Across France, students have spent the past few weeks enthusiastically embracing in a proud national tradition: Setting stuff on fire to make a political point.
The images and videos of the French student protests are stunning, and often horrifying. Gorgeous historic buildings are being burned to the ground. Shops are being looted. Many people have been seriously physically injured. It’s all very disturbing and disorganized and often, it seems, more about taking pleasure in destruction over actually making any coherent point. And the chaos seems primed to usher the French far right into political office — the opposite of what these students ostensibly want.
The tactics are awful and may amount to a total own-goal. But the core complaints are legitimate.
In France, people over the age of 60 make up a quarter of the population, but hold 60% of the nation’s wealth. They are the recipient of two-thirds of French government social spending. That means that three-quarters of the French public is getting just one-third of the public benefits. And in recent years, spending on education has dropped, while the number of students has risen.
France actually does not spent an inordinately low percentage of its GDP on education. It’s on par with many other high-income countries, and ahead of Germany, Ireland, and the UK. The problem doesn’t seem to be underinvestment alone; it’s comparative underinvestment. The same way monkeys react with indignation at injustice — when, say, one is given a cucumber and the other a grape (a better treat) — humans don’t just notice if our needs our met, but if we’re comparatively well-off, or comparatively deprived.
French students feel comparatively deprived in a country that has lavished spending on the old.
It is also a bit of a scandal how much the French government spends on its retiree class while also having one of the youngest retirement ages in Europe (when the government proposed raising the retirement age a few years ago, it was the olds who rioted). France is broke. It does need to cut its spending and its debt. But doing so by pulling investments from the young, while making comparatively few asks of the old — who already hold the lion’s share of the wealth and receive the lion’s share of public investments — really is unfair.
American politicians should take note.
