Forget Paris
In 1995, Billy Crystal wrote, directed, produced and starred in a movie for which he enlisted Debra Winger as his love interest. That movie was called Forget Paris and it gets a modest 6.5 rating on IMDb, but is actually a very funny and somewhat poignant movie about life and love and how hard it is to expect that things don’t move on in life, whether we want them to or not.
Who doesn’t love Paris, not just in the springtime, but at any time? I know that Kim and I have loved every visit to Paris that we have made, even though I spent my youth in Rome thinking that anything Francophone was bullshit and that Paris was overrated. I have long since written that off as adolescent idiocy, and I too love going to Paris.
But even the last time we went to Paris for a purposeful visit for a week, Kim needed to get to the Gar de Nord train station to meet me (I was coming in from London through the Chunnel) and from there we were heading to Charles De Gaulle Airport for our flight home. She had all our luggage from a week, so she wanted to take a taxi. That proved to be a problem since we were staying at my friend’s apartment in the Marais, which is in the 3rd Arrondissement and thus adjacent to Place de la Bastille, the square made famous in 1789 by virtue of it being the place where the French Revolution ignited in front of the notorious Bastille Prison. As such, the Bastille is the rallying point for most of the French protests that take place even now. No revolution in history is as seminal as the French Revolution and thus, no place is more “revolutionary” than Place de la Bastille. Kim’s problem that day in Paris was that there was some sort of protest at the Bastille and it overflowed into the 3rd Arrondissement and screwed up traffic. But the French are nothing if not polite, and the crowd gave her way and the police allowed her to go into the Metro and she eventually got herself to the Gar de Nord to meet me. Since then, there have been countless more protest at the Bastille because the French seem to like only one thing more than sipping wine at a sidewalk cafe, and that’s protesting the injustices in their lives.
It has always amazed me that the French have developed such a modern lifestyle since there seems to be an abject lack of work ethic in France and the tendency to protest anything to get their way seems deeply imbedded in the French psyche. Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!
Emmanuel Macron, the current president of France since 2017 is a centrist politician now, but has been a member of the French Socialist Party in years past. Socialism in France is not a fringe movement like it is in the U.S., it is a functioning part of the coalition that runs France, and has been for years. I think many would consider France one of the more socialistic countries in what we consider the “developed” part of the world. And still, it seems that France still functions and, indeed, prospers. If the U.S.’s biggest exporter is Boeing, Airbus is France’s biggest exporter. In fact, Airbus is a consortium formed with Germany and joined now by Spain and the UK, but the point is, despite the egalitarian implication of the “bus” in its name, Airbus is a pretty capitalistic competitor on the global economic scene. So, despite all the cafe sitting and wine sipping, France can and does get down to business once and a while.
On the stage of global politics, I tend to think of Macron as a consistently liberal voice. He spearheaded the Paris Climate Accord and did his best to drag Trump into some semblance of responsible global stewardship (though he failed). But now, within France, this external liberal image is viewed as anything but liberal. Macron is the devil in France and it all boils down to something I predicted a decade ago in my book Global Pension Crisis. In that book I showed that France has only saved 7% of its GDP for the retirement pensions of its population. That compared to countries like The Netherlands that had saved 140% and even the U.S. had saved 108%. What that portended at the time was that there was a day of reckoning ahead for France (as well as other countries including Germany and Japan). As our populations have added longevity, most societies, including the U.S. have slowly pushed their retirement ages out to match the demographic realities and the shortfall of the pension savings in place to support retirement income security. We in the U.S have seen Social Security gradually increase from age 65 to age 67 and rising. In France and Europe in general, retirement age is even younger, having started at about 60 and rising now to about 62 (there are subtle and gender-based differences). But as the Baby Boomers of France and Germany have approached their retirement age, they have not taken kindly to attempts by the government to push their retirement out like a carrot in front of a donkey’s nose.
The news cycle is now showing us violent protests in Paris over the pushing of the retirement age from 62 to 64. And the devil behind it all is none other than Emmanuel Macron, one of the co-princes of the miniature and elite country of Andorra. So much for Macron’s liberal image. But wait. By global standards, Macron IS liberal, and its just in France where he is being depicted as a dastardly evil and stingy elitist politician. What is this telling us about the world? I have long said that the world’s biggest and most defining moment will come when the Baby Boomers need to retire and we all face the species-defining moment of whether the needs of the aged or the needs of the young will be served. The funny thing is that the people who generally do the protesting at the Bastille are the young, but that seems counter-intuitive. I guess these protestors just want the amorphous “Government” to pay the old and make growth available for the young. Easy peasy, right? Wow, not so in any economic world I know of.
If the French and the Bastille are the lightning rod for where the world is most likely to go next, all of this implies a rather disruptive movement to the left that is less grounded in economic reality and more grounded in social unrest. I am torn by this because the economist in me wants to agree with what Macron is trying to do to hold the line (it does seem logical to my economic self), but the social liberal in me wants to see people be allowed to enjoy a comfortable retirement while their grandchildren can still expect some modicum of economic growth to give them hope for a brighter future. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be lots of common ground between the two extremes. So, I am left to just wait and see what plays out on the stage of French political economy. In the meantime, my best advice is like those who I advise not to travel to China in this environment, it is probably just best for now to forget Paris and find somewhere else friendly to visit…like Beirut.