ABSTRACT

The Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) community consists of individuals each personally dedicated to reducing consumption, so as to build up financial surpluses that are eventually adequate to live off. While it shares certain features in common with other ‘financial independence’ ideologies and self-help communities, one thing that distinguishes it is the emphasis on frugality. Freedom comes to consist not only in independence from the labour market, but also from materialism, consumerism, and consumer debt. At the same time, this freedom is predicated on passive investment in the stock market and reliance on financial techniques for representing the future. Using semi-structured interviews with leading FIRE advocates and analysis of books and blog content, this paper assesses the ambivalent moral economy of FIRE, to understand how and why individuals seek this unusual relationship to capitalism, that pursues the status of rentier through the strategic rejection of materialism.

摘要

Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) 社区由个人组成，每个人都致力于减少消费，以建立最终足以维持生计的财政盈余。虽然它与其他“财务独立”意识形态和自助社区具有某些共同特征，但与众不同的一件事是对节俭的强调。自由不仅在于独立于劳动力市场，还在于摆脱物质主义、消费主义和消费者债务。同时，这种自由建立在对股票市场的被动投资和对代表未来的金融技术的依赖之上。通过对主要 FIRE 倡导者的半结构化访谈以及对书籍和博客内容的分析，本文评估了 FIRE 的矛盾道德经济，