'What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.

In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.

"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."'

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/chapters/chapter-out...

Wow, that is patriarchal oppression and stifling familial roles.

Obviously, the oppression and stifling isn't felt, that's the equilibrium, but I would guess that you would feel it very quickly if you tried to rock the boat. I strongly doubt that a openly gay, openly atheist couple (so, totally uncontroversial in most cities in Europe) would enjoy a happy, laid back lifestyle with plenty of daily socialising in Ikaria. I doubt that a straight, church-going couple that had married against their (Ikaria) parents will would do so.

When social conservatives long for the lost world of the past, it's places like Ikaria they have in mind.

It's not like the past won't become the future again.

Getting off-topic for me here, but...

From "The Fate Of Empires" 1978, by John Glubb, who was Lieutenant General and commander of Jordan's Arab Legion:

"The works of the contemporary historians of Baghdad in the early tenth century are still available. They deeply deplored the degeneracy of the times in which they lived, emphasising particularly the indifference to religion, the increasing materialism and the laxity of sexual morals. They lamented also the corruption of the officials of the government and the fact that politicians always seemed to amass large fortunes while they were in office.

The historians commented bitterly on the extraordinary influence acquired by popular singers over young people, resulting in a decline in sexual morality. The ‘pop’ singers of Baghdad accompanied their erotic songs on the lute, an instrument resembling the modern guitar. In the second half of the tenth century, as a result, much obscene sexual language came increasingly into use, such as would not have been tolerated in an earlier age. Several khalifs issued orders banning ‘pop’ singers from the capital, but within a few years they always returned.

An increase in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline. The later Romans complained that, although Rome ruled the world, women ruled Rome. In the tenth century, a similar tendency was observable in the Arab Empire, the women demanding admission to the professions hitherto monopolised by men. ‘What,’ wrote the contemporary historian, Ibn Bessam, ‘have the professions of clerk, tax-collector or preacher to do with women? These occupations have always been limited to men alone.’ Many women practised law, while others obtained posts as university professors. There was an agitation for the appointment of female judges, which, however, does not appear to have succeeded.

Soon after this period, government and public order collapsed, and foreign invaders overran the country. The resulting increase in confusion and violence made it unsafe for women to move unescorted in the streets, with the result that this feminist movement collapsed. "

Oppression and stifling social norms cause the very same stress that these guys appear to have managed to avoid. It appears that they've found their own norms that, to a naive observer, look stifling or oppressive, when the net effect is that the average level of social comfort actually increases. Call it "traditional gender roles" or "acceptance of social inequality" if that fits your particular bias, but you cannot take such a value judgement and call it "oppression".

That's actually BS based on urban legends (and inflated by the Greek government at the time for political reasons).

On actual life, this involved a small number, in the hundends, (literaly around 400-500 cases) of people using false certificates for stuff like disabillity pensions which happened in a specific prefecture.

Most of those instances were about bending the law to cover some poor person with pension that didn't really qualify for, but couldn't get any other way (e.g. getting a "blind man disability pension" to some seeing old man who without that would have become homeless or be unable to pay for his healtcare). In cultures were such social help is valued above legality, this is something that happens, exploiting laws or holes in the law, etc.

Of course this bending is counted as "corruption" (the same way that turning a blind eye in a poor families use of electricity when they don't pay their power company bill would), but its impact is negligible and is mostly a way to short-circuit ineffective social care policies in small societies. For actual corruption we have far better (and more impactful) examples in the higher echelons.

It wasn't legal, but it wasn't a "get rich quick scheme" either -- and it was far from "widespread" nor was the loss "so great". If we're talking Amdahl's law this is insignificant as far as the debt is concerned - but being a nice example against Greek corruption in general, it was blown out of proportion and used as an representative example.

Don't believe the hype. The same way the right wing blows some non-representative cases of people getting welfare in the US out of proportion.

In any case, Ikaria, the island in TFA, is not one of those places.

In fact, the pension system in Greece has been following the European standards since at least 10 years.

I am so sick and tired of outsiders spewing nonsense all of the internet about Greece without knowing any real fact.

Search for "greek pension abuse" on Google:

* Greece pulls the plug on pensions for the dead (Apr 25, 2012): http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/25/greece-benefits-id...

* 2% of Greek population abuse pension system (26 Apr, 2012): https://www.devere-group.com/news/Greek-population-abuse-pen...

* Greece Still Paying Dead Pensioners (Aug 17, 2013): http://greece.greekreporter.com/2013/08/17/greece-still-payi...

* New Greek finance sham: 120,000 families claiming 'ghost pensions' for relatives who died years ago (12 October 2011): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2048385/Greek-financ...

Title: "120,000 families claiming 'ghost pensions' for relatives who died years ago"

Actual content: "Greece has halted welfare or pension payments to 200,000 people either because they are unentitled to the money - or because they are dead, a Labour Ministry official said on Wednesday."

Not that the 200.000 number includes all pensions under examination -- and most of those were found to be absolutely OK in subsequent checks.

So, first the "dead getting pensions" were far from "120,000" (more close to a few thousands -- and of those "dead cases" most were recent deaths of a few months were the reported death wasn't yet registered (the bureacracy is chaotic).

The final tally was some 40.000 problematic pensions (which in a huge messy bureacracy like Greece includes pensions missing a few supporting documents, having 1% less "pension credits" than needed, etc), and around 2.500 cases of "dead pensioners".

Moreover, of those "dead pensioners" most were cases of people who died with no relatives etc and weren't declared to stop the pension being deposited. Of the 35 million euros deposited to dead pensioners, the state found that the 21 million euros were such and reclaimed it immediately ( http://www.enet.gr/?i=news.el.article&id=380165 ). The rest could be actual fraud cases.

Not as impressive as the BS baity headlines that preceded the investigation one year before. The government merely wanted to give an impression of wide corruption, in order to sweeten the passage of some anti-pension laws.

Both the pension fraud and the early retirement age in Greece where hotly debated and well documented topics, not "rumors".

I think the problem here lies in the different cultural perception of the phrase "widely misused". For Greek values, 1% is a bureaucratic rounding error. For North European values it's sign of massive corruption.