Paradox of thrift 节俭悖论
The paradox of thrift (or paradox of saving) is a paradox of economics. The paradox states that if everyone tries to save more money, then aggregate demand and therefore income will fall and will in turn lower total saving (the autonomous portion that changed initially plus the portion induced by the level of income) in the population, because the tendency to save is directly related to the amount of income received. The paradox is, narrowly speaking, that total saving may fall even when individuals attempt to increase their saving, and, broadly speaking, that increase in saving may be harmful to an economy. Both the narrow and broad claims are paradoxical within the assumption underlying the fallacy of composition, namely that what is true of the parts must be true of the whole. The narrow claim transparently contradicts this assumption, and the broad one does so by implication, because while individual thrift is generally averred to be good for the economy, the paradox of thrift holds that collective thrift may be bad for the economy.