The Mayor of the Spanish city of Granada met with the high-schoolers who had shown the best results on a college readiness test. The Mayor had some important wisdom to impart to the eager students.
“The more naked a woman is, the more elegant that makes her!” the Mayor announced. “And it’s the opposite for a man! The more dressed he is, the more elegant that makes him!”
There is an enormous brain drain from Spain right now. Brilliant young people are fleeing the country en masse because the country’s future has been devoured by corrupt and piggish politicians like the Mayor of Granada.
Clarissa's Blog 
Piffle.
Piggishness has very little to do with the brain drain. It’s all corruption and the fact there are no jobs. There are reams of engineers who’ll go to Qatar or Saudi Arabia ignoring the piggishness and the distinct lack of freedoms.
I wonder where the young brilliant Greeks and Spaniards are headed to. I don’t know how welcoming other EU countries are going to be and for how long.
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Whenever times are tough, Spaniards traditionally go to Germany. And now to the UK as well. Some go to Canada because immigration is easier for young people.
And I’m guessing the engineers who are so happy to go to Saudi Arabia are not women. 🙂
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I have known two women who worked in Saudi Arabia for a few years. The fact that they were paid three to five times what they would have earned for the same work in the U. S. was a factor. They lived in a “European-American compound” so they had respite from the oppression of the society toward women.
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Good for them! This is a very good story.
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A two year old infographic on where the Spanish emigrate to
Hilariously, it’s by an American who moved there in 2014. His fiancee must have sick relatives or have a family business in which he can have a sinecure, because given the choice between a tire-fire economy and a meh economy, why go towards the tire fire?
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Half of my students dream of emigrating to Spain. I feel like an ogre when I dash their dreams and tell them it’s not a good idea.
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I haven’t decided yet whether brain drains are an unintended effect of IMF policy or something they actually plan on. The sum total of their policies seem to be designed to attack the economy and any possibility for growth from every angle.
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If anybody is not to blame for Spain ‘ s problems it’s the IMF. Even my most pinko – commie friends from Spain agree the corruption and the “social spending” were just insane. What can the IMF do? Give Spain more money to sink into a dozen more ghost airports and dead opera houses? What purpose will that serve?
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Give Spain more money to sink into a dozen more ghost airports and dead opera houses? What purpose will that serve?
Imagining an AU where literal ghosts fly on planes and zombies attend operas. The worldwide United Airlines computer fuckup today is just an emerging AI going on strike in solidarity with the drones. :p
I have to agree with Cliff though. Any current economic policy or one that’s likely to be implemented in Spain is designed to create a brain drain. It’s hard to say it’s accidental/unintended when we’ve seen the results of these policies so many times before. A brain drain for one country means cheap educated labor for other countries, which makes it a net macroeconomic win for world economies.
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Let’s say complete debt forgiveness is implemented with Spain, Greece, Ukraine, Portugal, etc. Do you have any doubt that within a few years these countries will be in the exact same situation they are now? What will prevent all of these corrupt officials who spent all the money on palaces and private zoos from doing it again? And again?
This is not about current policy. In Spain, the situation has been going to the dogs since the 1990s. The governmental spending has been absolutely ridiculous. For decades! It’s a fact of objective reality that I thought was not in dispute.
I don’t know how to discuss Spain without this history. I have not even seen anybody in Spain who doesn’t believe that the current problem was created internally. Why are we discussing it as if it was caused to Spain by some outside forces?
Even my favorite writer Rafael Chirbes who is a die-hard Marxist explains Spain ‘ s crisis with internal factors. Spanish writers who are or were members of the Communist party of Spain are writing essays about the crisis and all agree that it was caused internally. I don’t even know how far to the left you need to go on Spain to arrive at the conclusion that Spain ‘ s penury was caused by Europe or the IMF.
Austerity polices are not producing good results, that’s obvious. But these policies are only trying to correct a horrible situation created fully and entirely by Spaniards. Just like Ukraine ‘s bizarrely bad economy was created by absolutely nobody else but Ukrainians.
As for educated labor, Spain ‘ s education system is ridiculously bad on every level.
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I’m not arguing that the basic problems were caused internally, of course they were. I’m saying that external solutions aren’t necessarily going to work (especially since they tend to be resented so much). Also, the sum total of IMF policy recommendations is to turn all the potentially productive parts of the economy against itself making a comeback all the more remote.
I tend to think that some debt forgiveness will have to part of a solution and restricted and/or no access to more loans. But too much IMF policies look like they’re designed to create beggar nations that lurch from one ruinous loan to the next (the point of which is to pay interest on the old loan).
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Yes. I have to agree with this. IMF has such a long history of doing this and has in many countries made loans on condition they were spent in ways that benefited economies of central countries, or certain corporations, and not the economy they allegedly supported.
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Yes, before IMF was created, Spain was doing SO well economically. It was the wonder of the world with its amazing economy. That evil, evil IMF turned the prosperous, happy Spain into the impoverished country we see today.
Let me go throw away all of my scholarly volumes on the history of the Spanish economy now.
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Let’s say complete debt forgiveness is implemented with Spain, Greece, Ukraine, Portugal, etc. Do you have any doubt that within a few years these countries will be in the exact same situation they are now? What will prevent all of these corrupt officials who spent all the money on palaces and private zoos from doing it again? And again?
Germany was forgiven its debts following WW II. I suspect that Spain, Greece, et al. would be likely to follow a similar trajectory to post-1945 Germany, given the chance.
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Why would they be likely to follow a trajectory of an entirely different country with entirely different problems in an entirely different historic era? Doesn’t it make more sense to judge what Spaniards will do tomorrow on the basis of what they are doing today than on the basis of what Germans did 70 years ago in an entirely different economy, an entirely different world , an entirely different era?
I’m just not seeing the logic of this. Why are we choosing Germany as an example and not, say, Russia that much more recently wasted a cool trillion on corrupt schemes and still hasn’t stopped? Was Germany very known for corruption schemes under the Nazis, or something?
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Economic forces are the same for all countries. If any country lacks the capital to have its economy grow, its economy will not grow. If it does not grow, it will not be able to repay anything, no matter how badly it is treated. Period. We saw this with Weimar Germany.
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The crisis has demonstrated that what we thought was economy in Greece and Spain was actually a bubble. Feeding more money into the bubble to pretend that “economy is growing” in these countries has already been done. And it proved to be a huge mistake.
Before there is any actual economy that has the capacity to grow, the bubble needs to be burst. Obviously, that’s an excruciatingly painful process. We all experienced that back in the FSU when the bubble of Soviet economy burst. And the recovery is still ongoing. These bubbles are deadly and have to be avoided at all costs. However, once the bubble is created it is an enormous mistake to pretend it isn’t there.
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< a href=”http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2015/07/08/new-york-stock-exchange-halts-trading/”>A computer glitch halted all trading on the NYSE What a coincidence.
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Welcome to the new age of uncertainty!
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You’ve probably heard of this already, but in case you haven’t, more craziness from Spain, this time Asturias
I do have to say I like the catchphrase “preserva tu decencia también el verano”
http://www.asturias24.es/secciones/vivir/noticias/los-carlistas-proponen-la-segregacion-por-sexo-en-las-playas-para-evitar-los-pecados-de-la-carne/1436123574
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” If any country lacks the capital to have its economy grow, its economy will not grow. If it does not grow, it will not be able to repay anything”
This is what I was getting at, I don’t see anything in the IMF program that encourages (or allows!) growth.
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There is no evidence that pouring any more money into the same broken receptacle will suddenly bring a different result. Money’s been pouring into Spain for years. Spain was a country back in 2005 where the greatest number of 500-euro notes in all the EU was in circulation.
The last thing Spain needs is more European money. Spain needs to defeat corruption. Greece needs the same. And so does Ukraine. And all these countries really need to do something about their bizarrely bad education systems.
No fairy godmother IMF can do this for them. They’ll have to figure it out themselves. Spain, I’m sure, will. Greece and Ukraine – I’m not so sure.
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You seem to think I want more loans and/or ‘bailouts’ for Spain (or Greece or Portugal). I probably favor some level of debt reduction (even the IMF says debt reduction is needed for Greece) tied into no more loans (and getting the hell out of the Euro).
Again, the Euro is not a currency union. Part, not all but part, of the PIGS problem was not realizing that Germany meant it when it made clear that there are to be no transfers. It’s a case of poorer countries using a rich country’s currency whose exchange rates and supply they have no influence over which is in the long run unsustainable and will lead to just what’s happened.
Spain (and the others have misbehaved but the medicine at present is more likely to kill the patient than cure it.
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Hey, the faster Greece is kicked out of the euro, the sooner there will be space for Ukraine in there. The “center” of Europe needs to go East. 🙂 I don’t mean right now, of course, or even in 30 years. But one day, I could see it.
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