For A New Thrift

Project Overview

The Thrift Project is a multi-year initiative to conduct scholarly research on the meaning and history of thrift as an American value and to bring together leaders from across the political spectrum who can lead a national conversation on thrift and make recommendations for the future.

The project is sponsored by the Institute for American Values in partnership with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, the New America Foundation, Public Agenda, Demos, the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions,  the Consumer Federation of America, and CUNA (Credit Union National Association).

The project is supported by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead is the Director of the Templeton Center for Thrift and Generosity at the Institute for American Values.

The project’s director is David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values.

Current and prospective written products include:

For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture, a jointly-authored report to the nation to be publicly released on May 12, 2008.

Thrift: A Cyclopedia, by David Blankenhorn, to be published in the summer of 2008.

The Next Progressive Era, by Phillip Longman and Ray Boshara.

Thrift and American Culture, a three-volume collection of scholarly essays edited by James Davison Hunter and Joshua Yates of the University of Virginia.

It's a Wonderful Life: Essays in American Thrift, edited by David Blankenhorn, Sorcha Brophy-Warren, and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, to be published in 2009.


For more information, please contact us:

Institute for American Values
1841 Broadway, Suite 211
New York, NY 10023
Tel: (212) 246-3942
Fax: (212) 541-6665