The other day I was reading the New York Times and I spotted an article about Spain’s unemployment. Seeing it was like noticing an acquaintance mentioned in the newspaper – I wanted to show somebody, and point to it, shouting “I know that country! I’m living there right now!” – but I was alone. The article explains that “Joblessness has climbed to 19 percent in Spain, the highest in the euro zone,” and is up to 29 percent in Cádiz, the city in the south of Spain where the story was written.
There is a lot of threat implied in economic statistics. Numbers are cold and discreet, and it’s easy to see them as a report card on a country.
I remember my first long stint in Europe – a semester studying abroad in southern France – and how the numbers began to seem a little more more abstract. The study abroad program took us to a center for the unemployed, where we sat in on a lunch whose main person, it seemed, was to foster even more solidarité, which already seemed abundant. In France, unemployment seemed like just another thing, more like an inconvenience than a death sentence. It was almost as though you could do something about your employment status by just sitting around and communing.
It all seemed a little alien to me at the time, but since then, I've realized that when something about a culture strikes you as strange, it means you're understanding "cultural difference" on a whole visceral level that you can't get by just chanting to the word.
Anyway, after having seen and experiencing all that, unemployment numbers began to seem a bit more unreal. I couldn’t pick the statistics up with my hands or hold them; they were more like an abstract notion I could take or leave.
According to the article:
Elsewhere in Europe, such high numbers would lead to deep social unrest. Not so in Cádiz. Here, as across the Mediterranean, life remains puzzlingly comfortable behind the dramatic figures, thanks to a complex safety net in which the underground economy, family support and government subsidies ensure a relatively high quality of life.
