The Week of Living Thriftily
By Rod Dreher – Director of Publications
When did “thrift” become a granny word? That is, when did Americans stop thinking of thrift as a life-giving virtue worth emulating—after all, it derives from the word thrive—and start treating it as an antique concept as relevant to contemporary life as Model T Fords and Lawrence Welk?
It’s hard to say for sure, but sometime around 1966 is not a bad guess. That was the last year America observed National Thrift Week, an annual event begun in 1916 to educate adults and children in the value of saving and handling money responsibly, but abandoned after half a century.
“Thrift came to be seen as old-fashioned as the financial service industry, the consumer economy, and the consumer culture all converged to provide the means and send the message that it was okay, even strategically sound, to take on loads of debt to finance our consumer wants and desires,” says sociologist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, director of the John Templeton Center for Thrift and Generosity at the Institute for American Values.
According to a 1997 Congressional Budget Office analysis, the early 1960s saw a change in the personal bankruptcy rate. Previously it had been closely tied to the recessionary cycle, but it was also linked to consumer credit, which was becoming more widespread. The upswing in personal bankruptcies during economic expansions indicated that Americans were losing the skills and the impetus to manage their money wisely. If people were spendthrift during good times, how much worse off would they be if times got seriously bad again?
We found out when the Great Recession struck in the last decade. Seeing the country reeling from the consequences of its free-spending ways, Templeton Press editor-in-chief Susan Arellano and Thrift: A Cyclopedia author David Blankenhorn started a nationwide Bring Back Thrift Week campaign, reviving the old observance in conjunction with the January 17 birthday of Benjamin Franklin, the Founding Father of American thrift.
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VIDEO: Mayor Nutter proclaims
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This year, Franklin’s hometown of Philadelphia became the first American city to revive Thrift Week, from January 17-23. Mayor Michael Nutter joined in seven days of public education on diverse aspects of thrift, including exploring the thriftiness of gardening, and public libraries as repositories of community thrift. Philadelphia's Thrift Week included a roundtable, hosted in part by Templeton Foundation president and chairman Dr. Jack Templeton, in which community leaders discussed how renewing personal habits of thrift can, in turn, renew the city.
Philadelphia pastor and community leader Dr. Herbert Lusk II was also part of the city’s Thrift Week program, and shared ideas and experiences from his non-profit community service organization, People For People, Inc. Frank Robinson, the organization’s development director, tells the Templeton Report that People For People runs a credit union helping inner-city Philadelphians avoid payday loans and predatory lenders, and acquire smart money skills. Plus, People For People works thrift into the curriculum at its charter school.
“We’re competing against so many other factors,” Robinson explains. "The instant gratification mentality, the values people place on sneakers and cars, and having it now—versus a culture of patience and prudence and deferred gratification. The culture has been like that for decades."
“I don’t know that people really know the concept of thrift, but they do realize that they can’t have a livelihood that’s sustainable by spending all the time,” he continues. “How to change—that’s new for people.”
New? Yes—but necessary. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead says tossing thrift on the ash heap of history has been “a disaster for the country and for families.” To build a solid future for ourselves, one free of debt slavery, we have to return to an ethic of thrift as a way of life.
“Thrift has always been identified with freedom from servitude to another person's power,” she says. “And thrift is a source of human happiness and thriving. People feel more optimistic, more in control, and more confident when they save, according to a number of studies. Even saving a small amount of money changes an individual's outlook about the future and about his or her own efficacy in shaping the future.”
Dafoe Whitehead adds that the long tradition of American philanthropy derives from an ethic of thrift—that is, the idea that great wealth is not strictly a personal possession, but a gift entrusted to their stewardship to improve the lives of others.
Along those lines, Susan Arellano calls the efforts of both the Templeton Foundation and Templeton Press to revive an authentic American culture of thrift a legacy of the late Sir John Templeton. Says Arellano, “One might say that Sir John’s life exemplified John Wesley’s definition of thrift: ‘Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can.’”
2011 JTF Grant Inquiries Accepted February 1
Researchers and project leaders seeking financial support from the John Templeton Foundation will soon be able to submit Online Funding Inquiries (OFIs) for the first funding cycle of 2011. Applications that specifically address our Core Funding Areas in Science and the Big Questions, Character Development, Freedom and Free Enterprise, Exceptional Cognitive Talent and Genius, and Genetics or our new Funding Priority, Can GM Crops Help to Feed the World?, can be submitted between February 1-April 15. The OFI must include a project description, an explanation of the project's strategic promise, its capacity for success, and the amount of funding requested. Applicants will be notified by May 23 whether the Foundation will be inviting them to submit Full Proposals. The second funding cycle of 2011 will begin with the acceptance of OFI's on August 1 and will follow a similar timeline.
Potential grantees can learn more about how to submit an OFI for Our Core Funding Areas or for the Funding Priority by visiting www.templeton.org.
Nature’s Hidden Handiwork
What if a group of top scientists and scholars from various disciplines came together to examine each other’s research in fresh ways? That’s the organizing principle behind The Chicago Social Brain Network, a Foundation-supported association of academics from the hard sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities who collaborate across professional boundaries to investigate big questions that overlap their fields. As Network members write in Invisible Forces and Powerful Beliefs: Gravity, Gods, and Minds, a recently published a collection of their essays:
For hundreds of years, theology and philosophy were the hub disciplines of scholarship, and other fields of inquiry orbited around this dyad and were tightly constrained by it. Over the past three centuries, the sciences have come into their own, displacing theology and philosophy at the center of the academic universe. In so doing, they have produced extraordinary advances in everyday life. People may reminisce about the good old days, but thanks to science and technology, the amount of total income spent on the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter dropped from 80% in 1901 to 50% in 2002–2003. Yet there remains an inchoate sense that something is missing in our lives, something intangible and elusive. Science has improved our material lives, but improvements in material life may not be enough to optimize human well-being.
Can these two very different ways of seeing the world be used synergistically to shed new light on the human mind?
Invisible Forces and Powerful Beliefs is an enlightening positive answer to this question. With essays from leading scholars in fields as disparate as neuroscience, psychology, and theology, the book explores ways that “invisible forces”—things like religious beliefs, neural processes, social dynamics, and even gravity—condition the way human beings experience the world, both individually and collectively. “Part of the idea behind this work was that what is invisible can matter just as much, if not more, than what is visible,” says Barnaby Marsh, executive vice president, strategic initiatives at the John Templeton Foundation. “The original research of this group illustrates just a few of the ways that science can discover vast unseen patterns and realities, especially in the domain of social behavior.”
