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Barcelona — From Saturday's Globe and Mail Published on Saturday, Jul. 17, 2010 5:00AM EDT Last updated on Saturday, Jul. 17, 2010 10:28AM EDTEstudias o trabajas?” When young Spaniards gather around the bars and patios, that’s their traditional icebreaker line: “You study or work?” In the past year, it’s become almost mandatory to answer, with a self-effacing smirk: “Nini.”It is half a joke, for nini is a way of saying “neither-nor,” and NINI is the Spanish government acronym for “Not in education or employment” – that is, lost to the economy.But it’s not really a joke, because now almost everyone is NINI. The under-30 unemployment rate in Spain has just hit 44 per cent, twice the adult rate. Italy also has passed the 40 per cent mark, and Greece has gone even further. If you count all the people who’ve given up looking, it means the number of people between 20 and 30 who have any form of employment in these countries is something like one in five.An entire European generation is leaving school to discover they have no place in the economy.
Did that tool really do any reporting in Barcelona? It seems unlikely from the two lines of Castillian he dusted off for the article, extended personal anecdote and two second google stats.
