In November 2023, the conservative British newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, had an article by the newspaper’s deputy editor, an economic journalist, lamenting the country’s low rate of saving. In September 2024, it had an article by the newspaper’s deputy economics editor lamenting the country’s addiction to saving.
Perhaps the articles were not contradictory, strictly speaking. The first contained the following warning:
Too much saving can be economically destructive—or what the British economist John Maynard Keynes called the “paradox of thrift”: if you don’t spend, but save all your money instead, it damages demand and can cost someone else his job.
Given Britain’s current position, however, too much saving would be a nice problem to have. In any case, we’ve got the balance hopelessly wrong as things stand.
Continue reading the piece here at Law & Liberty
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Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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