Paper prepared for Revisiting the American Dream: How U.S. Families Cope with Work and Family Life. American Anthropological Association Annual Conference.

Alex Carlsberg expounds on his family’s model for success. There are, he explains, only two strategies for financial security. The first and most common one is that of earning more money, while the second is to search relentlessly for bargains. In both cases, he assumes his family’s consumption will remain high. Alex says that most people adopt the first strategy, but he and wife Ann pursue the second. They scour the Internet, visit garage sales and flea markets, and patronize remainder stores and outlet malls. Annual department store sales loom especially large in their annual purchases of personal items and gifts. Alex and Ann have a model or image of themselves as a family defined by principles of efficacy, and that model plays out daily in their sense of obligation and the activities they perform. Suzanne Mendoza-Jones has never met Alex, yet the family she describes is principled, albeit in quite different ways. She and husband Humberto believe that everything that enters it—goods, services, people, ideas— comes with attached costs of time, money, and grief, and so they zealously patrol the boundary around family. Items no longer needed are immediately discarded in the weekly trash, taken to the local landfill, or donated to a thrift shop; they are never stored, “just in case ” they are needed. Suzanne and Humberto live below their means by a principle of simplicity that is explicitly articulated and applied to decisions large and small. What Alex and Suzanne share is the articulation of models of their families as effective ones. These model