Based in particular on a very nice article he did in the NYT magazine a while back on birth rates in different countries, I have very high expectations for Russell Shorto. Given that, I was disappointed by his recent NYT mag article on Greece. The article, though fair enough on its own terms--I'm sure lots of Greek businesses, such as the construction business doing work for the government that employed the story's central figure, have indeed gone under--struck me as Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.
My sense is that the 64K question for Greece (and Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France) is whether to change a system in which the dominant group of employees consists of managers and workers in the private sector and government who have a very high degree of job security. A country in which most of the best people are locked into a highly protected, relatively stationary order is perhaps not a country whose prospects are good compared to countries such as the United States. Here, a highly protected job market, though it prevails for government employment, does not characterize the private sector in the way that it does in southern Europe.
The issue of a dominant sector of employees that protects itself at the expense of others in the country and of social dynamism--as opposed to an apparently related but quite different issue as to whether Greeks are simply more laid back than Germans--did not surface in Shorto's piece. He would be extremely well qualified to write a piece that treats that issue, regardless of his underlying position on the normative issue of junking the high job security system for the private and public elites of southern Europe.
Just as Shorto's birth rates article wound up using the Nordic countries, with their combination of a big welfare state and high birth rates, as a nice qualifier to a US-centered "don't run too big a government if you want people to have kids" line, he might write a piece on the job security issue that uses the same Nordic countries as a possible counter to a line that a security system for the managerial and employee elite is a serious drain on dynamism. My sense is that higher level private sector employees are not protected in Sweden, Denmark, etc. in the way they are in Greece, Italy, etc., but I'm not sure at all about that--am writing now away from a connection.* But even after satisfying my curiosity on that point with a net search, I'd be highly interested in reading a future Shorto comparative analysis of the job security and social dynamism issue. A nice starting point for that article would be an NYT piece the other day comparing the bustling scene in a border town on the more flexible German side of the Rhine with the ossified, high unemployment scene in the counterpart town on the French side.
*Wified-in while waiting to testify on tenure reform in Trenton--checking on job security in the private sector in Scandinavia...looks as though Sweden has a less flexible approach and Denmark has a more flexible one...this is a tricky issue to research because the reality of whether there is an inflexible labor system of high job security lies in the details of whether poor employees can successfully avoid discharge through a hearing process...the NJEA (teacher's union) rep here in Trenton is now advocating for poison pill "due process" changes to the tenure bill that would if applied in a certain way kill the efficacy of reform and keep the current NJ system in which it is virtually impossible to get rid of teachers no matter how incompetent. (My sense is that the current system also operates in that way for govt employees in in general in NJ and elsewhere in the US. Teachers are a current flashpoint, but the bigger issue is that an important part of the US, the govt sector, operates in the same way that a broader part of Greece, Italy, etc., does.)