Before the whole Greek fiasco, euro crisis, and the news that European banks were on the verge of collapse (which is not happening according to this), some EU commissioner had the audacity to declare the travel some kind of human right.  Actually, the idea was to convince more foreigners to come to Europe and spend their hard-earned money on a continent where tourism is the 3rd largest business and accounts for 12% of its jobs.

But of course the financial shit storms hit and this initiative is now probably buried deep inside Euro castles somewhere in Brussels or Strasbourg.

This is my first summer here with no off-continent travels, and I’ve seen first-hand the kind of exodus that happens on the road when July and August hit.

People schedule their vacations to coincide with their children’s schooling. The construction sector is closed for an entire month between July and August for vacation, and some government agencies also close for August.  Half of the small/independent shops in my neighbourhood are closed, so if you want pizza or beef from the butcher, or dry-cleaning services, then tough luck.

There are several so-called Black Saturdays, where people literally pack up as much personal belongings and household apparatus as possible in their cars, endure hours of congested traffic, in order to drive to their neighbouring countries to camp.

Camping is huge.  I haven’t tried it yet, but hearsay tells me camp grounds are generally more compact, well-serviced and in some cases, cheaper than across the pond.

Stay-cations are also almost unheard of here. Recession or not, the majority of people surveyed (at least in the Netherlands, although I can’t quite find the link) said they intend to go on vacation.

For most, that means packing up your house, drive 5 to 10 hours, and set up camp in a neighbouring country.  I have seen everything from cars loaded up with camping and cooking wares, to more luxurious foldable tent set-ups hooked to the back of a car, to plastic picnic table strung on the top of a car, all to keep the vacation cost as low as possible, and to make those foreign destination feel as homely as possible.

With this kind of set-up in: price (low, camping), convenience (high, drive anywhere in a few hours), and availability (of holidays and destinations, also high), I can see why most Europeans exercise their rights to vacations.

Modest salaries, high taxes, but high level of social safety net: that was the social contract stricken between the governments and their peoples across post-war European lands, in various forms. The welfare manifests itself in various forms: high level of labour market protection, unemployment benefits, guaranteed pension, subsidized housing and education, etc.

With greying populations and a fiscal trend that can only predict more costs and less tax revenues, the most logical thing for governments to do would’ve been to save more and borrow less.  Growth does not seem to be an option.

But that is hardly an attractive option with voters with their own interests to protect.  Voting with their ages and the social contract they still believe they are entitled to, working-class Europeans bought into their politicians’ utopian vision that they can live better without actually making things better.

Spain is now grappling with the highest unemployment level of Europe. And many people have no savings.  After all, why bother with financial literacy and savings when you can never be sacked from your job, are supposedly guaranteed a pension, and are entitled to live forever in subsidized housing?  And the perverse incentives of paternalistic policies is hardly unique to Spain, so you can betcha that this story of broken promises will only be repeated in more versions than one in the coming years.

In Greece, the trouble seems to be compounded with a troublesome political past (as recent as the 80s):

The Greek crisis reminds us that while Greece is a part of Western Europe, it is also a place where hammers and sickles and “F—- the Police” decorate the city walls; where references to civil wars and world wars and postwar American meddling come up in daily conversation; where immigrants fleeing violence and economic plunder scramble atop the life raft of Greece’s fragile European shores, only to fester in homogenous Athens. It is also a country that in some ways still mirrors the lands across the Mediterranean—the countries of North Africa and the Middle East that continue to be strangled by Third World ways and won’t simply acclimate to the rules of the West as one might have hoped.

A all-too-speedy embrace of American-style materialism without paying its dues:

“Greece had the mentality of the nouveau riche. We borrowed, and we spent.” The nation hungered for new status symbols. A 2008 Nielsen report found that, of all the countries in the world, Greece cared most about designer labels, trampling Hong Kong (the runner-up) in its taste for brand names.

And an even more profligate vote-buying arrangement:

Stereotypes of Greek people as lazy and sun-stroked may have roots in the public sector: For decades politicians plied poor citizens with cushy jobs and pensions in exchange for votes. The 2004-09 conservative New Democracy government added over 85,000 public-sector jobs in its tenure; the public sector accounts for 40 percent of Greece’s GDP and 15 percent of the active workforce. The government isn’t even sure how many people it employs. As Jens Bastian, an ELIAMEP economist, explains, “Every Greek has a relative who works as a civil servant in the public sector, excluding the military and police. Reducing employment levels in the public sector immediately becomes a very touchy, family affair.”

So comparing Greece’s economic and political development stage in its teenage years does not seem too far off.

“The best way to think of it is to think of Greece as a teenager,” says Stathis N. Kalyvas, a Yale University political scientist who was in Athens when I visited. “Many Greeks view the state with a combination of a sense of entitlement, mistrust, and dislike similar to that of teenagers vis-à-vis their parents. They expect to be funded without contributing; they often act irresponsibly without care about consequences and expect to be bailed out by the state—but that only increases their sense of dependency, which only increases their feeling of dislike for the state. And, of course, they refuse to grow up. But like every teenager, they will.”

France is now, sitting at the bottom of the Group A table, and amazingly out of the World Cup after 2 losses and 1 draw.

The French are naturally reflective of the loss and the mayhem that led to this abysmal reality, but not before some serious drama.

France is sensitive about its world image in the best of times. But when its team self-destructs on the World Cup stage, when it ties Uruguay and loses to Mexico, when its star forward hurls epithets at the coach and is sent packing, when the team then goes on strike, when some players won’t dress to play against host South Africa today, when the team director resigns in tears, when the French public shouts “shame” in the streets and the sports minister is pushed to the cameras by President Sarkozy to call for team dignity, when the world press snickers, when bank Credit Agricole drops ad sponsorship, and the far right blames “blacks” and the far left blames “millionaire athletes” – it all amounts to a national crisis, a moment of bitter societal soul-searching.

Back in the late 90s, racial diversity in the French team was accredited with its famous win.  Nowadays, it is a cause for little else than more bickering.

“Now in France a sense of decline is exacerbated by economics, the fall of the euro…a betrayal by elites felt in some places, and in the midst of this the French national soccer team is in disarray. Now you hear the words ‘black, black, black’ about the team. Unfortunately, this will spark our ‘cultural’ divide’ discussion.”

There might be a questionable correlation between sports prowess on the international stage and economic prosperity back home, but social cohesion on and off-field seems to translate to a certain degree.

Culture is one of these double-edged swords.  Certain aspects of a culture might help a country during one period of economic and political development.  The same traits will hinder development, if not outright self-destruction, during another period.

I enter Japan as exhibit number one.

On the heels of Japan’s latest prime ministerial resignation, the following seems especially relevant.

Dogged resignation to the status quo is inculcated from an early age here. There is next to no education in civics and no attempt to make children aware of their democratic rights. Children are not encouraged to express an opinion at school, where classes are large and taught by rote. The energies of pushy children are channeled into sports clubs where they learn how to fit into a hierarchy, first learning how to stoically endure discipline from older members, and then, as they get older, learning how to discipline their juniors. Less pushy children, meanwhile, can sleep in class and go unnoticed.

There is also great emphasis placed on the individual’s ability to gaman (put up stoically with suffering), rather than on problem-solving skills, and children are taught to fear the censure or ridicule of others, which makes them unwilling to stand out. In fact, the education system, with its songs, uniforms, rituals and group-focused activities, has achieved an almost perfectly Foucauldian model of passive citizenship. It’s an achievement, of sorts.

What helped to propel Japan to economic stardom post WWII is now dogging both its political and economic systems.  A lesson for China perhaps?

Are we really faced with an inter-generational struggle in resources for the coming decades?

The politics of the next decade will be dominated by a battle over public spending and taxes between the generations. Young people will realise that different categories of public spending are in direct conflict — if they want more spending on schools, universities and environmental improvements they must vote for cuts in health and pensions.

Schools and universities are more important for a society’s future than pensions. Yet every democracy around the world has made the opposite judgment. While many politicians claim to be obsessed with education — recall Tony Blair’s three priorities were “education, education and education” — in reality they support health and pensions to the point of national bankruptcy, while squeezing universities. The same applies to the many fiscal benefits heaped on pensioners over the years. Is it, for example, better for society to offer free bus travel to wealthy 80-year olds rather than students or impoverished youngsters looking for their first job?

Or will it find some kind of resolution not unlike the compromise made between developed and emerging worlds?

Does the increasing first-world sense of austerity give the rest of the world room to grow into middle-class status? If so, we need to find a few Saudi Arabias worth of oil to fuel their ensuing energy needs, and that seems unlikely. Or will we all meet in the middle somewhere, with declining resource requirements increasingly hard-wired into our makeup, the way it is already. happening already in Europe and elsewhere?

Courtesy of Mutuantfrog, an excellent blog on Japan, I came across this pretty troubling depiction of what the Japanese expect out of life, and what is clearly unattainable given today’s socio-economic configuration.

A recent government white paper found that a large portion of women in their 20s want to be housewives. Not only that, another survey found that around 40% of unmarried women aged 25-35 want a husband who makes at least Y6 million a year. Sadly for them, only 3.5% of unmarried men in that age bracket actually make that much.

This kind of typical post-war middle-class lifestyle is pretty out of reach in a country that’s still struggling through two decades of recession, where the last Prime Minister’s attempt to de-regulate and dismantle the carefully-constructed social contract that included life-time employment, and where society is certain to be confronted with more uncertainty in the near future.

In the translated op-ed , the author suggests breaking down the rigid structure of Japan’s full-time employment system, and make part-time work a more systematic and acceptable feature of Japans labour landscape.

If embraced by the people, I can see how those changes may very well draw out stay-at-home moms into the work force. It may also steady overall future productivity if the policy succeeds in pushing up low birth rates that is plunging the nation into demographic abyss.

But is this really ideal? A more socially acceptable and entrenched part-time work culture will most likely be accessed by women, especially in a still traditionalist society where gender roles persist.  Will this kind of labour arrangement be the right transitional model to engage and entice more women into the labour force?

Take a look at the Dutch experience with part-time work.

Back in the 80s, labour force participation of prime-aged women in the Netherlands was one of the lowest in the OECD.  Over the next two decades, a part-time work structure gradually emerged and attracted more and more women to the work force.

But contrary to Scandinavia, where women transitioned rather quickly to full-time work, women in the Netherlands stayed with their part-time arrangements.  It now has one of the highest (I think Japan has since 2001 overtaken the Netherlands) female part-time employment rates in the OECD.  Which is to say, most of the women that work in the Netherlands, work part time.  And the percentage that actually does work is a rather abysmal 55%.

Ideal? I think not.

During the 1980s and 1990s, part-time work was praised as a way to increase the low female participation rates. However, the attitude towards part-time work among policymakers has changed. Now, a part-time job is often considered a trap in which the full potential of women remains unexploited. Part-time working women are paid less and have fewer opportunities for promotions. Therefore, increasing working hours would be beneficial for their labour market position. Stimulating female labour supply is also considered to be a potential source to increase economic growth and deal with the costs of an ageing society.

So if Japan goes down this road, a more flexible employment system will contribute economically, but will probably just further entrench the gender gap.

Even in a country that’s perceived to be one of the most progressive by the rest of the world, “about 40% of both Dutch men and women think that the family would suffer if the woman would work full-time. This opinion has not changed much during the past decades and across generations”.

Additionally, if female participation in the word force is truly encouraged, then more affordable and accessible child care facilities must be available.  In Japan, as in the Netherlands, and quite distinct from Scandinavia and North America, it is complicated, expensive, and socially frowned upon to organize child-care around awkward school hours (i.e. children getting sent home at lunch at in early afternoons).

Addressing those concerns and taking away the burden of women planning their lives around the children, will probably have consierable impact on both labour market participation and birth rates in the long run.

Finally, an intelligent dissection and critique of Christopher Caldwell’s work on the problem of Muslim immigration in Europe.

[B]ecause of his inability to resist the temptation to try to fit virtually every trend, process, and event he considers, from the most lurid to the most mundane, into the tired category of a supine Europe doomed by its failure to breed in sufficient numbers, leached of its ethical strength by relativism and colonial and racial guilt, and complicit in its demise at the hands of an immigration both vigorously fertile and morally self-confident, Caldwell’s argument ends up not being a great deal more enlightening than books by his intellectual inferiors, above all because it so oversimplifies the reality of contemporary Europe.

For him, every kind of criminality, whether it is petty street crime in Amsterdam beyond the canals or the huge riots that convulsed the major cities of France in 2005, plays neatly into his argument about the immigrant tide. This argument is deeply flawed both factually and analytically.

True, Europe has indeed neglected the issue of integration – and the lack of economic integration further amplifies the cultural alienation of these groups.  But to lump every manifestation of social problem, regardless of its root, to the issue of faith and culture, is indeed an oversimplification.

Has Europe really responded so ineptly and cravenly to the transformation that mass immigration has brought? The facts that Caldwell gathers to demonstrate this proposition support other, far less damning interpretations. It is true that at least some of the rioters have screamed anti-French slogans. But this is really not all that different from much Mexican nationalist sentiment one encounters routinely at street demonstrations in California demanding legalization of illegal immigrants.

So I agree with Rieff when he ends the piece on a money quote: “In the fight between money and blood, history actually shows that money often emerges victorious.”

A rant that started with an Audi ad and meandered through the requisite American distaste for conformism eventually arrived at this.

Not that the tin-foil helmet crazies are in anyways more desirable than disenfranchised anarchist mobs taking over government buildings.  And considering the reasons for protests: one for introducing universal health insurance and/or financial sector bailouts, the other against belt-tightening in wages and benefits, I’m not entirely sure the comparison can really be considered parallel.

The majority of us hit by economic hardships just want to put our heads down and get on with the whole thing, kind of like, well, Ireland.

But just for fun: fringe to fringe, protester to protester, crazy to crazy, which one would you rather?

[T]he difference between America and Europe is that, when the global economy nosedived, everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria mobs took to the streets and besieged Parliament, demanding to know why government didn’t do more for them. This is the only country in the developed world where a mass movement took to the streets to say we can do just fine if you control-freak statists would just stay the hell out of our lives, and our pockets. You can shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill, and your multitrillion-dollar porkathons. This isn’t karaoke. These guys are singing “I’ll do it my way” for real.

Unlike its OECD brethrens, Australia is facing a population crisis, in the other direction!

Australia now has the fastest population growth in the developed world, surpassing that of the U.S. and the United Kingdom, and even many developing countries, including Indonesia and China.

Nice.  Except in a rather Malthusian twist, Australia has limitations when it comes to natural resources, and even more trouble catching in terms of infrastructure. So what to do?

Australian businessman Dick Smith is opposed to population growth and says Australia should cut its skilled migration intake, and encourage people to have fewer children.

But an uptick in population density has its benefits.

“And there will be opportunities there. Greater density will mean that certain public options become viable; better public transport’s viable … so there’s all sorts of ways that we can deal with this. But closing our minds and our hearts to people from around the world is not the way that’s going to do that,” he added.

Along with a heavily distributive society, what else do the Scandinavians get right?

A review of The Spirit Level finds the following:

Deep down, Norway and the other Scandinavian societies still have it right because there are a host of other social policies (affordable child care and greater paternity leave for men among them) that are sustainable on the back of a redistributive economy, but which themselves provide the basis for a more caring society.

So it’s not merely the act of wealth distribution that result in the happier, safer, and nicer societies as outlined in Wilkinson and Pickett’s research.  It’s the social policies that consistently display a “degree of care” that some countries have neglected in our pursuit of individualism and fairness, so argues the authors.

Do you buy the arguments for nanny states?

Francophone Africa is gradually moving away from its former colonial overlord.  Those with resources are finding it easy to make new friends with a clean slate.

Gabon has acquired many friends in recent years, including China, the US and a number of wealthy Arab regimes. Beijing is courting, hosting and assisting African leaders, with very few conditions, much as France used to do, and while they may not fight to the death for real democracy in their country, Gabonese nowadays rise up in revolt at the idea of a leader being ‘elected in Paris’.

Half a century after the independence of most of its former colonies, France is still “nodding and winking” when it comes to African politics. And things haven’t changed much.

[S]ince he took office, Sarkozy has perpetuated France’s time-honoured tradition of parallel diplomacy in Africa. … In its African backyard, Paris professed a doctrine of ‘limited sovereignty’, just as Brezhnev was doing in the satellite states of Eastern Europe.

Before Rwanda and Ivory Coast, however, France was surprisingly effective in protecting pax franca - those under its jurisdiction against violence, relatively to other European masters.

Between 1960 and 1990, 40,000 people are believed to have died as a result of internecine violence in French Africa, half of them in Chad; by comparison, roughly two million died in former British Africa, another two million in former Belgian Africa, 1.2 million in the former Portuguese colonies and another million in the residual category that includes Ethiopia, Somalia, Liberia and Equatorial Guinea.

Nowadays, Françafrique is losing patience with its elitist Franco-African leaders, whom are increasingly detached from Africans on the ground.  The French too, while holding little objection to the idea of neo-colonialism, are becoming more and more aloof to the realities of maintaining political ties while doing business on the continent.

The Guardian paints a bleak picture of a former Eastern German town, where the population crash has sank the place into a “demographic abyss”: with no children, tons of old people, abandoned buildings and packs of wolves.  Wow, that sounds like the ideal setting for a Cormac McCarthy and P.D. James collaboration.

The more educated and mobile women moved out, and the men just kind of regressed, Russian-style.

Under communism, East ­German women worked more, and were ­often better educated, than the more conservative western hausfrau. But when their jobs disappeared in the early 90s, hundreds of thousands of them, encouraged by their ­mothers, took their school diplomas and CVs and headed west to cities such as ­Heidelberg. The boys, however, seeing their fathers out of work, often just gave up. In adulthood, they form a rump of ill-educated, alienated, ­often unemployable men, most of them ­unattractive mates – a further factor in the departure of young women.

Just like Japan, the problem becomes catastrophic in the second generation, when the pool of available women to have children dwindles, leading to even lower fertility.  Especially if both genders are just as indifferent to the existence of children (social policies are moving in the right direction, but are they moving fast enough?).

“Today, 48% of German men under 40 agree that you can have a happy life without children. When their fathers were asked the same question at the same age, only 15% agreed,” says Europe’s top demographer.

The report gets spooked by its own doom at this point, and suggest we consider this as Europe’s future.

About a million homes have been abandoned, and the ­government is demolishing them as fast as it can. Left ­behind are “perforated ­cities”, with huge random chunks of ­wasteland. Europe hasn’t seen ­cityscapes like this since the bombing of the second world war.

What now?

A new government report coming out of Britain has revealed the not-so-shocking news that over the last few decades, the country has become the most unequal since WWII.  While many lament the multitude of wealth gaps based on gender, class, and geography, and social mobility, City Journal zeros in on the race-gap.

[I]t listed the average net household wealth in Britain by religious affiliation. The figures were as follows (I convert into American dollars):

Muslim: $68,000

None: $224,000

Hindu: $337,000

Christian: $361,000

Sikh: $371,000

Jewish: $684,000

And makes the not entirely convincing argument that sounds vaguely American.

These figures conclusively demonstrate what statist social reformers have long sought to deny: that Britain, despite its obvious and pervasive class structure, has long been a very open society. The figures show that neither concentration of wealth nor prejudice—provided that they are not enforced by law or absolutely monolithic and universal, which was never the case in Britain—can prevent the ascent of a social group if it has a mind to ascend.

The idea is essentially contradictory: how can a society be considered open, if the definition of open seems still limited and greatly stratified by race?  The argument is essentially reduced to nothing but a cultural critique.

Back to the report, some interesting observations:

• Inequality over the last 40 years is mostly attributed to gaps WITHIN social groups, rather than BETWEEN them.  Does this mean social mobility has essentially improved, or that the range of wealth within a social group has widened?
• “Profound and startling differences” were found between areas: median hourly wages in the most deprived 10th of areas are 40% lower than in the least deprived.  In short, the north-south divide has not changed much.

How unequal is Britain?

Just twenty years ago, most Chinese urban families would not even dare to dream of owning a car, most have never been inside of one!  Ten years ago, many of the nouveau riche started showing up in them.  Nowadays, nobody bats an eyelash if there are two cars per family, as long as they can find, and pay for parking.

Needlessly to say, this singular pursuit of the four-wheeled life has marginalized the biking culture.

Horrified by the implications of billions of cars on the road – challenges in logistics, infrastructure maintenance, and worst of all, pollution, Beijing is implementing some reforms to bring the bikes back.

Xinhua says:

The city will restore bicycle lanes which were cut to make more room for cars and buses. It will also work to relieve a shortage of secure bicycle parking. …  The government will build more parking lots for bikes alongside bus and subway stations so that cyclists could easily transfer to other transport vehicles. Meanwhile, the city is making bikes more available for hire. By 2015, about 1,000 outlets will be offering 50,000 bikes for rent.

Perhaps they can learn from the Danes, or the Dutch.

(H/T: Good.is)

For decades now, Israel’s experiment with collective farming has remained free of dogma, repression, or, let’s face it, cultist stuff that scares our pants off when the word “commune” comes up.

It turns out that in the last years, most of the kibbutz have been transformed into profit-making, capitalist co-operatives.

Today, many kibbutzim not only have thriving businesses – including in the tourism industry – that operate exactly like other private enterprises, but some have even decided to embrace the capital market: 22 kibbutz companies are currently listed on stock exchanges in Tel Aviv, New York and London. With annual sales worth Shk37bn ($10bn, €7bn, £6bn), the kibbutz companies account for about 10 per cent of Israel’s industrial production.

A shift from agriculture to heavy industries switched the lights on, and the community self-corrected.  Unfortunately, the Communist bloc did not get the memo.

[T]he shift to industry that started in the 1960s and 1970s was an important factor in persuading the kibbutzim to change their ways: they realised that a factory, unlike a farm, is hard to run along egalitarian lines. Someone, in short, had to manage, and someone had to stand at the assembly line.

Much of the change in ethos also came from an increasingly rich country in general.

As the country began to prosper during the 1980s, Israelis increasingly turned away from the frugal socialist ethos that had dominated the state’s early years.