How Recessions Can Shape Future Behavior

Newsweek has published an intriguing article that examines how recessions affect future lifestyle choices. It explores how tough times in early adulthood can reshape people’s core values, making them more frugal and humane.

They report:

We all know the type of person who came of age in the Great Depression. They are the grandmothers and grandfathers who can’t use a tea bag too many times, yet are enjoying comfortable retirements in warm climates. And we know what the children of the 1950s are all about. They are the optimistic boomers who embodied an age of continual upward mobility and possibility. They have often spent more than they earned, because for them it has been a truism that times can only get better. It’s no accident that the psychology of entire generations is shaped by the milieu in which they grew up; economic research tells us that our lifelong behaviors are determined in large part by the seismic events—good or bad—of our youth

Newsweek: “The Recession Generation”

[image by Ed Yourdon]