Greek particularities

The Ekathimerini published a commentary by Angelos Stangos who concludes his observations with the following paragraph: 

"There is no need to point out that Greece has the highest unemployment figures, also among its youth. Efforts are being made to create new jobs via growth-inducing measures, and yet Greeks continue to be extremely picky when the opportunity does arise. There’s an ad for peach picking, but hardly any Greeks show up for the job. There’s one for strawberry picking (25 euros/day for a five-hour shift) but there’s hardly any interest and such jobs are unavoidably taken by non-Greeks. It’s a mystery how all those unemployed people out there manage to get by. Meanwhile, in yet another mystery, car traffic has reportedly increased over the past few months and so has turnover in the recreation and entertainment sectors. Meanwhile, we hear the market is all dried up".

That hit home with me because I make the same observations when we live in Thessaloniki close to half of the year: traffic jams (many SUVs) all the time; full cafés; retail shopping like there was a boom; etc. At the same time, I observe two extremes. Let me first give the example of my wife's nephew.

Giorgos is 25 years old and just graduated from a technical college in Serres. Giorgos is a compulsive worker. Every free time he spends in his father's earth-moving business (his father is also a compulsive worker who seems to have accumulated a good amount of wealth during the Euro-boom and who has no debt). The type of heavy duty work which Giorgos does makes the picking of strawberries look like recreation. At the same time, Giorgos drives - for a couple of years now - a fancy Mercedes Coupé which was not brandnew when he bought it but which still looks brandnew. Now, regardless of how much his father paid Giorgos per hour, there is no way that he could have saved enough to buy that car. Obviously, in the small village where Giorgos and his family live, that attracts quite a bit of attention.

I attended Giorgos' graduation last month. I was most impressed by the young people I saw and met there. They were not loser types. Instead, they all seemed self-confident and eager to go out and conquer the world.

Another example is Eva, a 30-year old language teacher at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki who, in addition to her university job, has two other jobs: private language lessons and a part-time job in a software company. She tells me that she can financially support herself. Obviously, she has no time during the week to spend in cafés.

Now to the other extreme. One of Giorgos friends, also 25, is a cocky young, spoiled brat of Albanian descent (he flunked the graduation exams). He drives a Mercedes SUV provided by his father. When I asked what his father did for a living, he said 'he is a businessman'. This fellow gave me a lecture about everything that was wrong in Greece. People like he, he said, really did not have high expectations. All he wanted was a good job so that he could buy a house and have a family. 'Is that asking too much?', he asked me. Well, if he worked like Giorgos, he would be able to fulfil his dreams; probably not tomorrow and probably not next year, but some time soon. That thought, however, did not cross his mind and neither did he understand what I tried to explain to him.

This reminded me of a recent article which Marina Souyioultzi published in her blog Greconomy. Note the following excerpt:

"This system of education (the Greek system) has obviously not been developed in a vacuum.  In a recent lecture (in Greek) (http://steliosramfosgr.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/homo-economicus-homo-hellenicus/), the philosopher Stelios Ramfos explained how the way that Greek children are educated is completely consistent both with our culture of parenting, and with our attitudes towards work and the State in later life.  Essentially, the argument was that the Greeks fail to ever wean ourselves from mothers who tend to express their love in overpowering and often co-dependent ways.  This early childhood experience translates into an obsession with the past (and hence the memorising of facts) in school and the civil service mentality in adulthood of a job for life.  Breast-feeding on the mother becomes milking the state (through tax evasion, a civil service job, a fake pension claim, a state-dependent enterprise and so on).  With this psychological make-up it is very difficult for the Greeks to modernise our (caretaker) State institutions such that they become more appropriate for creative risk-taking.  It is also difficult to escape the vicious cycle of populist leaders, as the Greeks are always seeking father figures assuring us that we will be provided for.  Finally, I would add that the failure of Greek parents to instil boundaries in children's behaviour early on evolves in adulthood into a disregard for the law (tax code, building regulations), for public property (university campuses), for for public property (university campuses), for meritocracy and indeed for common civility.  The lack of boundaries at home is obviously exacerbated by a failure of the school system to teach values of tolerance and respect, thereby perpetuating low levels of trust.  meritocracy and indeed for common civility.  The lack of boundaries at home is obviously exacerbated by a failure of the school system to teach values of tolerance and respect, thereby perpetuating low levels of trust".

Based on my own experience with a Greek wife raising our sons and based on many observations of other Greek families, I could associate with those observations (well, maybe not the part about breast-feeding and its consequences...).

Still, how can all of this work when the country is in deep crisis? One of my Greek friends explained that to me as follows: "The casual observer may see complete misery in very selected areas of Greece but he does not see complete misery all over Greece. This can only mean that 'Greece is still living off the fat and there is a lot of fat left'. Ok, so that makes the overall situation a bit more bearable. But what happens when the rest of that 'fat' is gone? My Greek friends tell me that there is plenty of 'fat' left. They concede that the 'fat' is limited to only a part of the population but that part, according to my neighbors, is quite large".

In a way, this makes sense. Before the crisis hit, I never got the impression that Greeks who were doing reasonably well (not wealthy!) would consider an amount of, say, 100 TEUR as a large amount. Heck, a taxi license allegedly went for 200-300 TEUR. Suppose a family had 200 TEUR and can now get by with, say, 20 TEUR a year, that family can live 'off the fat' for another 10 years. And when you add to that the fact that, since the crisis, over 80 BEUR left the Greek banking system by way of deposit withdrawals, a totally new dimension is added.

So what's the point of all of this? My point is that there may be many, very valid Greek pecularities which explain the current situation but none of them bode well for the future. At some point in the future, the 'fat' will be gone and when that happens, people like Giorgos' friend will have to learn that money and living standard are not blessings which fall from heaven (or come from parents). Instead, they are the result of hard work and clean living. At least in my vision, they are!