pigs. Even though some people -- this particular interviewer -- seemed to think that. I have another chapter on the synthesis between cheapness and the environment. And sort of, using fewer resources and why people like my dad were green before it became popular to be green.Although, he now sheepishly says that he had no idea that there was any other benefit besides saving money to all of his compulsive turning off of lights and stuff.
Once we started cooking food, we could consume extraordinary amounts of calories very quickly and very efficiently. And cheapness is a lot more expensive than we realize.
New York City. There are no dumpsters in New York -- very few. So it basically means like sidewalk, trashpiles of supermarkets. You know, I thought I had been thinking about waste and excess and cheapness for a long time. So I thought I was prepared for what I saw. But I was shocked by how much perfectly good stuff we cavalierly throw away in this culture. We would open supermarket garbage bags and
that make sense to you-- now, you wouldn't use any of these measures all by themselves. If you just used relative cheapness -- if some of you remember the internet bubble, and you bought the cheapest internet stock, that wasn't cheap. It was just cheap relative to all the other crazy-priced stocks at the time.
Although, he now sheepishly says that he had no idea that there was any other benefit besides saving money to all of his compulsive turning off of lights and stuff. Another chapter goes into the psychology of cheapness . People seem to really like that one, because I think we all are trying to understand ourselves and the people around us. And the origin of that chapter came when I
What you think of advertising and its effect on reducing frugality, because it's in the advertiser's interest to make you buy? And the second one, which is based on when you said that the psychology of cheapness is that, Stressed people are more likely to save. And I think it's the opposite. People who are stressed are more likely to buy to kind of relieve their stress.
Because the price valuation is essentially proxying for a bad market expectation. And in theory we make money on this because of mispricing because that cheapness is essentially a proxy for market-wide expectation errors.
And then you sort of couple that with, oil is dirt cheap, and it's so hard to compete with that right now for any other alternative fuel. To just take your last point first, the cheapness of oil is a very short term transient. I mean, we're not going to see it this cheap for a long time, maybe a few years, optimistically.
But the others are more expensive. Again, the reason the press reports their cheapness is because of unstated subsidies. For example, AllEarth renewables in Vermont-- the capital cost of that plant was paid for 30% by the federal government as a tax credit.
You know, there are some famous examples of horders whose homes got so filled with crap that they actually died from it. There's a famous brother -- the Collyer brothers the book that you went, "This cheapness is really destructive rather than a virtue?” Lauren Weber: Yeah. Well, many points. I mean, in my own life.
So, I'm going to read a little bit from one of my historical chapters, and then read a little bit from one of the later chapters. This chapter was one of my favorites to write. It's called "Cheap Jews and Thrifty Chinese.” It's all about the ethnic stereotypes of cheapness . And my family's Jewish, and I always felt that part of the way that people looked at my father -- as kind of an eccentric and a nut and totally cheap -- had something to
So the first two-thirds of the book or so is historical and some of it is really chronological and some of it is more thematic, like that chapter I just read from. And then, the last third of the book looks more at the contemporary issues of cheapness , you could say. One of them really goes into the economics. Like I said, I was really interested in what it means that we have such a low savings rate in this country, and you know, what the effects from that are.
You know, there are some famous examples of horders whose homes got so filled with crap that they actually died from it. There's a famous brother -- the Collyer brothers Psychologists have studied a lot on hording. Very few people -- very few researchers have studied cheapness , thrift, you know, frugality. It's not that interesting to consumer researchers,
You know, there are some famous examples of horders whose homes got so filled with crap that they actually died from it. There's a famous brother -- the Collyer brothers it. An 84-year-old man heard about my interest in cheapness and got so excited that he offered himself up for an interview about his frugal
You know, there are some famous examples of horders whose homes got so filled with crap that they actually died from it. There's a famous brother -- the Collyer brothers That's not the kind of cheap I like. I like my dad's version of cheapness which is really, personal austerity and public generosity. He's very generous to anybody who needs it
You know, there are some famous examples of horders whose homes got so filled with crap that they actually died from it. There's a famous brother -- the Collyer brothers But, you know, I would like to not see cheapness be co-opted and exploited as a marketing opportunity.
And it was a good thing because Bill-- I got in a little trouble with this before, but Bill is a little Trumpian in the way that-- there's good old Dollar Bill, as they called him, for his cheapness . He wouldn't put the games on TV.
said, "Can you eat in the cafeteria?” And I will report back that I did. So, thanks again for having me. I sense from the composition of the audience that cheapness is a topic that resonates more for men than for women maybe. And I was also telling Katie that, after some of the media stuff that I've done,
And my family's Jewish, and I always felt that part of the way that people looked at my father -- as kind of an eccentric and a nut and totally cheap -- had something to do with him being Jewish. That there was a particular way of combining those two qualities in him -- the cheapness and the Jewishness. So this was a really fun chapter to research and then put together.