From the UK's Daily Globe and Mail:
Nini and the European Dream
Estudias o trabajas? When young Spaniards gather around the bars and patios, that's their traditional icebreaker line: "You study or work?" In the past year, it's become almost mandatory to answer, with a self-effacing smirk: "Nini."
It is half a joke, for nini is a way of saying "neither-nor," and NINI is the Spanish government acronym for "Not in education or employment" -- that is, lost to the economy.
But it's not really a joke, because now almost everyone is NINI. The under-30 unemployment rate in Spain has just hit 44 per cent, twice the adult rate. Italy also has passed the 40 per cent mark, and Greece has gone even further. If you count all the people who've given up looking, it means the number of people between 20 and 30 who have any form of employment in these countries is something like one in five.
An entire European generation is leaving school to discover they have no place in the economy.
Most will do all right, eventually -- a period of low income is manageable, sometimes even noble, when you don't have kids or life obligations -- but when they finally enter the work force, they'll almost certainly discover that the crisis has permanently altered the nature of working life in Europe.
Spain and Greece are quietly stepping back from the abyss while America plunges head-on into the night. A comment left at the site demonstrates the failure to grasp a very simple economic fact of life -- a failure that was Karl Marx's biggest fuck up and is something that trips up the 'logic' of 99% of all of the progressives and liberals out there -- including our President:
So, who has all the wealth from the previous boom in Espana?
I suspect it's the wealthy elite. Why not tax their wealth to offset the impact of the "depression"?
The writing is excellent, the human tragedy poignant.
Where did the money go? Who's got it? Why won't they share it?
One of Marx's (and it seems, President Obama's) key thoughts was that there was an unequal distribution of money (capital) and that to ameliorate people's sufferings, that money needed to be re-distributed more evenly. The fact they get wrong wrong WRONG! is that there is not a fixed pool of money. Money (and capital) is fungible. When Bear Sterns crashed, the money that disappeared wasn't quietly shifted off premises in large unmarked paper bags, it simple went away when the leveraged securities were shown to not be worth anything. On the other hand, a single mom living in Edinburgh single-handedly created a multi-billion dollar industry when an idea popped into her head while riding the train. Sometimes, I just want to grab a few people by the throat and shake some sense into them...
