Why Investing in “We” Over “Me” Could Heal America

Could a little more generosity heal our nation? / Illustration by Jon Krause

I am not at all inclined to spend money freely or easily, a trait I trace directly to my father. On Saturdays when I was growing up, I frequently accompanied him on his weekly grocery trips for our family. That’s where I learned, aisle after aisle, how to ignore the main prices listed on the tags and instead look at the tiny per-unit price, and how it didn’t matter if you preferred Cheerios; you were getting GenericOs because they cost two cents less per ounce. The per-unit price was very nearly always the deciding factor, unless you had a coupon. And even then, you should still do the math, to be sure you’re actually getting a deal. (Needless to say, grocery shopping with my dad took eons.)

At more than one point in his life, this sort of frugality had been a financial necessity for Dad — and after that, I think, it just stuck as a mindset to which he adhered long after it was strictly required to make ends meet. If you kept track, he would tell you, you’d see that these pennies added up every trip, every month, every year. And he did keep track, meticulously, of every cent, every expense. He weighed every option — spending hours searching for the best deal on major and minor purchases, finding the gym or car or cable package that offered the most bang for the buck, calculating the cost-benefit analysis of a rare splurge before indulging: Just how special is this vacation, this night out, this gift for my mom? (The bar was high: We didn’t take many vacations, and we rarely dined out. When we did, it was indeed special.)

Now, at 74 and set on maxing out the pleasure of his golden years, Dad is far freer than before with such analysis, but by and large, he still does this. Grocery shopping with him still takes eons.

But you have to understand this: My father’s brand of penny-pinching is a selective sort. As far back as I can remember, even when money was tight, my parents have tithed — that is, given 10 percent of their income, at least — to their church and/or to organizations they’ve deemed ultimately similar in mission, mostly involved with feeding or caring for people in need.

You also have to understand that they’re neither millionaires nor saints, my folks, just people who view supporting institutions that support people around them (“spending money on not just us,” as Dad says) as a sort of nonnegotiable, the same as voting or mowing the lawn — a moral and civic and personal obligation, if you could swing it. And they could. So they did, and do. Money where mouths are, and all that.

Beyond the ideals at play, though, I think my father, being who he is, came to recognize that there was a deal here too: The church they’ve helped support these many years has likewise supported them, and far beyond the spiritual realm. It’s given them friendships, meals in times of illness, a place to be and something to do from the time my sister and I were children until now, a pickleball league. The food charity they’ve contributed to most generously has also brought them into the fold as active volunteers, given my dad what amounts to a second career in retirement, offered them the relief of knowing that some neighbors who might otherwise be hungry aren’t. So there’s happiness there. Community. A sense of belonging, of contributing.

There is an entire canon of scientific literature out there showing that people who feel meaningfully connected to others live longer, healthier lives, and another entire canon of literature out there about America’s loneliness epidemic — so much “human suffering,” as the surgeon general put it, here in the richest nation in the world.

So, Dad’s 10 percent: a worthy cost-benefit balance, I think he’d agree.

Obviously, loneliness isn’t the only thing plaguing us as a people. Look what we’ve just lived through, my fellow citizens, what we are living through. I’ve lost track now of the stories I’ve read — heck, written — over the past decade about what, exactly, might heal our wounded democracy and soothe our tired, traumatized, divided, rage-filled American souls. Bravery! Grassroots progressivism! Cutting each other some slack!

Maybe it’s the fact that we just elected the human embodiment of greed, but lately it has struck me that the answer might also be something much more tangible, much less amorphous: money. That maybe the road toward coming back together again is paved in cold, hard cash. Your cash. My cash. Spent on anything and everything that benefits more than just us. Because, as they say, cheap is expensive. Maybe it’s time we all reconsider what a deal really looks like and just pony up, buttercup.

In 2023, a documentary called Join or Die focused on the life’s work of Robert Putnam, the political scientist who, a quarter of a century ago, put out his hit book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In it, Putnam posited that America had morphed from a nation of community-minded joiners into one of lone wolves who broke off into more isolated lives and individual pursuits — a mindset and lifestyle shift from the we to the me, as my colleague Sandy Hingston once put it in this magazine. And as our social engagement and shared experiences shrank down and down and down, Putnam showed, so did our trust in one another, our cohesion as citizens, and our participation in (and thus the health of) our democracy. This he pointed out in the year 2000.

You know what’s happened since.

For obvious reasons, I’ve thought about Putnam hundreds of times over the past decade of American political life. For less obvious reasons, I thought of him again last spring, spurred by a conversation with my friend Josh. (Josh isn’t his real name, but this is a conversation about money, and people are sensitive about money.) Josh was a teammate in my softball league — look, Robert Putnam! We joined something! — and likable: cheerful, fun, quick to buy you a beer, a good hitter.

He’s also some 15 years younger than I am — somewhere on the cusp between millennial and Gen Z — with a promising career and dreams of an early retirement. In our postgame drinking sessions, talk of said retirement plans led to talk of savings, which led to talk of taxes and how he feels he pays too much of them. His gist was essentially this: The government isn’t as good a steward of his money as he is (he believes). Why should he throw in so much for, say, public schools when his own children (as yet unborn) will go to private schools (he assumes)? Why should he shell out for SEPTA when he has his own car, one he’ll drive even more after he (presumably) moves to the burbs? And so forth.

Now, obviously, Josh’s perspective is neither unique nor novel. Americans have been sparring over this very topic since Jefferson and Hamilton; bitching about taxes is literally built into the foundation of this country — a birthright. And still I felt distraught, in a Putnamian sense: Here was this gregarious young urban joiner planning a sort of one-man secession from the We, without a hint of acknowledgment that he is himself a product of public education, that he just left a park built and maintained by public money and walked over to the bar on wide, tree-lined sidewalks also built and maintained by public money, not to mention that he was going to drive home on roads … well, you get the idea.

It called to mind a piece another colleague, Tom McGrath, wrote for Boston magazine about — of all things — public libraries, and the vital role they have played and still play in the intellectual and public and personal lives of American citizens. (One Atlantic story on the same topic noted that 90 percent of Americans polled believe that if the library in their community closed, it would be missed.) But imagine, Tom posited, that libraries didn’t yet exist; imagine mustering a critical mass of enthusiasm now to pool enough public money to create a bunch of (beautiful) buildings that would offer this sort of access to free books and programming, to classes and business services, to tax help, bathrooms, study spaces, music, and any number of other things designed simply to better the life of the average citizen.

It wouldn’t happen. The president of the Boston Public Library — the oldest large public library in the country — says as much in Tom’s story: “In today’s particular version of Western democratic capitalism, it is very difficult to envision how that would come about.” Right? I can cover my own books/music/Internet, thanks. I’m good.

Of course it tracks that as we’ve shifted from we to me, our money, and how we think about our money, would follow. That charitable giving would be down. (There was a 2.4 percent drop in individual giving in 2023, according to Giving USA; over a longer term, Vox has noted that there were 20 million fewer households giving in 2016 than in 2000.) That religious giving would be down, from 58 percent of all donations in the 1980s to 29 percent by 2022. (This follows from the decrease in attendance across many faiths.) That instead of rallying behind public schools it’s assumed everyone will attend, we’d be having national debates about individual vouchers to allow for personalized choice. That even though a majority of Americans — 57 percent — believe everyone in the country should be ensured health care, we still can’t muster enough consensus, political will, compassion, or cash to see it through. That we’d cut and cut and cut state funding for higher ed and instead just transfer the skyrocketing cost to individuals, and good luck to you!

Not coincidentally, 46.2 million of us are burdened with federal student-loan debt (more, if you consider private-loan debt for education), while some 100 million of us bear the weight of medical debt — which happens to be the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States.

Here in Philly, we have languished — and still languish — waiting to see whether our regional public transit system will continue to be starved of the funds it needs to function, left to wither (or not) by a state that seems not to understand that the Philadelphia region’s economic well-being and standing is deeply, intimately connected to Pennsylvania’s economic and environmental and reputational well-being. (The area the SEPTA system covers represents just five percent of the state’s land, Chamber of Commerce president Chellie Cameron noted in September in the Inquirer — but that same area “generates 42 percent of the economic activity and 38 percent of the tax revenue the Commonwealth relies on.”)

Don’t you remember, Harrisburg? Remember, Pennsylvanians? How we hang together or we hang separately? Ben Franklin knew this. Robert Putnam knows this. So does my dad. We are all connected, our fates and fortunes. Whether we act like it or not.

Taking a more generous, We-focused stand on state and federal spending — which, for our purposes, is mostly a question of what and whom we vote for, what we lobby for and rally around and get riled up about — is one thing. There’s also spending on a personal level to grapple with — from shelling out for fair-trade coffee to buying local to tipping better, there are so many micro-decisions we make in a day about where we put our bucks, and how we feel about it. Here, too, I think it’s really easy to miscalculate (or forget, or ignore) the bill for things that don’t exclusively belong to us, or belong to us at all. It’s so easy to gloss over how much buy-in — literal buy-in, not just good vibes — it takes to make a neighborhood and city and country we actually like and feel good about, no matter who is in office.

You know who really likes their country? Swedes — who are also famous (infamous?) for having some of the highest taxes of any nation on the globe. In 2021, the BBC ran a story about this seeming paradox, headlined “Why the Swedes Love Doing Something That Americans Hate.” A sociologist in the story explained it thusly: “Swedes generally, if you look at the research, are really supportive of the idea of paying higher taxes in order to have a well-funded welfare state … founded on the idea that it was not this kind of welfare state of the last resort. Rather a well-funded resource that was going to be used by everyone in the population.” Education, parental leave, childcare, health care: all covered, or close to it.

“In general, there’s a high level of trust in the Swedish society,” one citizen tells the reporter. “We trust that the public sector will do good things, long-term, with our money.”

Hmm. Is trust — and lack thereof — our problem here? (Like Putnam said — distrust is a symptom of our disconnectedness.) Why do we hate paying our share? Why do we expect so much American greatness — or, you know, even just bridges that don’t collapse, a population that can read — for a bargain-basement price? Is it our idea of rugged individualism? Is it the bystander effect at play? Are we just too deep into the morass of late-stage capitalism to imagine a return on investment that doesn’t come packaged in an Amazon box?

What can possibly explain the many people in my neighborhood — far less inclined toward cheapness than I — who, upon getting new property-tax assessments this summer, were so reflexively keen to appeal them, even though they’re generally reflective of the market rate? These are the taxes that pay for the schools that anchor the community, the leafy streets that boost our home values, the potholes that will (eventually) get fixed. Remember? And what of the so many educated, socially and politically engaged citizens who constantly bemoan the paywall that blocks them from reading the news, but don’t think to just … pay? (Hey, y’all: A subscription to this magazine is $25 a year. Just sayin’.)

It’s no coincidence that the era in which misinformation seemed to take over everyone’s feeds and the country itself coincided with the death of newspapers in the U.S. (2,500 have closed since 2005 — roughly one quarter of them), which has overlapped with the time in which we all decided it was better to curate and personalize our news sources (and/or just let Elon Musk handle that).

And speaking of everything personalized: I read recently about a 1983 study at Baylor University that looked at some 600 men, a third of whom had heart disease. The lead researcher, a psychologist, counted how often each of his subjects used first-person pronouns — I, me, mine — and found that the men who used them most were the ones who were most likely to have heart disease — and, later, most likely to have heart attacks. His takeaway? It was healthier to listen to others, to give to others, to “do things for reasons other than furthering your own needs.”

Consider also that in the United Nations World Happiness Report, the three happiest countries — Finland, Denmark, and Iceland — are among the most highly taxed countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. And don’t forget Sweden, with those very high taxes everyone is so happy to pay! Not only do Swedes achieve higher levels of education and live longer, reportedly happier lives compared to the average OECD country — including the U.S. — but, according to the OECD’s Better Life Index, voter turnout in recent elections has approached 90 percent. In the same report, the most recent American elections garnered a mere 65 percent turnout, which is also roughly where last month’s election landed, too.

I’m not trying to argue for a Swedish-style welfare state (I mean, I could … paid parental leave!) or even specific policy positions so much as I am a new outlook, a fresh cost-benefit analysis for 2025, person by person, budget by budget. I think the evidence suggests that a mental shift about what we spend and how generously, where we scrimp over the per-unit price and where we spend with relish, might make us happier on the whole. It might make us live longer and be less lonely. And after this miserable slog of a furious, fractious, f’ed-up election season (and contemplating whatever it is that lies ahead), investing in the we over the me might be the only way to save our democracy and keep a nation full of lone wolves from finding ourselves with more money to spend but a much, much poorer world in which to actually spend it. So: a deal, in the end.

Published as “You Get What You Pay For” in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.