Spain’s 2011 crisis drove youth unemployment to 46 percent

Evidence

In 2011, however, neither the Montes nor their customers and friends would take their August holidays. The economic crisis had ripped through the country like the black plague, shrinking consumption and driving unemployment to 21 percent, the highest in the EU, and to an astonishing 46 percent among people under twenty-four years old. In Catalonia, the region that includes Barcelona, 18 percent of its 7.5 million people had fallen below the poverty line. In the summer of 2011, few could afford the simple pleasure of an August spent by the sea or in the mountains. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 172

Categorization

• CANDY: Concrete, tweetable figures: 21% overall unemployment, 46% youth unemployment, 18% of Catalonia below poverty line — vivid snapshot of the 2011 eurozone crisis.