Team HISD extends teacher application deadline
Travel blogs about Spain abound the blogosphere. But John Schellhase of takes a different approach, digging a bit deeper than just tapas and flamenco. While Venture Spain highlights different Spanish cities, he also provides a lens into Spain’s economic situation, providing balanced insight into the country’s unemployment as well as its wealth.
John is from Arkansas, United States, and moved to Spain, from Washington, DC, where he had been working at a policy think tank. Between Arkansas and DC, he lived in the Philippines for two years as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer and then went to graduate school at New York University.
That’s where he met Teresa, who’s from Spain, and they fell in love in New York. They’re getting married next summer in a 900-year-old church in Segovia! He’s spending these months learning Spanish and getting to know the country that shaped her. And he also wants to be able to talk with all of the aunts and uncles on the wedding day!
A few things he talks about in the interview below:
Spain has suffered three major blows to its human capital in the last decade. The first was the construction boom, which convinced hundreds of thousands of young people to drop out of high school and college and go to work on construction sites. When the bubble burst around 2007/2008, all of these young people lost their jobs and were left without a useful degrees or, in many cases, without a degree at all.
The second blow has been the long unemployment crisis itself. By January 2009, one-third of people under 25 were jobless. That number climbed every month until it peaked in July 2013… at 56 percent. The youth unemployment figures are still over 50 percent today. These are insane numbers. And this prolonged youth unemployment crisis means that a generation of young people are not getting the training and on-the-job experience required to build strong, productive careers. More than half of them are starting in the hole, and they will have to dig themselves out later in life.
The final blow to the country’s human capital has been a growing emigration trend. Spain’s population is shrinking. The immigrants who came during the boom years in the 2000s have gone home. About 80,000 Spaniards moved abroad in 2013 – more than double the normal rate a few years before. About half of the people who leave are in their 20s and 30s, and they are, naturally, often highly educated professionals with advanced language skills. In other words, they are kind of people who are attractive to companies abroad, but also these the kind of people Spain would definitely prefer to keep at home.
It seems that in Spain, a lot of the blame of the current situation is placed on politicians and the banks. To what extent, do you think this is or isn’t true?
It’s clear that the banks in Spain, like their counterparts in the United States and elsewhere, acted recklessly in the run-up to the crisis. They were over-leveraged. And they were particularly over-leveraged in an over-heated construction sector. When the construction sector collapsed, the banks reckless debts turned toxic. The banks deserve a great deal of blame for negligent, irresponsible financial management. They’re meant to know better, and they failed.
Public officials also failed in their oversight role. They’re supposed to make sure the financial sector doesn’t run rampant and take down the whole economy. It’s obvious they failed. In many cases, Spanish politicians fed the construction bubble in corrupt schemes to win bribes for municipal construction contracts. The level of corruption in the years since the crisis began has also been a national shame. Whether the recent bank-card scandal, the theft of EU funds for job training in Andalusia, or the exploits of the Pujol family, politicians across Spain have repeatedly misused the people’s money. The loss of money is bad enough, but the loss public confidence is perhaps worse. The country needs strong political leadership right now, and the constant news stream of corruption stories is steadily eroding the government’s ability to govern. The rise of the alternative Podemos party, whose economic proposals, sadly, are laughable, is a symptom of this larger problem.
There’s a lot more, of course, that could be said on all of these topics, but I would just add one more thing. Even though Spain is in a mess, it remains, in the big picture, one of the world’s most advanced, progressive countries where people lead long, healthy, meaningful lives. In the wake of the crisis, it is easy to forget that, which I think makes it all the more worth repeating.
I agree with John — all in all, Spain offers an incomparable quality of life. It was a pleasure having him on Latitude 41. Check out his blog, for more!
learn spanish 4 hour work week learn spanish 1