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February 16, 2012

Juxtaposition of the Day: The World on Two Balconies

The first one is from emerging China; the second from declining Greece.

(photo: Aly Song/Reuters caption: A worker climbs a ladder next to a mannequin during the China International Wedding Expo in Shanghai February 15, 2012. The expo will allow exhibitors to highlight their products, high-level equipment and the world’s wedding photography trends, plus the exchange and trade between the domestic and overseas wedding industries.)

(photo: Panayiotis Tzamaros/Reuters caption: An employee of the Workers Housing Organisation threatens to jump from the office where she worked because her wage has been cut and she and her husband were threatened with layoffs, in Athens February 15, 2012. Workers Housing Organisation is a state owned company that is on the list of state entities that may be shut down to cut costs under the terms of the new 130-billion-euro ($170 billion) bailout agreement with the European Union and International Monetary Fund. .)

From today’s Reuters Editor’s Choice slideshow (#21 and #12).

  • Anonymous

    Is it fair to ask one generation to pay back another generation’s debts?  That always leads to trouble, as Keynes noted in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, his book about the unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I.  Nothing good will come of it, Keynes predicted, and nothing did.  After World War II, the world was a lot smarter and built up Germany and Japan instead of crippling their recovery.

    Replace every brick in the Heraclitean wall and it remains the same wall.  However, imposing severe restrictions on a nation’s economic growth replaces on set of debtors for another.  If a wall is a set of bricks, national obligations can be said to be the collection of the set of debtors; however, as in the case of Germany after the first world war, these are no identical sets; they are overlapping sets.

    The use of overlapping sets instead of identical sets may be a paradox instead of a contradiction.  Greece desperately needs a Marshall plan today, not an exercise in reasoning.