[roc]

The problem with that story is that it completely ignores what has actually happened since Glass-Steagal was repealed and the bubble burst. This isn't a simple case of ants and grasshoppers.

The current economic problem is a lack of aggregate demand. Too many people are cutting their spending to pay down their debts, which cuts economic activity, which puts more people out of work contributing to the lack of demand, dragging on the economy more, etc.

This means that many careful savers are finding themselves in the same boat as the profligate simply because the drop in demand cost them their jobs. We might judge individuals for not doing more to get new jobs, but market-wide, they can't all try harder and win the few remaining jobs. There simply do not exist enough jobs and some careful savers will unavoidably find themselves in the same boat as careless spenders.

Consider an allegorical ant who worked just as diligently as any other, rudely ejected from the ant hill on the onset of winter because the others decided the hill simply didn't need to be as big as it was the day before. This now-homeless ant would suddenly need to dig his own shelter, preventing them from gathering further food, costing them food to the elements and ultimately leaving them in much the same boat as any grasshopper who played the summer away and never stored a thing. Is it truly fair to judge such an ant no differently than a grasshopper?

Also, the cause of this economic problem is largely one of a supposedly-regulated and free-from-fraud industry enjoying regulatory-capture and left to run amok. Many careful savers are finding themselves in the same boat as the profligate, because they were defrauded by lenders and/or brokers. Lenders and brokers who are facing no punishment for their crimes. No return to effective regulation to prevent it from happening again. No dissolution to prevent "too big to fail" institutions from holding the economy hostage. [1]

Consider another allegorical ant who worked all spring summer and fall, as hard as any other, who wakes up one day to find that the food he'd saved has mysteriously disappeared, despite him taking no less precautions than any other, perhaps simply because his pile happened to be protected by an incompetent or possibly corrupt guard who let or helped others steal it away. And this ant now finds himself being ejected for not having anything to contribute to the hill. Should we also judge this ant no differently than a grasshopper?

You are certainly free to cast judgment and aspersions on these formerly-careful-savers for not having years and years worth of living expenses set aside. And/or for trusting that a protected-from-fraud industry actually was.

But it seems to me that they were punished for these things largely by chance -- not everyone who saved as much/little as they, or stored their money in the same ways, or researched as much/little on their investments, woke up to find themselves cast out by society and treated no differently than a degenerate check-to-check gambler.

And as such, your moral judgment strikes me as terribly myopic, hollow and false.

[1] It's debatable that these fraudsters were even directly rewarded from the bailouts on a far more massive scale than the profligate would be by a few years of modest inflation.

If you're concerned about sending a message that people who follow the rules are an idiot, your complaining about modest inflation rather than the bailouts is akin to complaining that a burglar tracked mud through your house while taking your valuables and your insurance policy leaves it up to you to pay for a carpet cleaning. Sure, that's also unfortunate, but it pales in comparison to having been burgled in the first place.

[prodigal_erik]

> The current economic problem is a lack of aggregate demand.

This just half-gelled a different viewpoint for me. There's nothing inherently noble about saving, because the demand doesn't vanish—that money still represents a claim on some fraction of society's resources, only they plan to consume in the future rather than now. Well, we have to align both present and future supply and demand. We can't have everyone expecting to consume all their resources in the future, because then we're wasting our capacity to produce resources in the present.

[roc]

> "We can't have everyone expecting to consume all their resources in the future, because then we're wasting our capacity to produce resources in the present."

Very true.

That said, there is something inherently noble about saving. Life is unpredictable and retaining your ability to weather some reasonable fraction of bad times on your own is the most base expression of a person's ability to contribute positively to a cooperative society.

If someone can't save to a reasonable degree, they simply can't be trusted to engage society in good faith. To vote responsibly, to participate without causing undue costs on everyone else, etc.

This isn't to say that more savings is equivalent to more nobility. Nor anything like that. But there is a reasonable level of saving that, when the drive isn't present, is of very real social concern and should not be allowed to pass as a neutral behavior.

To clarify: this isn't to say that low net savings at some given point is a fault. Again, life is unpredictable and a bad hand may have been dealt early in the game, or a string of bad hands beyond any reasonable expectation. It's the desire and effort and discipline expended toward (re)building that reasonable level of savings that society should incent and recognize as noble and good.

[eli_gottlieb]

The traditional adage for proper saving was to have six months of living expenses in liquid savings as a "rainy day fund". After that, tradition holds you can safely indulge yourself, or save for long-term expenses like cars, houses, college educations, or entrepreneurship.

Back before this Depression, the notion that a responsible person could or should hold two or three years of living expenses as liquid savings was absurd. Saving that much was hoarding, and prevented you from building up savings for your long-term goals or capital for your ventures.

Now every 6-month ant is suddenly being lectured on their grasshopper-hood by 3-year ants? Bullshit.

[eli_gottlieb]

And even this lengthier story has failed to mention 40 years of stagnant and even falling real wages, the decapitalization of domestic industry in Western countries, the resulting deskilling of much of the population in Western countries, and the resultant loss of incomes for both families and governments.

An ant wakes up one morning to find that the queen of his anthill has outsourced food production to another hill of smaller ants who eat less. He is now told that he can eat as little as them, and keep receiving food, or he can be cast out and go hungry entirely. He knows winter is coming, but no longer has enough food to feed himself and save.

Winter comes, he is cast out, and the other ants in the hill laugh at the idiot who didn't save anything for winter.