“The credit and debt system … is a story about us, people, being persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.” Tim Jackson, Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the ESRC Research Group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment (RESOLVE), Economics Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development Commission, and author of Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, in his TED talk Economic Reality Check explains the paradox of living in crisis times, the paradox between people’s needs to “save, save, save” and the continuation of an socio-economic influence to “spend, spend, spend,” and suggests a solution of redefining prosperity: for meaningful, altruistic values to spread throughout society in order to achieve a “we” vision of prosperity. Graph: The dramatic rise in personal debt and the plummeting of personal savings in the U.K. the last 15 years before the 2008 financial crash [taken from the TED talk] The Crisis’ Paradox – The Need To Save & The Social Influence To Spend “In the crisis, in the recession, what do people want to do? … They want to spend less and save more. But saving is exactly the wrong thing to do from the system point of view … saving slows down recovery. And politicians call on us continually to draw down more debt, to draw down our own savings even further, just so that we can get the show back on the road, so we can keep this growth-based economy going. It’s an anomaly, it’s a place where the system...
