The Wisdom of Frugality is an unusual book for our times. It sets out to rescue frugality from its reputation as joyless, miserly, or morally suspect. Author Emrys Westacott’s core claim is clear. Living with less is not only ethically defensible, but often the most coherent path to a good life.
This sits squarely within the territory of Living More with Less. Our project is not about deprivation or purity. It is about aligning how we live with what we know about wellbeing, justice, and planetary limits. Westacott is walking a parallel path, though in a more academic realm.
The book’s structure makes its intent explicit. Each chapter introduces a familiar objection to frugality, then carefully dismantles it. Frugality kills pleasure. Frugality harms the economy. Frugality is antisocial. Frugality is elitist. The method is patient, methodical, and earnest. It is in itself a reflection, not a guide.
Advocacy Wearing Skeptical Clothing
Westacott presents himself as engaging critics on their own terms. In practice, the counterpoints often feel like scaffolding rather than genuine threats. The objections are raised politely, then dispatched with a kind of philosophical tidiness.
This is not a flaw so much as a tension. The book wants to persuade without preaching. Yet its sympathies are never really in doubt. Frugality emerges, again and again, as not merely defensible but wise.
The irony is hard to miss. A book arguing for restraint, sufficiency, and parsimony is itself more verbose than necessary. Many chapters revisit the same small constellation of thinkers. Aristotle. Epicurus. The Stoics. Aurelius. Thoreau. The repetition reinforces the argument, but it also dulls its edge.
Frugality, the book insists, is about enough. The prose rarely models that discipline. I don’t place the blame for this on the author however. I understand there is an formula that must be maintained to successfully publish a book.
Pleasure, Service, and the Good Life
One of the book’s strengths is its refusal to frame frugality as self-denial. Westacott takes pleasure seriously. He argues, through the assertion of the sages, that frugality can enhance enjoyment by sharpening attention, reducing anxiety, and freeing us from status competition.
This aligns with Epicurean restraint, but less so with traditions that put service to others at the fore. Historically, many philosophers praised simple living not because it felt good, but because it enabled moral action. Less distraction, fewer dependencies and more capacity to care.
Westacott touches on this, but doesn’t linger. The balance tilts toward personal flourishing rather than collective obligation. Frugality becomes a lifestyle choice that happens to have ethical side benefits.
For Living More with Less, that framing feels incomplete. We are interested in frugality not only because it can make life calmer or more meaningful, but because excess consumption directly crowds out others’ chances at a decent life. Frugality is not just therapeutic. It is distributive.
A Narrow Historical Lens
The philosophical lineage Westacott draws is almost entirely Western. The story begins in ancient Greece and largely stays there. This feels like a missed opportunity.
Anthropology has long challenged the assumption that affluence requires accumulation. Marshall Sahlins’ idea of the “original affluent society” describes cultures that met their needs with relatively little labor and little surplus. Affluence, in this sense, was not about having more, but about wanting less.
Bridging frugality to these traditions and crossing further into the eastern philosophies would have strengthened the book’s case. It would also have destabilised the idea that frugality is a corrective to modern excess, rather than a default human condition disrupted by industrial capitalism.
By keeping the focus narrow, the book risks reinforcing the very cultural exceptionalism that makes frugality seem strange or optional in the first place.
Accessibility Without Depth Loss
Westacott is clearly trying not to write a book only philosophers can love. Technical language is mostly avoided. arguments are restated and assumed knowledge is kept to a minimum.
This mostly succeeds. The downside is a sense of circling. The same arguments reappear in slightly altered forms. The same philosophers re-enter the conversation.
The formal structure contributes to this. Each chapter follows a similar rhythm. There is first an objection, then analysis then a rejection, though it is not always clear what each of these is, given the polite tone in which any disagreement is ensconced. The book rewarded my patience more than curiosity. That said, I have not made a point of reading a great deal of philosphy, so it could be as much my own preference as a limitation of the author.
The Question Left Hanging
The most striking absence is also the most important.
If frugality is pleasurable, ethical, rational, environmentally necessary, and historically endorsed by many of our “wisest” thinkers, why do so few people choose it?
Westacott suggests that the ideal life framed by the philosophers is simply the life that suits them and their personalities. He does not pursue the question with any real force. There is no engagement with influence of advertising, debt structures, housing markets, social status anxiety, or the political economy of growth that has defined human existence since the rise of civilisation.
Frugality is treated as an individual ethical stance, not a behaviour suppressed by systems that depend on worship of the idols of materialism and individualism. Without this analysis, the argument is more a polite suggestion than a challenge to the foundations of modern life. A safe move, perhaps, from the publisher.
For Living More with Less, this gap matters. People are not failing to live frugally because they have not read enough Aristotle. They are responding rationally to incentives, narratives, and fears that push them toward more.
The co-opting of our instincts to further the interests of those at the helm of society is something I have been exploring. It is not to be underestimated, even for the ancient Greeks.
A Useful, If Incomplete, Companion
The Wisdom of Frugality is thoughtful, careful, and well-intentioned. It succeeds in reframing frugality as humane rather than harsh, intelligent rather than austere. It gives readers permission to question consumption without retreating into asceticism.
What it does not fully do is explain resistance. It defends frugality, but rarely confronts the forces aligned against it.
For our project, the book functions best as a philosophical companion rather than a roadmap. It legitimises a path many already sense is right.
The harder work remains. Showing, in practice, how frugality becomes not just wise, but possible, contagious, and culturally normal again, before it is forced upon a great many of us by circumstances beyond our control.