Excerpt from a New Book by Arthur C. Brooks

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It took a village

The death of an Austrian community in 1929, and the lessons for Europe today. An excerpt from a new book by: 

By ARTHUR C. BROOKS

I never managed to visit Marienthal. I have a good excuse: Marienthal no longer exists — at least not in the form it once did. And what happened to Marienthal holds lessons for the future if we continue to allow work to disappear and dependence to grow.

Twenty miles southeast of Vienna, Marienthal formed in the early 19th century around a flax mill, which later grew into a thriving textile factory. By the early 20th century, the village had 478 families.

 The work was hard, but salaries were ample and community life rich. Residents socialized, enjoyed the town’s manicured parks, and belonged to numerous social clubs. Weekends were dedicated to church, family outings, and evening dances.

But all that changed suddenly in 1929. The town’s sole employer went bankrupt. The factory was shuttered and almost all of Marienthal’s families lost their earnings. Two years later, only one in five families still had a member earning income from regular work. The village became a microcosm of idleness and economic depression.

The slow-motion tragedy that unfolded next could easily have been lost to history. Fortunately, a group of sociologists were seeking to study how unemployment reshaped societies. They knew an ideal case study when they saw it. The researchers descended on Marienthal to learn from the people who lived there.

“Nothing is urgent anymore,” the report observes. “They have forgotten how to hurry.”

“It used to be magnificent,” one woman told the researchers. “During the summer we used to go for walks, and all those dances! Now I don’t feel like going out anymore.” Another man summarized, “[T]here was life in Marienthal then. Now the whole place is dead.”

Although residents now had unlimited time to read, reading habits collapsed after the factory shut down. Before, the town library lent an average of 3.23 books to each resident; after, just 1.6.

Public spaces began literally falling apart. “Opposite the factory lies a large park,” the researchers noted, of which “the people of Marienthal once were very proud. Now the park is a wilderness… Although almost everyone in Marienthal had enough free time, no one looks after the park.”

Even Marienthalers’ sense of time seemed to warp. Men stopped wearing watches. Wives complained that husbands were chronically late for meals, even though they were not coming from any place in particular. It took people longer just to walk down the street. Interestingly, the researchers found that this phenomenon was different for women. The men walked more slowly and stopped more often. The scholars theorized it was because the women were not really unemployed; “they have a household to run which fully occupies their day.”

Worst of all, people turned on each other. Marienthalers took it upon themselves to enforce the government dictum that nobody could supplement insurance payments with earned income. One poor soul lost his benefits after he was turned in by his neighbors for taking a little money while playing his harmonica on the street. Another after he helped fell trees in return for a share of the firewood. A woman lost her benefits after she delivered milk and was given some for her own children. Solidarity shattered.

Family life followed. “I often quarrel with my husband,” one woman vented, “because he does not care about a thing any longer and is never home.” A different husband, describing his wife: “What strangers we are to each other; we are getting visibly harder. Is it my fault that times are bad? Do I have to take all the blame in silence?” Another woman sunk into depression. “I couldn’t care less now. If I could hand the children over to the welfare people I would gladly do so.”

What decimated life was not the loss of wages. Public assistance blunted the financial blow of the lay-offs. What destroyed Marienthal was the loss of meaningful work. All the other ills were downstream from this. One man confided, “If I could get back to the factory it would be the happiest day of my life. It’s not only for the money. Stuck here between one’s own four walls, one isn’t really alive.” St. Irenaeus said that “the glory of God is man fully alive.” What makes men and women fully alive — what endows them with a sense of self-worth — is work. And the people of Marienthal had lost it.

Did Europe learn a lesson from this early experience in work-extinguishing policy? Let’s see what has happened to modern-day Europe, and the lessons it holds for us.

 * * *

It is midnight, but José Luis Flores is not ready for bed just yet. The 23-year-old in Cádiz, Spain, simply has too much to do. José begins his evening watching two hours of reality television. When that finishes, he turns to video games, which he plays until 4:30 a.m.

How can José live this way at age 23? Won’t he be exhausted for work or school in the morning? No and no. He has neither a job nor goes to school. José still lives with his parents.

Fully one-quarter of people aged 15-29 are neither working nor in school. Many young Spaniards between 15 and 29 live with their parents, and few have any plan to move on.

José is not an anomaly. His case is typical, growing more so every day. In Spain, fully one-quarter of people aged 15-29 are neither working nor in school. Many young Spaniards between 15 and 29 live with their parents, and few have any plan to move on. This situation is so common that Spaniards have a nickname, ninis, for people who neither work nor study — ni trabaja, ni estudia.

Ninis are everywhere in Spain. My wife grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Barcelona. Ninis are the adult children of her childhood girlfriends, the now 50-year-old women who struggle for steady work to support two generations at once. Few of these mothers have ever been married, having come of age in a culture that rejected traditional faith and family life. The fathers of their adult children are nowhere to be found.

But wait: Isn’t Spain a family-oriented Catholic country? It used to be, but church attendance has collapsed by half between 1981 and the present. In 2007, 25 percent of Spanish adults agreed, “Marriage is an outdated institution.” Nearly 90 percent of Spanish women agree, “It is all right for a couple to live together without intending to get married.” Meanwhile, the percentage of Spaniards who feel “very happy” fell by 30 percent between 1981 and 2005.

The unemployment rate for Spanish adults is the highest in Europe — 24 percent. And even this figure is dwarfed by the unemployment rate among young adults — 54 percent. That’s a level one would expect from a tinpot dictatorship in meltdown.

Regional economic woes play a huge role. But the roots of Spain’s malaise reach further down than real estate bubbles and complications with the eurozone. The editors of a Spanish newspaper told me that the Spanish embassy in Washington had an exciting new program. The government was offering 600 paid jobs for young Spaniards to come teach Spanish in America, a way to rekindle national pride and create opportunities for young people who desperately need them. The youth of Spain didn’t see it that way: only 300 applied in the entire country.

This is not Marienthal, where economic opportunity was snuffed out and the government stripped your benefits if you were caught working. Here entrepreneurial policymakers actively sought out ambitious young people to fly across the ocean, toward meaningful work. But something has happened in Spain to make that kind of trip (taxpayer-funded!) seem less attractive than living with mom in Madrid.

And it’s not just Spain.

Arthur C. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute. This text is adapted from “The Conservative Heart,” his latest book, published by Broadside Books (2015).