Más sobre Europa

Insisto, es imposible vivir indefinidamente por encima de nuestras posibilidades.

The postwar European social model was viable for a long time, but it, too, has always required accounting tricks, and over time these became too elaborate to sustain. First, the demographics of the past favored the system, since the generation of those who would have retired just after World War II had been decimated in World War I. Second, the demographics of the future favored the system, too, as the unusually large Baby Boom generation paid for the generation born in the 1920s—unusually small to begin with and then decimated by another war. Finally, by the time demographics began to look more foreboding, the welfare state had been going on for so long that even people who should have been able to do the math mistook the status quo for a law of nature. They borrowed from the next generation, confident that some trick would be found such as previous generations had enjoyed. When that didn’t work, they cut the military. And when that didn’t work? Well, here we are.