01/11/2024
When I was a kid, misers were still a rather big deal. They were common in fairy tales and 19th century novels, like Ebenezer Scrooge and Silas Marner.
But I never hear about misers anymore.
And, sure enough, the word “miser” started to fall off in frequency in English- language books after the hard times of the 1840s, reaching a low from the 1970s into the early 2000s. For some reason, misers have made a recent slight comeback, but I have no idea why, or if this is the beginning of a real comeback or just some random or fashion-driven fluctuation. (I can imagine some impoverished freelancer pitching an online magazine in 2018 on “The New Miserliness: Why Cryptocurrency Encourages Hoarding Your Money.”)
Classical economists didn’t think much of misers. Adam Smith’s bête noire was mercantilism, which was miserliness elevated to the level of statecraft: the successful nation, mercantilism asserts, piles up wealth by taking in more gold and silver than it sends out to pay for nice stuff. Marx’s theory was that miserliness was outmoded by capitalism: modern people know, in effect, that you gotta spend money to make money.
And neither Smith nor Marx had much experience with modern advertising, which is probably the final boss enemy of miserliness.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.