Christmas is an easy target, a flaccid fish in a shallow barrel. The garish excesses, the family stresses, the festive messes: No wonder so many satirists over so many years have found seasonal employment taking it down a notch or two.
Here we have three books that bring varying degrees of wryness to bear on all things Yule. Augusten Burroughs decks the halls with boughs of dysfunction; The Dreaded Feast collects the thoughts of 31 writers – both the quick and the dead are represented – on how best to grit the teeth and bear the holidays; and from Joel Waldfogel comes a demonstration of why economics is called “the dismal science,” a rather cheerless, clinical scuttling of our intemperate spending habits.
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Waldfogel (does that mean “forest bird”? I think it must) is amply qualified as a scourge for spendthrifts, attached as he is to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business (named for Joseph Wharton, a somewhat removed cousin of Edward Wharton, the first and feckless husband of Edith Wharton, should you keep track of such things.).
Waldfogel's big gripe, as outlined in Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays, isn't the reflexive whipping out of the credit card that's so usual at this time of year. His goat is gotten not by spending per se, but by inefficient spending. What makes spending “inefficient,” apparently – and it is possible that the word has a different weight and resonance if your degree is in economics than if your degree is in English – is something called “deadweight loss.” This, I gather, is the discrepancy between the retail value of an item – a scarf, a blender, a book – and the value it might be assigned by its recipient. If you deed someone a gift for which you paid $70, and he or she values it at only $40, you have a deadweight loss of $30 and a grievous example of inefficient spending.
Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays, by Joel Waldfogel, Princeton University Press, 174 pages, $10.95
The better we know the people for whom we buy the gifts, the greater the chance we'll buy them something they might actually like or use, i.e., the greater the chance that we'll spend efficiently. The most efficient gift to give is cash, but since that's tawdry beyond telling, why not give gift cards?
I have just re-read those last few sentences and they leave me with same hollow feeling I took away from Scroogenomics. My lips were forever forming the words “and so?” and I kept on thinking – yea, verily – hoping that I would detect an “Ah heck, I'm just funnin' ya” gleam in the Waldfogelian eye, or that something resembling a punch line would pop up from behind a supply-side sugar plum. But none ever appeared, at least not as far as I could discern.
To be fair, and in the interests of full disclosure, I should say that Scroogenomics brings together the two aspects of humanity of which I'm least fond – Christmas and economics – so I am far from being the best-equipped reviewer for this little book. And you will understand, of course, that there is more to Waldfogel's argument than I've just outlined; more, but not so very much more, really, and I cleave to my assertion that the book is mostly a record of what is self-evident, supported by whacks of data, but with little that resembles a payoff moment. There's no money shot, no improving moral, no convincing explanation of how the world might be a different or a better place if the efficiencies after which the author hankers were brought to bear.
