Saturday, December 20, 2008

More Unrest, Less Meltdown

For the French-inclined, here's a nice piece about the background to the Greek riots.

High schoolers have been marching in France as well. I will have to explicate later - I'm not feeling so good.

Suffice for the moment to say that Greek and French unemployment for 18-24 year olds is about 25% in both cases. This is always attributed by our economists to the oppressive welfare state in places like France, that discourages innovation - like mass layoffs. OK, to be fair, French business law is a pain in the butt. But Greece has no welfare state and is as stuck as ever.

I keep thinking we'll start to look at the business system itself for an explanation.

It's kind of obvious that massive unrest or global meltdown are the only things that prompt basic introspection in our political and business leaders. We need more unrest.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

But in Greece, how does doing anything about the business environment deal with the anarchists? They are not going away because of changes in the business climate. Whatever one does to deal with the putative origin, repairing the social damage will take something more.