Does a Culture of Thrift Cultivate Generosity?
Does a Culture of Thrift Cultivate Generosity?
My answer to the question is yes. A powerful and reciprocal relationship between thrift and generosity can exist, and has existed at key moments in our past.
Beginning with Benjamin Franklin, the great popularizer of thrift, we can trace the development of thrift as a complement and spur to generosity in American thought and practice.
The high point of this development came in the early decades of the twentieth century when a mass culture of thrift provided the rationale and resources for a culture of organized mass philanthropy. To be sure, the practice of thrift has not been consistent across the centuries. Americans have often been notoriously unthrifty. But the broad tendency over time has been to tie thrift and generosity together in a new and expansive view of giving.
Over much of the world, the practice of giving freely and sacrificially of one’s time, talent and treasure has been rooted in the religious obligation to offer tithes to one’s own faith community and to give charity to the poor and needy.
Franklin broke with this tradition. He recast the philosophy of giving from a religious obligation to care for the poor to a secular rationale for doing good while doing well. Central to his thinking was the connection between thrift as a means to individual betterment and generosity as a means to social betterment.
Franklin saw thrift as way to wealth for “middling” people who were not born to great riches but who could gain wealth through persistent hard work and frugal living. However, his notion of thrift was never narrowly conceived as wealth-building for its own sake or for the sake of one’s heirs, much less for the establishment of a permanent class of wealth and privilege. Indeed, in Franklin’s view, riches passed on to future generations only bred idleness and dissipation. Those who gained wealth, he believed, had the responsibility to give their time and talents to serve the public and the common good.