Just in case you needed any more reasons to oppose austerity, here's another, outlined in this neat and evocative Guardian piece ('Europeans migrate south as continent drifts deeper into crisis): emigration.
Yes, in a development that has probably never occurred to Europe's blinkered political leaders but is blindingly obvious to anyone residing in the real world, young, ambitious and dynamic European citizens are escaping from the misery of austerity and seeking a new life elsewhere, often outside the EU. It is hardly worth pointing out the obvious implication - that austerity is even less likely to work if the most productive sections of society are bailing out and leaving the pain behind.
This is neat in all sorts of ways, but what I find intriguing about it is the stark distinction it draws between the collective responsibility of debtor nations and the individual responsibilities of their citizens. So Greece must suffer for its mistakes, otherwise moral hazard will encourage it to behave badly in the future; but of course there is nothing stopping individual Greeks leaving the sinking ship and evading the punishment.
This reminds me of a neat piece of prose on the crisis by John Lanchester, who has made more sense out of this mess than many economists. In a piece published in the London Review of Books last summer, he noted the following:
From the worm’s-eye perspective which most of us inhabit, the general feeling about this new turn in the economic crisis is one of bewilderment. I’ve encountered this in Iceland and in Ireland and in the UK: a sense of alienation and incomprehension and done-unto-ness. People feel they have very little economic or political agency, very little control over their own lives; during the boom times, nobody told them this was an unsustainable bubble until it was already too late.
In consequence, people don't feel that the crisis was in any real sense caused by them:
The austerity is supposed to be a consequence of us all having had it a little bit too easy (this is an attitude which is only very gently implied in public, but it’s there, and in private it is sometimes spelled out). But the thing is, most of us don’t feel we did have it particularly easy. When you combine that with the fact that we have so little real agency in our economic lives, we tend to feel we don’t deserve much of the blame.
It's difficult to argue with this. But irrespective of whatever moral responsibility an individual Greek may bear, there is no law whatsoever against him or her leaving the country and starting afresh, washing their hands of the whole mess.
A kind of citizen's default. So much for moral hazard.
