16-7-2011
I
REALIZE that I should be in Washington watching the debt drama there,
but I’ve opted instead to be in Greece to observe the off-Broadway
version. There are a lot of things about this global debt tragedy that
you can see better from here, in miniature, starting with the raw plot,
which no one has described better than the Carnegie Endowment scholar
David Rothkopf: “When the cold war ended, we thought we were going to
have a clash of civilizations. It turns out we’re having a clash of
generations.”
Indeed, if there is one sentiment
that unites the crises in Europe and America it is a powerful sense of
“baby boomers behaving badly” — a powerful sense that the generation
that came of age in the last 50 years, my generation, will be remembered
most for the incredible bounty and freedom it received from its parents
and the incredible debt burden and constraints it left on its kids.
It
is no wonder that young Greeks reacted so harshly when their deputy
prime minister, Theodoros Pangalos, referring to all the European Union
loans and subsidies that propelled the Greek credit binge after 1981,
said, “We ate it together” — meaning the people and the politicians.
That was true of the baby boomer generation of Greeks, now in their 50s
and 60s, and the baby boomer politicians. But those just coming of age
today will never get a bite. They will just get a bill. And they know
it.
Read the full article in the New York Times.
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