The first thing a reader will note about this eclectic compendium of essays is that it is enormous; 630 pages with 23 contributions. The subject is the history of “thrift,” by which the editors mean, not saving behavior, but the moral virtue of “frugality,” a form of prudence. This virtue they bundle with other “middle-class” virtues: honesty, self-discipline, charity, temperance, industry, stewardship, and the like. Their primary concern is not with the economic theory and practice of saving, but with the “changing moral economy of the self” (p. 5). Their project is designed to call attention to “the inescapably normative dimensions of economic life” and “the acute normative perplexity of late modern capitalism” (p. 572). But since some of the consequences of leading the virtuous life are monetary saving, conservation, philanthropy, and concern for the commonweal, more than several of the essays will be of direct interest to economic historians and economic theorists. The reason, I suspect, for the book's bulk is that the expansive concept of thrift that was adopted for this project, funded by the Templeton Foundation, is so broad that even their multidisciplinary team of scholars from across the social sciences and the humanities had difficulty embracing it all.

Rather than mention each of the contributions individually, I comment on several of the essays that—in my opinion—are most likely to interest readers of the The Journal of Economic History.

Rather oddly, the first two chapters, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel Walker Howe and the always provocative Deirdre McCloskey, contradict the editors' argument. This, the editors recognize (pp. 15–17) and I will return to comment on the disjunction in conclusion.

The editors see thriving as either the consequence or the companion to thrift, hence the title (the original meaning of “thrift,” dating from medieval times was “thrive”). As a history of thrift and thriving in America, the volume naturally contains some discussion of the meaning of these twin concepts in colonial times. Unfortunately, not much is known about the economic relevance of thrift in this period. The essay by James Calvin Davis and Charles Mathewes explicates Puritan moral theology. Like most theology, I find it a rather tortured world view, but this background is necessary (no doubt) to understanding the origins of the Protestant Ethic, its dynamic evolution, and its waxing and waning influence on the economy and culture. Stephen Innes picks up the theme of a religious connection in his discussion of the Weberian thesis and the implication of the Protestant Reformation for the institutions brought into colonial New England and nurtured there.

Kathleen McCarthy, a historian of philanthropy, reminds readers that many of the financial intermediaries of the nineteenth century were founded as benevolent charities intent on instituting moral reform by instilling habits of economy among those of modest means. Early savings banks, for example, “were conceived as an antidote” to sinful and expensive excesses like drinking, gambling, and the wearing of fancy apparel (p. 163). Since these institutions helped finance the transportation revolution and the rise of manufacturing, McCarthy suggests links between moral proselytizing, philanthropy, and economic growth.

In the simple algebra of Econ One, income that is neither taxed nor saved is consumed. That suggests that the advertising industry which arose around the beginning of the nineteenth century to promote consumption could be implicated in the decline in the propensity to save (if, indeed, there has been such a decline). Jennifer Scanlon argues otherwise in her chapter on “Thrift and Advertising.” Her claim is that the industry “sought to replace thrift not with reckless consumerism but with modern notions of efficiency and self-control, themselves analogues for thrift” (p. 284). “Thrift and consumption were paired, twinned, mutually supportive rather than mutually exclusive” (p. 302).

Lendol Calder, historian and author of Financing the American Dream, takes on the charge that consumer credit is antithetical to thrift in a spirited essay on the credit revolution. This chapter is particularly timely in light of today's obsession with debt both personal and public. His view is that the spread and democratization of credit transformed the understanding of thrift. The concept of saving now “applied to a new commodity: time.” Uncertainties about the future make waiting chancy. Credit solves the problem by moving “future satisfactions to the present” (p. 309). Going into debt actually stimulates and routinizes both saving and frugality. How else will the debt be repaid? Moreover, in a broadened definition of saving, the purchase of a home or automobile on installment is an act of saving (and investment) as much as putting money in the bank (p. 325). Oliver Zunz also broadens the concept of saving, in his case to include philanthropy. Saving and giving are complimentary behaviors (p. 335).

David Reimers writes on “Immigrants and Thrift” emphasizing that their frugality was often forced by low wages, the need to pay off creditors who financed their passage, and the commitment to make remittances to those left behind. Kiku Adatto describes the patriotic saving generated by the war bond campaign fought on the home front of World War II.

The economist Robert Frank employs the logic of behavioral economics to point out that lack of willpower often interferes with the propensity to save, to champion Duesenberry's relative income hypothesis over the life-cycle model, and to argue that a “collective-action problem” and “expenditure cascades” inevitably drive up spending on homes and positional goods to the detriment of saving as everyone seeks an advantage in status and strives to be above average. Of course, half are doomed to miss that goal. Frank suggests these downward forces operating on saving have been intensified recently by rising income inequality.

In a disappointingly brief essay, “The Rise and Fall of ‘Collective Thrift',” Steven Fraser touches on the corporate and union pensions established in the early decades of the twentieth century, the traumatizing Depression of the 1930s, the resulting search for security that culminated in the Social Security system, unemployment insurance, and economic planning. He then rushes on to comment on the postwar unraveling of the social safety net, the privatization of pensions (401(k) plans), and the assault on Social Security during the second administration of George W. Bush. Wilson Brissett surveys the terrain inhabited by “LMI individuals,” the low- to moderate-income population. Coincident with the fall of collective thrift described by Fraser, Brissett describes the rise of “anti-thrift institutions,” such as state lotteries, payday lenders, and easy-credit cum high-interest credit cards.

Two environmental historians, J. R. McNeill and George Vrtis, emphasize not thrift, but profligacy. They point to the “almost unremitting escalation of demands made on natural resources,” the absence of an effective conservation movement, and long-standing habits of environmental heedlessness. The extinction of the passenger pigeon, the massacre of the American bison, the exhaustion of the New England cod fishery, the unchecked generation of municipal waste, the fouling of air and water, the embrace of the high-energy economy with its apparently insatiable thirst for petroleum products; their list is long and disturbing.

The editors' claim thrift was a shared American virtue rooted in Calvinist theology that served to initiate and sustain economic growth. They argue that the concept mutated and evolved to permit the institutional and cultural realignment necessary for the transformation of the overwhelmingly agricultural economy of the early republic into the industrialized and urbanized America of the late nineteenth century. And they suggest that thrift's importance in this connection has been neglected by historians: thrift is “a virtue without a history” (p. 5). The opening essays by Daniel Walker Howe and Deirdre McCloskey tell a different story. Colonial thrift was not a virtue that was chosen as part of accepting a religious precept; it was a necessity of the autarkic agrarian life, not an option (p. 41). The moral philosophy of Adam Smith was more influential than the theology of the Puritans. Thrift adapted to economic development rather than cause it. A seemingly common commitment to thrift did not reconcile disagreements over what public policies should be adopted. Accumulation was not “the heart of modern economic growth” (p. 82). Openness to new ideas, new technologies, and mass education explain American development and growth.

The editors make no attempt to resolve this dispute. Likewise, such a task is beyond the scope of this report. Part of the fun, part of the challenge, of this lumpy and sprawling compendium is that the reader is free to find insights or faults in these essays at will; left alone to challenge the contradictions or to gloss over them. If it is true that thrift has hitherto had no history, this effort has not provided a coherent one.