The Unemployment Rate in Every Region of Europe

It's almost never the case. The way welfare works is kind of...buggy.

You accept a job, do it for a couple of days, and that's it.

What we're seeing in this map I think is not just your everyday failure of monetarism (trying to control and balance out complex economies with only a single variable which is also an extremely heavy, blunt tool - interest rates). I think the problem is deeper, being a combination of a) misguided treaties based on bad economics (some would call it 'neoliberalism') like the so-called "Stability and Growth Pact" (which actually restricts member state's ability to deal with financial crises) and the way the ECB has been set up to not make fiscal transfers between states (or the equivalent, directly buying bonds from member states), and b) the madness of fixed exchange rates between the member states, by having a common currency without a federal budget.

It mostly comes down to the Euro - what we see with countries with flexible exchange rates is that their economies don't have to internally devalue with changes in inflation, terms of trade, etc. because the exchange rates changes and just balances it out. But in Europe with the common currency, compared to Germany's economy the Euro is weak, meaning their exports are more competitive, and compared to the weaker economies the Euro is strong, which means imports are cheap but exports uncompetitive. This is self-propagating, so Germany has been able to massively increase its trade surplus at the cost of the weaker countries' increasing trade deficits and increasing unemployment, because they are internally devaluing to compensate.

There are two ways to solve this - either do what the US does for its states with a federal taxing and spending Government (meaning fiscal transfers from the stronger economies to the weaker ones to balance this out), or abandoning the Euro and having individual currencies with flexible exchange rates. Business as usual will see Spain, Portugal, Italy and eventually France in the same boat as Greece...

Can people really still point at Turkey and call it a serious candidate for EU membership?

There is a serious case for including Israeli figures in this kind of pan-regional not-exclusively-EU analysis. Israel is far closer, culturally, to Europe than geographically closer neighbors (e.g. Morocco, Tunisia) and is increasingly part of European academic, sporting, and artistic interests (most recently thinking of Eurocrypt 2018, which was in Tel Aviv this week, and this year's Giro D'Italia, which is starting in Israel this weekend).

There are strong historical reasons why Israel will never apply to be a member of the EU or to adopt the Euro - but a perspective is to think of Israel as strongly Eurosceptic. Can anyone really look at Eurosceptic parties on the Continent and say that, what, the EU defines what it means to be European? That Hungary is no longer culturally European or that it dropped off the Continent because Viktor Orbán got elected Prime Minister?

Zero is not rock bottom. A lot of stores of value have negative returns. Zero is high in a lot of contexts.

Historically, negative real returns on stores of value were the norm. Before financial systems existed, almost all investments had negative returns if you didn’t put work and energy into them. To store value, you had to accumulate stuff, buildings or land. Most options either had high maintenance costs, were subject to risk of damage from natural causes and theft, were very volatile or required hard labor to get production out of.

Even in societies with financial systems, getting low risk, hassle free, liquid, positive real returns has been difficult for most of history. This just reflects the natural laws of thermodynamics that tell us that everything tends to decay without a constant supply of work and energy. In general, most things require maintenance to keep their worth.

The 20th century was probably the most notable exception. Because of unprecedented demographic and technological growth, positive risk free real returns were easy to find. The recency effect probably explains some of the confusion people have about this. It is possible that under favorable conditions, wealth can have positive returns and even compound into very good long run returns but it is not a guarantee and there is nothing natural about it. It may not continue forever, particularly amidst an aging and retiring population in a world no longer as rich in easy to exploit natural resources.

While people are used to get negative returns on very short term purchases, you buy fresh vegetables at the supermarket, even if they degrade over time, many can’t seem to accept the normalcy of negative returns on longer term assets. In nature, squirrels’ nut caches have a certain percentage of losses from theft and spoilage. Real returns tending towards the negative is natural even if they can seem unusual for people just out of the 20th century.

As things stand, currently, Turkey's candidacy isn't going to be going forward anytime soon. But that's not the point. It is an official candidate, so Eurostat keeps an eye on it. If Israel became a candidate, Eurostat would do ditto (though for practical reasons Israel also won't be a candidate anytime soon).

Incidentally, Turkey is also in a customs union with the EU, the only non-EU/EEA/EFTA country of any significant size to be in one. This gives Eurostat added incentive to keep an eye on it.

Israel is a member of or involved in various non-EU pan-European things (EBU, Council of Europe etc), but Eurostat is an EU thing, not a European thing.