And in the mean time, personal savings absolutely plummeted.

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

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

Savings bonds.

Do you know what this was right here?

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

They're savings bonds.

A 1 0 U.S. Savings Bond.

This is something I call the 50 20 paradox.

let's look back at that OECD graph that we were talking about.

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

So this is a timely problem.

What's this building?

Save your dollars bills, yo!

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

It's not even sustainable economically.

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

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

Because I kind of view that as a reference point.

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

Well, think about smoking, for example.

I designed a dip that Cattle magazine called brilliant.

You'd rent a smaller home.

Keep something for a rainy day.

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

Let me just put it into my mattress.

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

In an emergency you can fall back on your savings.

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

In an emergency you can fall back on your savings.

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

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

What is the average difference here?

Put by money for the future.

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

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

Now all of a sudden, the credit crisis hit and all this credit disappears.

But the remainder is savings.

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.

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

Jim has a lot of our nest egg invested in this real estate venture.

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.

Smoking is in some deep sense negative savings.

Both my nine and seven year olds have a stock broker already.