Austerity: Madrid Locks Trash Barrels to Prevent Scavenging

Times:

The woman, 33, said that she had once worked at the post office but that her unemployment benefits had run out and she was living now on 400 euros a month, about $520. She was squatting with some friends in a building that still had water and electricity, while collecting “a little of everything” from the garbage after stores closed and the streets were dark and quiet.
Such survival tactics are becoming increasingly commonplace here, with an unemployment rate over 50 percent among young people and more and more households having adults without jobs. So pervasive is the problem of scavenging that one Spanish city has resorted to installing locks on supermarket trash bins as a public health precaution.

The Fear of China

Sophie Meunier examines growing French fears of Chinese competition:

57% des Français pensent que la Chine est désormais la principale puissance économique du monde, contre 29% seulement pour les Etats-Unis. Pour les Français, le monde « post-américain » est une certitude et a déjà commencé, même si les perceptions sont bien loin de la réalité.

Poverty on the Rise in France

Laurent Mauduit reviews the latest INSEE study of the French income structure (as of 2010; data for 2011 are still being processed). Poverty (with threshold set at either 60% or 50% of the median income) increased sharply over the Sarkozy years:

"Où sont les intellectuels?" Bouvet vs. Fassin

After the victory of Mitterrand in 1981, as problems started to accumulate for the new socialist government, Le Monde published an article entitled "Où sont les intellectuels?" The import of this piece was that intellectuals of the left, who had been vociferous in their critiques of government when the right was in power, had fallen silent when the left arrived, as if it had nothing to say about governing.

What about now? Where are the intellectuals? Are they silent, or have they simply become "organic," to use Gramsci's term, parts of the apparatus of government itself, specialized in technical activities such as fiscal and monetary policy, environmental regulation, labor law, etc., and therefore not suitable for discussion in public forums? Marianne, for its part, believes that there is a vital intellectual debate raging on the left but that it hasn't attained the visibility it deserves, so it arranged a face-off between Laurent Bouvet, representing what it calls "une gauche d'inspriation conservatrice, parfois souverainiste, affichant un ton nouveau sur les questions de sécurité et d'immigration," and Éric Fassin, representing a left more open to the inclusion of minority communities but no longer calling itself "multiculturalist." And this Marianne sees fit to call "the war of the lefts."

Neither side in this war has many divisions, but the generals are intent on enlisting imaginary armies. For Bouvet, his troops consist of nothing less than les classes populaires, while Fassin counters that "visible minorities" such as female workers, shop clerks, and homosexuals are not all "bourgeois bohemians" and are in fact the heart of Bouvet's imaginary army. Has "la gauche populaire," the name sometimes applied to the vague school of thought associated with Bouvet and geographer Christophe Guilluy, really emulated la droite populaire of Thierry Mariani et cie. and the Dutch "new realists," as Fassin alleges? Or have the "neo-Tocquevilleans" and "anti-racists" of old morphed into the think tank Terra Nova, which according to Bouvet would transform the Socialist Party into a third-way mishmash designed to ensconce a well-to-do socially liberal elite in power at the head of a rainbow coalition of voiceless but symbolically visible minorities?

I'm afraid I fall into the squishy marais between these two would-be montagnes. There's too much rhetorical heightening of differences for my taste and too little in the way of strategic or policy implications. La gauche populaire is right to stress the importance of solidarity, while its opponents are right to insist that protection of minority rights is essential, and that differences can be discussed without being enshrined. Et après? Les chiens aboient, les caravanes passent. But others may find more to chew on in this debate, so I bring it your attention just in case.

The Rent Control Decision

I commented earlier on Cécile Duflot's announcement of a new rent control measure as a political ploy. In that sense it may be successful as an appeal to the left of the Left. As economic policy, however, it is more questionable. France unquestionably suffers from a shortage of housing. It also has a very high unemployment rate. The obvious thing to do would seem to be to put unemployed workers to work building houses, no? So why not try that instead of controlling rents?

Well, one reason is that "the coffers are empty," as Sarkozy used to say. But this is not entirely persuasive, given Hollande's pledge to stimulate new investment via some kind of public investment bank. New housing would be an obvious choice, since the demand is known to exist. To be sure, there would be a lag before the pressure on rents was alleviated, but a lag is better than an imposed rent control that is likely to choke off any new supply of housing.

Another reason is the current credit squeeze, as investors fly to safety. But it would be better to put some of this capital to work building houses than parking it in sovereign debt yielding close to zero. A better use of the government's prerogatives would be to devise incentives to funnel this money where it's most needed.

Perhaps, after the legislative elections, France can debate this issue rather than rely on executive orders to impose rent control. One hopes that the turn to rent control as a sop to the left of the Left is not a sign of the direction that Hollande intends to go in economic policy. This is a bad decision, but it is not yet set in stone. There is still time to revise it after the elections. Matt Yglesias offers a similar analysis here.

Rent Control, Nuclear Control

Cécile Duflot has announced a measure to limit permissible rent increases in case an apartment is rented to a new tenant. There is perhaps less than meets the eye in this measure, since the allowable increase is linked to an index of rents that is itself increasing. But the announcement is a useful crowd-pleaser in advance of the legislative elections and pending a promised new law on rents.

Meanwhile, there are rumors that Hollande might oust Henri Proglio from his post as head of the nuclear firm Areva. On the other hand, Hollande's promise to cut French dependence on nuclear-generated electricity from 75% to 50% by 2025 has now been downgraded, according to some advisors, to a mere "aspiration."

So it's interesting that Cécile Duflot, who comes to the Socialist government from the Greens, is the minister who is tasked with announcing the rent-control measure, which will please the left of the Left, while her own Greens, who didn't contribute much to the Hollande victory, are left to wonder what became of their dream of shutting down the French nuclear industry.