ABSTRACT
I grew up in a home that stressed saving as an unquestioned virtue. At 18 years old, however, having gone back to college for my sophomore year, I found both my macroeconomics professor and the textbook that he had assigned saying something far less complimentary about saving than my parents had said about it. Both the professor and the textbook said that, if people tried to save more, production and employment would suffer (not “could suffer,” they said, but “would suffer”). Far from seeing saving as a virtue, I should now see it as a vice, public even if not private, the cause of economic depressions, including the Great Depression, which my parents themselves had lived through. My days as an undergraduate are now more than thirty-five years behind me. Yet some economists and textbooks teach this anti-saving lesson still, and all the more remarkably, I must say, to judge by the 1980s and 1990s lament that we Americans save too little, that we concern ourselves too little with the future.
