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January 31 - February 5, 2017
What appeared to be economic growth was activity fueled by people borrowing money they probably couldn’t afford to repay: by their rough count, worldwide debts, public and private, had more than doubled since 2002, from $84 trillion to $195 trillion.
The financial crisis of 2008 was suspended only because investors believed that governments could borrow whatever they needed to rescue their banks.
“Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.”
Americans wanted to own homes far larger than they could afford, and to allow the strong to exploit the weak. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers, and to allow their alpha males to reveal a theretofore suppressed megalomania. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish.
The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job.
In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.
And the truth is, if you were to design a human being to maximize the likelihood that people would assume he drank too much you’d have a hard time doing better than the Irish prime minister.
This awkward social responsibility—normalizing a freak show—is now a meaningful part of the job of being Ireland’s finance minister.
most of them echoing German public opinion, and expressing incomprehension and outrage that other people can behave so irresponsibly.
The German government was equally prudent because, he went on, “there is a consensus among the different parties about this: if you’re not adhering to fiscal responsibility you have no chance in elections, because the people are that way.”
When did we go from giving people sick leave to letting them accumulate it and cash it in for hundreds of thousands of dollars when they are done working? There’s a corruption here. It’s not just a financial corruption. It’s a corruption of the attitude of public service.”
Service-level insolvency means that the expensive community center that has been built and named cannot be opened. It means closing libraries three days a week. It isn’t financial bankruptcy; it’s cultural bankruptcy.
“We’re all going to be rich,” he says. “We’re all going to live forever. All the forces in the state are lined up to preserve the status quo. To preserve the delusion. And here—this place—is where the reality hits.”
It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences.
He thinks the dysfunction in America’s society is a by-product of America’s success. In academic papers and a popular book, American Mania, Whybrow argues, in effect, that human beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans.
Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.
The only political ideology that anger benefits these days is anarchy. From the point of view of those who enjoy political stability, it’s a stroke of luck that anarchists have no natural talent for organizing themselves. But how long will it take them to learn?
