Are We Over Affluenza?

"Benjamin Franklin is largely responsible for making wise spending and living a virtue. His publications, Poor Richard’s Almanac and The Way to Wealth, were cornerstones for much of our collective frugal mindset and perhaps for the long-revered idea that in this country, anyone can make it big with ethics and elbow grease. But even in Franklin’s day, thrift was nothing new."

Thrift "began slipping our minds in the late 1940s and early 1950s as American life prospered. In The Decline of Thrift, David M. Tucker contends that as the 1950s rolled along, frugal middle-class ethics gave way to a “leisure class” mentality: vacations, golf clubs and the newest television became coveted goals. In the 1960s, the topic of frugality was largely absent from school education. A national thrift week that kicked off every January on Benjamin Franklin’s birthday since 1916 folded in 1966. After the brief hiccup of a 1973 oil scare, the 1980s became the epitome of excess.

That lifestyle roared on through the 1990s. The first hint of problems weren’t revealed until the wild, woolly Internet had a dotcom bust in 2000. Then American involvement with the Middle East began to sap financial resources. 2008 brought a collapse of financial institutions and real estate prices. Our economic survival became a panicked, white-knuckle, roller-coaster tour. Americans began to see all the ways things had gone wrong....Like a pendulum and the old science of equal and opposite reactions, it seems that thrift is returning."

Read more here: The New Thrift, Long absent as a respected part of the American psyche, frugality could be making a comeback