HERE AND NOT THERE:

Burning Down
The House In FranceLand: No jobs, no future, why not riot? (DANIEL HENNINGER, November 11, 2005, Opinion Journal)

Anecdotes don't carry much statistical strength, but for some time I've been carrying around three about Western Europe because they illuminate the continent's perplexity about the future.

A Frenchman who lives in New York described how he has been remodeling a large estate home in central France. He flies back constantly to supervise the never-ending project because he can't find local French willing to work on it, and because those who work do so poorly. Why bother? "It's an investment," he says. Come again? "This house is going to make a lot of money for me," the Frenchman says, "when France arrives at its inevitable destination as mainly a vacation land for Chinese tourists."

In January I spent most of a week walking around Rome. Talking to a lifelong resident, I remarked that while it was a wonderful place for strolling, one couldn't help but notice there weren't many young adults. I asked: Is there much opportunity for a young person in Rome? Came back the instant answer: "Zero." Most of the young, she said, certainly those with ambition, move "north." The jobs available in Rome are with the government "or maybe a bank."

But let's take on the idea that France's rioters have little to do with economic enervation, that this is really about France's failed attempts to "assimilate" Muslims who in any event don't want to assimilate. But what if they did? Or what if, instead of Arabs, they were Rome-fleeing Italians or even workaholic Slovakians? About three weeks before these riots, a German-born businessman in New York, who is now a successful developer of American real estate, tried to explain why he was here and not there:

"I could not do in Europe what I did here. A European at the age of 25, with little money but a lot of ambition and ideas, could not expect to move outside his own country--move to say the center of France, or the center of Italy, Belgium or any other country--and have much prospect of succeeding. He would remain an outsider."

Folks can look at the demographic numbers and see the fertility problems, but it requires only a bit of imagination to see that their motivated young will bail out en masse when the crunch comes.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 16, 2005 3:57 PM