news-record.com

Thrift, that once-great American value, passed away at roughly the same moment as my father, one of its most fervent practitioners, who died in 1987. Just a coincidence, of course, but one that struck me as the world copes with a financial crisis that stems in some large part from our thriftless culture.

My dad was a believer in what he semi-ironically referred to as the Protestant work ethic, a good earner who did not believe he had broken even for the year until he had put something aside for savings, a physician who loved to park his Plymouth next to the flashier cars in the doctors' parking lot. All of this put him squarely in a tradition that dates back to Ben Franklin. "To use Franklin's favorite terms, thrift's core ideas are 'industry' (that is, diligence) and 'frugality' (that is, conservation)," writes David Blankenhorn, the head of a think-tank project dedicated to exploring thrift. He calls it "the ethic and practice of best use ... [of] time, money, our possessions, our health, and our society's natural resources - to promote both our own flourishing and the social good."

Thrift was still a cultural touchstone when my dad was a young man, in the era of Pat Nixon's Republican cloth coat. The popular John Houseman ads for Smith Barney -- "We make money the old-fashioned way, we earn it" -- ran almost until the end of his life. But as the years went by, the ideal was fraying, and now the bill has come due.

This change in our national character, though far from the only cause of the current deleveraging crisis, can be seen at every level of the catastrophe. Individuals and institutions lost sight of common sense and core principles. People borrowed more than they could hope to pay, banks lent unwisely and did deals they did not fully understand. Regulators were hobbled and indifferent. We abandoned our superego and doted on our id.

I'm not a believer in golden ages, and of course similar behavior has taken place in other eras. The phrase "conspicuous consumption" dates back to the 19th century, and our allegedly thrifty forebears managed to induce numerous financial panics (as they used to be called) and the Great Depression. Some of this stuff is just human nature. Still, something has changed in the last generation. The nation's personal savings rate began to drop in the mid-1980s. Maybe this was because the great inflation of the previous decade made saving money look like a sucker's game - when cash is worth less over time, why keep it in the bank? Another possible reason, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Board of San Francisco, was the new ubiquity of credit cards. The personal savings rate finally went negative in 2005, for the first time since the Great Depression, as consumers splurged on expensive goods.

Keeping up with the Joneses is an age-old game, but it got more expensive as quotidian items like blue jeans and athletic shoes turned into markers of status. In the early '80s, the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans (a project I helped produce in 1986) began to fetishize wealth in a new way, while television shows like "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" both reflected and informed the zeitgeist. Popular musicians used to sing about being poor, then they started boasting about their wealth, reciting brand names to which we are supposed to aspire.

Americans began stuffing themselves on super-sized menus and wheeling super-sized vehicles onto the roads, just because they could. Making money the old-fashioned way was for chumps as day trading and its cousin, casino gambling, spread across the country; even staid old North Carolina added a lottery.

People who get paid to know better, didn't. Savings and Loans -- known as "thrifts" - gambled depositors' money away in the '80s. As time went on, credit cards were pushed on college kids, and second mortgages, once a signal of financial distress, were repackaged as lifestyle enhancers. "Live Richly," Citicorp began telling its customers in 2001, meaning "borrow against your home." Houses got bigger and down payments got smaller. Our government spent profligately and -- after Jimmy Carter was mocked for wearing a sweater -- seemed reluctant to model thrift. George Bush the Elder, faced with a war over oil, raced his powerboat for the cameras. Bill Clinton made a mockery of the idea of self-restraint. Dick Cheney, at a moment when the nation was hungry for purpose, derided conservation as national policy.

Maybe thrift was a community value that our atomized society no longer has the power to enforce, leaving consumerism to fill the gap. Maybe American abundance and optimism convinced us that we didn't need to be thrifty -- or maybe the stagnant earning power of many Americans convinced us there was no point in trying. Given the circumstances at hand, we may be forced to reaffirm thrift in our personal and public lives. A friend who fancies himself a conservative complained to me recently that high gas prices forced him to think carefully about driving, so that he now does several errands on the same trip. I can hear my father's voice whispering, What's so bad about that?

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record alternate Sundays.