Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.
Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home,
You don't know which way to go?
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,
Got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home,
Oh, well, oh, well, oh, well.
Don't it make you feel bad
When you're tryin' to find your way home,
You don't know which way to go?
Published under the title "U.S., Europe on different paths to same place"
The Eurovision Song Contest doesn't get a lot of attention in the
United States, but on the Continent it's long been seen as the perfect
Euro-metaphor. Years before the euro came along, it was the prototype
pan-European institution and predicated on the same assumptions.
Eurovision took the national cultures that produced Mozart, Vivaldi and
Debussy, and in return gave us "Boom-Bang-A-Bang" (winner, 1969),
"Ding-Ding-A-Dong" (winner, 1975) and "Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley" (winner,
1984). The euro took the mark, the lira and the franc, and merged them
to create the "Boom-Bang-A-Bang" of currencies.
Sophie Fact: When Sarkozy wanted to raise the number of hours in the work week from 35 to 40, the entire country went on strike. It wasn't always that way. In 1970, the French actually worked 10% more hours than Americans. What happened? As the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Edward C. Prescott, has pointed out: Taxes have risen sharply since 1970 and higher taxes give
workers less of an incentive to work extra hours.
How will it all end? One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in
Zagreb: "Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra," cooed the hostess,
Helga Vlahović. "The string section and the wood section all sit
together." Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically
cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through
the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their
genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahović herself was forced into a
sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV's head
of "war information" programming.
Sophie Fact: Swedes work the longest years in Europe with an average 40.1 years. Hungarians have the shortest working lives with less than 30 years on the job. The average American works 45 years. All of us -- especially our totally pissed off children and grandchildren, who will hate us for what we've done to them -- are going to have to work a lot longer.
Fortunately, no one remembers Yugoslavia. So today Europe itself is
very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind
players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting
for the German guy to show up with their checks. Just before last week's
Eurovision finale in Azerbaijan, The Daily Mail in London reported that
the Spanish entrant, Pastora Soler, had been told to throw the
competition "because the cash-strapped country can't afford to host the
lavish event next year," as the winning nation is obliged to do. In a
land where the youth unemployment rate is over 50 percent, and
two-thirds of the country's airports are under threat of closure and
whose neighbors (Britain) are drawing up plans for military intervention
to evacuate their nationals in the event of total civic collapse, the
pressing need to avoid winning the Eurovision Song Contest is still a
poignant symbol of how total is Spain's implosion. Ask not for whom
"Ding-Ding-A-Dong" dings, it dings for thee.
Sophie Fact: Both Spain and Greece have fertility rates of around 1.45. For a country just to maintain its population, it needs a fertility rate of 2.3.
One of the bizarre aspects of media coverage since 2008 is the
complacent assumption that what's happening is "cyclical" – a downturn
that will eventually correct itself – rather than profoundly structural.
Francine Lagarde, head of the IMF, found herself skewered like souvlaki
on a Thessaloniki grill for suggesting the other day that the Greeks
are a race of tax evaders. She's right. Compared to Germans, your
average Athenian has a noticeable aversion to declaring income. But
that's easy for her to say: Mme Lagarde's half-million-dollar
remuneration from the IMF is tax-free, just a routine perk of the new
transnational governing class. And, in the end, whether your broke
European state has reasonably efficient tax collectors, like the French,
or incompetent ones, like the Greeks, is relatively peripheral.
Sophie Fact: One-third of Greece's economy before the crisis was carried out "under the table" or "off-the-books."
Likewise, on this side of the Atlantic: Quebec university students,
who pay the lowest tuition rates in North America, are currently
striking over a proposed increase of $1,625. Spread out over seven
years. Or about 232 bucks per annum. Or about the cost of one fair-trade
macchiato a week. Which has, since the strike, been reduced further, to
a couple of sips: If you're wondering how guys who don't do any work
can withdraw their labor, well, "strike" is a euphemism for riot. The
other week, Vanessa L'Écuyer, a sexology student at the Université du
Québec à Montréal, was among those arrested for smoke-bombing the subway
system and bringing the city's morning commute to a halt. But, as in
Europe, in the end, whether you fund your half-decade bachelor's in
sexology through a six-figure personal debt or whether you do it through
the largesse of the state is relatively peripheral.
Sophie Fact: In Germany, the retirement age is 67 and retirees receive 46% of their final salaries as a pension.
In the twilight of the West, America and Europe are still different
but only to this extent: They've wound up taking separate paths to the
same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common
currency for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative
easing and the global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your
final years in the care of Medicare or the National Health Service death
panels, whether higher education is just another stage of
cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion dollars' worth of
personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic
citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany,
California or Quebec.
Sophie Fact: In Greece, men can retire at 55 and women at 50...unless they work in arduous and dangerous professions like television presenting, hairdressing or radio announcing, then they can retire at 45. Retirees receive 97% of their final salaries.
That's to say, the unsustainable "bubble" is not student debt or
subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the
assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western
democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to
earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of
human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world.
Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you
worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been
chewed away at both ends. We invented something called "adolescence"
that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a
desultory half-decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till
you're 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents' health
insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced
something called "retirement" that, in the space of two generations, has
led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend
the last couple of decades, or one third of their adult lives, as a long
holiday weekend.
Sophie Fact: In Italy, a parent can be ordered by a court to pay his 32 year-old daughter an allowance and 85% of Italian "men" between the ages of 18 and 33 live with mama (this was pre-crizioso!) Bamboccioni!
The bit in between adolescence and retirement is your working life,
and it's been getting shorter and shorter. Which is unfortunate, as it
has to pay for everything else. This structural deformity in the life
cycle of Western man is at the root of most of our problems. Staying
ever longer in "school" (I use the term loosely) leads to ever later
workplace entry, and ever later (if at all) family formation. Which
means that our generation is running up debt that will have to be repaid
by our shrunken progeny. One hundred Greek grandparents have 42 Greek
grandchildren. Is it likely that 42 Greeks can repay the debts run up by
100 Greeks? No wonder they'd rather stick it to the Germans. But the
thriftier Germans have the same deathbed demographics. If 100 Germans
resent having to pick up the check for an entire continent, is it likely
42 Germans will be able to do it?
Sophie Fact: Average government spending by EU nations today stands at approximately
49.2% of GDP — v. 44.8% in 2000.
Look around you. The late 20th century Western lifestyle isn't going
to be around much longer. In a few years' time, our children will look
at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away
their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that
came from. In turn, their children will be amazed to discover that in
the early 21st century the Western world thought it entirely normal that
vast swathes of the citizenry should while away their youth enjoying
what, a mere hundred years earlier, would have been the leisurely
varsity of the younger son of a Mitteleuropean Grand Duke.
Sophie Fact: In 2011, 23 of the 27 nations
in the EU increased spending. This year, 24 of 27 will do so. In 2011, the United States increased spending. In 2012, it will do so again.
I was sad to learn that Helga Vlahović died a few weeks ago, but her
central metaphor all those years ago wasn't wrong. Any functioning
society is like an orchestra. When the parts don't fit together, it's
always the other fellow who's out of tune. So the Greeks will blame the
Germans, and vice-versa. But the developed world is all playing the same
recessional. In the world after Western prosperity, we will work till
we're older, and we will start younger – and we will despise those who
thought they could defy not just the rules of economic gravity but the
basic human life cycle.
©MARK STEYN
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