I’m no good at finances, but I’m not a stranger either to whatever happens to me and to the world. I cannot solve the financial crisis but I can recollect the traditional principles I learned in my youth and can be of help to us again, the principles of moderation and saving. When I was young we were told that we should never live above our means, should spend less than we earned, and should save for the future. This was the basis for all rational economics for the person, the family, the institutions, and the state. But things changed as I went on in life. Accidentally, I’ve found an echo of that culture and that change in an autobiography that describes with charming innocence this same process of economic change that has affected us all along one generation and has brought danger to the whole world. Alek Wek, the international supermodel of the Dinka ethnic group in South Sudan, tells her experience when, after years of extreme poverty in her country, she reached the fashion catwalks, settled in New York, and thought of buying a house for herself. She stopped one day with her American agent, Mora, in front of a real estate office and looked at the photos and prices of houses “For Sale”.

- That one looks nice – said Mora, pointing to a three-storey red brick townhouse that was listed at 395,000 dollars.
- Are you kidding? You know I don’t have anywhere near that much money in the bank.
- You borrow it, Alek. You get a mortgage.
- No way! In Dinka culture it’s almost unheard of to borrow money. My mother had always stressed that a person should never buy anything they can’t afford or pay for outright. This idea of getting a mortgage was so foreign to me that I couldn’t even begin to understand it: you borrow a hundred thousand dollars and end up paying the bank two hundred thousand dollars over the life of the loan? That seemed ridiculous.
- Let’s just get a list of houses and we’ll go see some of them. There is no harm in looking.
- OK. But I’m not buying anything I can’t afford.

After a few years in my own life, I too came to know, in the midst of my persistent ignorance of finances, that not getting into debt was out of fashion. Only a fool would live below their means when it was now possible to live above them. The new economics was called “deficit financing”, and apparently that was what governments, business, the rich, and the clever were doing. That was also what Alek finally ended up by doing:

“We went along in the car and saw about ten houses that morning. We laughed a lot. All the time I was wondering how I could possibly pay for a house. Mora made it sound really simple, if daunting. If I put 10 percent down I could pay the rest off monthly until I was over fifty years old. It sounded crazy but I realised that it wasn’t as crazy as paying rent.

As we pulled up to the last house of the day I realised it was the red brick one I’d admired in the real estate office window. For some reason, it made me think of my childhood home in Wau, even though they didn’t look at all alike. There was a feeling, an energy about the place that spoke to my heart. The house said, ‘Home’. It was very expensive, and in Timbuctu we’d get a whole city block for that kind of money. But this was New York. I bought the house. All of a sudden I was an upstanding member of the community with a mortgage to pay and pipes to fix.”
(Alek Wek, Alek, Virago, London 2007, p. 177)