Last year, Tim Harford sang the praises of poor old Ebenezer:
Ebenezer Scrooge is underrated. Literature’s most notorious misanthrope gets no respect from anyone. He’s a miser, a bully and a sociopath. Only with the most strenuous pleading from three supernatural mentors does he embrace the spirit of Christmas and, in so doing, join the human race. Dickens’s story is viewed as a journey of redemption; I am not so sure.
In his original, miserly form, Scrooge actually gives us much to admire. He was a model of inadvertent benevolence. He earned vast sums and avoided spending so much as a farthing if he could help it. The economic implication of this? Regardless of Scrooge’s motives, because he spent little, everyone else enjoyed more, as surely as if Scrooge had divided his fortune and sent a few coins to everyone in the country. As the economist Steven Landsburg once wrote: “There is nobody more generous than the miser — the man who could deplete the world’s resources but chooses not to.”
[…]
It is hard for us to grasp the discrepancy between how we see the world when giving gifts and when receiving them. Recipients may appreciate cash or presents from a list and not fuss too much about expensive gifts; gift givers, in contrast, imagine that the ideal present is an expensive surprise. It isn’t. All this suggests we should probably be spending less on presents, and thinking a lot more about the presents we do buy.
Which brings us back to Scrooge himself. When he finally did decide to embrace the conventional spirit of Christmas, he didn’t waste his money on demonstrative extravagances for people whose desires he didn’t really understand. Instead, he gave three superb gifts. First, a prize turkey that he knew — thanks to a ghostly premonition — was much needed by the Cratchit family. Second, the gift of his time and attention, playing games and making merry with his nephew. Finally, he gave Bob Cratchit the greatest Christmas gift of all: a pay rise.
As I say: underrated.
