In the early 1960s Viv Nicholson won a small fortune on the football pools. Ms Nicholson was a blonde for whom the cliches "bubbly" and "blousy" seemed for once appropriate, for when she picked up her big cheque in London she announced amid a sea of flashbulbs that she had no intention of going back to her old life - trying to make ends meet on £7 a week in Castleford - but was going to party hard.
When newspapers trot out the ritual "spend, spend, spend" headline they are paying homage to Ms Nicholson's commitment to blow the lot - a pledge she duly fulfilled. She became an iconic figure. There was a play of her life and she appeared on the cover of a single by The Smiths. But when it comes to the live-now, pay-later, she was an amateur compared with today's hedonists.
A survey released last week by Mintel showed that for the first time last year consumer spending broke through the £1 trillion barrier - 9% up on the previous year. Foreign holidays, champagne, glossy magazines chronicling the lifestyles of celebrities: all have now, apparently, become integral parts of the good life. Things have moved on since Harold Macmillan announced 50 years ago that Britain had "never had it so good".
Macmillan's phrase was mentioned by Mervyn King a couple of weeks ago, although the governor of the Bank of England put the words into their proper context, namely a warning by the then prime minister that he had his doubts about whether the good times could continue if policy makers failed to deal with the threat of rising inflation.
Weapons
King and his fellow members of the monetary policy committee certainly believe that things have got a bit out of hand recently. That's why they have nudged up interest rates four times since last summer. It also explains why the governor is uneasy about the size of Britain's current account deficit and is looking for a rebalancing of the economy so that investment and exports are substituted for consumer spending.
This is easier said than done. Back in 1957, the big picture of the economy looked similar to that of 2007 - steady growth for a prolonged period, inflation between 2% and 3%, low unemployment (lower than today, in fact) coupled with concerns about Britain's competitiveness and ability to pay its way in the world. Macmillan's government, though, had more weapons at its disposal; consumer demand was regulated through credit controls; there were import curbs to help boost exports; and there was stricter property taxation to keep house prices in check. One feature of the so-called Golden Age was that - until the last couple of years before the 1973 Yom Kippur war - there was nothing remotely resembling a property boom.
Today, the main instrument for regulating the economy is the bank rate, supported to some extent by Gordon Brown's fiscal rules. That can make life difficult, since it is almost impossible to set borrowing costs at a level that will keep consumer spending buoyant enough to maintain a growth level consistent with hitting the inflation target. What tends to happen is that rates are, for a time, reduced to a level that sets off wild speculation in the housing market. When people are borrowed up to the eyeballs and house prices are soaring, rates are pushed up to a level that causes enough pain for borrowing, spending growth and house prices to moderate. If the distress becomes too acute, rates are cut and the cycle starts again.
We are at the point where some analysts want the Bank to bang up rates to at least 6% and others warn of the risks of overkill. Either way, any period of belt-tightening will be temporary, when what is needed is a prolonged period of restraint, moderation and thrift.
The debate over climate change makes a revolution in attitudes less difficult than might appear, but only marginally. It is good news that the government has finally woken up to the risks of global warming; less encouraging that it persists in the fantasy that cutting emissions is consistent with a business-as-usual, go-for-growth economic strategy.
New frugality
Both the big white papers out this week encapsulate the dilemma; the planning blueprint out today will make it easier to build new runways at airports while insisting that reducing carbon emissions must be taken seriously; Wednesday's energy white paper will say that the only way Britain can cope with rising demand for power is to build a new generation of nuclear power plants.
Ministers would be better off if they levelled with us. The foundation stone of the new frugality is to admit to ourselves that we can continue to breeze off to Riga for the weekend courtesy of Michael O'Leary or take action to stop temperatures rising. We can't do both.
A second necessity is for a reappraisal of what constitutes the good life. Economic success is judged by what happens to gross domestic product. If GDP goes up by 4% that is twice as good as it going up by 2%, but not quite as good as if it went up by 5%. In a country where the population is living on the edge of starvation this crude measure has relevance; in the Britain of 2007 it does not. The measure of domestic progress published by the New Economics Foundation is just one piece of work showing that the link between economic growth and wellbeing is tenuous once a modest level of prosperity is reached. That, though, is not the way the economic system works. It operates on the basis that there is no such thing as enough.
Third, the government has to be more serious about incentives for households to go green. The pitiful amount allocated for grants to install renewable energy into the home is one example of a lack of real commitment; ministers should be providing tax breaks for households to generate their own energy and insulate homes. Britain has a small but innovative environmental industry sector; far more could be done by stimulating demand for anti-pollution technologies at home and work.
Given that the spend, spend, spend culture is closely linked to the excesses of the property market, a fourth feature of any new regime would be more stringent taxes to prevent house-price inflation. Various methods have been proposed, including capital gains tax on prime residences, a Danish-style annual property tax that rises in line with house prices and a tax on land values. All have their merits and their adherents. All are seen as politically unacceptable.
But unless we are prepared to show more restraint, there is not the slightest possibility of India and China signing up to a new binding global treaty to tackle climate, and the idea of 2.5 billion people following Ms Nicholson's example doesn't really bear thinking about.
