The key to 'passion and rapture': Philosopher Alain de Botton on the savings gap

This essay was written for Aviva's Future Prosperity Panel, a collection of thinkers Aviva brought together to tackle the savings problem. View the rest of the contributions here. We can frankly admit that to be described as a "saver" is little short of an insult. Around the saver there hover associations of miserliness, excessive caution, bloodlessness, renunciation and timidity. This is a small part of a larger, perplexing phenomenon of the modern world, whereby many apparently good and virtuous patterns of behaviour have become awkward and dispiriting concepts, whereas degenerac...