97. Inexpensive, Not Cheap

(Epistemic status: Hard-won practical wisdom and fishing out a few frames from the water supply to weave them into something grander. Written in under two hours, to prove a point. For anyone who's had to make powerful things work with sorely limited resources, and who managed it.)

What do you do, when your reach exceeds not your grasp but rather your budget? What does it really mean, to half-ass it with everything you've got, if we want to think about it in a more general sense than mere effort? What considerations must you make, what heuristics arise, when you need to actually pay attention to the consumption frontier, when you haven't got the goods to build in a safety factor of 10, or can't paper over your inconveniences with funds, or don't have the luxury of infinite time to think before you must make your move?

There's a distinction that people often miss when they talk about frugality. They inappropriately embucket "inexpensive" with "cheap", shrugging off the distinction between the two as irrelevant; nothing could be further from the truth. They view any attempt to identify needlessly wasted time, money, energy, or materials with suspicion, deriding it as a lack of respect for quality. Nothing could be further from the truth. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." So noted Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in a meditation on the nature of airplane design; indeed, it's in the design of airplanes that this principle is more stark. Maximally durable materials, every feature desirable, and lavish furnishings on every surface - these are death to a machine that seeks to slip the surly bonds of earth. Ounces make pounds, after all.

But neither can you wantonly remove any old part with weight as a justification; neither should you fully skimp on materials, if you want your plane to fly for more than a few inglorious seconds. The vital distinction between "cheap" and "inexpensive" is thus illuminated. "Cheap" means cutting the corners that matter. It means using materials that will fail under reasonable strain and skipping necessary quality control steps. It means closing your eyes to the fact that when you implement a quick and dirty "good enough" solution, the "quick" vanishes like morning mist, but the "dirty" lasts forever; good enough will rapidly cease to be good enough. To be cheap is to practice false economy: you'll pay less now, sure, but you'll pay vastly more later. If you're lucky, it'll be in broken machines and broken machines, and not broken bones. Pay less now, and pay more later when what you've wrought breaks, disappoints, or needs replacement. And I don't mean to talk of prototypes and test purchases and sure-why-not expeditions, here, either - those have their place. A prototype is never meant to last; sketch studies are in charcoal for masterpieces in oil paint; a hobbyist might buy a cheap version of a tool to see whether they'll get use out of it, fully intending in advance to replace it with a better version when it gives out.

Indeed, that hobbyist craftsman likely seeks the inexpensive. "Inexpensive" means knowing which corners you can reasonably trim without much of a loss in quality. It doesn't mean settling for an inferior result; it means having sufficient knowledge of your field to grok which ingredients you can leave out as irrelevant signaling and which would really ding you to miss out on. It means looking at a time-worn production pipeline and thinking - what steps can I skip here, or do differently and more efficiently? It means thinking carefully about which precious sacred cows you'd be best off turning into steak or hamburger.

Take vanilla extract, for instance. Most recipes for baked goods call for a splash of it like it's holy water; better recipes will recommend vanilla paste or even whole beans. And in some cases, you really do need it - ice cream will generally be much worse without some vanilla in it, even if you're not making vanilla ice cream. But consider that for cookies baked at higher temperatures, all those complex flavor molecules will bake right off; perfuming your air isn't worth it. Skip it. Save the money for better butter, or better chocolate for the chips.

Or take ultramarine pigment. In ages past, you made that vivid blue by buying ruinously expensive rocks from Afghanistan, lugging them all the way back from Afghanistan, grinding them incredibly fine, and hoarding the resulting paint jealously for religious iconography. Nowadays, chemically identical ultramarine can be synthesized for pennies and bought by the pound. And it's not even like it's a worse product - it's actually better! The grain size is smaller; the color brighter, purer, and more even. Lapis lazuli comes from rocks, after all, and those rocks aren't entirely the delightful blue stuff. If you care extremely much about provenance or just want to show off that you can afford ground lapis, sure - use the Afghani rocks. But if you just want to paint something beautiful, use the synthetic.

In a similar vein, I think about synthetic gems a lot. Lab-forged diamonds sparkle just as brightly and resist scratching just as well as whatever's been dug out of the ground by dictators' slaves and artificially trickled out by De Beers; lab-grown rubies and sapphires have richer and more varied hues than whatever's being peddled from Cambodia and Burma these days; lab-grown emeralds are just as brittle and much more easily replaced than apartheid emeralds or narcotic cartels' goods; lab-grown moissanite is nearly as durable as and much sparklier than any diamond, and the conditions for their natural formation don't even exist on Earth. All of these synethetics are far cheaper and just as good as their dirt-dug counterparts. When I finally get around to making beautiful crowns someday, I will make a point of it to use only synthetic gems.

For a different angle, consider port. It's a delicious wine, a sweet wine; considered a dessert wine these days, never mind that for centuries it was considered a perfectly good dinner drink. But as time has gone on, tastes in wine have trended drier and more snobbish - why buy the stuff everyone can find joy in rather than signal your sophistication with something that you have to acquire a taste for? I think that that's nonsense. A nice cabernet is fine, but give me a ruby port with dinner any day; a bottle of Dow's ruby will cost you about $20, while . Even if you spring for the terrifyingly expensive vintage stuff, a bottle of 1977 vintage Dow's - considered among the best years in living memory from one of the best port producers - will cost maybe $300; a bottle of 1982 Lafite-Rothschild Bordeaux will cost an eye-popping $10,000. I know which one I'm picking.

The Pareto principle  - the 80/20 rule - applies here ruthlessly. Twenty percent of what you do determines eighty percent of the result, but the question is - which twenty percent? Use expensive materials where they matter for function and even style; use cheaper materials where no one will see or care. Use tools that won't fall apart in your hands, but don't spring for the very best gear until you know precisely what you want and why. Use the good cinnamon for your apple pie, but skip the fine vanilla in your chocolate chip cookies. Pick up last generation's camera equipment rather than demand the latest and greatest; your pictures will come out just fine.

Half-ass it with all you've got, is what I'm saying. Figure out what kinds of results you're aiming for and spend just a bit more than the minimum it will take to get those results. Do precise work on a budget, whether that budget's time, money, or goods; figure out where precision matters and where you can skip it. "Making do" doesn't mean settling for poor results - it means understanding what you actually need, rather than what marketing's convinced you that you want. Even if all you're "crafting" is your own enjoyment, pick up games when they're on sale instead of at launch; the gameplay is the same and you can afford to be patient. What you're aiming for here is maxing out your value in utils or hedons per dollar - if you can do something worthwhile for free, great! If you need a substantial outlay to get something exceptional and durable, that's fine, too. But be mindful that hobbyist expenses can grow arbitrarily large, and the returns to your expenditures diminish rapidly; try truly cheap versions first, if it's safe, and when entropy claims those flimsier tools, delight in the sacrifice and pick up something better, armed with a better understanding of what you like and an appreciation of finer goods.

And what's more, insisting on using every scrap and every drop can unlock new tech - refusing to part with the peels of the citrus you've used means curing them in sugar and collecting the delicious oils; not something you might think to do, if you've got enough limes around to use them frivolously. Similarly, demanding efficiency and simple repeatability in your processes means that other people can help you who otherwise might not, or that you can still execute on your plans even when you're tired or just not at your best.

The hard part is always knowing the difference. That takes experience, attention, and failures - sometimes expensive ones. If you're lucky, you can skip some of that with wise advice and the accumulated experience of others. What shortcuts work? Which come back to bite you? If you're clever or experienced, you might guess right; otherwise, it's the textbook of hard knocks. Which substitutions are invisible? Which ones ruin everything? The proof of the pudding is in the spoiling. Which corners can you safely trim? Which ones will bring your structure crashing down? Consult your careful textbooks and ponder engineering intution and doodle a free-body diagram, if you're fancy; the rest of us will have to settle for standing well clear.

Oh, but once you know? You can work wonders on seemingly shoestring budgets. To be clear - not cheap things, but inexpensive ones. They work. They last. They do precisely what you claim they will, and if they're flashy, it's because you underpromised and they overdelivered, not because of ignorant excess or conspicuous consumption.

I kicked off this whole thing by talking about consumption frontiers. Consider that trimming away frills and skipping legitimately unnecessary ritualistic steps means expanding those frontiers. It means reallocating those resources somewhere where they'll make a difference and make for a better result; it means making more of the perfectly good result rather than settling for fewer. Cheapness is contempt for quality; inexpensiveness is respect for resources. You owe it to yourself to stretch your supplies; to demand more of your tools and yourself; to squeeze every last hedon out of every red cent. Now get out there and make something stunning, and don't you dare bankrupt yourself doing it.