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Protests: The European Threshold

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/15/world/europe/workers-in-southern-europe-synchronize-anti-austerity-strikes.html?hp&_r=0

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324556304578118263611154772.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

 

Europe has been in turmoil ever since the Euro started declining. The decline of the Euro has obviously affected families, business, markets, and laborers. Spanish and Portuguese workers felt the pain of the economy and decided to protest. While the Portuguese and Spanish were striking, the Greeks and Italians decided to plan for the same.

The Spanish were provoked by their Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy who entered office last a little less than a year ago. Prime Minister Rajoy recently announced that there will be an austerity budget for the upcoming year. So far, Spain will be joining Greece and the UK with their austerity programs. Greece has been implementing austerity budgets for a few years and the UK initiated its program in 2010. The austerity budget was just adding fuel to the fire after Spain’s unemployment rate reached 25%. Portugal isn’t faring too much better. Portugal’s unemployment is similar to Spain’s and its budget is being cut due to last year’s $100 billion bailout.

According to Ignacio Fernandez Toxo, the head of one of Spain’s unions, he said that the simultaneous protests in Spain and throughout Europe were “a historic moment in the European Union movement.” Some business productions and airlines throughout Europe were affected and cancelled due to the protests.

This relates to the idea of clusters and the ability to penetrate a cluster. When something is popular, people want to join because their friends are joining. However, there usually is a threshold fraction that determines the number of friends that must be involved in an activity before you want to join. On the other hand, some people want to join the activity because they genuinely like the activity. This threshold fraction is probably much lower for the person that genuinely likes the activity than for the person that needs to be convinced to join.

For protestors, there could be 2 versions of people: 1) the person that is genuinely upset and wants to protest because he or she feels unhappy and 2) the person that is protesting because most of his or her coworkers are protesting too so it’s the “cool” thing to do. Person 1 would have a low threshold to join protesting. Person 2 would have a high threshold to join protesting.

 

-jeg333

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