ROY EDROSO

Lately I find myself working very hard. Not as hard as some, I hasten to add--a friend tells me that in the web banking business, 100-hour weeks are not uncommon. (Great what technology has done for us, isn't it?) But certainly harder than I'm used to.

There are practical reasons for this. I have a few debts, and I have also reached the stage in life where an empty wallet makes me feel less like young Hemingway on the Left Bank and more like Willy Loman. (It must also be said that I greatly admire the people with whom I work, and would not like to let them down.)

That's the best reason, but not the biggest. The biggest reason is that there is almost no way for me to work less hard.

No way left for me, I should say. The government recently sent me a Social Security statement, listing each of my yearly taxable income figures since the beginning of my working life, back in the days when dinosaurs ruled the earth. Up until seven or eight years ago, I lived on a ridiculously small amount of money. I lived in sublets. I owned practically nothing. My greatest ambition was to get from one day to the next, drink cheap beer and make records. And while in this period I could hardly be called happy (too many inner demons, that sort of thing), I had very few cares and slept like a baby most nights (and many mornings, and not a few afternoons).

But somewhere along the line I ran out of luck. I couldn't find cheap apartments anymore. I acquired a credit card. When I had a block of free time I went on vacations with my girlfriend instead of hanging out in Tompkins Square Park. My income level rose, but so did my financial commitments.

In short, I found myself in the classic position of the American wage-earner: running in place, more furiously every year.

You'd think I'd least have a big loft and a sushi maker like Charlie Sheen in Wall Street. But here I sit, in an apartment no more spacious or swank than the ones I was living in ten years ago (but considerably more expensive), wearing cheap clothes, eating tofu and drinking apple juice as I type this into a computer that I'm still paying for.

And I'm not the only one. I'm constantly running into people who are one credit card balance away from serious trouble. Despite all the palaver I hear about the endless boom of the New Economy, most of my fellow wage-earners seem more worried than bouyant.

I've pulled up some basic figures on the US economy. They are probably familiar to you--the trends have been in place for years--but let's put them all together and see if something clicks.

Productivity is rising, very quickly. Late last year the Department of Commerce gleefully announced a 4.2% rise in productivity for the third quarter--the biggest such rise since 1994. For the second half of 1999, reports CNNfn, US productivity "shot up at a 5.7% annual rate...way above the 1.5 percent average rate in the 1980s." New York Federal Reserve President William McDonough told CNNfn he expects this trend to continue.

Personal income is rising, less quickly. Per the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis, personal income rose in March by 0.7%. That's the high side of recent averages--in December 1999 it was 0.3%; in February 2000, 0.4%.

Prices are rising, as usual. The consumer price index has been rising steadily throughout the 1990s. And it rose by 2.8% in the first 10 months of 1999. It's up by over 68% from the CPI in 1984. In March alone it rose 0.7%--wiping out that 0.7% income gain I just mentioned.

Personal savings are very low. Recently, in fact, they sank to an all-time low--2.1% in the second and third quarter, and a stark 1% in December, says Commerce.

Spending is way up. The BEA's third-quarter report stated that "real personal consumption expenditures increased 4.6% in the third quarter, compared with an increase of 5.1% in the second." Gross domestic purchases were also up by 6.1%. In January 2000, they were back down to an 0.5% gain. But, then, that's the month after Christmas.

Taken all together, what does this imply? Based on my experience, it's fairly simple: Prices are rising, so spending is rising. In my experience, most people who are spending more money need to make more money, hence the increase in productivity.

Savings are in the crapper because, it would follow, the money is going as fast as we can make it.

Of course, I'm no expert. And what the experts say is, we're all a bunch of wastrels who just can't hang onto a dollar.

Analysts attribute our lack of thrift to mood swings, of the sort suffered by giddy adolescents. Saving and spending, in their view, is not about need, but about feelings. "U.S. consumers are feeling the benefits of higher incomes and are spending more to reflect their good moods," explained Sherry Cooper, chief economist with brokerage Nesbitt Burns Inc., to CNNfn. "Consumers are spending like crazy, that's the bottom line," added David Resler, chief strategist with Nomura Securities.

The more these guys tease this theme out, the harsher their judgement on Spendthrift America becomes. The Economist recently moaned that the problem is cultural, a lack of "national maturity" on the part of baby boomers, and recommends as a moral corrective--what else?--capital gains tax cuts. "Thrift is Out, Spendthrift is In," declares the American Enterprise Institute. The disaster in this, says the notorious right-wing think tank, is that it has forced American business to over-rely on foreign investment: "When personal savings were in the black," sighs AEI, "U.S. business could go to private domestic sources of savings and find the money it needed to keep funding its own expansion. But in 1998, private savings fell $284 billion short of what business needed for investing."

Breaks your heart, doesn't it? Meanwhile, taking the "liberal" view, Tim Smart at the Washingt on Post thinks good economic data has just made us all feel rich, so we overspend and under-save; it's a psychological malady--"the extra wealth we feel we have when our stock portfolios soar or the value of our three-bedroom colonials goes up."

Yeah. We all know that feeling.

Well, maybe I'm just being pessimistic. Maybe all that bad deficit spending is being done by me and a bunch of my no-account buddies, and most Americans are riding merrily along, cheerfully laboring long days in their Dockers and sport shirts in the vineyards of the New Economy, then rushing home in their Lexuses to their equally glad-to-work spouses and children who look with affection and pride upon their workaholic parents, all happy as motivational speakers on a late-night infomercial. Maybe someday soon I will cross some invisible boundary into their world, and there find the true meaning of all this getting and spending.

Forgive me if, from time to time, I have my doubts.