The Conservative Heart

by Arthur C. Brooks

  St. Irenaeus once said that “the glory of God is man fully alive.” What makes men and women fully alive—what endows them with dignity, happiness, and a sense of self-worth—is work. And the people of Marienthal had lost it.

  To be fair, 1929 was a long time ago. Did Europe learn a lesson from this early experience in work-extinguishing policy? Let’s move to the present day and see what has happened to modern-day Europe, and the lessons it holds for us here in America.

  LA GENERACIÓN NINI

  It is a bit past midnight, but José Luis Flores is not ready for bed just yet. The twenty-three-year-old man living in Cádiz, Spain, simply has too much to do.12 José begins his evening watching two hours of reality television. When that finishes, he turns to his great passion—video games—which he plays until 4:30 a.m.

  How can José live this way at age twenty-three? Won’t he be exhausted for work or school in the morning? No and no. He has neither a job nor goes to school. José still lives with his parents.

  José is not an anomaly. His case is quite typical and growing more so every day. In Spain, fully one-quarter of people aged 15–29 are neither working nor in school. That’s much higher than the average for developed countries.13 Many young Spaniards between 15 and 29 live with their parents, and few have any plan to move on with their lives. This situation is so common that Spaniards have invented a new nickname. They call this generation ninis, short for la generación nini: the nini generation. That’s because they’re people who neither work nor study—ni trabaja, ni estudia.

  Ninis are everywhere in Spain. I know several personally. My wife grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Barcelona. Ninis are the adult children of her childhood girlfriends, the now-fifty-year-old women who struggle for steady work to support two generations at once. To boot, few of these mothers have ever been married, having come of age in a culture that rejected traditional faith and traditional family life. The fathers of their adult children are nowhere to be found.

  But wait: Isn’t Spain a happy, traditional, family-oriented Catholic country? It used to be, but church attendance has collapsed by half between 1981 and the present. In 2007, 25 percent of Spanish adults agreed, “Marriage is an outdated institution.”14 According to one survey, nearly 90 percent of Spanish women agree, “It is all right for a couple to live together without intending to get married.”15 Meanwhile, the percentage of Spaniards who feel “very happy” fell by 30 percent between 1981 and 2005.

  Meanwhile, the overall unemployment rate for Spanish adults is the highest in Europe—24 percent as of this writing. That catastrophic figure has hardly budged since the trough of the recession in January 2013.16 And even this top-line figure is dwarfed by the unemployment rate specifically among young adults—it sits at 54 percent. That’s a level one would sooner expect from a tinpot dictatorship in total meltdown.

  To be sure, regional economic woes play a huge role in all this. But the roots of Spain’s malaise reach further down than real estate bubbles and complications with the Eurozone. Recently, the editors of a major Spanish daily newspaper told me that the Spanish embassy in Washington, D.C., had announced what seemed like an exciting new program. The government was offering six hundred paid jobs for young Spaniards to come teach Spanish in America. The initiative seemed like a way to rekindle national pride and create good opportunities for young people who desperately need them. Well, the youth of Spain didn’t see it that way. Only three hundred people applied in the entire country.

  This is not Marienthal, where economic opportunity was snuffed out and the government stripped your benefits if you were caught working. Here entrepreneurial policymakers actively sought out ambitious young people to fly across the ocean, toward a unique experience and meaningful work as an educator. But something has happened in Spain to make that kind of trip (taxpayer-funded!) seem less attractive than living with mom in Madrid.

  And it’s not just Spain.

  GRANDMA EUROPE

  “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”

  These words, shouted by an elderly woman, were made famous in a medical alert device ad in the 1990s. In 2015, they are in danger of becoming Europe’s catchphrase.

  Europe’s economic problems are well-known. The recession has come in wave after wave. But if the only issue were macroeconomic sclerosis, the problem would be easy to fix. A team of experts could assess the fiscal situation and apply a conventional package of fixes. It might start with monetary and fiscal policy, plus a healthy dose of labor market liberalization. Getting the policy levers and economic incentives right would be sufficient to wrest Europe free from the vortex of decline.

  Unfortunately, this is not the answer. As important as sound economic policies are, technocracy will not cure Europe’s ailment. This point was articulated beautifully before the European Parliament by none other than Pope Francis. As the Holy Father told his stone-faced audience of European leaders in November 2014, “In many quarters, we encounter a general impression of weariness and aging—of a Europe which is now a ‘grandmother,’ no longer fertile and vibrant. As a result, the great ideas which once inspired Europe seem to have lost their attraction, only to be replaced by the bureaucratic technicalities of its institutions.”17

  But wait, it gets worse! “Grandma Europe,” the pope tells us, is not only tired. She’s also going dotty. As Francis sadly explained in an earlier speech to a conference of bishops, she is “weary with disorientation.”18 The continent, in other words, is losing its marbles in addition to its demographic health.

  It’s important to understand what the Holy Father meant. Pope Francis was hardly going for some kind of cheap shot. He would be the first to remind us that elderly people have great and inherent dignity. Our grandparents grace us with wisdom and experience accumulated over many years of living, thereby enriching the lives of their children and grandchildren.

  But this is precisely the sacred duty that “Grandma Europe” has ceased to carry out. Due not to age but to “disorientation,” she has lost the ability to recall such honored traditions as faith, family, community, and, especially, work—and thus is unable to share these gifts with new generations. This is the dereliction that led Francis to proclaim that “Europe has discarded its children.”

  The pope, to be sure, is no demographer. But it is hard to imagine any objective observer objecting to much of his sad appraisal. Take faith, for example. The most diplomatic way to describe the status of religion in Europe is to describe the continent as “post-Christian.” Europeans may have some cultural memory of Christianity, but fewer and fewer practice, and many are openly hostile to their religious patrimony.

  A 2004 Gallup poll19 found that just 3 percent of Danes attend church at least once a week. Only 5 percent of Swedes and of Finns do so. Weekly attendance at religious services is below 10 percent in France and Germany, and hovering between 10 and 15 percent in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the United Kingdom. Spain, an old bastion that many still (inaccurately) view as a cornerstone of European Catholicism, claims weekly church attendance of 21 percent, and much less in major cities like Barcelona. (Some estimates place it under five percent.)

  One of the longest holdouts to this secularizing sweep was Roman Catholic Ireland. In 1984, nearly 90 percent of Irish Catholics still made it to Mass every week. But inevitably, Ireland fell as well, and it fell hard. By 2011, that number had plummeted to just 18 percent.20

  As church attendance has declined, so have birthrates. Europe is indeed becoming barren. The continent’s low birthrate has been shrinking its native populations for more than two decades. There are fewer live births in France today than there were under Napoleon. At current birthrate levels, Germany is poised to lose the equivalent of the former East Germany’s entire population by 2050, and Spain’s population will shrink by one-quarter over the same period.

  Imagine a world where most people have no sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, or uncles. According to Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer
and my colleague at AEI, that’s where Europe could head in the coming decades. Birthrates may fall so low that many children’s only relatives will be ancestors. Christmas shopping will be more affordable, but that is small consolation for such an unprecedented demographic decline.

  There are a few exceptions. France has risen to almost exactly two children per woman in 2012, from 1.95 in 1980.21 Yet even this exception makes the pope’s point: France’s increased fertility is widely attributed to a system of government payments to parents,22 not a change in the culture of family life. Is there anything more dystopian than the notion that population decline can only be slowed when states bribe their citizens to reproduce?

  Well, maybe there is. Denmark has taken to airing provocative public service announcements that prod young people to go on holiday and reproduce. The state has been reduced to begging its own citizens to “do it for Denmark!”23 There is something seriously off about a society where young married couples need their government to encourage them to mate.

  If you have spent any time in Europe recently, you know what I mean when I say it feels old. Not the castles, the people. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s International Database,24 a bit more than one in six Western Europeans were sixty-five or older in 2010. This is hard enough to endure, given early retirement ages. But by 2030, this will have risen to more than one in four. That qualifies as science fiction territory for economists.

  The effects of current childlessness on the European economy are a disaster in the making. Europe’s creaky pension systems operate on “pay-as-you-go” models, meaning that current pensions are paid out of the wages of current workers. That creates quite a problem when your citizens stop replacing themselves. Absent real reform, these systems are vulnerable to insolvency as populations age. There simply will not be enough new workers to pay current retirees’ pensions.

  And as faith and family have withered in Europe, so has its sense of community. There is so little private charity in Europe that I have a hard time tracking down data. The subject is amply covered in American scholarship, but across the Atlantic, it seems so irrelevant that few researchers bother to investigate it consistently. The best data on private money donations in Europe date from the late 1990s. My adopted country, Spain, has average giving that is less than half that of the United States. Per person, Americans give three and a half times as much as the French, seven times as much as the Germans, and fourteen times as much as the Italians.25 I would conjecture with confidence that this charity gap has only grown in the intervening years.

  What about gifts of time? Data from 1998 compare volunteerism in America and Western Europe. They tell a very similar story. Americans are 15 percentage points more likely to volunteer for religious, political, and charitable purposes than the Dutch, 21 points more likely than the Swiss, and 32 points more likely than the Germans (fewer than one in five of whom volunteer for any causes whatsoever).

  Patriotism, another key form of community, is likewise decaying in Europe. Living in Spain, I found it shocking when nobody knew the words to their own national anthem. Nobody stands up when they hear it. The Spanish government had to dig up and begin enforcing a national law requiring public buildings to fly the country’s flag. In a small town called Gallifa, officials (Catalan nationalists demanding independence from the Spanish state) complied by putting up a flag “so small it looks like it ought to be attached to a toothpick protruding from a plate of flan.” A local leader sarcastically explained himself to journalists: “They are asked for a flag. Well, there it is. I hope they’re happy.”26 That would be unimaginable here in the United States—at least for now.

  Given all this, you might imagine Spain is an outlier for patriotism in Europe. Indeed it is. But unfortunately, it’s an outlier on the high end: Spain is actually more patriotic than most of Europe. In 2006, research out of the University of Chicago examined levels of patriotism in 33 countries. According to the University of Chicago Chronicle, the study found that “the countries at the bottom of the list are generally established nations in Europe.”27 Nine of the ten least patriotic nations in the world were in Europe: Germany, Latvia, Sweden, Slovakia, Poland, France, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic. Spain came in 17th. Britain trailed at 19th.28

  LIVING TO WORK, WORKING TO LIVE

  Faith, family, and community are eroding. But the most devastating problem in Europe today—and arguably the root of the others—is the disappearance of work. The percentage of the European population that is in the workforce is withering away.

  Again, this is not an isolated problem. In the wake of the recession, work has suffered almost everywhere in the developed world. In the United States, the labor participation rate—the percentage of people who are either working or looking for work—recently reached a thirty-six-year low of just 62.7 percent. Those are disastrous numbers, the worst since the 1970s, and an indictment of our own big government approach.29

  But as bad as that is, the United States looks swell compared to Europe. The old saying says that Europeans “work to live,” while we poor Americans “live to work.” That might be compelling if the former group was, you know, actually working. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012 the labor participation rate in France was 55.9 percent. In Italy it was just 49 percent.30

  Prolonged unemployment is always a tragedy. It is doubly tragic, though, when it prevents young people from getting a proper start on their adult lives. In America, the unemployment rate for people under 25 is about 12 percent. That’s down from an all-time high of 19.6 percent in 2010, but is still much too high.31 Well, in May 2014, the unemployment rate for those under 25 across Europe was 22.2 percent—almost one in four.32 In Portugal it was 34.8 percent. In Italy it was 43 percent. And as we already know, in Spain it was 54 percent.

  Remember, this is more than a simple shortage of jobs. Macroeconomics are at play, to be sure, but they do not comprise the whole story. As we saw, the Spanish government offered 600 teaching positions and received just 300 applications. It takes a whole worldview to create that level of apathy.

  The worldview in question boils down to one word—retirement. Getting young Spaniards to take a paid adventure working in a foreign land is like getting your grandmother to do it. She is just too old and too tired to be tempted. In Spain, the whole idea of working hard to reach for new horizons seems to have disappeared. That’s a young nation’s game. Better, at this late date, to live as comfortably as possible by eating the seed corn—cultural and economic—compiled during previous eras of productivity.

  This is why Spain is a nation in decline.

  Most readers will have already identified a subject we haven’t addressed yet—immigration. Shouldn’t the waves of foreigners arriving on Europe’s shores buoy our hopes for the continent? In 2012, while the median age of the domestic-born population in the European Union was 41.9, the median age of foreigners living in the EU was 34.7. Presumably, these new arrivals will help stanch the fiscal and demographic bleeding. So, are the Europeans pleased?

  Not exactly. Anti-immigrant sentiment is surging across the continent.33 Nativist movements performed alarmingly well in 2014’s European Union elections. By one scholar’s count, the number of “far right” anti-immigrant nationalists in the European Parliament has multiplied three and a half times in just five years.34 One poll found that 69 percent of Italians say immigrants are a burden because they take jobs and social benefits.35 In Greece it was 70 percent; 52 percent in France; and 46 percent in Spain.

  Perhaps “Grandma Europe” is not the best metaphor after all. A tranquil, old grandmother knitting placidly in the window would not be so hostile to newcomers. No, Europe today is more like an angry grandfather, shaking his rake and yelling at outsiders to get off his lawn.

  Of course, xenophobia is a terrible outlet for frustration. The problem in Europe is not that the mosques are full on Friday, but that the churches are empty on Sunday. Not that immigrants are having too many children,
but that Europeans are barren by choice. Not that foreigners are soaking up all the welfare, but that many Europeans have grown tired of hard work. Not that immigrants are stealing jobs that Europeans are desperate for, but that Europeans themselves have forgotten that work is a blessing.

  This European decline has accelerated in recent years, but it had already begun eighty-five years ago in that small Austrian village of Marienthal. Marienthal turned out to be the future of Europe.

  And it might be the future of America if we don’t change course.

  THREE LESSONS FOR AMERICA

  Today, America is somewhere on a continuum between Marienthal and Dharavi—and we are going to have to choose a direction. Some say we should want the castle, not the slum—even if the castle is empty and desolate, while the slum is brimming with work, hope, and opportunity. I understand that. But in focusing on material circumstances, we can make mistakes that risk our future.

  The stories of Marienthal and Dharavi—and the data on modern Europe—hold three lessons for us in America.

  Lesson 1. Human dignity is not a function of wealth.

  If you look at Dharavi and see people living in greater degradation and less dignity than someone in Barcelona who has been unemployed for a decade, there is something deeply wrong with your analysis. In a word, it is materialistic. Of course there is breathtaking poverty in an Indian slum. We have a moral duty to relieve it however we can. But in the midst of these people’s too-difficult lives, what I saw when I visited Dharavi was dignity. What I see when I visit Barcelona is degradation.

  This completely breaks the usual materialist frame. Social democrats in Europe and the United States reduce their vision of dignity to what the lens of economics can capture. In their view, dignity is a quantifiable concept that can be solved by social welfare spending.