Many economists, on the other hand, think that thrift among young people is generally a bad idea. When economist Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, landed at the University of Chicago as a first-year professor, a senior colleague named José Scheinkman told him he should spend more and save less—the same advice that Scheinkman himself had gotten from Milton Friedman, the even more famous University of Chicago economist. “Your salary will only go up, your earning power will only go up,” Levitt recalls his older colleague telling him, in almost a perfect echo of what Joe Farrell told me. “And
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