“Keep on Saving”: A Transnational History of How Other Nations Forged Cultures of Thrift When America Didn’t

Amidst the current financial meltdown, it has become painfully clear that Americans spent too much, saved too little, and borrowed excessively. Although we like to believe the rest of the world behaves “like us,” other capitalist nations have saved at much higher rates than Americans. Historically, Europeans, Japanese, and other Asians systematically encouraged saving by means of campaigns and institutions such as savings banks, postal savings, and school savings programs. Beginning in 1800, this lecture tells the global, interconnected story of savings-promotion, illustrated by savings campaign posters from around the world.
Sheldon Garon is the Dodge Professor of History and East Asian Studies at Princeton University. He explores relations between state and society in modern Japan, while also examining the transnational flow of ideas and institutions among several European nations, the U.S., Japan, and other Asian nations. Publications include The State and Labor in Modern Japan (1987) for which he received the American Historical Association’s John K. Fairbank Prize in 1988, and Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (1997). His current transnational history, “Keep on Saving”: How Other Nations Forged Cultures of Thrift When America Didn’t, is under contract with Princeton University Press. With Patricia Maclachlan, he co-edited The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West (2006). He recently served as advisor in the preparation of For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture: A Report to the Nation from the Commission on Thrift (2008).

Cosponsored by the EAC, the East Asian Cultures RFG, IHC, and the departments of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, History, Political Science and Economics.

LOCATION CHANGED ON 4/21 TO THE MARINE SCIENCES BUILDING AUDITORIUM.
It is next to Bren Hall on the East side of campus (campus map).

hm 3/31/09, 4/21.09