Alain de Botton, author, philosopher and founder of the School of Life, gives us his take on closing the savings gap, via medieval saints, Spartans and Adam Smith.
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...
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