Why Europe’s austerity experiment is doomed to fail

I’ve spent the past two weeks in Europe, with speak­ing engage­ments in Italy, Greece and Aus­tria. This was my first visit to Greece, and my first chance to get an admit­tedly super­fi­cial tourist’s view of what a coun­try with Great Depres­sion lev­els of unem­ploy­ment looks like.

It didn’t look like any­thing in par­tic­u­lar until the drive from Athens, Greece’s cap­i­tal and largest city, to Thes­sa­loniki, its sec­ond largest. Then it struck me: the roads were near empty — as the toll booth shown in Fig­ure 1 illus­trates. My host Nikos reck­ons he has done a mil­lion kilo­me­ters over the years on this 500km drive, and he con­firmed that roads which were now vir­tu­ally empty were once full of cars, and espe­cially trucks — that mobile sign of a thriv­ing economy.

Fig­ure 1: A toll booth on Greece’s main high­way at about 5pm: no vehi­cles in either direc­tion

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