This was an interesting piece, but I wasn't sure where to post it.
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https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-impossible-miser-mrs-hetty-green-5736774By Jeffrey A. Tucker
10/7/2024
NOTE: when reading at The Epoch Times, it's best to either use "reader mode" (in your browser), or to DISABLE javascript (using free add-ons or plugins)We are all working on new ways to save money. That means a turn toward frugality.
Most people have little experience in this after 40-some years of seemingly limitless material progress. With that at an end for large parts of the population, a new generation is figuring out home cooking, paring back, reducing expenditures, dealing with a greater range of temperature variation in the home, and trying desperately to stay ahead.
There are already interesting coinages to describe the problem. There is a new world, HENRYS. This stands for high earners, not rich yet. It’s people making more than six figures but still struggling to pay the bills. They too face the unrelenting problem of how to cut back. We all need new habits.
There is frugality, which is a virtue but there is also miserliness, which is a vice. What is it? It happens when a person of tremendous means is deeply reluctant to part with any of it for any reason. They are legendary in literature: Ebenezer Scrooge, Silas Marner, Fagin in “Oliver!” and the wheat farmer in Jesus’s parable who builds ever more silos to store it and then kicks the bucket.
Misers in real life are a fun lot to study because everyone has a story. The brilliant book by John T. Flynn called “Men of Wealth” has a chapter that can serve as a guide. It’s about Hetty Green (1834–1916), whose weird, wacky, and wonderful life now haunts me to no end.
She was the richest woman of the Gilded Age, and sometimes the richest person, having died with a solid $200 million then or $2.7 billion today. But she was a miser. Even from the time she was a little girl, she refused to spend money. She only wanted to make it, and she was astonishingly good at doing so. She inherited a small fortune and turned it into a mighty one through some of the smartest financial moves of the day.
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