5 ms·

Greece Is Richer. So Why Do So Many Greeks Still Feel Poor?

34 points by theanonymousone 4mo ago

root-parent 4mo ago
Same with Brazil or Portugal or Angola. Full of billionaires with poor people.
- mlinhares 4mo ago
  Yeah, its all inequality. Most people are going to be renters forever in my hometown and the government has absolutely no plan to fix it. People will just be pushed farther and farther away from where they work and will have longer and longer commutes because it is impossible to pay to live close to work with the salaries they're making.
  - bluefirebrand 4mo ago
    > Most people are going to be renters forever in my hometown and the government has absolutely no plan to fix it This seems to be the plan basically everywhere though. Yes, some countries still have a ladder for average people to own property and find success, but the global trend seems to be that this possibility is shrinking for the vast majority of people That's what happens when average people have to compete with real estate conglomerates for housing though
  - aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
    > Most people are going to be renters forever in my hometown and the government has absolutely no plan to fix it. People will just be pushed farther and farther away from where they work and will have longer and longer commutes because it is impossible to pay to live close to work with the salaries they're making. [emphasis mine] I somewhat disagree: at least during the COVID-19 times the government did have a plan to partially fix it: At that time there were a lot of discussions whether work from home will be there to stay or not. If it would have stayed, that would have partially solved the problem (not for everybody, but for a substantial subset of people): Since people can live at places where rent or the price of houses is much lower, companies can pay smaller salaries, but employees (after subtracting the cost of living) still have more money. In other words: both sides get their slice of the pie: employers can decrease salaries while employees still have more money. Unluckily, when COVID-19 was over, companies decided they basically want people to come back to to office (working from home should be an exception). This was the central reason why this plan failed.
  - microgpt 4mo ago
    Renting itself isn't inherently the problem if you have very strong tenant rights. Imagine renting came with all the rights of owning except the money flowed differently (like a perpetual mortgage) - that'd be pretty okay, actually. It is within the power of a government to enable something like that.
    - _puk 4mo ago
      But renting is a problem if there's no asset at the end of it. Even if rents were capped at half what a mortgage for the same property is, you still are in a position that once the asset of the house is paid off the landlord now has an asset that earns income without labour. And the inverse. Regardless of what you earn (to a point, even into higher income brackets), if you do not put it into an asset that can house you, and you stop earning, you cannot live without reducing your overall capital. So rental means a lack of opportunity to reduce your labour dependent income over time (important as you age), and a reduced ability to weather negative life events.
      - wqaatwt 4mo ago
        It can work (and did in some places in Western Europe for a while) if housing stock is mostly state owned and/or communal. Of course that introduces some other issues
      - microgpt 4mo ago
        Paying to consume something continually isn't inherently wrong. We do that with food. If you like, you could offset it with UBI. A separate concern is who should receive the money and how we morally justify that, since they didn't produce anything or work to earn it.
    - mlinhares 4mo ago
      Its more likely you'll continue to own the place than the government making something like that, that would hurt real estate owners. Renting is fine if you're on your prime years, making money and enjoying life, once you're on your way down, old and likely less employable, renting becomes an issue as you'll likely not make as much money anymore but the rents never go down. I've seen many parents and grandparents of friends having to live on scraps and decide between healthcare and rent because they just can't make ends meet anymore. For the young folks that can't buy because they can't save its even worse, they'll be indentured servants for as long as they're useful for the labor force and will then be thrown into the bin.
samiv 4mo ago
There's no paradox here. Distribution of wealth matters. Rich got richer and everyone else didn't. Simple as that.
- abirch 4mo ago
  As Ray Dalio has mentioned, you should measure results on how it impacts the bottom 51% of the people (the majority) it's a lot more illustrative than looking at the average.
  - samiv 4mo ago
    Yep. I'm not an economist but my social democratic common sense would tell me to look at the bottom 10% income bracket and see how they're doing. Incidentally these people are the best economic citizens because if you give them money they'll spend every cent of it because they need to buy food and energy, use health care and pay rent. In other words if a rich person gets a million they (if they're sane) spend a fraction of it and put the rest in assets, stock market, property, etc. If you give 1000 poor people each 1000e every cent will go into local economy immediately.
    - onraglanroad 4mo ago
      The capitalist response to that would be that the investment in companies is better because it makes everyone richer in the long term by increasing overall wealth. I'm not sure I buy it but it's an effect to consider.
      - kubb 4mo ago
        That does sometimes happen - investment does cause development. The mistake is to assume that's always what happens, and that everybody can benefit from the development.
        onraglanroad 4mo ago
        Oh I agree with you. I suspect it happens less than is the conventional wisdom, but I might be wrong.
erdeibit 4mo ago
Capitalism optimization: make the rich richer making the poor poorer
- d4ng 4mo ago
  Influence will be distributed similarly, regardless of political system: (Pareto Principle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
- password54321 4mo ago
  You live in the most privileged period in human history. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=line&country=~OWID_WRL&Indicator=Share+in+poverty&Poverty+line=%243+per+day%3A+International+Poverty+Line&Household+survey+data+type=Show+data+from+both+income+and+consumption+surveys&Show+breaks+between+less+comparable+surveys=false https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=li...
  - microgpt 4mo ago
    How privileged is a period?
  - dwroberts 4mo ago
    You’re posting this like it’s a counterpoint, but it further highlights how disgusting the situation is. We have people becoming trillionaires while 10% of the world’s population is considered to be in extreme poverty. It’s ‘less bad’ than in the past but it’s still absolutely horrifying.
    - password54321 4mo ago
      How much of that trillion is liquid? If people stopped buying a Tesla, would that somehow help the poor? Making electric vehicles more mainstream seems like a net-positive to the world.
      - microgpt 4mo ago
ykonstant 4mo ago
Feel poor??? Man... this is some prime ragebait title.
BariumBlue 4mo ago
Seems like housing again: > Rents have surged in recent years, driven by tourism, foreign investment and a shortage of affordable housing. The cost of housing now consumes one of the largest shares of disposable income in the European Union My impression is that where housing is expensive, there will be complaints of unaffordability (obviously), but also vice versa, that where there is unaffordability, housing always seems to be a large component (at least in "the west"). in most places basic food (rice and beans or an equivalent) is cheap. Services can usually be skimped on. Transportation can usually be flexible (new car / cheap used car / transit / bike). Housing costs seem to be relatively non-flexible though. I wouldn't be surprised if Greece has strong NIMBY factors.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago
  >I wouldn't be surprised if Greece has strong NIMBY factors. No doubt. You see it in tourism economies the world over. Cheap services + cultural/historical novelty + nice climate make tourism highly viable -> tourism becomes outsized part of economy -> those enriched by peddling tourism write the rules to their benefit -> it becomes all but illegal to develop any other industry, build housing, etc, etc because all this activity winds up punitively regulated lest someone do something that scared away the tourists.
- j16sdiz 4mo ago
  > (at least in "the west"). It is the same in the east - it is either housing, or housing related tax.
- spystath 4mo ago
  You are right that it's due to housing but in my opinion most of unaffordability comes from immense pressure due to tourism. Housing situation is better outside the touristy areas (and Athens). If anything Greece has seen massive housebuilding up until the economic crash in the early 10s. I remember block of flats appearing left and right in most major cities in a span of months. They still do but in a lot of cases they are almost exclusively short-term lets (again especially in tourist hubs). Why let a flat for €500 monthly when you can charge €150 per night? It's maddening.
lebuffon 4mo ago
The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. Perhaps accelerated by social media. Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age?
- aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
  > The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. [...] Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age? I rather believe that the individual problems in each country are very different (even though you summarize them by "this wealth inequality is so common around the world"). Additionally, it often happens that the interests of people in one country are antagonistic to the interests of people in another country, so I don't believe that people from different countries will club together, and have common wishes.
  - jedimastert 4mo ago
    > Additionally, it often happens that the interests of people in one country are antagonistic to the interests of people in another country. I find this honestly kind of difficult to believe, except when it comes to distractions by the people who want to stay in power
    - aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
      Just to give one class of examples: Should a country implement some very nationalist policies that serve the interests of the not so well-off people in its own country, but will be against the interests of other countries and their people? Think of the uprise of right-wing, nationalist parties in many European countries that often present themselves as "the new worker parties", i.e. they intend to implement policies that are good for the workers in their own country, but on the other hand make it very clear that they have not the interests of people of other EU countries in mind.
cucumber3732842 4mo ago
Because, to the surprise of literally nobody who's ever been on the receiving end of these sorts of policies they cook up in far away think tank offices and the ivory towers of academia, there's a million ways to make the number go up that doesn't actually make normal people any better off.
- nosioptar 4mo ago
  At this point, I'd settle for not being better off. It'd be a helluva lot better than everything getting worse. We need to eat the fucking rich. Bnch of parasitic fuckwads.
g8oz 4mo ago
<https://rentierblackhole.com/ https://rentierblackhole.com/> "The Rentier Black Hole" A theory of land, housing, and open-economy failure: how a non-reproducible asset absorbs global savings, breaks wage-price adjustment, and hollows out the productive economy.
croes 4mo ago
[dead]
jedimastert 4mo ago
The idea that the answer to this question would not be intuitive to pretty much anyone that participates in an economy is a genuine shock.
- Avicebron 4mo ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair
alephnerd 4mo ago
Gotta love HNers who never read articles and use it as a soapbox: "The scale of the destruction that followed the debt crisis was extraordinary. Between 2009 and the trough of the bailout years in 2016, average household wealth fell by roughly 35%, wiping out more than a third of Greek families' assets" ... "The labour market has improved markedly since the darkest years of the crisis, with unemployment falling sharply and the informal economy shrinking. But structural weaknesses remain deeply embedded. Long-term unemployment, low participation in the workforce and a high reliance on self-employment continue to shape opportunities and outcomes" ---- Tl;dr - Greek households still haven't recovered from the Eurozone and Greek Debt crisis.
sgt101 4mo ago
Frustraged by the endless prattle about GDP, europoors and Brexit, me and my agent frien's sat (manifested) together and brewed up some alternatives: https://x.com/AiSimonThompson/status/2070900546119114970/photo/1 https://x.com/AiSimonThompson/status/2070900546119114970/pho... I think that median household disposable income is a much better way of looking at this than GDP. 2014 is the turn. The US gained shale, isolationism is possible, Trump 2 is created by the general (true) perception that things were good under Trump 1. The European war starts and China is left to dominate Asia.
- wqaatwt 4mo ago
  Also massive influx of money from Europe especially due to the dominance of the US megacorps and the tech sector in general. Basically you had companies like Google or Meta constantly leeching from everyone while providing approximately zero real value in return.
lokar 4mo ago
I could see this was bad reporting right away. Average wealth? Per-capita gdp? Pointless. Give me the decile values, or just show the histogram.
BurningFrog 4mo ago
"Poor" is a relative concept! If everyone gets 10x richer, half the people will still be in the poorer half, and will still feel poor in some sense. This is surely not the only factor in this story, but it's you need to keep it in mind in these discussions.
1970-01-01 4mo ago
In no particular order: - Per capital GDP still awful - Quality of life continues to get worse thanks to rising global temperature. - Everything else worth doing is still fairly terrible compared to better-off EU neighbors since tourism remains the economic staple. That strangles any other economic programs from working.
- antisthenes 4mo ago
  Also in that bucket: - Average is one of the worst ways to measure wealth (use Median) - Wealth is typically tied up in illiquid assets (e.g. housing), making people feel trapped or anchored to a place that may not be economically mobile (e.g. rural)
jaharios 4mo ago
While income taxes are low for the majority ( the salaries are low anyway) the indirect taxing is the way the Greek Goverment managed to recover. The prices of everyday goods rose (sometimes more than double) and the profits from VAT(24%) with them. High duties on fuel + fuel price went up, combined with rent prices (living far away from your workplace) => longer work commute, bad infrastructure and older vehicles ( no money to buy a fuel efficient one when you are poor) Liberalization of the energy market forced by EU which lead to extreme prices. (new companies that don't produce anything got in the middleman position with only goal higher profits) In summary, everything has been and continues to be done at the expense of the majority (low-wage earners), while making them even poorer.
stankondrat 4mo ago
I live here. Few facts: normal salary €1000 per month; houses €150–200–300k; house prices are rising because of foreign investors; seasonal workers from the philippines earn €500+ per month. Officially, it's a 6-day working week - 48 hours (!) The tourism economy requires only cheap labour, ideally buying all the properties and bringing in seasonal workers. That's sad.
asfodelsu 4mo ago
Greek here. Fake news. Totally fake news. Greece is not Richer. Greeks become poorer every month.
- IAmBroom 4mo ago
  Data says otherwise, over a years-long scale.

root-parent 4mo ago

Same with Brazil or Portugal or Angola. Full of billionaires with poor people.

mlinhares 4mo ago
Yeah, its all inequality. Most people are going to be renters forever in my hometown and the government has absolutely no plan to fix it. People will just be pushed farther and farther away from where they work and will have longer and longer commutes because it is impossible to pay to live close to work with the salaries they're making.
- bluefirebrand 4mo ago
  > Most people are going to be renters forever in my hometown and the government has absolutely no plan to fix it This seems to be the plan basically everywhere though. Yes, some countries still have a ladder for average people to own property and find success, but the global trend seems to be that this possibility is shrinking for the vast majority of people That's what happens when average people have to compete with real estate conglomerates for housing though
- aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
  > Most people are going to be renters forever in my hometown and the government has absolutely no plan to fix it. People will just be pushed farther and farther away from where they work and will have longer and longer commutes because it is impossible to pay to live close to work with the salaries they're making. [emphasis mine] I somewhat disagree: at least during the COVID-19 times the government did have a plan to partially fix it: At that time there were a lot of discussions whether work from home will be there to stay or not. If it would have stayed, that would have partially solved the problem (not for everybody, but for a substantial subset of people): Since people can live at places where rent or the price of houses is much lower, companies can pay smaller salaries, but employees (after subtracting the cost of living) still have more money. In other words: both sides get their slice of the pie: employers can decrease salaries while employees still have more money. Unluckily, when COVID-19 was over, companies decided they basically want people to come back to to office (working from home should be an exception). This was the central reason why this plan failed.
- microgpt 4mo ago
  Renting itself isn't inherently the problem if you have very strong tenant rights. Imagine renting came with all the rights of owning except the money flowed differently (like a perpetual mortgage) - that'd be pretty okay, actually. It is within the power of a government to enable something like that.
  - _puk 4mo ago
    But renting is a problem if there's no asset at the end of it. Even if rents were capped at half what a mortgage for the same property is, you still are in a position that once the asset of the house is paid off the landlord now has an asset that earns income without labour. And the inverse. Regardless of what you earn (to a point, even into higher income brackets), if you do not put it into an asset that can house you, and you stop earning, you cannot live without reducing your overall capital. So rental means a lack of opportunity to reduce your labour dependent income over time (important as you age), and a reduced ability to weather negative life events.
    - wqaatwt 4mo ago
      It can work (and did in some places in Western Europe for a while) if housing stock is mostly state owned and/or communal. Of course that introduces some other issues
    - microgpt 4mo ago
      Paying to consume something continually isn't inherently wrong. We do that with food. If you like, you could offset it with UBI. A separate concern is who should receive the money and how we morally justify that, since they didn't produce anything or work to earn it.
  - mlinhares 4mo ago
    Its more likely you'll continue to own the place than the government making something like that, that would hurt real estate owners. Renting is fine if you're on your prime years, making money and enjoying life, once you're on your way down, old and likely less employable, renting becomes an issue as you'll likely not make as much money anymore but the rents never go down. I've seen many parents and grandparents of friends having to live on scraps and decide between healthcare and rent because they just can't make ends meet anymore. For the young folks that can't buy because they can't save its even worse, they'll be indentured servants for as long as they're useful for the labor force and will then be thrown into the bin.

samiv 4mo ago

There's no paradox here. Distribution of wealth matters. Rich got richer and everyone else didn't. Simple as that.

abirch 4mo ago
As Ray Dalio has mentioned, you should measure results on how it impacts the bottom 51% of the people (the majority) it's a lot more illustrative than looking at the average.
- samiv 4mo ago
  Yep. I'm not an economist but my social democratic common sense would tell me to look at the bottom 10% income bracket and see how they're doing. Incidentally these people are the best economic citizens because if you give them money they'll spend every cent of it because they need to buy food and energy, use health care and pay rent. In other words if a rich person gets a million they (if they're sane) spend a fraction of it and put the rest in assets, stock market, property, etc. If you give 1000 poor people each 1000e every cent will go into local economy immediately.
  - onraglanroad 4mo ago
    The capitalist response to that would be that the investment in companies is better because it makes everyone richer in the long term by increasing overall wealth. I'm not sure I buy it but it's an effect to consider.
    - kubb 4mo ago
      That does sometimes happen - investment does cause development. The mistake is to assume that's always what happens, and that everybody can benefit from the development.
      - onraglanroad 4mo ago
        Oh I agree with you. I suspect it happens less than is the conventional wisdom, but I might be wrong.

erdeibit 4mo ago

Capitalism optimization: make the rich richer making the poor poorer

d4ng 4mo ago
Influence will be distributed similarly, regardless of political system: (Pareto Principle) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
password54321 4mo ago
You live in the most privileged period in human history. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=line&country=~OWID_WRL&Indicator=Share+in+poverty&Poverty+line=%243+per+day%3A+International+Poverty+Line&Household+survey+data+type=Show+data+from+both+income+and+consumption+surveys&Show+breaks+between+less+comparable+surveys=false https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=li...
- microgpt 4mo ago
  How privileged is a period?
- dwroberts 4mo ago
  You’re posting this like it’s a counterpoint, but it further highlights how disgusting the situation is. We have people becoming trillionaires while 10% of the world’s population is considered to be in extreme poverty. It’s ‘less bad’ than in the past but it’s still absolutely horrifying.
  - password54321 4mo ago
    How much of that trillion is liquid? If people stopped buying a Tesla, would that somehow help the poor? Making electric vehicles more mainstream seems like a net-positive to the world.
    - microgpt 4mo ago

ykonstant 4mo ago

Feel poor??? Man... this is some prime ragebait title.

BariumBlue 4mo ago

Seems like housing again: > Rents have surged in recent years, driven by tourism, foreign investment and a shortage of affordable housing. The cost of housing now consumes one of the largest shares of disposable income in the European Union My impression is that where housing is expensive, there will be complaints of unaffordability (obviously), but also vice versa, that where there is unaffordability, housing always seems to be a large component (at least in "the west"). in most places basic food (rice and beans or an equivalent) is cheap. Services can usually be skimped on. Transportation can usually be flexible (new car / cheap used car / transit / bike). Housing costs seem to be relatively non-flexible though. I wouldn't be surprised if Greece has strong NIMBY factors.

cucumber3732842 4mo ago
>I wouldn't be surprised if Greece has strong NIMBY factors. No doubt. You see it in tourism economies the world over. Cheap services + cultural/historical novelty + nice climate make tourism highly viable -> tourism becomes outsized part of economy -> those enriched by peddling tourism write the rules to their benefit -> it becomes all but illegal to develop any other industry, build housing, etc, etc because all this activity winds up punitively regulated lest someone do something that scared away the tourists.
j16sdiz 4mo ago
> (at least in "the west"). It is the same in the east - it is either housing, or housing related tax.
spystath 4mo ago
You are right that it's due to housing but in my opinion most of unaffordability comes from immense pressure due to tourism. Housing situation is better outside the touristy areas (and Athens). If anything Greece has seen massive housebuilding up until the economic crash in the early 10s. I remember block of flats appearing left and right in most major cities in a span of months. They still do but in a lot of cases they are almost exclusively short-term lets (again especially in tourist hubs). Why let a flat for €500 monthly when you can charge €150 per night? It's maddening.

lebuffon 4mo ago

The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. Perhaps accelerated by social media. Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age?

aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
> The way this wealth inequality is so common around the world. makes me wonder if the next time the pitchforks come out, it will be some kind of global uprising. [...] Or are the elite better able to control the masses in this age? I rather believe that the individual problems in each country are very different (even though you summarize them by "this wealth inequality is so common around the world"). Additionally, it often happens that the interests of people in one country are antagonistic to the interests of people in another country, so I don't believe that people from different countries will club together, and have common wishes.
- jedimastert 4mo ago
  > Additionally, it often happens that the interests of people in one country are antagonistic to the interests of people in another country. I find this honestly kind of difficult to believe, except when it comes to distractions by the people who want to stay in power
  - aleph_minus_one 4mo ago
    Just to give one class of examples: Should a country implement some very nationalist policies that serve the interests of the not so well-off people in its own country, but will be against the interests of other countries and their people? Think of the uprise of right-wing, nationalist parties in many European countries that often present themselves as "the new worker parties", i.e. they intend to implement policies that are good for the workers in their own country, but on the other hand make it very clear that they have not the interests of people of other EU countries in mind.

cucumber3732842 4mo ago

Because, to the surprise of literally nobody who's ever been on the receiving end of these sorts of policies they cook up in far away think tank offices and the ivory towers of academia, there's a million ways to make the number go up that doesn't actually make normal people any better off.

nosioptar 4mo ago
At this point, I'd settle for not being better off. It'd be a helluva lot better than everything getting worse. We need to eat the fucking rich. Bnch of parasitic fuckwads.

g8oz 4mo ago

<https://rentierblackhole.com/ https://rentierblackhole.com/> "The Rentier Black Hole" A theory of land, housing, and open-economy failure: how a non-reproducible asset absorbs global savings, breaks wage-price adjustment, and hollows out the productive economy.

croes 4mo ago

[dead]

jedimastert 4mo ago

The idea that the answer to this question would not be intuitive to pretty much anyone that participates in an economy is a genuine shock.

Avicebron 4mo ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair

alephnerd 4mo ago

Gotta love HNers who never read articles and use it as a soapbox: "The scale of the destruction that followed the debt crisis was extraordinary. Between 2009 and the trough of the bailout years in 2016, average household wealth fell by roughly 35%, wiping out more than a third of Greek families' assets" ... "The labour market has improved markedly since the darkest years of the crisis, with unemployment falling sharply and the informal economy shrinking. But structural weaknesses remain deeply embedded. Long-term unemployment, low participation in the workforce and a high reliance on self-employment continue to shape opportunities and outcomes" ---- Tl;dr - Greek households still haven't recovered from the Eurozone and Greek Debt crisis.

sgt101 4mo ago

Frustraged by the endless prattle about GDP, europoors and Brexit, me and my agent frien's sat (manifested) together and brewed up some alternatives: https://x.com/AiSimonThompson/status/2070900546119114970/photo/1 https://x.com/AiSimonThompson/status/2070900546119114970/pho... I think that median household disposable income is a much better way of looking at this than GDP. 2014 is the turn. The US gained shale, isolationism is possible, Trump 2 is created by the general (true) perception that things were good under Trump 1. The European war starts and China is left to dominate Asia.

wqaatwt 4mo ago
Also massive influx of money from Europe especially due to the dominance of the US megacorps and the tech sector in general. Basically you had companies like Google or Meta constantly leeching from everyone while providing approximately zero real value in return.

lokar 4mo ago

I could see this was bad reporting right away. Average wealth? Per-capita gdp? Pointless. Give me the decile values, or just show the histogram.

BurningFrog 4mo ago

"Poor" is a relative concept! If everyone gets 10x richer, half the people will still be in the poorer half, and will still feel poor in some sense. This is surely not the only factor in this story, but it's you need to keep it in mind in these discussions.

1970-01-01 4mo ago

In no particular order: - Per capital GDP still awful - Quality of life continues to get worse thanks to rising global temperature. - Everything else worth doing is still fairly terrible compared to better-off EU neighbors since tourism remains the economic staple. That strangles any other economic programs from working.

antisthenes 4mo ago
Also in that bucket: - Average is one of the worst ways to measure wealth (use Median) - Wealth is typically tied up in illiquid assets (e.g. housing), making people feel trapped or anchored to a place that may not be economically mobile (e.g. rural)

jaharios 4mo ago

While income taxes are low for the majority ( the salaries are low anyway) the indirect taxing is the way the Greek Goverment managed to recover. The prices of everyday goods rose (sometimes more than double) and the profits from VAT(24%) with them. High duties on fuel + fuel price went up, combined with rent prices (living far away from your workplace) => longer work commute, bad infrastructure and older vehicles ( no money to buy a fuel efficient one when you are poor) Liberalization of the energy market forced by EU which lead to extreme prices. (new companies that don't produce anything got in the middleman position with only goal higher profits) In summary, everything has been and continues to be done at the expense of the majority (low-wage earners), while making them even poorer.

stankondrat 4mo ago

I live here. Few facts: normal salary €1000 per month; houses €150–200–300k; house prices are rising because of foreign investors; seasonal workers from the philippines earn €500+ per month. Officially, it's a 6-day working week - 48 hours (!) The tourism economy requires only cheap labour, ideally buying all the properties and bringing in seasonal workers. That's sad.

asfodelsu 4mo ago

Greek here. Fake news. Totally fake news. Greece is not Richer. Greeks become poorer every month.

IAmBroom 4mo ago
Data says otherwise, over a years-long scale.