitely a lot of stress out there. I was struck at two places in your book where you give synonyms for both approval and extravagance and a kind of set it up in the difference between a miser and a saver and so i didnt know this. Actually it should have known it from my old age but in dantes inferno both misers and spenders are placed in the fourth circle of hell. [laughter] so how are they alike . Why should they be in hell . Guest why they are in hell is how they are alike im not sure they are alike really. They are pretty different. They are actually the opposite. Its interesting again although very much in favor of simple life in being frugal there is a concern that you have to be aware of. Taken to an extreme and not actually not that much of an extreme that he can fall into the trap of being a miserly even becoming pennypinching. They can even become irrational. I have known people like this where lets say they are on holiday. You are on holiday in a certain place. Theres a fight and you want to see it and you find out the charges lets say 20 you say 20 no way, not paying 20 for that especially when youve got children in tow and a Family Discount of 60. Forget it. Later on you think perhaps i wont ever be there again and that was my one chance to see that great building in going to that museum or whatever and 60. Later on in life you are not going to miss that 60 where as you would have that convenience. Sometimes i think i have it sparks a tendency that you and i both share that sometimes leads you to make bad decisions. Host you just described me. Guest you have done it as well. Host we just came back from italy and i said those exact same words. Why, we are in italy and my husband the whole trip is like we are in italy, we are not going to go broke. We are in that honey. You do cross that line. Oftentimes you cross the line from being frugal to being a miser and there really is a difference, correct . Sometimes people will say i miserly. Im not and i try to fight against it but where is that line . How do you be frugal . I think a lot of people are going to be watching this and they are scared to death. You dont want to be wasteful. You want to be a good steward over your money. You mentioned solomon and ecclesiastics where he talked about how he spent so much because he wanted it and it got to the point where it was so much. So where is that line between being a miser in being vocal . Guest i dont think theres a clearcut line in the spectrum and i think one aspect of being a miser would be to be ungenerous so if you are never willing to give money to anyone else or spend money or give money to charity or anything like that again thats the downside being extensively frugal and i think you know you can compensate that behavior the way many religions, they are sort of an application give to charity. One of the ideas of that and its a pretty good ideas to cultivate the habit of being somewhat generous, not necessarily extravagantly generous but somewhat generous as a check against that selfinterest and the tendency to hold on to everything. And i think, and i think any people who are frugal actually can be very generous. Many of my students when i talked about these events they will find grandparents or great grandparents who have lived on depression era of values and who even in old age will absolutely not shake the habit of saving every penny and being very concerned and yet those people are not ungenerous. They just dont want to waste money and theres a difference between wasting money like spending money on things that you dont need and being ungenerous which is refusing to part with money even for good causes. Host i love that. Guest i am definitely one that i really dislike ways. For instance i cant stand throwing food away. Host im with you on that one. Guest i will make strange meals of leftovers, some strange combination of leftovers that my wife will never be that. Host i love it, love it. At my house we have leftovers night because i might do if is starting to look a little but we are a large family of five so leftovers there are only enough for two. They open the refrigerator door and take them out and put them on the counter and yell through the house left overnight and you hear this because they are better leftovers the ones that are later in the week so i thoroughly get it. But i wanted you to tell the listeners or viewers, can you define the term in your book you use, frugal zealot. What is that . Guest the frugal zealot. Its the person who created and wrote and put out the dash gazette which was a newsletter that came out once a month, cost a dollar. Eventually the newsletters were compiled into a think two volumes that you can still buy. Shiites called himself the frugal zealot and a frugal zealot is someone like you really who sort of this very area where of where you can save money and avoid waste and unnecessary extravagance and constantly looking to take your lunch to work instead of buying it and make your own coffee instead of buying it. Turn off the lights to say that last bit. Guest i used to charge my children a dollar. They would leave the lights on in the house. Host i was going to say the thing about turning your lights out and composting the vote and the food and all the this sort of thing every little bit helps i think. You know, every small action you take goes to a way of living and if enough people share that way of thinking than i think it actually ships the world and the direction that makes more sense. Host i have to mention the confession because the next question i want to ask you this is Simple Living always green and environmentally sound . My husband and i are redoing our bedroom. As frugal as i am i have to say i was quite ashamed at all the stuff that ive accumulated, looks in things i cant throw away and it really pains me because a lot of the stuff you cant recycle. I actually got a moment of depression. I felt even as frugal as i am im wasteful and im not as green as i should be but is Simple Living always green . Guest no. I wish it was but its not. In the book i address this, the environmental argument. Clearly theres a pretty obvious environmental argument which is that Simple Living involves by default involves reducing ones footprint. You reduce waste and turn off the lights and save energy. You reduce the need to produce items because you tend to buy them secondhand. There are lots of ways in which you can reduce your footprint. On the other hand there parts of frugal living which the Lifestyle Associated with it, i live in a detached singlefamily house. Far more efficient surrounded by all sides in an apartment, far more efficient. You drive a lot more than a few lives where there was a good system. The Lifestyle Associated with it especially with Country Living which is not all that green. Host i know what you mean. I live in the suburbs and i work from home a lot but also the cost of it in the gas and the emissions really. What has everybody embraced for gallippi and what if everybody thought like you and i . I sort of imagine that and what would our economy look like . What would the country look like . Wouldnt there be lots of jobs and what if everybody was cheap . If everyone suddenly rushed out and bought the book and decided to go, lets say they followed your advice and one on a threeweek financial fast right before christmas. The economy would collapse and it would be a disaster for retailers and its not going to affect and so thats something you have to recognize. At the same time i have said this before its also the kind of world we had to create is the world where theres more and more production and consumption. It seems to me that a huge amount of people, millions of people have got all the stuff they need. They dont need more stuff, they just dont. Many people in the u. S. Have more than they can really handle but its true you cant turn this thing around overnight. Thats actually one of the places where philosophy has a value because getting people to reflect on the way things are and the way we do things and our current way of thinking as it were this not resist overproduction overnight but could we reorient our values away from so much consumption and production. Embracing a simple lifestyle, valuing the Simple Pleasures and therefore inevitably its redistributing work and redistributing wealth so that everyone can share. What i would call forward the dog an overnight transformation but rather a reorganization. The things you talked about and what you said about reorienting the way you work and one thing ive been writing a lot about on the post is encouraging people to live together, not single people that families, multigenerational households because housing is so expensive. I tried to make the argument for sample when college students, i think its perfectly fine and they should move home and live home for a while. Not everybody can afford their own house but thats a hard sell , dont you think . Philosophers and Henry David Thoreau thats a hard sell in our culture of more. You have to have your own apartment and you have to have your own house. How do we make that argument that its okay to kick them out. They need to be out on their own. If they are on their own they need a whole house full of stuff. Guest its a problem and i think for many people certainly in modern society one of the fix problems are housing costs. Housing costs explain a lot of peoples difficulties and dissatisfaction. Housing costs in new york and San Francisco takes a huge huge amount of peoples incomes. They have to work or a hard and i dont have much money for anything else. I dont have a simple solution to that. I do think that government should see the problem and address it in one of the obvious ways with be to invest large amounts of money to bring down housing costs. And living more communally. This is a case where we could benefit from thinking a little bit outside the box. One of the reasons why i think for many People College days are such a happy memory because its a time when they lived with a whole group of friends that its a very communal set up. Again there has been social Science Research on this and places like denmark and perhaps seven or eight families share a home and they have a communal set up. You might cook today two days of Company Might wash todays month and an evening their communal activities in this kind of thing. Its become part of our cultural dna. I would love to see us questioning that a little bit more particularly when it comes to the way in which children are raised and the way in which we deal with people in old age. People living in old age suffer terribly. Wouldnt it need nicer and a worthwhile experiment to try to bring the generation together and communal living arrangements where people all people have young people around them and young people instead of eating isolated in their Nuclear Families are constantly mingling with different generations. Host i love that idea. We have had someone living with us at one point or another. Guest and epicuruss was the subject of a great deal of gossip but actually what he spent time doing was ridings leading and eating communal meals but basically he said of all the things necessary for happiness the most important by far his friendship. Host thats a hard sell, you know that, right . We are getting closer to the end and ive enjoyed this conversation so much and anytime you talk about pennypinching i love it. A subchapter Simple Living allows one to work less and enjoy more leisure and the right the more frugal you live the less money would need and the more you are likely to save you either way this will reduce your need to work thereby increasing your leisure time and hence your happiness. Wow. Basic they work less and you can have more and live better. Why are we not doing that . You put your finger on some the problems. We dont live in isolation and its all around you. Housing costs are going up. You either have to swallow the increased housing costs or go and live somewhere else. I think the problem people face is to live in the modern world requires a certain set of expenditures that you might prefer not to make. If you dont have a car you are up the grid. People are required to have a cell phone. If you dont have a smartphone youre off the grid and you wont be able to keep track of things. That means you have to pay for a phone plan and that means you have to have Car Insurance in that sort of thing. We dont live in isolation from our society. We live invested in it and our society pretty much requires us to shell out and you really dont have a choice about it. Thats why its not easy. If people really did want to embrace a lifestyle which involves working less and spending less i think operably they would move to places in the world or places in our country where housing costs are very cheap in living is very cheap. If you are a young person looking for opportunity you are probably not going to move from an exciting city with all kinds of opportunities to a location which is in the cultural backwater. Host you wrote this book talking about value. Do you see a sea change . Is there a movement after 2000 years of philosophers advocating for this . Is their great change towards it do you think . Guest i would like to say yes we are witnessing the beginning of a sea change. I obviously doubt that is true. What is true is that we have a Consumer Society now for two or three generations and i think people have become more aware of the problems with consumerism. I think we spend a fair amount of good serious thoughtful criticism on consumerism and i think in that sense we are a little bit more selfaware. I think maybe not a sea change but perhaps there could be a gradual drift toward what i called earlier a reorganization of values. I think its a little bit analogous to the way which that on august time after the Second World War for the first time in history the majority of society got fast food and junk food and so we started to eat more. Its an art dna to grab the food when you can because you never know when the next famine is going to come. The next famine is not likely to come soon so we started ingesting more calories than was good for us and the result was excess obesity. We are aware of that now we are starting to take measures to deal with it. Theres too much materialism so we are beginning the first step is always selfawareness and philosophy. Its interesting you talk about that because he taught a class and i assume i read thats where the book came out of there were some criticism about for galotti, was there not . Guest quite a few years ago i taught classes. It was one evening a week and it was called good life on a dollar a day. It was a serious component to it but we could also have some fun. There really was a serious component to it and reread thoreau and the loss of first critics of consumerism and materialism and there were a few classes that were fun. We did a field trip to yard sales and then did a show and tell. Students what the video on how to cut hair and practiced cutting each others hair. We at the end of the semester at banquet where everyone had to bring it depression era recipe and we try to eat under 10. But i would resist the notion that the class was a waste of time or foolish. The less theoretical more personal class like we had a couple of classes on personal finance where students would learn about roth iras and dollar cost averaging and those were actually fairly important things. Host guest go ahead, im sorry. I never met a parent objected to the class either. Host i certainly wouldnt. What do you hope people get from the book . Its very academic what it also, i mean you are very philosophical and i found myself nodding quite a bit, yeah, yeah but what you hope for the average person to get should they pick up the book, and they should. Guest i would say first of all i would like for them to enjoy the loss of i think ive actually think philosophy is a serious discipline but i think possibly can also be enjoyable. In fact it causes you to think hard about problems like why should we think frugality is a virtue in what does it mean, how do you define these terms and what are the arguments for it and what are the arguments against it and where does the balance lie . I think those are interesting and enjoyable as but its important as well because what we are talking about here is not a trivial matter. To question on how we should live as individuals and families and as a society. I would hope not that everyone will read the book and become a certified tightwad necessarily but certainly that they would reflect on their own values that they live by and perhaps moving towards last waste and of all things the most important thing is friendship. Host its been a pleasure to talk to about this. Emrys westacott, the book is the wisdom of frugality why less is more more or less. Its been a pleasure and i hope everybody will embrace for galotti because it is a good thing. Guest my pleasure