The Mortgage Mortgages Your Life

Twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents. That is what Thoreau's house at Walden cost, itemized down to the last second-hand brick, and he prints the bill because he wants his readers to run their own. Here Economy turns personal: the mortgage, a new invention in his lifetime, which he watches quietly spending his neighbors' lives; then clothes, which he treats as a moral question, and Kaag has come to think he is right. A thirty-dollar sweatshirt shows up and does more work than it should. One question waits at the end: if your time were suddenly short, what would your days hold?