And in the mean time, personal savings absolutely plummeted.

This is something I call the 50 20 paradox.

Holding down the right flank of the OECD, all the way on the other side, is Greece.

What we're seeing is an uptake in the savings rate.

There was nothing to buy, unless you wanted to buy some rivets. Right?

Shows what I know.

It's not just numbers on a piece of paper.

But then starting in the early '80s, right around, let's see, about 1984, you see that people started saving less and less money.

But there's another group of people who were more than offsetting that by taking credit.

Pulling money out of the house as fast as they could, putting money on credit cards as fast as they could.

What is the average difference here?

They work, they provide services to each other and they have savings, right?

He's given a control that allows him to adjust his savings rate.

What's this building?

Now even after all of this granular level of control, do futureless language speakers seem to save more?

Been on my hip right next to my whip for 15 years.

And what I'm going to talk about today is Save More Tomorrow.

So we're starting to pay for things with money that we have.

So this is a timely problem.

That was a great day for my mother.

It's not even sustainable economically.

And slowly, slowly we're bringing it up to a moderate savings rate.

In fact, if anything, they were borrowing against those things, especially home equity.

Have you any savings?

I guess there's two things you could talk about.

let's say every January you're going to be saving more automatically and it's going to go away from your paycheck to the 401(k) plan before you see it, before you touch it, before you get the issue of immediate gratification.

Because I kind of view that as a reference point.

Until we get to this point right here, where everything starts blowing up.

Let me just put it into my mattress.

Well, think about smoking, for example.

I still have some money saved! I'm prepared for hard times.

Keynes called this the paradox of thrift saving slows down recovery.

She runs two of the lines, and has already saved enough money to put a down payment on her house.

I'd been cheated out of my life savings!

All the way to the extreme circumstance, to 2007 where, on average, people didn't save money.

This is people expanding debt, drawing down their savings, just to stay in the game.

I'm saving up.

Keep something for a rainy day.

You'd rent a smaller home.

Where maybe I saved 5, but someone else borrowed 5.

In an emergency you can fall back on your savings.

Put by money for the future.

Do you know what this was right here?

I don't dividend it out to the shareholders. I just keep that.

And I can do that in the first year and I can balance that in the next 10, and the next 20 years, this energy, which is necessary to condition a World Cup in Qatar, the next 20 years, this energy goes into the grid of Qatar.