January 17, 2012
That’s the question that the Washington Post is implicitly raising for readers in its discussion of Iceland’s recovery from the recession. The piece notes that Iceland’s unemployment rate is 7.0 percent. It doesn’t make the comparison to other crisis-afflicted countries which have unemployment rates well in the double-digits, with Spain leading the pack at 22 percent.
In general the piece does paint a reasonably positive picture of Iceland’s economy, but it warns readers that:
“It’s tempting to conclude that this country of 318,000 people simply handled the crisis more adeptly than others, like a pick-your-own-ending book in which Icelanders chose correctly. There is a sliver of truth in that, but the full story is more complicated. That’s partly because the circumstances in Iceland are far different than in the United States and Europe, but also because such a simple explanation ignores the anger, the angst and the struggles that remain here, hidden barely beneath the surface.
“Iceland has weathered the worst of the financial crisis, but its society has yet to solve the identity crisis that followed in its wake.”
If Post readers were informed of the situation in the other crisis-afflicted countries, they would be able to put Iceland’s identity crisis in context.
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