Join us for a lively debate between historians who take opposing views on the need for thrift in America today. Ever since the economist John Maynard Keynes famously contended that thrift was good for individuals but bad for the economy, scholars have argued over savings policy and its role in the national economy. This debate has fresh relevance today as Americans struggle to get out of debt and as the nation struggles to speed its sluggish economic recovery. The conversation promises to challenge thinking about our own saving and spending behavior and about the institutions that shape our behavior.

The Conversation is part of the Summer Institute on Thrift Education at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

SEATING IS LIMITED. To reserve a seat, please RSVP to
http://thrift.eventbrite.com/ OR 215-732-6200 Ext. 246. Program will begin
promptly at 7:00 p.m. RESERVATIONS REQUIRED.

Copies of Against Thrift and Beyond Our Means will be on sale.

James Livingston has taught history at Rutgers since 1988. Before then, he taught at a community college, a maximum-security prison, a small liberal-arts college, and three state universities. He's the author of five books, beginning with Origins of the Federal Reserve System (1986), on topics in economic, intellectual, social, and cultural history, and most recently Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment and Your Soul. He has written on the Federal Reserve and the Little Mermaid with equal earnestness but very different results. His heroes are Nietzsche, Freud, and Gramsci. Hegel and Marx were just the beginning. He lives in New York City.

Sheldon Garon is the Nissan Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University. A specialist in modern Japanese history, he also writes transnational history that spotlights the flow of ideas and institutions among the U.S., Japan, and European and Asian countries. His new book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves (Princeton University Press), examines what Americans might learn from European and East Asian nations whose public policies have vigorously encouraged citizens to save. The book has received media attention from NPR, BBC, New York Times, The Guardian, Financial Times Deutschland, The Australian, and many other newspapers around the world. Previous publications include The State and Labor in Modern Japan, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life, and the co-edited volume, The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West.

David Blankenhorn David Blankenhorn is founder and president of the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan organization devoted to strengthening families and civil society in the U.S. and the world. Blankenhorn is the author of Fatherless America (1995), The Future of Marriage (2007), and Thrift: A Cyclopedia (2008) and the co-editor of eight volumes, including Franklin's Thrift: The Lost History of an American Virtue (2009). A frequent lecturer, Blankenhorn's articles have appeared in scores of publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Public Interest, First Things, and Christianity Today.