Finally. The search comes to and end. The origins of the Tight Arts revealed.
The Scots built this castle to keep people away from their money. True.
The last time I was talking to Scottish folkin an effort to understand their thrifty reputation, I was getting nowhere – until I met this guy in a Scottish café. He hit it on the head.
Check out the castle.
Listen to him and learn what few people know.
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I dug deeper… and chatted with him for a while. It was great to learn about the Tight Arts and how they’re connected to human nature in all of us.
Firstly there’s a very important difference between being thrifty and being cheap.
Scots are considered practical, hard-working, competent, educated and hard-headed as opposed to mean. They donate more per person to charity than any nation in the world. I can testify to this as I watched Stevie opening the hordes of letters he receives from various charities he donates to.
And yet no Scot could deny that when he sets about it he has an eye for a bargain and will always ensure that he gets value for money. The Scots have found that it pays to know the value of money. A mean miser does not know the value of money; he overrates it. The big spender underrates it.
So why did Scots become renowned at master Tight Artists?
Part of it is rooted in a long legacy of national poverty. Scotland was for centuries one of the poorest countries in Europe, and like the poor everywhere the Scots learned not to squander the few resources they did have.
My Scottish mate Ian – one of the most generous people I know
Part of it, too, may reflect Scotland’s Calvinist legacy, a lean Presbyterian version of the Protestant work ethic. Calvinism encourages godliness, hard work and the accumulation of wealth. Max Weber, the German economist famously identified it as the engine of modern capitalism “Whatever a person saves from his revenue he adds to his capital – without capital, there is no capitalism.”
So my friend in the coffee shop wasn’t just making stuff up.
We can drill even deeper, as the Scottish father of classical economics, Adam Smith did.
He saw that frugality ran much deeper than Calvinism or even moral rectitude – “Human beings have a universal, continual and uninterrupted effort to better their own condition”, Smith explained – with the thrifty saver intending to better it sometime in the future.
Now this bit gets a little heavy, but hang with it…
As a student of social psychology, Smith recognised that most people look for some immediate gain and take it when it comes – a bigger car, a bigger salary, a bigger plate at the buffet. But some, a special minority, are willing to pass up immediate payoffs in order to set his or her sights on a much bigger gain down the road.
This is the other surprise Smith springs on us: his insistence that thrift is a natural impulse rather than a moral constraint. Just as there is hardly any individual “who is perfectly and completely satisfied with his situation, as to be without any wish of alteration or improvement of any kind,” so even the giddiest consumer prefers to buy the Mercedes convertible for less, if he or she can.
It’s natural for all of us to want a bargain… regardless of our financial circumstances. And it’s natural for us to be frugal. In fact, being frugal is a trait that naturally predominates.
Smith says that although the desire to spend “prevails in almost all men upon some occasions, and in some men upon almost all occasions, yet in the greater part of men, taking the whole course of their life at an average, the principle of frugality seems not only to predominate, but to predominate very greatly.”
Another early economist and social observer, Smiles focused on how it transformed the individual. Its effects were in his view as much psychological as financial, “Possessed of a little store of capital, a man walks with a lighter step, his heart beats more cheerily.” He realises that the misfortunes of life, like losing a job or a home, or disastrous illness, may bow him down but can never break him. The man who saves even a few pennies from his wages is a man on the path of self-realisation and self-improvement.
And: “The man who improves himself improves the world.”
That’s a pretty cool quote. The Tight Artist is improving the world.
There is no reason why thrift has to be a bleak exercise in puritan self-denial. It could be a rich source of pleasure to know that one has money set aside to provide for one’s family when times are hard, or to afford nice things when times are good; to know that as the savings accumulate, one’s opportunities grew, along with one’s freedom, independence, and that most elusive of all human qualities, one’s self-respect.
So there you have it.
The Tight Arts should be appreciated and proudly upheld on one condition. Thriftiness must be carried out in the spirit of our Scottish forefathers – pragmatic, sensible and consistent with the value of money. A true Tight Artist does not over estimate the value of money in a miserly, cheap fashion.
We don’t want Adam Smith turning in his grave.
Greg Ellis
Tight Artist
References
Arthur Herman, author of How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It.
