Sentences to ponder

…when Prime Minister Mario Monti remarked that having a job for life in today’s economy was no longer feasible for young people — indeed, it was “monotonous” — he set off a barrage of protests, laying bare one of the sacrosanct tenets of Italian society that the euro zone crisis has placed at risk.

Reaction was fast, furious, bipartisan and intergenerational. “I think the prime minister has to be careful with the words he uses because people are a little angry,” Claudia Vori, a 31-year-old Rome native who has had 18 different jobs since graduating from high school in 1999…

This point is not irrelevant:

Debate has been especially intense over Article 18 of the 1970 Workers Statute, which forbids companies with more that 15 employees from firing people without just cause. The unions say that line cannot be crossed.

The article is here.  How many years does it take to a) undo this, and b) have it kick in as a positive for growth?  This again also gets back to the question of why Germany does not wish to pay for everything.  By the way, is anyone writing a behavioral economics piece about how “crisis fatigue” increasingly is shaping eurozone policy?

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