memorandum@tumblr.

“Of course, it’s obviously in our self-interest as a company to surface more compelling stories about creators on Tumblr; at the same time, though, we think Chris and Jessica will be able to do so in ways that embody professional rigor and first-rate writing,” he said in an e-mail message.

There are many Tumblr blogs that could be covered, and some have already won broad attention. Last fall, for instance, a blog that posted stories of hardship and titled itself “We Are the 99 Percent” was widely cited in the media as Occupy Wall Street protests spread across the country. Other blogs have chronicled health scares, political campaigns and foreign conflicts. Many brands have set up Tumblr blogs to attract interest and show a more lighthearted side of their corporate owners.

Operators of the vast network of roads that connect China’s fields to cities can earn gross margins of up to 90 percent, making them the most profitable of the supply chain middlemen who reap the most from China’s harvests.

So while food prices soared 11.8 percent and China spent more on farm subsidies in 2011 than ever before, the 18 percent rise in average rural incomes still left farmers like Jiang Bo lagging badly behind their urban cousins.

So, they’re going through a drawn-out step-by-step procedure of demands for reforms, promises, failed implementations, rebukes, withheld bailout transfers that then might still be made, and so on. The idea is to keep markets from panicking, give governments time to prepare for the inevitable, and render politicians blameless for Greece’s exit from the monetary union.

Return to Otmar Issing. “A monetary union without political union is absurd,” he said. “The keyword today is fiscal union. But a fiscal union cannot function without a political union. Yet decisions in that direction have to be democratically legitimate … and that takes time. Those that defend the concept of a fiscal union know that.”

When educated and entrepreneurial young people leave their country in massive numbers, it impacts the economy for the long term. Their country invested heavily in their education, an asset, and now they put this asset to work in another country. There, they earn money, pay taxes, consume goods and services, and rent or buy a home—the exact activities that their own country must have to get out of the economic quagmire. Sure, emigration reduces the expenses for unemployment compensation and other services, but it drains the economy of energy, entrepreneurial spirit, can-do attitude, and knowhow.

And it worsens the debt crisis. For national debt to remain “sustainable,” young people need to stick around, start a productive career, consume, build up assets, move into those vacant homes that banks are holding, and pay taxes. But the exodus underway now doesn’t bode well for a long-term solution of the debt crisis—assuming that a country like Greece can even stay in the Eurozone.

These numbers convey a sense of utter hopelessness. For young people, the vision of a good life that their society has imparted on them has gone up in smoke. A bitter irony: it’s the best educated generation ever—and the most pessimistic.

People deal with it the best they can. Some retrench. Even 35-year-olds move back in with their parents. They delay plans and wait for the situation to turn around. But others, the most energetic and entrepreneurial, those that the country needs to rebuild the economy, they don’t have that kind of patience. They pack up and leave to find a job elsewhere. And they are doing it in massive numbers.