Greece's Growing, Overqualified Agricultural Sector

Want another sign of just how bad Greece's economy is?  Its agricultural industry is growing. Greece's agricultural sector added 32,000 jobs between 2008 and 2010 which, in the face of of this awful crisis, might not sound like such a bad thing. And it does sound like better news than the 40,000 Greeks who expressed interest in fleeing (and the 2,500 who actually fled) Greece's blighted economy for Australia last year or the shady, desperate, perhaps a little bit illegal pawn shop industry that's booming in the country. But it's who exactly is taking those jobs that's disconcerting--it's not migrant workers, it's the country's college graduates and working professionals reports The New York Times. "The biggest increase is in middle-aged people between 45 and 65 years old," an expert told The Times, which added that "unemployment in Greece is now 18 percent, rising to 35 percent for young people between the ages of 15 and 29 — up from 12 percent and 24 percent, respectively, in late 2010."  The Times being The Times, found educated people selling edible snails, a dot-com executive married to a marketer who both gave up their jobs to sell mastic trees, and a Ph.D graduate who had to give up his dreams of being a nuclear physicist to take become a ship engineer and attend maritime school.  As  the nuclear physicist-turned-ship engineer depressingly puts it, "My family opposed my wish to enroll; they were asking me, ‘Did you study all those years for nothing?’... Everywhere in Greece it’s a disadvantage to be overqualified now."