European leaders have at last begun edging, haltingly and reluctantly, toward (점차 나아감.. 한방향으로..)the only realistic solution to the continent’s debt and banking crises: refinancing unpayable government debts and reinforcing weakened banks. If their monetary and political union is to survive, all members must start acting more like a union and less like a collection of jealous sovereign states. Unless they quickly convince stock and bond markets that they are truly ready to stand together, Europe risks a spiral of disasters, including a Greek default and the failure of one or more major debt-weakened banks. If things get bad enough, the euro zone could fracture, and that could lead to the fracturing of the entire European Union.
The United States would not escape. A collapse in Europe would sap confidence in global markets and shrink demand for American exports when Washington is struggling to avoid a double-dip recession.
President Obama and his aides must keep their public comments upbeat to avoid further spooking the markets. But we hope that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner — who is now on his second trip to Europe in just over a week — is being blunt in closed-door sessions that there is no more time to waste.
What is most urgently needed is a demonstration that Europe will lend as much as necessary to debtor countries and weakened banks that find themselves shut out of private credit markets. That was supposed to be the job of a new, strengthened bailout fund, but all 17 euro zone countries must still give formal approval. For now, the lending must continue to come from the European Central Bank.
German politicians, who are happy to pocket the many benefits that Germany draws from an economically united Europe, are objecting to the rising costs. With Greece sinking, panic spreading and banks — including German banks — buffeted by losses from past careless lending, it is a little late for that. If Chancellor Angela Merkel means what she says about standing by the euro, she must face down these critics.
Europe also needs to rethink its demands for punitive austerity as the price for bailout loans. Athens needs to pare down its bureaucracy, improve tax collection and liberalize its labor markets. But Greece will never be able to work off its debt if its economy keeps shrinking.
What would help a lot more right now is for Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, to temporarily cut taxes. That would increase domestic demand and imports, including from Greece and other indebted countries that need to find new markets. But fearing the ghosts of long-ago inflation more than the spread of present-day depression, Germany is resisting.
A lasting solution will also require restructuring unpayable debts by writing down principal, lowering interest rates and extending maturities. Common European bonds, taking advantage of the lower interest rates available to Europe as a whole, should be part of the process.
That is more European unity than the rich northern European countries want. The truth is that nothing less will get Europe out of this mess.
Poor Models. Seriously.
AS the designers, stylists and editors of Fashion Week pack up to leave New York City today, one group of participants isn’t going anywhere: hundreds of young models, the surplus labor of the fashion industry.
Ten years ago, I was one of them. When I told my dad excitedly that I would be walking in a fashion show — which paid in dresses instead of money — he summed it upsuccinctly: “That and a buck will get you a cup of coffee.”
Fashion Week, despite bringing over $400 million to the city each year, is unprofitable work for most of the people wearing the designs. Because modeling is freelance work done on a per-project basis, models don’t receive benefits, have little control over the conditions of their work and never know when their next job is coming. They are arbitrarily selected and easily dismissed. And vast disparities exist in payments among models who do equivalent work; for the same show, top models can earn between $1,000 and $5,000, while others are not paid at all. Some models even work under arrangements that recallindentured servitude: they are in debt to their agencies for visa expenses, plane tickets, apartment rentals, even the cost of bike messengers who transport their portfolios to and from offices.
Fashion is a glamorous industry, but rub off the sheen, and quite another scene emerges.
But should anyone feel bad for models? At the start of my first Fashion Week in New York, when I was 19, my agent advised me to dress to look as long and lean and possible, because “anorexia is in this season.” It was a joke; he laughed and so did I, but his words stayed with me when I returned to my undergraduate studies in gender and sociology. When I came across “The Beauty Myth” by Naomi Wolf, I winced at the passages on fashion models, an “elite corps deployed in a way that keeps 150 million American women in line.” She rightly lambasted the exaggerated silhouettes and prepubescent forms of high fashion. It was all the more offensive, she wrote, considering models’ “gross high pay,” and she added a crack about the challenges of being a paid beauty: “it’s really grueling under those hot lights.”
But sarcasm aside, for many models, it is grueling. Confronted with the huge successes of modeling’s winner-take-all market, most people miss the mass of losers. This is how glamour works: as a spell. Even the word glamour has magic roots, as a charm cast to transform appearances.
The truth is, modeling epitomizes the kind ofprecarious job that, since the 1990s, has been spreading from the informal labor market into traditionally more secure workplaces, like the retail and service industries and my own occupational home, the university, where contracted adjunct instructors are replacing tenure-track professor lines.
(I feel lucky to have a job with a future, however. I knew modeling wasn’t a long-term career when, at the age of 19, I was told to tell casting agents I was 18. “We are meat,” a Parisian male model told me matter-of-factly in a recent interview, “and it gets bad as it gets old.”)
Decades of critiquing representations of bodies in fashion have not changed what we see on the catwalk; reforming the conditions backstage just might. Empowering models as workers could potentially help them stand up against other aspects of the industry, like unhealthy expectations about dieting.
Sara Ziff, a model working with Fordham University’s Fashion Law Institute, has formed a nonprofit group called the Model Alliance that hopes to give models a platform to organize for workplace protections. At a minimum, it would be a space for them to share information about how much jobs pay and agencies charge. Models are so disorganized as a work force that, when a class-action lawsuit brought by models against their agencies was settled at $22 million in 2005, the court couldn’t find enough models to claim the damages.
The judge donated an unclaimed sumof $6 million to treatment centers for women with, among other problems, eating disorders. It’s hard to miss the irony. We shouldn’t miss the opportunity to change the terms of fashion’s labor, either.
The Republicans, and Rick Perry in particular, have a reasonably strong story to tell about decline. America became great, they explain, because its citizens possessed certain vigorous virtues: self-reliance, personal responsibility, industriousness and a passion for freedom.
But, over the years, government has grown and undermined these virtues. Wall Street financiers no longer have to behave prudently because they know government will bail them out. Middle-class families no longer have to practice thrift because they know they can use government to force future generations to pay for their retirements. Dads no longer have to marry the women they impregnate because government will step in and provide support.
Moreover, a growing government sucked resources away from the most productive parts of the economy — innovators, entrepreneurs and workers — and redirected it to the most politically connected parts. The byzantine tax code and regulatory state has clogged the arteries of American dynamism.
The current task, therefore, is, as Rick Perry says, to make the government “inconsequential” in people’s lives — to pare back the state to revive personal responsibility and private initiative.
There’s much truth to this narrative. Stable societies are breeding grounds for interest groups. Over time, these interest groups use government to establish sinecures for themselves, which gradually strangle the economy they are built on — like parasitic vines around a tree.
Yet as great as the need is to streamline, reform and prune the state, that will not be enough to restore America’s vigorous virtues. This is where current Republican orthodoxy is necessary but insufficient. There are certain tasks ahead that cannot be addressed simply by getting government out of the way.
In the first place, there is the need to rebuild America’s human capital. The United States became the wealthiest nation on earth primarily because Americans were the best educated.
That advantage has entirely eroded over the past 30 years. It will take an active government to reverse this stagnation — from prenatal and early childhood education straight up through adult technical training and investments in scientific and other research. If government is “inconsequential” in this sphere, then continued American decline is inevitable.
Then there are the long-term structural problems plaguing the economy. There’s strong evidence to suggest that the rate of technological innovation has been slowing down. In addition, America is producing fewer business start-ups. Job creation was dismal even in the seven years before the recession, when taxes were low and Republicans ran the regulatory agencies. As economist Michael Spence has argued, nearly all of the job growth over the past 20 years has been in sectors where American workers don’t have to compete with workers overseas.
Meanwhile, middle-class wages have been stagnant for a generation. Inequality is rising, and society is stratifying. Americans are less likely to move in search of opportunity. Social mobility has been flat for decades, and American social mobility is no better than European social mobility.
Some of these problems are exacerbated by government regulations and could be eased if government pulled back. But most of them have nothing to do with government and are related to globalization, an aging society, cultural trends and the nature of technological change.
Republicans have done almost nothing to grapple with and address these deeper structural problems. Tackling them means shifting America’s economic model — tilting the playing field away from consumption toward production; away from entitlement spending and more toward investment in infrastructure, skills and technology; mitigating those forces that concentrate wealth and nurturing instead a broad-based opportunity society.
These shifts cannot be done by government alone, but they can’t be done without leadership from government. Just as the Washington and Lincoln administrations actively nurtured an industrial economy, so some future American administration will have to nurture a globalized producer society. Just as F.D.R. created a welfare model for the 20th century, some future administration will have to actively champion a sustainable welfare model for this one.
Finally, there is the problem of the social fabric. Segmented societies do not thrive, nor do ones, like ours, with diminishing social trust. Nanny-state government may have helped undermine personal responsibility and the social fabric, but that doesn’t mean the older habits and arrangements will magically regrow simply by reducing government’s role. For example, there has been a tragic rise in single parenthood, across all ethnic groups, but family structures won’t spontaneously regenerate without some serious activism, from both religious and community groups and government agencies.
In short, the current Republican policy of negativism — cut, cut cut — is not enough. To restore the vigorous virtues, the nanny state will have to be cut back, but the instigator state will have to be built up. That’s the only way to ward off national decline.
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