And in the mean time, personal savings absolutely plummeted.

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

Savings bonds.

They're savings bonds.

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

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

So this is a timely problem.

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

A 1 0 U.S. Savings Bond.

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

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

This is something I call the 50 20 paradox.

What's this building?

Save your dollars bills, yo!

Let me just put it into my mattress.

Keep something for a rainy day.

It's not even sustainable economically.

I can explain. I can explain. Explain this, jackhole.

In an emergency you can fall back on your savings.

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

Next January comes and people might feel that if they save more, they have to spend less, and that's painful.

In an emergency you can fall back on your savings.

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

Because I kind of view that as a reference point.

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

Well, think about smoking, for example.

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

You'd rent a smaller home.

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

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

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

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.

What about the remaining half of the people?

Linguists and cognitive scientists have been exploring this question for many years now.

It should be noted, of course, that the United States and the U.K. are the next in line.

And because I care, I'm putting it all away for you. Just like storing nuts for the winter.

Smoking is in some deep sense negative savings.

If you actually go to 2007, the average American consumed more than we produced.

Now I'm going to describe to you a study I did with Gur Huberman, Emir Kamenica, Wei Jang where we looked at the retirement savings decisions of nearly a million Americans from about 650 plans all in the U.S.

It will pay you to save a part of your salary each month.

But the remainder is savings.

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?