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RE: I Kept Thinking of a Clever Title, but All I Came Up with Was This - a Few Thoughts on "Short-termism"
There's a question of how much money we're saving. Is it a 2-year reserve -- highly useful for coasting through a pregnancy and the very tough first year of baby's life -- or is it a 200-year reserve, or a 2,000-year reserve?
The capitalist idea is that more is better, which is simplistic and dangerous. The biological idea is that enough is enough, which we see in the way that successful biological systems optimize around a realistic set of target values for multiple variables, rather than maximizing one factor at the expense of all others.
What's wrong with saving a load of money? I think the philosophy of enough is enough is flawed; how do you know it's enough? It might be today, but what about tomorrow or the next day?
If you're American, they say you're only 2 major illnesses away from bankruptcy; so saving money is the only prudent thing to do, unless of course, you enjoy living hand to mouth, month to month.
Cg
That's the point. How much is enough? It's a good conversation to have, as individuals and as a society. It's a conversation that one never has under capitalism. Capitalism says it's never enough, that there is no such thing as enough. What individual could possibly need a billion dollars, except as a way to compete with other billionaires for social influence? Why not put that money back in circulation where it can do something useful?
This is a neat talk that goes into how our ideas and assumptions about money affect the design of currencies, and experiments that are underway to try new types of currencies. http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/We-need-to-talk-about-money-Sus