Can frugality be a virtue today?

A recent post on X complained about “the total lack of frugality” on the part of the “American poor.” His examples were food stamp recipients driving SUVs and a couple who put every third paycheck towards tattoos.

One can, of course, always adduce extreme examples that don’t necessarily “prove” one’s case. Might a temporarily poor person needing food stamps to tide them over still have the car they had before layoff and eviction? Maybe. But, I also get the point that such phenomena might be too common to be a coincidence.

I have a different question.

Do we think of “frugality” as a virtue? Do we teach it as such?

Recently re-reading Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum about the just living wage, I was struck by the fact that Leo used the word “frugal.” He did not say a living wage was what a wage earner might receive without any need for thrift or frugality on his part. He said that “wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner” (no. 45). He, in fact, thought of frugality as a virtue.

In denying that the Church neglects people’s temporal economic welfare, Leo insisted she wants them to “rise above poverty and wretchedness” (no. 28). But he also recognizes the danger from the other side: greed and pleasure-seeking also often “devour not small incomes merely, but large fortunes, and dissipate many a goodly inheritance.” Frugality and thrift as virtues ensure a balance: not living in poverty but also not becoming so accustomed to the “good life” that the latter is identified with costly non-necessities and optional luxuries.

Leo emphasized that man has a right to private property because, in the reality of the world, he needs something to call his own to ensure his economic safety and stability. That is why I have always admired the Jesuit notion of “indifference.” It means a simplicity of life that recognizes material things are means. If I use them to do God’s will, fine. If I allow them to lead me away from God, that’s wrong.

Obviously, “simplicity of life” means a different thing in New York than in New Guinea, but–appropriate adjustments considered–we should be able to agree on the main lines of what is simple and what is not.

This is where Catholic social thought goes from principles binding on everybody everywhere to practical indications that require the virtue of prudence and the intellectual and spiritual honesty to question one’s assumptions. When discussing a just living wage, Leo wrote that “[i]f a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income” (no. 46, emphasis added).

Notice the twofold criterion here: the wage should allow him “comfortably” to support a family, but once that is achieved, he also should “practice thrift” and reduce “expenses” to protect the future. That means that employers cannot skate around the bare minimum. If most people are living paycheck-to-paycheck without the ability to save even if they “practice thrift,” there’s something wrong. Once upon a time, Catholic social thought assumed a just economy was one where no more than 25% of income had to go for keeping a roof over one’s head. Today, some mortgage lenders jack that proportion up to even 40%. But even with “bracket creep” in the portion of wages spent on necessities like housing and eating, one must also honestly ask: Is there nowhere I can be “cutting down expenses?”

These are the kinds of questions that honest engagement with Catholic social thought makes clear that it does not neatly align with particular political slants. The Left will object that, in calling for thrift, we are “poor shaming,” piling subjective ill feelings atop objective economic constraints. But is it “thrift” to buy lots of prepared and junk foods and “poor shaming” to exclude them from things like food stamps?

The Right will object that Catholic social thought ignores “economic realities,” namely, subservience to market forces that regard buyers and sellers as mere “interested parties” whose relationship is primarily or exclusively defined by the value of the thing they trade. If they are just parties with “interests” and not human beings, one’s sense of obligation to treat them as the latter often loses out.

So, in response to my X tweeter: Yes, the “lack of frugality” is a problem. But it is not primarily a problem because of the added costs it imposes. It is first and foremost a problem because frugality and thrift are not recognized as necessary virtues but unnecessary evils, constraints imposed by a perhaps “unjust” economic system.

Recovering a sense of thrift requires a sense of solidarity–we’re all, buyers and sellers, employers and employees, in this together–and of limits. Limits means both abandoning a “throwaway culture” as well as tempering the human passion Shania Twain identified in “Ka-Ching,” observing “all we ever want is more//a lot more than we had before//so take me to the nearest store!”

Aristotle said, in media stat virtus–virtue is in the middle, between extremes. Between extremes of poverty and indulgence. Frugality is not found among those whose “religion is to go and blow it all.