In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue by Lauren Weber

(Little, Brown, 320 pages, $24.99)

The Puritans, it turns out, were not so thrifty, says journalist­ Lauren Weber. Sure, they looked frugal during their first American winters, scraping individual kernels of corn off the floor in order to eat. But catch up with their progeny a few decades later, and you’ll find Colonial New Englanders rationalizing their pewter- and ribbon-buying splurges with the best of them. If God had smiled on their diligence, they argued, who were they to hide the evidence? America’s post–World War II economic expansion may have dealt a deathblow to parsimoniousness as a national ideal, says Weber, but the nation never really enjoyed a golden age of thrift. Our ancestors pinched pennies when they had to. Whenever given a chance, they spent beyond their needs.

Weber’s “terrific” book really “messes with your fiscal psyche,” said Carolyn See in The Washington Post. The author comes at the subject of thrift from a “far-out” position: Her father, a strong-willed economist, used to keep the thermostat at 50 in her family’s New England home, and he once even tried to ration their use of toilet paper. His daughter plays such personal experiences for laughs, then leads us through a “lighthearted, learned” tour of the shifts in thrift’s reputation. Mostly, Weber makes clear that there’s no easy way to decide when spending is moral and when it’s not.

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That inner battle has always been with us, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Even during the past six decades—when spending has occasionally been equated with patriotic duty and “repression” of desires has been deemed unhealthy—a little of Weber’s father has dwelt in just about all of us. Seeking to build peace between these warring impulses, the author interviews numerous “vanguard practitioners of socially responsible thrift,” including a faction of committed Dumpster-divers who hold that any raw clam found among a supermarket’s garbage must be returned to its saltwater habitat. But the old-fashioned thrift of Weber’s father remains a more ­useful model, said Kristina Dorsey in the New London, Conn., Day. He still uses hand signals while driving to limit wear on his blinker lights, and he even directs some of his hard-won savings to charity.