I’ve spent the past two weeks in Europe, with speaking engagements in Italy, Greece and Austria. This was my first visit to Greece, and my first chance to get an admittedly superficial tourist’s view of what a country with Great Depression levels of unemployment looks like.
It didn’t look like anything in particular until the drive from Athens, Greece’s capital and largest city, to Thessaloniki, its second largest. Then it struck me: the roads were near empty — as the toll booth shown in Figure 1 illustrates. My host Nikos reckons he has done a million kilometers over the years on this 500km drive, and he confirmed that roads which were now virtually empty were once full of cars, and especially trucks — that mobile sign of a thriving economy.
Figure 1: A toll booth on Greece’s main highway at about 5pm: no vehicles in either direction
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