On Scarcity

I've written about wealth, and now I'm going to write about scarcity. When I reflect on the concept of scarcity, it makes me think of words like "penury", "skinflint", "tightwad", and "spendthrift". They're narrow, ungenerous words, and what comes to mind is a world where people are always cutting, cutting, cutting and trying to make do with less. It feels negative and constricting, a dark and narrow place, the way Egypt is described at Passover.

Is this the direction we're moving in? Is this a bad thing? I grew up -- most middle class Americans grew up -- in a world of waste and high expectations. If something broke, we could always get another one. My wishes always turned up under the Christmas tree. My parents read Consumer Reports and made a practice of buying the most sensible quality items. We had a pool membership, piano lessons, out-of-state travel, and summer camp. If we needed a service or a specialist, we simply paid for it. It was one part planned obsolescence, one part entitlement, and one part optimism. Our options and resources seemed endless in an ever-broadening world.

It wasn't always like that, of course. It certainly was different for the folks two generations up. There was my maternal grandfather Jerry,who was successful, egotistical, and somewhat mythical. Having grown up in a poor family of 10 kids in Denver, CO, he attended Harvard Law School in the 1930s on scholarship and -- legend had it -- could only afford to eat a single muffin for lunch each day. And he was a slave to that era, even after he became wealthy. Years later, in the spacious Central Park West apartment he had purchased, he still saved string. He took the subway to work long after he could afford taxis, and he refused to buy a washing machine for his summer house.

Then there was my paternal grandmother, who, although she was only a typing teacher, did well enough in the stock market to put several of her grandchildren through college, including me. I remember visiting her in the nursing home when she was in her 80s. "I don't have any money", she would wail, over and over. Her daughter would write out for her, "You have money. You are rich." But over and over again, my grandmother would forget. She would be bereft, lying there, as her deepest fears played themselves out in her mind. It's amazing what a Depression can do to people.

For whatever reason, I've absorbed some of these same fears. When I was in college, I remember riding a New York City bus through Columbus Circle and seeing a bag lady wearing a Harvard sweatshirt. I thought, oh no, that could be me in 30 years. This was in the 1980s, when bag ladies (and men) were popping up all over the place. I remember homeless people sleeping all over the steam grates on my college campus, like so many outlined post-nuclear apocolypse bodies. I think the fear of becoming a bag lady was more of a female issue than a guy thing. Maybe it had to do with a gender-specific lack of confidence, or a lack of imagination even the 1980s about how a woman could support herself even. All I know is that several of my female friends -- all of whom were high-achieving -- shared the same fear.

Despite these unrealistic (I hope) fears, there were some aspects of scarcity that seemed utterly foreign to me. But now I'm thinking that maybe they're not so foreign after all. For example, in 1994 I visited my cousin Laura in St. Petersburg -- that's Russia, not Florida. I slept on the spare bed in the kitchen, and I remember thinking that that was simply how life was in Russia, along with the decrepit apartment lobbies that nobody bothered to keep up. But then, years later, when my fiance and I visited friends in San Francisco, we ended up sleeping in the cramped kitchen of their small apartment, which had originally been a garage. When I expressed amazement that we should all be sitting on a bed in the kitchen, drinking vodka, our friend responded that this was what housing was like in San Francisco.

Around the same time that we made the trip to San Francisco, electricity companies were going broke, rates were shooting up, and Enron was somehow making a profit from it all. I recall listening to a show on NPR about how middle class Brazilians were dealing with the electricity rate hikes by only turning lights on in the rooms they were in at the moment. According to the announcer, you could look up at a tall apartment building in Rio or Sao Paolo and see the lights flicking on and off as people walked from room to room. I certainly didn't connect myself with any of that. At the time I was living in an all-utilities-included place. When my husband didn't turn on enough lights, I would jokingly say, "This isn't Sarajevo, you know." But now...well, you know how it is. It's not Sarajevo, but maybe it's Sao Paolo.

And it's not just electricity, it's gas too. I remember reading about an American philanthropist who went to North Korea in the winter. When he visited one government ministry he noted that one of the high officials was wearing a thick jacket and gloves inside because there was no heat. Not too long after that, I caught myself wearing gloves and a thick sweater at home as I teleworked, just so I could keep the heat below 65. I loved Jimmy Carter and his energy conservation thing, but I did feel like a little bit of the axis of evil -- the cold part -- had entered my house that day. The other day, to keep the heat down and save money, I actually wore a wool cap on my head. I felt like I was channeling Soweto township fashion, but at least I was keeping my gas bill down.

Similarly, I remember being in Serbia not long after the U.S. stopped its bombing campaign. The price of gas had shot up, and people waited in long lines at the state-owned gas stations because they charged a few pennies per liter less than the private stations. I remember being amazed that it would be worth it to them to do that, but as our own gas prices shot up this past summer the joke was on me. I also remember hearing about the inflation in Serbia during the early 1990s, which at the time was the world's worst ever. One friend told me that he worked for hours in the field one day, cutting grass with a scythe, and at the end of the day he received 6 million dinars. He took his pay to a store to buy some toothpaste, but to his chagrin he saw that one tube cost 7 million dinars. That's not something I can specifically relate to, thank God, but it does sort of call to mind our increasingly insane healthcare costs.

It all reminds me of a great David Byrne song called "Dirty Old Town". I always thought the song was about Brazil, because it's on the Rei Momo album. But when you listen to it, you realize he could be talking about New York or any other American city:

Well, there are sixteen people in Danny’s apartment
Sixteen people are living in there
Remember the days of rent control
Grandpa remembers rock and roll

These days won’t last forever
These days won’t last for long
You know, somebody somewhere owes us a favor
That’s how things really get done
In this world of opportunities, it’s a land of possibilities

Now when the ladies come from Kansas
They wear their traditional colors
Today the fabrics are ragged and torn
The clothes on their backs is all that they own
They say, don’t draw attention to yourself
They’ll tear you apart for a couple of bucks
Keep you head down and keep you nose clean
’cause people who’re scared do dangerous things

So, the world and its ways of scarcity can enter our cities and our houses and maybe change our behavior. But how much do tight times affect our character, our way of thinking? In The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver writes about women in Congo who lived in such dire straits that they related to each other in a totally different way than she was used to. She writes, "The Congolese have an extra sense. A social sense, I would call it. It's a way of knowing people at a glance, adding up the possibilities for exchange, and it's as necessary as breathing. Survival is a continuous negotiation, as you have to barter covertly for every service."

I've also experienced these different ways people have of thinking and acting that help them get by or survive in times of scarcity. I remember when I was living in Morocco, I met a woman who was studying biology. "Oh," I responded innocently. "My father works at the National Institutes of Health in the U.S." What was an offhand comment to me was practically a job offer to her. It was a totally different way of thinking. It was the same thing when I was living in a post-conflict area of Croatia and had much more cash than the locals. Looking back, I think I was pretty clueless. I was generous to other people there because I'm a generous person, but also because it caused me no pain to be that way. But I also didn't spare much thought to what people could and couldn't afford. Sometimes I made insensitive gaffes, like not treating people when we shared dinner or coffee. I didn't have to live in tight times, so I often forgot that other people did.

Thinking back, maybe I wasn't so generous, relatively speaking. When my landlady in Vukovar, which was still recovering from its 1991 near-destruction, wanted to increase my rent, I argued with her because I felt it wasn't fair. But I could have easily afforded it, and she definitely needed the money for her uncertain future. It's so easy to be generous when you have more than enough. What's really admirable, though, is being generous when you yourself are living in scarce times.

I remember, for example, when I worked at a movie theater in high school. We had a game to support the Will Rogers Foundation. We put an empty glass at the bottom of a large trash can filled with water, and we inveighed people -- "Drop a quarter in the glass, win a free movie pass! All proceeds go to charity!" Inevitably, it was poorer people, including a large proportion of Hispanics, who would play. You can explain this away by discussing the excitement of a game of chance, or you can say that maybe these people were poor because they gave away too much of their money like this. But I also think it means that they weren't poor in their imagination. They could imagine themselves winning a free movie pass -- or perhaps getting rich. In their minds, at least, they weren't living in the narrow world of scarcity.

And I think that's one key of how to respond to tight times without narrowing our mind as well. If you can give to others, you're empowering yourself and acknowledging that you do have something to spare. In a sense, giving spares us from becoming slaves to our fears of penury, like my grandfather was. Judaism says that the best kind of charity is totally anonymous, when the donor doesn't know the recipient and vice versa. It's the unalloyed act of giving that counts. But if you don't give at all, then your world really becomes narrow. You're focused only on yourself and your own shrinking circle of need. Maybe by giving, we keep our world large and allow space for hope and even faith. Maybe it's one way to keep ourselves out of the dark, narrow world of Egypt. So, while I feel like times are getting tighter and tighter for many people, including me, I'm going to try to keep my mind open and give what I can.