Money Skills from the 1900s that Have Died

05/05/2024

Sewing Kit

When you start looking backward at lost money skills, the first that comes to mind is making physical items from scratch. However, in an era of affordable mass-produced goods, we simply don’t have to put in the labor anymore.

And hopefully we won’t have to do so again due to some major crisis, such as nuclear winter.

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Morbid speculation aside, consider a few money skills from the 20th Century that we as a culture have largely lost.

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Critical Analysis and Skepticism of Scams

Think fast: who’s more likely to fall for a scam, older or younger adults?

Most of us assume that tech-savvy young adults can spot scams that might dupe a boomer. It turns out most of us are wrong.

Young adults appear to be losing the critical thinking skills and healthy skepticism necessary to avoid online (and offline) scams. A 2023 study by Deloitte found that Gen Z adults were three times as likely to fall for scams as baby boomers. They’re also twice as likely to let their social media accounts get hacked.

Bartering

If two people each had something of value, there was a time when their first impulse was to negotiate a trade rather than fish in their pockets for credit cards or dollar bills.

And if that meant that the government didn’t catch wind of the transaction to tax everyone involved, well, all the better.

Reusing and Repurposing Disused Items

During the Great Depression, millions of Americans suffered such dire poverty that they could not afford to throw anything away.

They saved buttons to reuse in other pieces of clothing and reused flour and rice sacks. When they cooked food that released fat or grease, they saved it in jars.

Every piece of every animal went to good use. Chicken feathers and down went into pillows, mattresses and comforters. People ate the gizzards and innards and put chicken feet into soups.

Depression-era adults repurposed old tires to patch holes in shoe soles, or even as building materials for “Hooverville” shanties. They repurposed paper from magazines and newspapers to wrap and store everyday goods for burning or even for toilet paper.

Need is, in fact, the mother of invention.

Making Clothes from Scratch

Similarly, people in the 20th Century repurposed old pieces of cloth to make clothing. Remember the curtains from “The Sound of Music?”

In fact, many adults knew how to make clothes from scratch. They knew how to spin, weave, crochet, sew and needlepoint.

Try asking a 20-year-old today to make a piece of clothing.

Building Furniture from Scratch

Furniture comes from little Swedish elves at IKEA, right?

Not back in the day, it didn’t. Just like clothes, people used to make their own furniture as needed from recovered pieces of wood.

Admittedly, it didn’t come with the same fun names like Poäng, Malm bed, or Kallax, however.

Hunting, Butchering and Curing Meat

Put a liberal environmentalist and a conservative hunter in the same room, and they may not share much in common — except their support for hunting wild deer and other plentiful animals for food as an alternative to supporting Big Beef.

Hunting your own food is free, both financially and in its greenhouse gas footprint. Deer also cause hundreds of deaths and thousands of injuries each year. And that says nothing of the $8 billion or so in economic losses caused by deer incidents each year.

We killed off most of their predators, such as wolves and mountain lions. And now they’re overpopulated: a problem we could solve by encouraging more hunting. Yet, instead, hunting has declined in America.

All Calculations with Political Tinting

Politics really do make people dumber.

No, really: a Yale study found that people performed far worse on simple math problems if the correct answer didn’t align with their political worldview. That goes for all sides of the political spectrum before you get too smug that your side is somehow immune from such narrowmindedness.

It shows one of the many costs of worsening polarization since a more harmonious era in the 20th Century. And since politics tint nearly every aspect of our lives in today’s America, there are plenty of danger zones for financial reckonings.

Final Thoughts

You may say “good riddance” to some of the lost skills above. But the time may come when we need some of these skills again — not for crafting but for survival.