NP - Why the Euro Is a Selfish Jerk

[John Bailey]

Yeah, this kind of pop psychology probably shouldn't be applied to
nation-states. Not hiring someone for a job is of a different order to
not relieving a nation of its economic burden, and suggesting that an
entire country and its heterogeneous population is reflected by the
fiscal decisions of the ruling party doesn't bode well for any of us
bastards, either.

On Sat, Apr 18, 2015 at 8:16 PM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
<lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>
> Ach David ... There simply is no European nation. Why don't you get it? No
> common language, thus no common public sphere. No common political identity
> ( - like you have in the US since 1865).
>
> What we have here in (Western) Europe since 1945 is the strong will not to
> go to war with each other. And this has caused the EU and then the Euro. Not
> the other way round. Actually no war will break out in case the Euro fails.
> Those who say otherwise like Angela Merkel or the bureaucrats from Brussels
> are just trying to push an ideology. Paul Collier ("Exodus. Immigration and
> Multiculturalism in the 21. Century") has a thought experiment on this,
> directly aiming at Merkel's nonsensical statement ("If the Euro fails,
> Europe will fail"). Poland and Norway were both occupied by German troops
> during World War II. These days, Poland is a member of the EU and has the
> Euro. Norway is not and has its own currency. Now, is it, asks Collier, the
> nano-tiniest bit more probable that Germany will invade Norway than it is
> that Germany will invade Poland? No, the correct answer goes, for both
> events the probability lies by absolute zero. The will for peace in Western
> Europe is not (anymore) dependent on economic sunshine. It is grounded in
> the terrible experience of devastating war. And this experience goes far
> wider back in history than the 20th century. The Thirty Years' War
> (1618-1648) killed in relative numbers more people than World War II. Even
> when the new Greek government went from ugly to insane, they didn't threaten
> Germany with military force but with the announcement that they would pay
> migrants with an Islamist background the train ticket to Berlin. War is
> simply not an option anymore.
>
> So what's the fuss about? Certainly not about poverty. There are a number of
> states in the Euro zone where the people are poorer. Slovenia for example.
> Or Estonia. People there too back up the guarantees for Greece with the
> taxes they pay. How can you explain to them that the Greeks want to have the
> cake and eat it too? Get unconditional financial support for their corrupted
> society and stay inside the Euro zone. This has to come to an end. And it
> does. For Greece it would be the best thing to leave the Euro zone and to
> reintroduce the Drachme which it could devalue to get some competitive
> capacity. If Greece stays in the Euro zone, it will economically crash and
> this time there won't be any bailout. It's called Grexident ...
>
> Oh David, one more thing: If you think this is about Germans and Greeks, ---
> why don't you ask a taxpayer from, say, the Netherlands or Lithuania how
> they feel about sponsoring the never ending  Athens party?
>
>
> On 17.04.2015 21:57, David Morris wrote:
>
> Hitting The Nail On The Head:
>
> http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/04/euro-ingroup-bias
>
> the Euro creators should have thought harder about what social scientists
> have learned about how compassion and cultural identity interact.
>
> In asking nations to entrust their economic fate to the Euro, its designers
> were assuming that Europeans have a reservoir of goodwill among them. That
> goodwill was supposed to ensure, for example, that no prospective member had
> to worry that a powerful member would use its Euro-derived leverage to turn
> the screws on a weaker member which was—to pick an example out of thin
> air—wracked by colossal levels of debt, unemployment and economic misery.
>
> But that's exactly what the Germans have done to the Greeks. Why aren't the
> Germans overcome with sympathy for the Greeks? It's not that Germans are
> selfish or hard-hearted: after all, they have spent ten times the current
> GDP of Greecehelping the economically struggling people of the former East
> Germany.
>
> Social psychology researchers have identified a powerful in group bias in
> willingness to help others, whether it's hiring someone for a job or
> supporting social welfare programs for the poor. Human beings are, in short,
> more inclined to help other people whom we perceive as being a member of our
> tribe.
>
> Human psychology wouldn't cause as many problems for the Euro if there was a
> strong European identity, if a West German was as likely to consider an East
> German a tribe member as they would a Greek or a Spaniard or an Italian. But
> when most Germans and Greeks look at each other, they fundamentally see
> someone who speaks a different language and hails from a different culture
> with a different history—and for that matter was a military enemy within
> living memory.
>
> With no shared sense of tribe comes a sharp reduction in compassion and
> attendant willingness to help.  The elites who designed the Euro may
> genuinely have believed and even felt a sense that Europe is all about "us",
> but the currency's recent struggles show that for too many Europeans, it's
> more about us and them.
>
>
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l