Blessed Are the Thrifty?
Jesus’ teachings challenge how we spend when money is tight.
In May, Italy’s government called an emergency meeting over the rising prices of pasta. Italians have also been hit in the pocketbook by high natural gas prices, an expense of boiling water for cooking. In 2022, the Italian government recommended reducing how long home cooks boil pasta water as a thrifty “virtuous action.”
This is just one symptom of the recent surge in prices that makes paying for our daily bread difficult. Inflation has hit around the world, and with it have come different pressures on households. In the United States, the average lifestyle costs more than twice as much as it did in 1990. In Ghana, where inflation may be the highest in Africa, food costs twice as much as it did one year ago. Its last annual inflation figure was over 50 percent per year. Moth and rust, of a sort, have destroyed.
But there are other pressures on consumers to be thrifty, including a sense of responsibility to slow our waste. For example, America tosses about 13 million tons of clothing a year. And although there are hungry people, almost a third of the cultivated land in the world grows crops that will benefit neither humans nor animals. After that, about 14 percent of food is discarded before it even reaches a shop.
In view of our consumption and its costs, slack can feel elusive, and extra can seem outrageous. One response to these tensions of wealth, waste, and need always seems to have the stamp of virtue: thrift.
Thrift is a response to tradeoffs—to the choices we often make between having and eating our cake. It means using less, buying less, or spending less in order to redirect resources. Thrift may be a way of managing a small budget or big expenses, such as making money saved on used clothing …