My Sunday column returned to what’s become a recurring theme of mine: The remarkable political quiescence of Europeans in the face of the economic devastation wrought by their rolling disaster of a currency union. In this case, my jumping-off point was what the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson calls “the scariest graph in the world,” which shows youth unemployment — for under-25-year-olds, that is — breaking 40 percent in Italy, 50 percent in Spain and 60 percent in Greece. So it’s worth saying something about the (fairly widespread) rejoinder that these numbers aren’t actually as bad as they look, because most young people are in school or training rather than looking fruitlessly for work. For instance, here’s the Financial Times’ Kate Allen, downplaying the youth-unemployment crisis:

Unemployment figures only reflect the proportion of the population who are economically active – ie. looking for a job, but unable to find one. Among young people in particular, inactivity rates can be expected to be very high – many are in either education or training. What do the figures look like if we take into account the economically inactive population? Far less bad, actually, even with the caveat that some individuals will go into training or education because of the lack of jobs.

What follows is a chart showing that the vast majority of Spanish, Greek and Italians under 25 are neither employed nor actively job-hunting, but “economically inactive.” Which is a fair point — but is it really all that encouraging? For one thing, as Thompson noted in his post, the ranks of the economically inactive include millions of so-called NEETS — “Not Employed, or in Education, or Training” — who, like “discouraged workers” of all ages, are plainly jobless even if they aren’t technically unemployed. For another, the picture still looks extremely grim for Spain and Italy and Greece if you look at overall rates of economic activity instead of just looking at the unemployment rate alone. In the United States, which at least has a semi-healthy post-Great Recession economy, the youth workforce participation rate — the percentage of all 16-24-year-olds either doing or seeking paid work — is currently about 53 percent, and most of the more stable northern European economies are up over 50 or even 60 percent. In southern Europe, though, not so much: Spain’s youth workforce participate rate is about 36 percent, and Italy’s and Greece’s are both about 28 percent. In other words, almost half of the under-25 population in those countries who would be working under normal (and by normal, I mean the high-unemployment, slow-growth, post-Great Recession “normal”) circumstances are sitting on the sidelines instead. Of course some of them are doing useful things that may pay some dividends for them down the road. But the costs in wasted productivity, lost earnings, and delayed family formation far exceed those benefits — not least because this generation of young Europeans was not exactly undereducated or undertrained to begin with, so an extra few years of schooling would probably bring diminishing marginal returns even in the best of times.

Now these numbers do point to one plausible answer to the “why no upheaval” question: Namely, that European-style public education systems no less than European-style safety nets can serve as stabilizing forces in a crisis, making “economic inactivity” more bearable and even superficially productive than it would have been in past eras. The problem, though, is that the best response to this particular crisis is not the kind of muddling-through, “go back to school until the economy recovers” that the social democratic model is designed to enable; rather, it’s a painful-but-necessary break with a misguided continent-wide consensus. And because it’s hard to see how the economies of southern Europe can really recover absent such a break, there’s a case to be made that those countries would be better off if their young people actually had fewer short-term options — because that would make it more apparent what the Eurozone’s current course means for today’s under-25-year-olds in the long term, and encourage the Spanish and Italians and Greeks (and the Portuguese, and the Cypriots, and …) to actually leap out of the pot instead of letting themselves get slowly boiled.