The generational divide: old and new Greece can't agree

Perissa Beach on Santorini in Greece. Source: Big Stock Photo

June 15, 2010

The Los Angeles Times with an article by Megan K. Stack on how the economic situation is shaping up for young Greeks who cannot get jobs, and wont consider other options:

"The Greeks call it "Generation 700": a mass of highly educated twenty- and early thirtysomethings stuck in amiable insolvency, living with their parents, drifting from coffee shop to coffee shop with companions they can't afford to marry.

...Olga Stefou is 20. She speaks passable English and studies political science. These days she goes into the streets to shout slogans against the government and the International Monetary Fund. She has no choice, she says: She believes that upon graduation she'll be lucky to land a job that pays $500 a month."

Stefou believes that the government is bound to respond to her discontent. And she has suggestions: Greece should make up its budget shortfall by pulling its 122 troops from Afghanistan and levying steep taxes on the Orthodox Church rather than squeezing the workers, she says."

... To hear some critics tell it, the discontented young are a living metaphor for what ails Greece in general: fattened on the indulgences of a doting system, unwilling to make hard sacrifices, lacking in self-starting spirit. "What I'm really worried about is that you have a culture totally bereft of entrepreneurial ideas," said Takis Michas, a prominent Greek journalist and longtime critic of what he has called "the last Marxist state in Europe."

"People, especially young ones, are not taught to love entrepreneurship, but to hate it," he said. Last year, Michas did a study of Greek marriage agencies. He found that the top attribute sought by middle-class young women in a potential mate was a job in the civil service or the military. Government service has long been prized because of the elaborate set of benefits attached to the position.

"This is the mind-set now," Michas said. "It's a culture of dependency, first on parents, and it becomes a dependency on the state."

Related: Jobs in Greece

Athens Greece under a clear sky