(Author’s note: A version of this piece was scheduled to run in USA Today but was taken off the page at the last minute. I have not been able to find another home for it, but I would love to explore the issue more. So many stories of “the new frugality” these days! So little consideration that time is money — and spending 5 hours a week gardening to save $15 is a really bad pay off).

With the Dow in flux, and gas and food prices still high, Americans are feeling pretty pinched this fall. So pinching our pennies has become a national obsession in return. A recent BusinessWeek cover story profiles a “lean green family” (featuring Leah Ingram, a colleague of mine from the American Society of Journalists and Authors). Parade magazine did a covery story on America’s thriftiest families, one of whom then scored an appearance on an Oprah show which also featured a “Coupon Mom” and her $30 grocery bills. Lenka Keston, product manager at CouponWinner.com, notes that the site has seen huge increases in people printing coupons since the economy started slowing. In June, the Wall Street Journal claimed that more Americans were spending their summers planting victory gardens a la World War II — vegetable plots in their backyards — to minimize produce bills. More recently, the Journal claimed that office workers are skipping the deli in favor of the brown bag lunch.

There’s a simple reason for this new frugality. When times are tough, people have two options. They can cut costs, or they can increase their incomes. The latter sounds harder, particularly in a sour economy. That’s why most people try the former first, even though some of the penny-pinching tips batted around sound ridiculous (shave with soap instead of shaving cream for a year! You’ll save…$6).

But as the economic doldrums sink in this winter, I’ve started to wonder if this idea is due for a rethink. That’s because — even since the last downturn — we’ve shifted into what I call “The Craig’s List Economy.” The rise of online job sites, where people can easily advertise part-time jobs, gigs, or their own skills, means that for many Americans, spare time can be turned into money far more smoothly than in the past. This changes the calculation — from one of hunkering down with the coupons so — thanks to our keyboards and a flexible labor market — a more optimistic approach to dealing with tough times.

A new mindset

This idea of surviving a recession by boosting income seems counterintuitive. If you fear layoffs, you can’t ask for a raise. The trick is to nix the mindset that the only way to earn more is to ask the boss for a salary bump. This is tough. “People know how to cut back,” says Emma Johnson, a personal finance columnist for MSN Money. Being entrepreneurial in seeking out new gigs is “a very scary proposition for many people. If you cut a Netflix subscription, there’s no risk except that you’ll be bored.”

Certainly during the 1991 recession, trying to moonlight or freelance was tougher than nixing Blockbuster trips, or whatever the equivalent of cutting Netflix was back then. There were few good ways for people who had projects, and people with spare capacity, to meet up. Full-time jobs could justify lines in the newspaper classifieds. But if you want to pay $20 an hour for five hours weekly, it makes no sense to pay hundreds of dollars for enough print real estate to describe the gig. Nor does it make sense for a part-time job seeker to take out an ad listing her skills. Instead, you get signs in windows and pink flyers on telephone poles — inefficient means of finding talent in either case.

Then, in 1995, San Francisco programmer Craig Newmark founded his eponymous list. Since Craig’s List lets people advertise jobs, gigs, and their own skills for nothing or next to it, this site increasingly dominates the industry, with job posts rising 10-fold in the past three years to 2 million-plus per month, though of course it’s far from the only online job board (I look for gigs on some freelance writer sites and my college alumni networking lists). Plenty of jobs advertised online are normal full-time positions, but a growing number are part-time, contract, freelance. That’s because the cost to advertise a job (or job sought) online is so low that it results “in more jobs being listed than would be otherwise,” Craig’s List CEO Jim Buckmaster tells me. Because there are more jobs listed, there’s more variety, and “when you have a wider variety of different kinds of employment opportunities, it stands to reason that you’re going to fit more people into more different kinds of situations beyond the traditional ‘I’m looking for a 40 hour a week job in an office complex somewhere in a cubicle.’ There’s a lot bigger variety to be found on Craig’s List.”

Journal articles to parking

That’s putting it mildly. Nina Gilbert, who now teaches full-time, found an in-between jobs gig on Craig’s List editing journal articles written by scholars whose first language was not English (”I particularly enjoyed learning about the history of Armenian dovecotes,” she says). Andrew Robinton, who now works in publishing, found tutoring jobs, catering jobs, and valet parking jobs on Craig’s List — “obviously not what I wanted to do in the long run,” he says, “but it was a fine way to make ends meet in the short term.” Some gigs pay insultingly little. Some are scams. But not all are. And more importantly, you can always post your own ideal gig on an online job board, your pay requirements, and see who contacts you.

In the Craig’s List Economy, the barriers to finding new projects to bring in more cash are low. Granted, it’s not for everyone. About 15 million Americans already hold multiple jobs — with probably little more capacity to moonlight. Many of the rest of us feel pressed for time anyway, though somehow the average American manages to watch over 30 hours of television each week. Earning just $8 an hour freelancing for half of that would bring in an extra $120 a week — more, even after taxes, than most people can save with coupons, a victory garden, or bringing their lunch to work. In fact, you could sew your own clothes, get rid of your car, and still eventually face the same problem as, say, Chrysler idling plants to cope with a 22% decline in sales through June. There’s a limit to how much you can cut. Better to find new sources of revenue because, in theory, there is no limit to how much you can earn.

In practice, of course, there is. But in the Craig’s List Economy, that number is far higher than most of us have ever tried to find out.