Column worth reading by Kristine Frederickson in the Mormon Times on the perils of conspicuous consumption and how now necessity ”has engendered thrift, industry and charitable impulses and actions” prompting a new recognition of the difference between wants and needs, teaching us “to live well on less.”

She says that in 1869 Brigham Young:

…explained that others looked at the example set by his family, and, ”For this reason I desire to organize my own family first into a society for the promotion of habits of order, thrift, industry and charity; and above all things I desire them to retrench from their extravagances in dress, in eating and even in speech. … I am weary of the manner in which our women seek to outdo each other in all the foolish fashions of the world.”