Stiff Cerebellum Upper Lip

EUROSOC discovers just what it is that the Guardian finds a hideous, unjust degree of impoverishment that, frankly, YOU’RE supposed to DO SMETHING ABOUT, dammit!

"With inflation soaring, property prices sky high, wages relatively static, labour markets gridlocked and sluggish or slowing economies, (the Guardian's interviewees) are among tens of millions of Europeans raised to expect that their degrees and diplomas will assure them a relatively high quality of life who are now realising that the world has changed. The disappointment is a shock with big political, social, cultural, even demographic consequences," the newspaper reports.

But here’s the weasel in the woodpile:

On the face of it, they have our sympathy, but the Guardian holds the violins: One thirty year old Roman student lives in a flat his parents bought for him, while a 24 year old working as a stagaire in a Paris publishing house spends her weekends in her parents' country house by the sea in Brittany - an experience she claims will "leave a bitter taste in her mouth."

There are probably American EURSOC readers, possibly the sons and daughters of impoverished immigrants, who are reading this and spitting their morning coffee.

Awwww... It looks like SOMEBODY needs a HUG.

It's difficult to get worked up about their plight. Presumably our French publisher stands to inherit the country pile when her parents die, as well as their city home. Perhaps this inheritance will help her to buy a flat in Paris, where property prices have skyrocketed in the past decade. Even modest family apartments in the 20th arrondisement where our publishing stagaire lives can cost over 400,000 euros; choose a less gritty neighbourhood and the price can double.

This has certainly hit those who work in the cultural world and those at the modest end of state employment, such as schoolteachers. But state employees can balance their sometimes meagre incomes against the free childcare they enjoy as fonctionnaires, plus France's enviable education and health coverage. Pensions are better than those in the private sector, too.

Despite these complaints, around 80 percent of schoolchildren claim they want to grow up to work for the state. One understands the appeal of a guaranteed job for life in uncertain times, but there simply isn't enough money in the state's coffers to ensure these people enjoy the same standard of living as their parents.

As if that ever mattered to the people demanding “social justice” for themselves.