parsimony

noun

1. (uncountable, usually)Great reluctance to spend money unnecessarily.

   “Near-synonyms: (usually admirable) frugality, economy, thrift, thriftiness; (excessive degree) tightness, stinginess; (extreme degree) miserliness; see also Thesaurus:frugal, Thesaurus:stingy”

   “Parsimony, and not industry, is the immediate cause of the increase of capital. Industry, indeed, provides the subject which parsimony accumulates. But whatever industry might acquire, if parsimony did not save and store up, the capital would never be the greater.”

   “If mere parsimony could have made a man rich, Sir Pitt Crawley might have become very wealthy […]”

   “THE WATERFORD & TRAMORE RAILWAY. By H. Fayle and A. T. Newham. David & Charles. 12s 6d. [...] Parsimony was responsible for low wages: at the turn of the century the Secretary & Manager was receiving £175 a year and the Locomotive Superintendent slightly less.”

2. (broadly, uncountable, usually)The quality or characteristic of using the fewest resources or explanations to solve a problem.

   “We used three search heuristics, Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood, and maximum parsimony, to construct phylogenies from unique COI haplotypes and used default parameters for analyses unless otherwise noted.”